Lea sighed and pulled her sunglasses down from her forehead and over her eyes. “Ryan, say pirates if you mean pirates.”
“You’re lucky he didn’t say buccaneers,” Scarlet added with a laugh.
“If you’ve quite finished,” Ryan continued, “I’m simply making the point it’s not tame, even if it wasn't always the capital.”
“How’s that then?”
“A French general switched it from Fez to Rabat after the invasion in 1912.”
“Please don’t say that word,” Scarlet said.
Khatibi looked at her. “What word?”
“Sober,” Lexi said. “Scarlet has a fear of the word sober.”
Lea rolled her eyes and turned to watch the city flash past as they headed west through the Quartier Bettana and closed in on their destination. If she asked him, she knew Ryan would be able to tell her about the French colonial architecture, or the influence of Moorish culture, but she just didn’t want to hear it. The truth was she was starting to feel lost. She was rarely on the same continent long enough to see two sunrises in row, and it she felt like it was beginning to get to her.
And yet she was still running. Still running toward the truth of what had happened to her father, still running hand in hand with Joe Hawke… but was she running towards something or away from something? However she felt about it all, ECHO was her only family. There was her brother Finn, working for the police in Dublin, but they hadn’t spoken in years, so if she had any family at all, then it was the people around her now, and those back on Elysium.
Any thoughts she had of leaving the team seemed almost ridiculous. No matter how tired of this she got, it was her fate now, and there was nothing she could do about it.
Her thoughts were interrupted rudely by the sound of a loud horn and a grotesque string of abuse flowing from the mouth of Scarlet Sloane. Startled, she looked up from her daydream to see the former SAS woman giving a mouthful of loud abuse to a cab driver who was dangerously tailgating her. “Why don’t you get off my arse?”
“Said the bishop to the rugby team,” said Ryan, giggling at his own joke.
“Urghh,” Lea said.
“Will you please just stop that?” said Scarlet.
“Sorry.”
Scarlet slowed now as she pulled up into the marina area and cursed as she brought the vehicle to a stop and slammed the automatic transmission into park. With the former SAS woman at the wheel the journey through Rabat had been more hair-raising than strictly necessary and they were all very grateful to arrive and get ready to sail out to sea. Eden had spoken with the Moroccan Government who had agreed to the use of a French-built VCSM coastguard vessel, and as they approached the docks they all sensed the spectre of Atlantis rising on the horizon.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The VCSM inshore patrol vessel was one of just two operated by the Royal Moroccan Navy, and was used primarily for ocean surveillance off the country’s coast. It wasn't usually armed but a light machine gun had been installed on the boat’s foredeck for the purposes of the mission.
Now, they were cutting though the North Atlantic Ocean at twenty-five knots and following the course heading to the Dacia Seamount that Khatibi had worked out. Looking at the map he was sending them to precisely the middle of nowhere, but they had no other play and decided to take the chance.
Lea’s thoughts were largely restricted to how incredibly long it took to get anywhere by sea, accustomed as she was to flying around from country to country on board extremely fast private jets. The VCSM wasn’t exactly sluggish compared to many sea-going vessels, but it still felt like they were crawling along at a snail’s pace as the ship ploughed through the choppy ocean yard by yard.
Standing at the bow she had resisted Hawke’s pathetic attempt to recreate the Titanic scene with Jack and Rose, and turned to watch him as he made his way back inside the ship. Looking down the starboard side of the deck, she saw Reaper speaking in French with some of the crew. They were sharing tobacco and laughing crudely at a joke that thanks to the Frenchman’s hand gestures she had not the slightest inclination ever to know.
Down the portside, Maria and Lexi were leaning on the rails either side of a very green Ryan Bale, trying to comfort him as he emptied the contents of his stomach into the heaving North Atlantic. She smiled when she saw it and recalled the time they had taken the ferry from Dublin to Holyhead and the exact same thing had happened. That was a long time ago, and now he had Maria Kurikova to take care of him.
Like Hawke, Lea had hoped the Moroccans might have been able to provide more of a force to help them, but she knew she should be grateful enough for the ship. There was no other way to get out to the Dacia Seamount and then dive down to the ocean floor, and the officials in Rabat could easily have denied them the vessel.
None of this was new and the ECHO team were more than used to making do with depleted forces and whatever equipment they could lay their hands on. While they usually left Elysium with all the kit they needed things moved so fast that most times they had to improvise and this was one yet another of those times, what with Wolff’s weapons long since lost in Serbia and Morocco.
She wandered back to the bridge and joined Hawke. He was speaking quietly with Jack Camacho and Scarlet while Captain Bekri and his first officer were studying a nautical chart of the area. For now at least, it was a scene of organized calm, but she knew how fast scenes like this fell apart. She sighed. Silvio Mendoza and Aurora Soto were dead — their mangled bodies stretched out on a mortuary slab in Munich — but somewhere out here in all this nothingness was that bastard Dirk Kruger and his hired gorilla Dragan Korać.
Not to mention Luk and Kamchatka.
“Coffee?” Hawke said.
She shook her head. “I can barely stand up in this bloody boat, never mind drink a sodding coffee.”
Hawke smiled and nodded. “It can take some practice, I admit.”
“So how we doing?” she asked, keen to get back to dry land as soon as possible.
“We’re getting there,” Bekri said with a broad smile. “Although I have to tell you I’ve sailed these waters many times before and I can guarantee you there’s nothing at the Dacia Seamount except saltwater and seasickness.”
“But we’re diving there, don’t forget,” Reaper said.
Bekri gave a sceptical nod of his head and raised his palms in the air. “That’s why we’ll do the sonar scanning of the ocean floor. If there really is something out there then we’ll find it — I promise.”
“Let’s hope so,” Hawke said with more confidence. “We’re not the only ones searching for it and let’s face it — Atlantis is a pretty big prize… not to mention the other half of the ten million bucks for getting the idol back from Kruger.”
“As long as your coordinates are right then we have as a good a chance as anyone,” Bekri said with a warm smile.
“The coordinates are right,” Hawke said, glancing out the rain-lashed porthole at Ryan Bale as he was dry-heaving over the rail with Maria’s hand on his back. “Ryan hasn’t let us down yet.”
The hours went by, tedious and frustrating. Being a former Marine Commando and SBS operative, Hawke had spent more than his fair share on board boats and submarines, but since joining ECHO he had moved around the world much faster thanks to Sir Richard Eden’s fleet of Gulfstreams. Going back to life on the ocean wave might have been relaxing as a pastime but it just felt like a hindrance when he was in pursuit of Dirk Kruger. From the look on her face, it seemed Lea felt the same way.
She sighed. “I can’t believe how long this is taking.”
“That’s sea travel,” Hawke said. “The fastest corvettes in the world struggle to go faster than sixty knots, besides, Kruger’s on a ship as well, so he’s not going any faster than us. He just had a bit of head start, that’s all.”