CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
He tumbled down into the void with the harpoon buried deep in his leg. Crashing through the surface of the black water, he started to sink deeper. The pain was electric, radiating out from the wound over his entire body. He screamed in the darkness and lashed out with his hands, desperately fumbling for something to hang onto and stop his descent.
The slit of light created above him by the lamps in the temple was rapidly growing smaller as he sank faster in the underwater chasm. He checked his depth gauge and realized he was speedily approaching his maximum limit.
An experienced diver from his former life with the Special Boat Service, he knew the extreme dangers of diving too deep. As the inert gases built up in his tissues he could expect disorientation, tremors, exhaustion… Now, the icy water started to cause a serious cramp in his legs. If he didn’t act fast it would be too late and he would die down here.
Glancing down he saw no end to the chasm. It was entirely possible that this hole was hundreds more meters deep. Waiting to hit the bottom was suicidal. He grabbed the harpoon in his leg and wrenched it out with all his strength. Only he heard his screams as the steel endblade ripped out of his thigh muscle and finally came free. A cloud of blood burst into the water behind the endblade’s exit and twisted up above him in scarlet tendrils.
He grabbed the harpoon with both hands and held it above his head. As he brought it level it jammed up against the two sides of the narrow chasm’s walls and acted like a bar fixed into place in the tunnel. He jerked to a sudden stop and found himself hanging like a marionette from the harpoon’s main shaft. His plan had worked, but now he had to swim to the surface with a badly wounded leg.
His head started to swim around in the darkness. Disorientation, just as he had expected. He glanced at the depth gauge on his forearm but the glass face was smashed and it was broken. He must have belted it against one of the chasm walls as he plunged down through the depths. He cursed and craned his neck up. The slit of light was still visible — just, but was almost razor thin. He guessed he had fallen several hundred feet before he was able to extract the spear.
He was running out of air as well. Another curse. He pulled himself up over the spear and started swimming back up to the chasm’s black surface. Lea was still up there, with the rest of his team — and all at the mercy of the Oracle. He hadn’t come this far to let him win now. He had to get back to the others and stop that bastard getting his hands on the idols. Praying his friends were still alive, he forced his arms through the black water and powered himself to the surface.
The gaping wound in his leg slowed down his usual lightning pace and when he reached the top and broke through the surface he was surprised to find the chamber totally empty. He was less surprised to see the idols were all gone, too. Gripping the ground around the top of the chasm, he dragged himself up out of the water, screaming with pain when the wound on his leg scraped against the rocks around the edge.
“Dammit all!”
He blew out a breath as the blood pumped out of the deep cut and spilled out onto the sandy dirt on the chamber’s floor. He was feeling a little light-headed as he tried to calculate how much blood he had lost. Pulling his torn wetsuit away from the wound, he immediately saw the three deep gouge marks made by the Oracle’s triple-pronged spear head and the mess they had made when he had ripped them out of his leg. He thanked God the blades hadn’t gone too deep and tore strips of rubber off his suit to use as a tourniquet.
Staggering to his feet, he walked carefully along the tunnel until he found the rest of his team. He saw a minisub on the surface of the lake they had entered the cave by, and realized from its size they could easily have used the hole they’d blown in the temple floor to navigate here.
He heard a scream and turned to see his team were fighting the Athanatoi divers. Lea knocked one of them out with the stock of her speargun and turned to see him limping along the tunnel.
“Oh shit!” she ran to him and looked at his leg.
“It’s worse than it looks.”
“Fuck that. Get over here out of sight.” She grabbed her Scuba dry bag. Reaching inside for a bandage, she hurriedly cleaned and dressed the wound on his leg. “You absolute bloody eejit, Josiah.”
“Eh?”
“You could have killed yourself, you damned fool!”
“Eeejit? Damned fool? I thought I saved your life?”
She finished securing the bandage and looked deep into his eyes. “I know.”
“We have to get back to the fight,” he said. “They need us.”
“You can’t be serious? With a leg wound like that?”
“I already told you it’s not….”
The explosion knocked them both off their feet and sent then crashing backwards into the sand. When they sat back up, Hawke rubbed his head. “What the buggering hell was that?”
“Oh no!” Lea cried out. “They’re firing grenade launchers at them!”
Before he could say anything, she ran forward to help her friends. He tried to follow, but collapsed down on one knee, screaming in pain at the bloody wound in his thigh.
A deep rumble boomed inside the underwater cavern as a section of one of the pillars broke away and crashed down on a frescoed wall. It smashed through the ancient tilework and almost crushed him. He dived out of the way and landed in a pile of rubble.
When he finally clambered to his feet he could barely believe what he was seeing. The Oracle and Blankov were climbing inside the top hatch of the submersible while the Athanatoi were firing on his team with grenade launchers. Kruger and Venter had taken Devlin and Lea hostage and were forcing them inside the minisub behind the Oracle.
“Lea!”
But she never heard and now he watched as the rest of the team sprinted for cover in every direction to avoid the grenades blowing up all over the chamber, blasting car-size chunks of roofing plaster and rock all over their heads.
“Bastards!” he yelled, struggling forward to help.
Scarlet fired on the sub while Lexi dragged a woozy Ryan away from more rubble and chaos, but they were submerged in seconds. Nothing was left except some bubbles on the surface.
Hawke ran over to them. “We can’t let them get away! They’ve got Lea and Danny!”
They hurriedly got into their diving gear and grabbed the spearguns.
“This is it,” Hawke said. “It’s now or never!”
Venter grabbed the controls and increased power to the machine’s propulsion system. The mighty combat submersible lurched forward, spewing a trail of bubbles in its wake as it widened the distance between them and the pursuing ECHO team.
They had turned just under the lake’s surface and were now making good progress along the tunnel leading back to the temple. Lea and Devlin were gagged and bound and pushed up against the rear bulkhead wall, staring at the muzzle of Blankov’s submachine gun.
Requiring two operators, one of Venter’s men was sitting at the navigator panel while his boss steered the sub through the hole in the temple floor and out into the streets of Pavlopetri. “We’re almost beneath the Anapos. We need to surface.”
They heard a banging sound on the hull. Clunk clunk clunk.
The Oracle started wheezing and needed to grip the control consul to regain his balance. “Dammit! That’s Hawke! Do something, Blankov!”
Blankov never hesitated, immediately ordering the sub to speed up and turn in an arc. “If they want to play games, then we’ll play games.”
“We have the idols!” Kruger yapped. “Why not forget about them? We’re so close to getting what we want! We can afford to leave them behind and kill them later whenever we desire!”