As he spoke, Korać placed a bomb the size of a football inside the furthest alcove and activated it. “We have ten minutes to get well away from here and then it’s all nothing but dust.”
“Shit,” Camacho said. “That looks nasty.”
“What do you mean?” Lea asked.
“Not liking the look of that bomb at all,” he repeated. “Looks like it might have a motion sensor on it.”
“And you look like dead men walking.”
They turned to see Van Zyl bearing down on them with a submachine gun. Without alerting Kruger or Korać to their presence, he moved his finger off the guard and swung the gun into Hawke’s face.
“Get up, you pigs.”
Hawke and the others slowly got to their feet and raised their hands in the air.
“Look what I found!” Van Zyl called out.
Kruger looked over and sneered at them. “Got you bastards at last… wait — is that you, Maati?”
Khatibi looked at his boots for a moment before raising his head. “Yes, Dirk.”
“What are you doing with these people?”
“Richard and I are trying to stop you from desecrating this temple!”
“Richard — you don’t mean Richard Eden?”
Khatibi nodded and Lea stepped forward. “We work for Richard Eden, and he’s told us all about you. We’re not going to let you destroy this place and we’re certainly not going to let you plunder Atlantis.”
Kruger laughed. “I’ve heard everything now. You bastards work for Dickie Eden! Jesus Christ.” He turned back to the alcoves and then spoke over his shoulder. “Willem — take Mr Khatibi out to the trucks and make sure he’s secured. Mr Korać — keep the rest of these bastards under guard while I finish up.”
Van Zyl removed Khatibi while Korać approached Hawke.
But he got too close, and the Englishman reacted in an explosion of defensive moves, throwing a handful of grit into Korać’s face and grabbing the muzzle of the weapon simultaneously. The gun went off, firing the rounds into the floor of the temple and spitting up clouds of dust and rock chips.
Lea screamed and Ryan brought his hands up to cover his ears as Van Zyl slipped away and took cover.
Kruger spun around and his eyes darted over to the fracas at the entrance to the temple. He pointed at them haughtily. “Kill them!”
Then a fire fight exploded all around them with both sides taking cover as they fired on each other for control of the temple.
“I need another clip!” Ryan shouted.
“Here,” Camacho said and threw one over. “And it’s a magazine, son. No one’s used clips for about seventy years.”
With limited rounds the gunfight was over in minutes, and that meant only one thing. A number of Korać’s men rushed them and things broke down into a hand-to-hand combat situation. Judging by the tattoo on his shoulder which read СПЕЦНАЗ, Hawke’s opponent was a former Spetsnaz soldier. Russian Special Forces were trained well and fiercely aggressive, but Hawke was former SBS and that meant he had the edge and he knew it.
The man kicked things off by pulling a ballistic knife from his belt and lunging forward at Hawke’s face. The Englishman pulled his head back and simultaneously brought up his left arm to block the knife from coming any further. He disarmed the man with one hand and thrust a punch upwards into his jaw. The man fell backwards and struck his head on the wall.
All across the cavern the fighting was intense. Maria Kurikova blocked her opponent’s onslaught and immediately brought up a counter-strike into the base of his jaw. The man moved back to dodge her attack, so her punch landed in his windpipe. His eyes widened in shock as he realized he couldn’t breath and it gave the Russian spy the only chance she needed. She brought her right boot up hard and fast into his balls and his instinct sent him doubling over, just as she knew it would. She brought her left knee up into his face and knocked him out cold.
Scarlet was fighting hard closer to the entrance, bringing her knee-length boot up to her opponent’s groin and showing less mercy than Vlad the Impaler. He collapsed to the floor in a howling mess, dropping his guard long enough for the former SAS woman to send him off to sleep with a speedy palm strike.
“I cannot believe you crushed his giggleberries like that,” Ryan said. “It’s just not right.”
“Anything goes when you’re over a barrel,” she said.
“Said the archdeacon to the understudy,” Ryan replied.
“Reasonably amusing for you, but don’t think it makes you funny. You’re not.”
“Gotcha.”
A second man stormed over to Hawke and drew back a knife ready to attack. Hawke stumbled over an unconscious man and fell on his back. The man seized the advantage and jumped on him, raising the knife. Hawke strained against the man’s arm as he plunged the knife down and inched the tip of the blade closer to his eye. He grunted with the effort of stopping the knife from plunging into his eye, and he felt the blood pound in his ears as he pushed himself to the max to fight off the heavier man.
With the blade now less than an inch from his eye, and above it the grinning, sweating face of the Serbian merc as he mocked him, Hawke was starting to think he was in trouble, when suddenly a startled, frozen look of surprise flashed on the Serb’s face and he released the knife before collapsing in a heap on the floor beside the Englishman.
The man rolled off him to reveal Lexi standing behind him, this time holding not a lampshade but a fist-sized rock.
“Thanks. I owe you.”
“You know how you can pay me back.”
Hawke gave her a look, rolled over and leapt to his feet. “Give it a rest, Lexi.”
“You can’t blame a girl for trying.”
Hawke looked up to see Kruger and Korać fleeing from the cave. They had what they wanted and were evacuating as fast as they could.
“He’s getting away!” he yelled, his mind racing. He ran over to the alcove and saw the bomb now had less than seven minutes. “Jack — try and get this bomb defused and save this place if you can. Ryan — work out what Kruger was up to if possible and then everyone get the hell out of here. I’m going after that son of a bitch.”
“And I’m right there wit’ ya!” Lea said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Alex Reeve was taking a break in the Elysium headquarters building. With Hawke and the others damn near getting themselves killed like a bunch of amateurs on the Dadès River, Kruger slipping the net once again with his hired thugs and her father’s first televised presidential debate coming up in just a few hours she could feel the pressure rising. One glance down at her wheelchair sealed the deal and she pulled a Coke from the fridge and rolled herself out into the tropical breeze for some important Time Out.
The Coke was bad which is why it tasted good, and she took a long drink before setting the can down on the low wall which separated the compound’s north lawn from the beach. To say she had fallen in love with this place was an understatement but she could already feel the long, cold shadow of Washington DC approaching her.
She could be accused of many things but naivety wasn’t one of them. She knew what fate awaited the immediate family of a President of the United States and it wasn’t good. The United States Secret Service was charged with protecting the First Family and there was a persistent fear among them of something happening to a member of the President’s family.
The Constitution was amazingly prescient in its content, and there was provision built into it in case of a crisis. That provision was the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, used several times in the past, including the succession of Gerald Ford to the Presidency after Nixon’s resignation and the appointment of Nelson Rockefeller to the Vice Presidency, both in 1974. Most recently, and dramatically it was invoked after President Grant was kidnapped by the madman Klaus Kiefel on his rampage across America during the Medusa attacks. That had put the traitor Teddy Kimble in the Oval Office.