The Englishman kept his balance and stayed on his feet, but Reaper had already leaped forward in his defense. In response, Crombez raised his assault rifle and aimed it at the Frenchman. “Back, now! Or you all die.”
Reaper reluctantly obeyed, raising his hands in the air in a show of surrender, but giving Crombez a devilish wink. “You and I have some unsettled business, n’est-ce pas?”
“Tell me, Vincent — how are Monique and the kids?”
Reaper bristled at the question. “You stay away from my family, Olivier!”
Crombez laughed. “On verra.”
“I mean it.” Reaper lowered his voice. “Once, we were friends, but if you go near my family, I will kill you. All of you!”
Now Mukendi chuckled and sucked his teeth. “No more threats, Legionnaire, or I will skin you alive and feed you to the general’s crocodiles.”
Kashala’s face grew more serious. “It’s true. I’ve seen him do it. He likes the sound of their squeals as they thrash about in the water. Zhivkov, get over here.”
The professor moved over to the general and took the cannister. “You want me to start work?”
Kashala gave a curt nod. “Yes, and fast. Transfer the particles from the main field generator to the cannister. We don’t have much time.”
Boris Zhivkov shuffled over to his metal briefcase, scrolled through the combination lock and lifted the lid. Licking his lips with concentration, he gently placed the cannister out of sight behind the lid and started to work.
“Professor Zhivkov is very fast,” Kashala said. “Soon, I will have what I need and you will all be dead.”
Tense minutes passed with the Blood Crew and what was left of Dimitrov’s mafia heavies training their weapons on the subdued ECHO team and the elderly presbyter. When Zhivkov finally turned from the main generator beside the hole in the wall, he was smiling and holding the cannister in his hands.
Handing it to Demotte, the merc passed it to his boss, King Kashala. The Congolese warlord weighed it in his hands and held it up to the light of a nearby glow stick. “Very interesting… very interesting indeed. I can feel the power in my grasp.”
“And what now?” Lea said.
Dimitrov gave her a patronizing smirk. “With this antimatter, I will be able to extort anything I wish from any government. Up until now, even CERN physicists have only been able to produce a few nanograms of this per year, but now I have over a gram, enough to totally annihilate any city on earth in a fraction of a second. Now, General Kashala, hand it over.”
Kashala stood there, his hand gripped around the antimatter cannister, but he said nothing.
“I said, bring me the cannister, Kashala!”
The Congolese merc leader was still holding his Kalashnikov. Awkwardly now, he raised it and gently buried the stock into his hip as he aimed the weapon at Dimitrov.
The Bulgarian took a step back. “What are you doing, General?”
“I am executing my plan, Mr Dimitrov,” Kashala said in the quiet, tense cave. “And that means first executing you.”
“No!”
Dimitrov’s screams were cut short by the wild, metallic sound of the assault rifle’s magazine emptying in the dark cavern. When the Mafia chief finally collapsed face-first into the gravel, his body had taken the better part of the weapon’s forty-round box magazine. What was left, Kashala used to fire on the remaining mafia goons, ruthlessly cutting them to ribbons where they stood.
As smoke curled from the exit holes in the Bulgarian mafia boss’s back, Kashala turned to face Hawke and the rest of the ECHO team. “His plan wasn’t spicy enough for me. He wanted to use the weapon only to blackmail various governments for money. This has its merits, but I think it would be much better if they had an idea of how powerful it is first. Much more impact that way, no?”
Hawke’s eyes crawled up from Dimitrov’s cooling corpse to the Congolese general standing a few yards away from him. The smoking Kalashnikov was still in his right hand, and the antimatter cannister still firmly gripped in the other.
“You’re a psychopath, Kashala.”
“And you are out of cards to play, Hawke.”
“You think, eh?”
“In a few moments, my men will seal you in this cave with a grenade and then test the antimatter’s power by detonating Zhivkov’s cannister. He tells me that we can turn an entire city to ash with an amount of antimatter fifty times smaller than a sugar cube. It will scar the world forever, and in the meantime, knowing you and the rest of your friends have been crushed by millions of tons of granite will further enhance my pleasure.”
Boris Zhivkov stepped cautiously forward and took the cannister from Kashala. Sweat beaded on his forehead as he walked it over to his briefcase and started to transfer some of the particles into the test device. His hands were steady enough, but Hawke noticed his breathing was hurried and inconsistent. Clearly, he didn’t have the same confidence in his work that General Kashala seemed to have.
“We are ready,” he said at last. Behind him, Crombez walked back over to the mercs. As he passed Reaper, he made a gun with his hands and pointed his finger at him. “Tu es un homme mort, mon ami… un homme mort, et votre famille, aussi.”
Reaper said nothing but stood his ground and met the other man’s gaze, his face square and solid.
Kashala gave a curt nod and ordered the professor and the rest of the Blood Crew to withdraw. “And now we must bid you farewell, Mr Hawke. Me and my men are setting sail for foreign climes, but you and your friends will die here in this filthy hole, surrounded by lava. Au revoir.”
Before he left, he turned his gun on the presbyter and fired three shots into his stomach.
“No!” Lea screamed.
Kamala was closest, and now she rushed to him and lifted his head from the ground. “You’re going to be okay.”
“You bastard, Kashala!” Hawke yelled.
As the old man collapsed into the dirt, Hawke watched the general’s sweaty face as he tossed a grenade at his boots beneath the archway and then disappeared in the darkness of the entrance. The explosion buckled the portico pillars and brought them crashing down to the ground with hundreds of tons of mountain on top of them.
“Anyone got a spade?” Ryan asked.
“Funny,” Scarlet said. “Except no, we don’t have a fucking spade and now we’re trapped down in hell with only the lava for company.”
“And it gets worse,” Camacho said. “The grenade explosion took out part of the rockface containing the lava flow and now it’s pouring down the side into this cavern. I’d say were going to have some pretty hot feet in a few hours.”
“That’s not good,” Lea said.
The dying presbyter groaned in pain and tried to get her attention. His head was still cradled in Kamala’s arms when he mumbled some Greek words.
“Ryan!” Lea said. “Get over here right now!”
“What is it?”
Kamala turned desperate eyes to the London hacker. “He said something, but I don’t know what.”
“Can you say it again, sir?” Lea asked.
He spoke in Greek again.
“He says we’re not trapped,” Ryan said.
Lea’s eyes filled with hope. “Did you get that right, Ry?”
“I think so.”
Ryan spoke in slow, gently Greek to the man, who replied in hushed, dry tones.
“He says he always knew about this tunnel complex, but pretended not to earlier in case we were like Dimitrov and Kashala. He says there are other ways out of here, through the archways on the far side of the cavern.”
“Where do they lead?” Hawke asked.
“One to the monastery, one to Ancient Thera and one to the coast.”