“I need you to do one more thing for me, Héctor.”
“Anything!”
Skull gave a grim smile and raised his pistol. “Die.”
“No!”
The shot rang out in the tiny office, and Héctor Barrera staggered backwards into his desk. He turned and tried to hang on to the desk in a bid to stop himself going over, but it was in vain. The searing pain in his chest and the loss of blood pressure forced him down to the cheap vinyl tiles of his office, and then he was on his side, staring up at the world in agony.
He watched the man with the Skull mask step over to him with the gun from his new sideways angle, reaching out with a shaking hand in a desperate last-minute plea for his life, but he received no mercy — only a second bullet.
“There’s your bastard settlement,” the man said, pulling the Skull mask back on, and slammed the door behind him as his life slipped away into darkness.
CHAPTER TWO
Joe Hawke turned around to take one last look at the gravestone and shook his head in disbelief. Maria Kurikova was dead, and Ryan Bale was missing presumed dead. Hawke preferred Missing in Action because at least that way it left some hope for his survival, however slim. Far away across the Atlantic Ocean, their leader Sir Richard Eden was lying in a London hospital deep in a coma. His condition had deteriorated badly on board the USS Harry S. Truman and he’d been flown straight to London.
To complete the shattering of their team, Alex Reeve was in Washington DC in a military hospital due to a bullet wound in her shoulder. One of the men from the Black Hawk had not gotten back to the chopper and survived the F18 missile strike. He’d tried to take out Alex with his assault rifle and wounded her, but Kim Taylor had taken him down with a double tap from behind the cover of the black smoke pouring from the chopper’s wreckage.
She’d told him that she was going to have to go back anyway. While she was on the aircraft carrier she had been recalled by her father due to his new position as President-elect of the United States. Having won the election in early November, it was no longer considered safe to have his family drifting around the world due to fears of kidnapping and blackmail.
Alex would recover and get stronger, and he had hopes Richard Eden would do the same, but what was crushing Hawke was Ryan and Maria. He was struggling with the sense of injustice and rage more than he thought was possible for someone with a past as rocky and violent as his. He had watched many good friends die in battle, and even more fall to PTSD or the bottle, but watching a young couple taken away like this had really got to him.
He sighed and stared up at the complex that used to be Elysium Headquarters, but was now no more than a burned-out husk. He could still hardly bring himself to believe what Alex had told them about the Apache attack and the squad of Special Forces men who landed in the Black Hawk on north beach. It all seemed like something from a nightmare. He had no idea how long it would take them to pull the place together, but he knew they had to try. It was their home, and at least some of the lower floors were still intact.
He wandered away from the grave, picked up his kukri knife and resumed sharpening the Nepalese Army weapon, filing the edge of the blade with a butcher’s steel.
Lea walked over and sat down beside him on the small bench a few yards from the freshly dug earth. The Irishwoman kept her eyes closed as the swaying palms above her head broke the sunlight up and cast mottled shadows on her smooth face. “So what now?”
“I’m not giving up on him,” Hawke said. “Not until I know for sure.”
“Joe…”
He looked at the graves again: Olivia Hart, Sophie Durand, Bradley Karlsson, Ben, Alfie, Sasha and now Maria. The list grew longer. Their sacrifices were all marked here in the center of Elysium, their secret base, shaded by the palms. It was the one area that got away totally unscathed from the vicious assault on the island. He tried to fight it, but the thought of Ryan’s grave now manifested in his mind, right there beside the others. No… not until I know for sure,” he whispered.
He looked out to sea and saw Cairo Sloane speeding across the waves on her windsurfing board. A bright flash of scarlet against the dazzling turquoise ocean. This place didn’t feel like paradise anymore.
Lea saw his eyes as they tracked Scarlet across the water. “Nothing seems to affect her, not in the way it does the rest of us.”
“Cairo Sloane is in a different category,” he said almost automatically, and then with more feeling: “I wouldn’t have been able to get to that bastard Matheson without Maria. She was the one who shone the light on all that for me. I owe her so much, and now she’s gone.”
Lea raised a hand and laid it gently on his arm. “It’s not your fault, Joe.”
“If not mine, then whose?” he said, raising his voice more than he meant. “I was the one leading the operation. I put her in that place. She was following my orders when she was killed. This is just Sophie and Olivia all over again.”
“We’re not kids, Joe. We all know the risks. Maria was a very experienced FSB agent. You can’t take that away from her. When you say it’s all your fault you’re just saying she wasn’t capable of making her own decisions.”
Hawke said nothing, but moved her arm away and rose to his feet. She was right, of course. Maria Kurikova wasn’t a child. She was a highly competent agent for the Russian security services and a respected member of the ECHO team. She lived the way she wanted, and she died doing something she loved, but none of that made it any easier on Hawke and his tortured mind.
The mind that was now racing with the terrible events of the Seastead and his failure to kill the mysterious Oracle. Knowing Dirk Kruger and Dragan Korać were both dead brought almost no comfort at all considering the price their deaths had cost the team. Not even Reaper taking Kamchatka out or Maria sending Luk to such a miserable and violent death could bring any sense of fairness or balance to the world given the terrible loss they had suffered with the deaths of Ryan and Maria.
Maria. Since the now-notorious Seastead battle he had felt hollowed out, struck by her death like never before. He didn’t want to ask himself why he’d reacted in this way, that maybe he’d felt something more for her than mere friendship. He knew he loved Lea, so maybe it was just that he was drifting too far from his Special Forces days and could no longer deal with death in the way they’d trained him to all those years ago. But on top of Liz, it just felt like someone was twisting the knife. He couldn’t bring himself to think about what might happen if Lea ever got hurt.
Hawke loved Lea. At least he thought he did. It was a complicated business. At least it had become a complicate business since the death of Maria Kurikova. And then there was Alex Reeve. He was no fool. He knew the way the American felt about him, or at least he thought he did. When it came to successfully receiving signals from women, he liked to think he was the best among men, but the truth was he had no more idea than any other man and he knew it. Still, when they had been together in Idaho in her father’s mountain cabin he had been certain she was trying to be more than friends.
He was silent for a long time. When he spoke, it was through gritted teeth. “Otmar Wolff is a dead man walking.”
“If we ever see him again,” Lea said with a sigh.
“You can count on that,” he said. “I don’t care how long it takes. Wolff will pay for all of this.”
Lexi Zhang emerged from the headquarters building and called Lea over. Someone wanted to speak with her on the phone. As she got up to leave she kissed Hawke on the cheek before walking away.
He watched her step inside the shade of the wrecked building and tried to use the silence to get some perspective but then Scarlet walked up the beach toward him. Her hair was slicked back with the ocean and the saltwater was running off her wetsuit. She stepped across the hot sand and smiled at him.