Behind them, the Venom had no time to react and a second later it smashed into the hard rock at the top of the waterfall behind the overhang. It exploded into a massive fireball and sprayed gas-fuelled flames all over the rainforest canopy.
Scarlet hung out her window and yelled with glee as the wrecked chopper dropped like a dead fly into the plunge pool and disappeared under the foam and spray of the falling water. “Not confident Kruger’s getting his deposit back on the Venom.”
Hawke grinned. “I take it that my little plan worked?”
“This time, you total idiot, you got lucky.”
“And I thought Dirk was the lucky one…”
Hawke lifted the chopper away from the canopy and turned it south toward Machu Picchu.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Vincent Reno was starting to think he was getting too old for this line of work. True, he found strength by recalling his French Foreign Legion days, but those days were a long way behind him now. Some argued you never really stopped being a legionnaire, but that wasn’t true for him.
When he left the hardened ranks of the legion, he took his training and experience into Francophone Africa where he worked as an independent mercenary. After that he was the proverbial lost soul, drifting around from odd job to odd job and trying to stay on the straight and narrow to give his kids a decent life in the south of France.
Then his life took a radical change of direction when his old friend Scarlet Sloane had called him one day and drawn him into the Poseidon mission. Then, things had changed in a big way. He’d learned things about a world he thought he knew… things that had shocked him to his core, but, he thought with a Gallic shrug, nothing Vincent Reno couldn’t handle.
He wasn’t scared by what they had learned in Atlantis and the Seastead. If anything, it had given him a new lease of life. If it was true, and they really were facing a corrupt cabal of people who possessed the power of immortality, then he wanted to get to the bottom of it. If what they had learned was real, then the Athanatoi and its various chapters were like a crust of scum keeping the rest of humanity in eternal darkness and ignorance. Smashing that crust and letting the daylight flow in was his kind of day job.
More than that, breaking through their ranks and getting to their dark heart promised more than simply ending their grip on global power and understanding how they worked their magic with the elixir. It also meant discovering something they had kept behind a veil for millennia… something about the origins of humanity that his heart told his head he had to know, for himself, his wife, his twin boys and everyone else in the world.
He respectfully removed the dead pilot from the Mi-171 and fired up the engine as the others climbed in, put on their helmets and buckled up. He raised the collective to ascend the chopper into a hover above the ruins of the ancient citadel. Immediately the main rotor started vibrating and they began to lose altitude.
“What’s going on?” Lea asked.
Vincent noticed the sink rate increase and the vibration on the main rotors get worse. “It’s called a vortex ring state,” the Frenchman replied. “It’s when the rotors are engulfed by an air vortex.” As he spoke, he adjusted the cyclic and corrected the problem. “It’s fine now.”
“I don’t think so!” Lexi yelled, pointing out the rear starboard window. Kruger’s chopper had turned in the sky and was now flying toward them. It slowed to a hover above the citadel’s ancient Prisoners’ Area and that’s when they saw the side door open.
“What the hell are they doing?” Lexi asked.
She got her answer when Mauricio Balta’s dead body was thrown out into the wind. His clothes and hair flapped about in the downdraft as he tumbled out of sight in the ravine.
“Animals,” Lea said.
“And they’re not stopping there,” Reaper said.
They looked to see Rajavi shoulder an RPG7 while Corzo loaded a rocket into it. “They’re not playing games.”
“Damn it!” Reaper said. “Thanks to the VRS we’re too low!”
Rajavi hung outside the chopper and then a flash of smoke puffed out the back of the RPG launcher sending a rocket racing toward their helicopter. It left a trail of twisting white exhaust smoke drifting in a thin line above the citadel’s cemetery.
“Flare!” Reaper yelled through the comms, and then swung the chopper around to face the missile, reducing their overall target area.
Lea instantly pulled the flare dispenser from under her seat and grabbed the latch on the window. She slid the window open, and fired a decoy flare out the portside.
Reaper tipped the chopper hard to the right, almost pulling her on her side as the rocket screeched past them and struck the countermeasure. They all felt the explosion as it blasted against the bottom of the chopper but Reaper used his experience to bring her level and true. “We need altitude!”
He pulled her up to the maximum climb rate of eight meters per second and swung her one-eighty out over the valley. A second ago they were fifty feet above Machu Picchu, but now they were hundreds of feet above the Urubamba River.
Reaper sighed with relief. “Thank those guys for me, will you Lexi?”
The Chinese assassin nodded. She slid open her window and began spraying the two-man RPG crew with gunfire, but Kruger was an excellent pilot and easily dodged the line of fire.
Reaper dropped the collective and made the chopper dive down the western slope of the mountain. Machu Picchu flashed past them and was gone in a second, replaced by the lush green of the rainforest. Lea screamed and reached out for the grab handle as the Frenchman brought the machine under control, his mind split four ways between the collective, the cyclic, the rudders and the control panel. At over one hundred and twenty miles per hour and racing through a narrow valley while trying to avoid incoming fire from Kruger’s chopper, it took every ounce of his concentration.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Ryan said.
“Bien sûr,” Reaper replied. “The last time I flew one of these the instructor said I was one of his best students.”
Lexi gasped. “The last time you flew a helicopter was with an instructor?”
He nodded.
“So you’re not qualified?”
He shook his head. “Sadly, no.”
“Oh, shit!”
“Ah,” Reaper said, smiling at the memory. “1984 was a great year.”
Ryan and Lexi shared a horrified glance. “1984?”
“Mais, oui.”
“So let me get this straight,” Lea said. “You’re not qualified to fly a helicopter and the last time you flew one was before any of us was born?”
Reaper gave his famous Gallic shrug. “You really know how to make a guy feel old, you know that?”
He plunged the chopper into another dive. No one in the chopper could believe what they had just heard, but Lexi moved first and begun to load her gun.
“I don’t think you can hit Kruger from this range,” Ryan said.
“It’s not for Kruger,” she said coldly. “If Monsieur Reaper loses control of this thing I’m going out with a bullet, not in a burning heap of twisted metal. Would you like me to extend the same courtesy to you?”
Ryan swallowed hard and widened his eyes as he stared at the muzzle of her gun. “No thanks, you’re all right.”
Kruger’s chopper was directly behind them now, and dived down in pursuit of them as they opened fire once again. Rajavi was leaning out the sliding door with one hand looped around the handle while he fired his submachine gun with the other hand. Wild sprays of bullets traced all over the ECHO chopper as Reaper swung the cyclic from side to side to dodge the flying rounds. If they struck the gas tank they would be a fireball half a second later, and then nothing but burning debris raining down into the jungle canopy below.