“My God, you people really are insane. You’ll kill thousands of innocent people!”
“We see the grand plan you are unable to see.”
Blankov reached for a gun on the consul and Hawke released a burst of rounds from his MP5, mowing him down and killing him on the spot.
“You didn’t see that part of the plan though, did you mate?”
Behind the terrified captain through the front window of the airship, Hawke saw a long golden line of sand and glittering tower blocks shining in the sunset. They were already approaching Miami Beach but taking care to avoid the no-fly zone. All the Oracle had to do was hit the remote and detonate the tsunami bomb and hundreds of thousands of innocent people would die, not to mention the Five Eyes officials, including President Brooke.
Hawke pulled back the hammer on his pistol. “I said, where are they?”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
With Ryan holding the captain at gunpoint, Hawke made his way through the door and started to walk down the length of the gondola. Around fifty feet long, a central corridor gave way to doors on either side and at the end of it at the stern was a large viewing deck. On the table was Kruger’s backpack, complete with the codex and what looked like the base of one of the idols.
He had struck gold.
Now he saw the Oracle and a huddle of Athanatoi, then Kruger dragged Lea into view. There was a struggle and then the arms dealer slapped her hard across the face.
“Let her go, dickhead!”
Lea sighed with relief when she saw the Englishman.
Kruger shook his head. “Fuck me dead, Hawke. Can’t you take a hint?”
The Oracle swivelled around, a bomb remote in his hand. “I told you to kill him! Kill him now and throw his dead body out of my airship!”
“Who do you think you are?” Hawke said. “Max Bloody Zorin?”
They fired on him with a vengeance, spraying the rear section of the deck with bullets and instantly blowing out the large observation window. Glass spewed out into the air and vanished in the twilight and a loud, howling noise filled the inside of the cabin.
Hawke dived to the floor and rolled behind the long wooden bar as Kruger dragged Lea across the viewing deck and toward some steps. He was trying to take her up into the space between the rigid structure of the airship and its helium bags.
Hawke raised his head above the edge of the bar as bullets drilled into it and forced tiny clouds of splintered wood and shattered glass into the air. He ducked back down just in time to avoid being shot in the face, slamming into the floor and cutting his hands on the shards of broken glass.
He cursed and looked down at the wounds but they were superficial. He’d just have to suck it up for now, he thought with a grim smile. An Athanatoi acolyte rounded the edge of the bar in pursuit of him. Finding him crouched in the detritus, he grinned and raised his gun.
Hawke grabbed the neck of a broken bottle of vodka and threw it at the cultist with all his might. It spun through the air like a dart and the jagged end buried itself into the middle of his face like a set of jaws.
He screamed in agony and dropped the gun as he reached up to pull the broken glass fragments from his bleeding face.
Hawke seized the moment and grabbed the dropped weapon. Still lying on his stomach, he held the gun with both hands and fired on the man, planting three rounds in his chest. With the glass fragments still wedged in his face, he stumbled back a few paces and then his legs collided with an upturned chair in front of the shattered observation window. Losing his balance, he tipped backwards and gave a heart-stopping scream as he fell out of the window and spun down toward the ocean hundreds of feet below.
“A new high-dive record, I think,” Hawke said, peering outside the window. “Two tucks and a pike.”
Someone else fired on him. The bullet slammed into the wall beside his head and he crashed down to the floor behind a long leather sofa. He cursed but at least he still had the gun. He checked the magazine and saw ten rounds remaining.
The man who had fired on him was reloading and Hawke used the moment to return fire under the sofa. The rounds strafed across the carpet, kicking up little puffs of rubber and polyester before tearing through the man’s boots and burying themselves in his feet and ankles.
The cultist wailed and collapsed to the floor, howling in pain and desperately trying to drag himself into the cover of the central corridor.
Hawke fired on him and took him out before he’d made a yard.
Then he heard Lea screaming.
Scanning the room through the smoke he saw she was nowhere in sight. Kruger must have taken her into the top of the airship — but where the hell was the Oracle? He stuffed the gun into his belt and darted across the observation deck toward the steel staircase.
Taking a rail in each hand, he leaped up the steps two at a time until he found himself inside the space between the rigid structure and the helium balloons. It was cramped and smelled of oil but he had no time to assess the situation further. A gun fired in the darkness and he heard a bullet trace past his face and slam into one of the rigid structure support beams.
He dropped to his knees and pulled the gun from his belt. Looking ahead, he saw Kruger but still no sign of Lea. “Give up and I’ll let you live, Kruger!”
“Get real, Englishman.” Kruger fired again and Hawke buried his head in his crossed arms as the bullet blew past him and ricocheted off another of the steel girders. “We both know this is a fight to the death… Yours!” He fired on him again and the bullet struck a support strut and ricocheted down into Hawke’s shoulder.
It felt like flesh wound, so Hawke fired back, but Kruger dropped away into the thin air like a phantom, leaving nothing behind but gun smoke.
“What the hell?”
Hawke ran to where Kruger had been standing and saw a maintenance hatch leading down to the bridge. There, on the floor, Kruger was fighting Ryan. He went to jump down when he heard Lea screaming. She was back with the Oracle and she needed his help.
Lea or Ryan?
Hawke knew Ryan needed to exorcise his demons when it came to Kruger, so he threw him his gun, turned on his heel and sprinted back down the inside of the structure.
Ryan saw the hatch burst open but had no time to respond. The man crashed through the hole and landed right on top of him, pushing him to the floor in the middle of the bridge with heavy work boots that almost knocked him out. When he staggered up to his knees and saw who had attacked him, he thought his heart had stopped.
Dirk Kruger.
“Fuck me,” Kruger crowed. “I didn’t know we had the Girl Guides on here.”
Ryan saw the gun in the arms dealer’s hand. His own had been knocked across the floor when Kruger crashed into him, but Hawke had thrown him another. It was out of reach. He started to panic, but knew he had to play for time. The captain took a few cautious steps back and steadied the airship’s controls.
Then Kruger rushed him.
Ryan felt a surge of rage he had never known before. Before ECHO his life had been spent as a man on the run. When it came to fight or flight, he could write a PhD on running away. Mr Line-of-Least-Resistance, he always backed down, said sorry, walked away.
ECHO had changed all that. Hawke had changed it. Lea and the others had led him out of the darkness of timidity and into the light of courage and he needed to draw on that now, or he would die. He needed to use the intense, animal anger that Dirk Kruger was inducing in him if he was to survive.
The arms dealer’s sweaty face was right over the top of him now, looking down with a grin as he tightened his fingers around his throat. Visions of Maria Kurikova flew through his mind like starlings. What heaven was she in now, he wondered… and would he soon be joining her?