Lea felt the frustration grow in her heart. They had already lost Professor Balta and Luis, and now things were looking perilous for the rest of the team as well. Not only that, but Ziad Saqqal, Jawad, Rajavi, Corzo and Dirk Kruger were all getting away with the Lost Treasure of the Incas piled into their choppers. If that weren’t bad enough, they also had of the most lethal forms of pneumatic plague ever to strike mankind.
Reaper stared up at the grid, shook his head and let out a long, low sigh. It was low enough for him to reach now, and he grabbed hold of one of the spikes to test its strength. “Definitely bronze,” he said, trying hard to shift it. “And connected very strongly to the grille framework. We’re not snapping these things off.”
“More good news,” Scarlet said.
The grinding sound was louder now as the framework was working its way much closer, and they were all crouching to avoid the spikes pushing down onto their heads and shoulders.
“I’ve got it,” Ryan said. “It’s actually a rather complex mathematics puzzle — much more complex that I would have thought them capable of.”
“Ryan… four inches…”
“He knows all about four inches,” Scarlet said, nudging the young man in the ribs. “Eh, boy?”
Ryan ignored it. “It’s similar to Ribet’s Theorem.”
Lea stared at him. “What now?”
“Three inches…”
“It’s a number theory statement to do with the properties of Galois representations that are associated with modular forms.”
Lexi looked at him. “Ryan, are you having a breakdown?”
“When the epsilon conjecture was finally proven it led the way to Fermat’s Last Theorem being cracked.”
Hawke scratched his head and looked from the spikes to Ryan’s young face. “Mate, when you said it was a maths problem I thought you meant like adding up.”
“Yeah… not so much.”
“Two inches.”
“Ryan definitely knows about all about two inches,” Scarlet said.
Lea sighed. “It didn’t work and wasn’t funny at four inches, so why the hell do you think it would work and be funny two inches later?”
“Give me a break, I’m under pressure!”
On their knees now, the spikes were only inches away from them, and there was nowhere else to run or hide. “Can’t be more than thirty seconds before we’re all skewered,” Lexi said. “Not how I thought I was going to go out.”
“And how did you think you were going to go out?” Hawke asked.
She shrugged. I don’t know… maybe in battle, or in the basement of the Ministry under heavy interrogation. What about you?”
“Me?” Hawke said. “Not the sort of thing I think about.”
“And you?” Lexi asked Scarlet.
“Oh, no idea. Maybe massaged to death on a tropical beach with a banana daiquiri in each hand.”
Lea rolled her eyes. “Yes, how very you.”
“Thanks, darling.”
“It wasn’t a compliment, and ouch! Blood hell, Ryan — hurry up! These sodding spikes are starting to push into my shoulders!”
“I’m going as fast as I can, Lea.”
“So how about you?” Lexi asked Lea.
“Me? I don’t know. Not as a freaking kebab to be discovered in another two hundred years by another idiot searching for gold plates, that’s for damned sure!”
With seconds to spare, Ryan arranged the tiles and the frame stopped descending. A few seconds later the door opened, but the one behind, blocking the Amazonian warriors, stayed shut.
“Thanks buggery for that,” Scarlet said, rubbing her shoulder. “It was getting rather poky in there.”
“Oh, please…” Lea said.
They raced through the lava tunnel and emerged in the outside of the volcano into the fresh air. They ran through the jumble of stone houses in the outer quarter until they got back to the clearing beyond the town.
Just as they had predicted, there was no sign of Kruger, Saqqal or the chopper outside the volcano. They had cleared out with all of the treasure and the dead bodies of both the rebels were lying around the area where they had taken off.
“Why did he kill his own men?” Ryan asked.
“To make room for the treasure,” Hawke said with disgust, and then sighed as he turned his face toward the trees to the south where he had landed. Smoke was billowing up into the tropical sky. “Looks like they blew up our choppers as well.”
They all turned to face the scene of destruction in the distant jungle and walked slowly along the path they had hiked on their way to the volcano just hours ago. When they reached the clearing they saw Hawke had been right in his guess — both the Bell 47 and the Mi-171 were now just smouldering wreckage, courtesy of Rajavi’s grenade launcher.
Hawke clenched his jaw with anger as he thought about Kruger and Saqqal laughing as their helicopters exploded, while they were fighting for their lives back in the spike trap. “These bastards are really beginning to get on my nerves,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We’ll get him, don’t worry about that,” Scarlet said coolly. “I always get my man.”
“And everyone else’s,” Lexi said with a sideways glance.
“Oh, that’s rich coming from you,” Scarlet said, fronting up to her.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“Pack it in,” Hawke said.
“So what now?” Lea asked.
“Now we wait for Lund to send back up,” Reaper said.
Hawke nodded. “Thank God we told him the coordinates…”
Lea turned to him. “You think we can trust him?”
He shrugged he shoulders. “I hope so, because if we can’t, it’s a twenty day hike in that direction.” He pointed through a cloud of mosquitoes at the jungle beyond the clearing.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It turned out they could trust Lund, and when they failed to check in with their report from Paititi, he arranged for the Peruvian authorities to send rescue choppers out to get them. They also sent a team of archaeologists from the National Museum of Archaeology, Anthropology and History based in Lima.
After a brief handover the ECHO team were airborne once again and flying back to Cusco where their jet was fuelled and waiting for them. Lund had run the situation through what he called his ‘washing machine’ but come up with very little information about Kruger’s whereabouts. It seemed his arms didn’t have quite the same reach as those of Sir Richard Eden. From Saqqal’s bragging back in the volcano they knew they were returning to Rio de Janeiro, but they needed more than that so their only chance was Alex Reeve and her CIA contacts.
Hawke called her on his cell phone but there was no answer, so he left a voicemail message and settled back into his seat while he waited for a reply. He failed in his attempt to suppress a yawn and then pushed back in the soft leather seat of the private jet. According to the little screen on the partition wall, they were climbing out of twenty-thousand feet and somewhere above the Peruvian-Bolivian border. Their bearing was sixty-seven degrees and the ETA was in just under three and a half hours.
Reaper was once again crashed on the leather couch on the jet’s portside, and Lexi, Scarlet and Ryan were playing poker at the table in the rear of the aircraft. It was fairly subdued, but then they got on the subject of SUVs and when Ryan told Scarlet that Pajero meant wanker in Spanish she burst into uncontrollable laughter for what seemed a lot longer than it probably was.
Lea had brought a coffee and sat beside him, but the coffee was in the little cup-holder, untouched and now she was dozing in her seat. For a moment he watched her, wondering how she had turned out so right when everything had been so against her, and then his phone rang.