“The crash hasn’t made him any less ugly.”
“Joe!”
“He’s fine too, but he’s out cold. How’s everyone in the back?”
Ryan said, “Cairo’s out too, but Lexi’s fine.”
“Nine lives,” the Chinese assassin said as she kicked open the starboard door and started to haul Scarlet out of the chopper.
Kim unbuckled her belt now and started to climb. “We’ve got a fuel leak, Joe.”
“I know, I can smell it — plus the Oracle will have sent an armed force out to finish us off. We need to get out of here right now.”
Hawke grabbed his equipment bag, climbed out of the pilot’s seat and ran around to the other side. He saw the pool of jet fuel getting larger by the second and knew one spark would send them all hurtling into the next world. He opened the door and unbuckled Reaper’s belt. Pulling the heavy Frenchman from his seat, he dragged him out into the jungle to where Lexi had taken Scarlet. Kim and Camacho were there too, frightened and angry in equal measure, but unharmed.
“That right there,” Lexi pursed her lips. “Was one fuck of a landing.”
“My pleasure,” Hawke said, crouching down to Scarlet and checking her pulse. “She’s coming around.”
“And Reaper too!” Kim said.
Scarlet groaned as she looked up at Hawke. “What the hell happened?”
“We had a slight hitch with the end of the flight,” Ryan said.
“A slight hitch?”
Hawke shrugged and gave her a look of apology. “Kruger blew our rotors off with a grenade.”
“Ah.”
“You got knocked out, but you seem okay to me.”
The Frenchman rubbed his head. “What happened?”
“You were knocked out, Reaper,” Kim said.
“You hear that?” said Lexi. “Look, over there!” She pointed into the trees south of the crash site. “I see headlights.”
Reaper was now also on his feet, brushing mud and dirt from his jacket and jeans. “Sounds like quads to me.”
“Sounds more like trouble to me,” Hawke said.
“There they are!” Kim said.
Hawke knew what to do. “Don’t do anything until I give the order.”
“But they’ll be here in a minute or two,” Camacho said. “We can get away.”
Reaper started to trudge into the darkness of the jungle to the west. “Let’s get out of here then!”
“No.” Hawke stopped him. “Thanks to Kruger, we’re at least a mile short of where we need to be to assault the villa. We need those quads!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Danny Devlin had enjoyed better days. Chained to a wall in the dungeon of a freak like the Oracle while a meat mountain with medieval weaponry padded over to him was not his idea of the perfect evening.
Boboc grunted and swung the mace.
Devlin ducked and the spiky iron ball smashed into the wall behind his head and blasted a chunk of stone into the room.
“Are you not going to whisper sweet nothings into my year first?”
Another swing of the mace, closer this time. He actually felt the chain connecting the ball to the handle swipe past his face.
“OK,” Devlin said. “So now I know how you really feel about me…”
He stepped fast to his right and flicked up the manacle on his right wrist, sending the chain whipping up like a skipping rope. It sailed through the air just as he thought it would and when it came back down he pulled it around Boboc’s head and snapped it tight as hard as he could.
The chain-links cut into the flesh on the giant’s neck and Devlin whipped it around a second time creating a kind of metal noose which he pulled on with all his strength. The man grunted in response and dropped the mace, bringing his fat hands up to try and prise the chain away from this throat.
Devlin sighed with disappointment. “So you can dish it out but you can’t take it.”
Boboc’s mouth worked silently as he gasped for air. The powerful man spun around and threw Devlin back against the wall.
He started unravelling the chain from his neck, so the Irish Ranger knew he had to act fast. Reaching down he grabbed the mace and swung it hard at his enemy, catching him square between his shoulder blades with the heavy spiked ball. The bones in the man’s back splintered like old pottery and he opened his mouth wide to scream hard and loud.
Devlin wrenched the mace ball from Boboc’s back in a jet of blood and bone fragments and swung it again. It was a heavy, tough weapon to manipulate but Devlin was no slouch. He twisted his upper body to increase momentum and brought the spiked ball smashing into the back of the choking man’s skull.
Boboc fell forward like a freshly-cut tree falling over, smashing his face into the stone floor with a toe-curling crunch as his nose and cheek bones shattered.
Devlin took the mace and then reached into the man’s pocket and found the keys. Freeing himself he leaned forward and checked Boboc’s breathing, but there was nothing. “Just staying on the safe side, you big ape.”
Then he walked across the dungeon and slipped through the door, locking it behind him as he checked the corridor for any sign of the guards who might have overheard the festivities back in the cell. Nothing. “Good,” he said. “Hold on, Lea. I’m on my way!”
Hawke waited until the men were almost at touching distance from the chopper and then fired at the pool of jet fuel at its base. The men saw the trap a millisecond before the fuel ignited. They turned to run but the explosion swallowed them whole and burned their fleeing bodies to a crisp before they could take two steps.
With fire consuming the chopper’s twisted, gnarled wreckage in a fierce blaze, the other men backed up on their quads and turned away from the carnage. Spotting Hawke in the tree line, one of them alerted the rest of his team to his location and immediately headed for him.
Hawke darted back into the shadows of the jungle, allowing the men a long enough view of him to draw them in. As they approached, Lexi and Reaper opened fire on them and took another two of them out blasting them clean off their quads. The riderless machines spun out of control, one of them piling into the burning wreckage and the other smashing head-on into a tree trunk and spinning over on its side.
“There’s another one!” Ryan yelled.
One of the quads turned sharply to the right and sprayed an arc of dirt and leaves into their faces. The man riding it lifted an MP5 and fired a long burst of rounds at them. The bullets slammed into the earth and ripped chunks off nearby trunks filling the air with splinters and misty clouds of palm sap.
“Take cover!” Hawke yelled.
He leaped into a trench and slid to a stop in a pile of rotten coconuts. Scrambling to the top of the trench, he returned fire, aiming squarely at the quad’s fuel tank. He squeezed the trigger and emptied the magazine all over the man who had just tried to kill them.
The rounds snaked up the path behind the quad, blew out the two rear tires and then hit the target. The tank exploded in a ferocious storm of ignited gasoline and black smoke, blasting the quad into the air like a toy and propelling the rider into a palm trunk. He struck it with his back and slid down dead onto the jungle floor.
With the last of the men dead, they climbed on the quads ready to take off toward the villa in the center of the island when Scarlet’s phone buzzed. She took the call and they all watched as her face dropped.
“That was Rich.” She put her phone in her pocket. “He says the Five Eyes are meeting in a hotel in Miami Beach.”
“Mon Dieu!” Reaper said. “Now there’s a target worth hitting.”
“What’s Five Eyes?” Ryan asked.
Hawke fired up his quad and raised his voice. “It’s an alliance of the intelligence agencies of the main English-speaking countries — America, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. It started after World War II when they created the ECHELON surveillance network.”