Hawke frowned. “Not what I wanted to hear, mate.”
“I don’t know what to do!”
“Let me have a look.” Hawke walked over and fiddled with the dials and levers on the consul, checking the response each time he operated one of the control surfaces.
“Well?”
“It’s going to be rough, but we’ve got enough elevator control to bring the pitch up and make a shallower descent. You get on the radio and tell those F-16s we’re friendly!”
He wrestled with the controls as the stricken airship plummeted to the beach. Buffeted by the wind which howled in through the smashed bridge window, Hawke fought hard to bring the nose up just as the bottom of the gondola smashed into the sea a little way off shore.
Lea screamed and Ryan swore loudly, neither able to look as the impact blasted tons of water up over the sides of the gondola. Hawke cursed as he pulled the controls back to keep the nose up. The last thing he wanted was for the force of the impact to plow the gondola under the surface of the sea and drown them all.
Successfully pitching the airship’s nose up again, the gondola skidded across the surface of the ocean for a few hundred meters before plowing up into the sand and screeching toward the large collection of emergency vehicles that had assembled on the beach as first responders.
“You two OK?” he yelled.
Two scared nods.
“In that case, please wait until the aircraft comes to a full and complete stop before unbuckling your seatbelts.”
Slowly, the friction of the sand against the gondola’s glass-fiber hull brought the wrecked airship to a stop less than ten meters from one of the fire trucks.
He saw the rest of the team he had left back on the island and now Camacho and Scarlet sprinted over from the fire trucks as Lea draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed him on the back of the neck.
It was over.
Almost.
It was full night when they crawled from the crumpled gondola. The lights of Miami Beach glittered all around them and the sounds of the city were playful and innocent. Music boomed from a Porsche convertible cruising along Miami Beach Boardwalk and laughter echoed from a nightclub’s rooftop terrace.
Hawke was exhausted. He cricked his neck and strolled over to the rest of his team with his hands in his pockets. He wanted nothing more than a good night’s sleep and then another good night’s sleep straight after. When he glanced at his leg, he thought that maybe a trip to a local hospital might also be in order.
The entire team was together now except Devlin. He was piloting the airboat in from Biscayne Bay.
“There he is!” Kim said, pointing out into the darkness.
Devlin waved back as he navigated the airboat toward the beach.
“Why the long faces?” Hawke said. “And no horse jokes.”
“He got away, Joe.” Lea kicked he sand with her boot. “The bastard got away.”
“But this was a successful mission!”
“Not if he got away it wasn’t.”
“What are you talking about? We now have all eight of the idols and that weird little ring… and we killed Kruger!”
Ryan coughed. “Who killed Kruger?”
Hawke patted him on the back. “We all know what you did, mate. Well done. That settles an account, right?”
Ryan reddened a little. “I guess so.”
Reaper lit up a cigarette and blew the smoke into the night air. “That day you fired on him in Rio, do you remember?”
“I’ll never forget it,” Ryan said. “I let everyone down that day.”
“That day was the day you started on your journey to becoming a real man, Ryan. Today you finished the journey and I am proud of you.”
Lea started to well up.
Scarlet rolled her eyes. “Is there a fucking bar around here? I mean, it’s Miami, right?”
Hawke huffed out a tired laugh. “When Danny gets here, I promise we’ll find a bar. Somewhere nice and seedy where we can drink this nightmare away.”
“Debriefing first,” Lea said, pointing to a group of men in suits at the top of the beach. “The Five Eyes survived a serious terror attack tonight and those dudes are going to want every inch of it on paper.”
“Dotted Is and Crossed Ts,” Camacho said. “Gotta love the CIA.”
Lea looked at Hawke’s leg and shoulders. “And then hospital for you, mister.”
As the others walked over to the authorities for a debriefing, Lea kept watching her old friend and lover as he drove the airboat to the beach. When she saw the tiny red dot on the surface of the water she knew at once what it meant. She felt her skin crawl as it slipped effortlessly onto the airboat’s curved hull and then up over Devlin. It danced over his shirt and then settled on his left temple.
She cried out, “Danny!”
He couldn’t hear her and then it was over. A high-velocity round drilled into Danny Devlin’s head and blasted him off the airboat. He crashed down into the dark water and the airboat spun out of control, tipping up and cartwheeling over and over until it broke up and smashed into a hundred pieces.
No one in the team moved or spoke.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Hawke leaned on the edge of the wall and looked out across Galway Bay. The sunset was lighting the sky in pinks and ambers and a new hush was descending over the world. A swallow dipped and dived and twisted in the twilight. It landed on a telephone wire above his head and chirped in the dying light.
He considered Danny Devlin and how he had died fighting alongside him for the good of the team. He wasn’t quite sure what to feel when he thought about what had happened. He’d barely known Devlin but in the short time they had worked together he’d seen how brave he was and he felt a wave of guilt when he realized how badly he had misjudged the man when he’d hugged Lea in London.
Everyone in the ECHO team except Sir Richard Eden had attended the funeral in Dublin. Over a hundred friends and family had been there, including former colleagues from his army days and relatives from South Africa. No one could believe the great Danny Devlin was dead, but they raised many good glasses at the wake in his memory before the day was done.
That was a week ago and the rawness was starting to fade now. Scarlet and Camacho had travelled to visit her brother Spencer at Rytchley Manor in England and Ryan had returned to London to spend some time with a few friends from his hacking days.
Reaper had taken Lexi back to Provence where they planned to go to his summer home with his wife and twin boys. Her time at the hands of the Zodiacs had left her drained and she needed time to recover. Reaper’s wife knew a good plastic surgeon who had promised to help mend her tortured hand.
As for Kim, she had returned to Washington DC and her job with the President. Hawke knew in his heart that was where she really longed to be and he guessed she wouldn’t be coming on many more ECHO missions.
And there was Lea. After the funeral, when everyone had flown away and it was just the two of them, they had walked on the cliffs around Galway Bay and visited places she knew as a child. He’d watched her come back to life as she spoke in Irish to the older people in her family and realized just how damaging the lives they led really were.
Devlin’s murder had been hard on her. They’d lost team members before and this time it was no less painful. Lea was visibly crushed when he was killed, but she had been too focused on the mission to think about it. He knew it would hit her later, like a ton of bricks. The former Irish Ranger was an old friend of hers and they had once been lovers. There was no way she could process his murder without going through a lot of pain and asking a lot of questions.
And if that weren’t bad enough, she hadn’t even begun to deal with the impact of her grandmother’s letter. Or who she had thought was her grandmother, but turned out to be her sister. The stunning revelation of her father’s discovery of the elixir of life had shaken her to her core but the events of the last few days had shielded her from its brutal truth and enabled her to hide from it. They both knew that soon she would have to face all of this and much more.