“He can’t reply,” Kruger said. “His tongue was torn out in a gangland dispute when he was a teenager, but don’t worry. He’s very good at expressing himself with his hands.”
Boboc grinned and revealed a mouth of smashed, jagged stumps where his teeth had once been. He swung the flail mace around in a circle at his side and brought the spiked metal ball crashing down on the stone floor. It smashed through the surface and blasted splinters of granite into the air.
“Shit,” Devlin said.
“And to think he wants to do that to your ugly little head!” Kruger said. “Goodbye, Mr Devlin. Forever.”
Lea felt Kruger’s hands squeeze her arm as he dragged her out of the dungeon and slammed the heavy door. “You can’t let him die like that!”
Kruger chuckled. “If you think that’s bad, wait until you see what the Oracle has in store for you.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Eden and Alex had liaised with the US authorities and quickly figured out the Oracle’s flight plan to Miami, despite efforts to cover it up. Hawke and the rest of the team had landed in the city only minutes after the Athanatoi contingent.
A chopper was waiting for them on the apron and they were in the air before the engines on their private jet had stopped spinning. Tracking the Oracle’s NH-90 south across Biscayne Bay had been meat and potatoes for Joe Hawke, but no one was prepared for the surface-to-air missile streaking toward them from one of the keys down on the twilight horizon.
“Brace for evasive action!” Hawke pulled on the controls and tipped the helicopter hard to port. Pitching the nose to the ground to raise the tail boom, he did all he could to stop the projectile hitting them.
“Holy shit!” Kim yelled.
The missile scorched through the sky at the head of a plume of white exhaust smoke twisting in the tropical breeze. The lethal weapon flashed past the chopper and screeched into the eastern sky behind them, before turning in an arc and heading back around to its target once again.
“Heat seeker?” Reaper asked.
Hawke gave a quick shrug. “Or remote control… hardly matters. Look out!”
He descended the chopper rapidly to avoid the incoming missile. Their ears popped as he piled the helicopter down toward the surface of the sea. The key was rising up now and approaching fast. A large swimming pool surrounded by loungers and palm trees was at the eastern end of the island and now Hawke saw a number of men in black setting up a grenade launcher at the side of the pool.
“Something tells me they don’t want us to land!”
The grenade launcher crew fired on them and Hawke tipped the chopper aggressively to the left to avoid their rounds. He was too late. The grenade exploded and shredded the rotors, blasting them to pieces, instantly and fatally wounding the chopper.
He struggled with the helicopter’s controls as the missile streaked past them and headed for the swimming pool area. The crew abandoned their grenade launchers and ran for their lives as the weapon smashed into the decking beside the pool and exploded in a massive fireball that lit up half the island.
The chopper burst though the cloud of smoke billowing up from the destruction below. Situated to the left of the pilot’s seat like the handbrake on a car, the collective lever altered the pitch angle of the chopper’s rotors. This normally changed the machine’s lift and could even determine its rate of descent even if a helicopter’s engine cut out. It was usually possible to glide the machine safely to earth using this collective lever in a process called autorotation.
This allows the pilot to constantly change the pitch to keep the rotors spinning even without the engine, but not if the rotors had been blasted to shreds by a fragmentation grenade. Fighting with the anti-torque pedals as he tried to keep the chopper straight and level, it didn’t take an experienced helicopter pilot like Hawke long to know that this bird was going down, hard and fast.
He did all he could, desperately manipulating the pitch of what was left of the rotors in a bid to keep some kind of rotation going and slow the descent of the doomed aircraft. At the same time, he tried to edge the chopper toward the jungle running around the outside of the island. If they hit the hard ground at this speed, it was doubtful anyone was walking away, but if he could use the thick blanket of mangroves and palm trees around the island it might just arrest the fall enough to provide some sort of cushioning effect.
Hawke had flown many missions in helicopters, both as passenger and pilot and he’d had more than his fair share of close calls, but this was easily the most dangerous situation he’d ever had in one. Worse than that, the injuries on his arm and leg had been dressed on the plane from Greece but were still giving him a lot of pain.
The ground rushed toward him and the chopper now started to spin uncontrollably on its vertical axis. With time fast running out, he called over the comms to the rest of the team. “Brace for impact!”
“Not this again!” Ryan yelled.
The chopper plunged into the tropical canopy, its shredded rotors slicing the tops of the palms like two hot knives through butter and flinging the debris in all directions. Inside, the battered and terrified passengers held on for their lives as the machine smashed down through the trees and crashed hard into the sandy ground.
The landing skids instantly buckled and broke away from the main body. The spinning chopper’s tail boom whacked into one of the tree trunks and tore clean away sending the tail rotor violently ricocheting off into the jungle. The horizontal stabilizer tails ripped off as it shredded its way through the undergrowth before coming to a dead stop in a wall of vines.
The main rotors jammed into yet more trunks like blunt axes, bending and stopping with a deep thud, halting the drive shaft and burning out the main motor before the forward-motion of the chopper’s body ripped them off and sent them crashing to the ground.
The cabin of the helicopter, now without a tail boom or rotors, or skids, skidded along the jungle floor until they collided with a thick, low branch which punched a hole through the windshield. Nearly decapitating Reaper in the co-pilot’s seat, it had the effect of spinning the chopper around one-eighty degrees and finally bringing them to a stop in the center of the thick jungle.
The aluminum on the main fuselage bent and crumpled, bursting open on the starboard side and sending fuel spilling out on the sandy ground. With the stench of jet fuel rising into the battered and dented cabin, Kim came to and tried to bring her eyes into focus. She was dazed, dizzy and nauseous. She realized she must have been knocked out at some point, probably after smashing her head into the window pillar on her left side.
She blew out a breath and tried to get her head together. She was shaking like a leaf and her heart was beating so hard and fast she thought it might just burst out of her chest. Then she smelled the fuel.
She could smell it strongly and hear it running out of the helicopter. She looked out of the window and saw a pool of it collecting around what was left of the chopper. It must be coming from a severed fuel line, she thought.
We have to get out of here.
She looked around the rear seats and saw Lexi Zhang trying to unbuckle Scarlet’s belt and free her from her seat. The SAS captain was unconscious with blood trickling from a gash on her forehead. “Joe!” Kim called out in the darkness. “Joe, can you hear me? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he called back. “I think I hurt my shoulder, but the good news is my astonishing good looks are not compromised in any way.”
“Good to hear your voice,” she said, smiling at his joke but not responding to it. “What about Reaper?”
“Bad news I’m afraid.”
She felt her heart leap. “What?”