Glancing to his left he saw another colossal wave fast approaching. By the look of it they were all in a lot of trouble. It would give the boat a damn good beating, and if it struck while he was on the scaffolding he would be flung into the ocean like a rag doll.
Careful not to slip on the soaking ladder he made his way through the icy cold sea spray and finally reached the manhole in the base of the substructure. He clambered up inside and found himself in the base of the Seastead and could hardly believe what he was seeing. The section he was standing in was a vast space of support struts surrounding what looked and sounded like some kind of engine room, and from this perspective he could see that the sea directly below the structure was sealed off from the ocean by enormous steel walls creating a separate area for larger ships to dock.
Hawke fixed his eyes on his friends as they joined him. They were tired after fighting the sea. “Me and Scarlet are going topside to get Lea and Camacho.”
“Ooh — a double date!”
He gave her a look but said nothing. “Reaper’s going to lead Lexi, Maria and Ryan and go after Korać and Kruger. We don’t want those two loose cannons on deck. We know they came down here somewhere.”
Hawke and Scarlet jogged along a narrow section of the scaffolding along the western edge of the platform and made their way up a flight of service stars to where they thought the entrance would be located. When they reached the top of the stairs they saw that their sense of direction was right, but there were two men blocking their path.
“I’ll take the one on the right,” Scarlet said.
“But he’s the biggest.”
“Your point?”
“Fine,” he said with a shake of his head.
They approached through the shadows and struck like lightning. Scarlet took the heavier of the two men and Hawke now knew why she wanted to fight him — she wanted to use his weight against him, and it was working as she rolled out a series of martial arts moves against him and essentially turned him into a human punch bag.
Hawke struck the second man but despite his smaller size he was more seasoned than his colleague and knew how to hold himself. He struck back hard and made Hawke sing for his supper, dodging, ducking and weaving to avoid a ferocious salvo of punches.
The man moved fast and used some kind of martial arts Hawke had never seen before. In a flash he had Hawke in a headlock. Hawke struggled but the man had a good grip on his head and was now pushing his face into the steel mesh behind him as hard as possible. Freezing seawater sluiced up over the scaffolding and hundreds of feet below he watched the slate-gray Atlantic heave and swirl in the turmoil of the storm.
“I would kill you fast,” the man said in a heavy Baltic accent, “but I like to make my victims suffer.”
“Are you single? If so I know a woman you might really get on with.”
“What?”
“Shut it, Joe,” Scarlet said. She ploughed the heel of her boot across her opponent’s cheek, delivered by an eye-watering roundhouse kick that was rapidly becoming her signature move. The man howled and staggered back and gave Scarlet the chance she needed. She leaped forward and raised her leg above his head, smashing it down on his skull with a ferocious axe kick. He crumpled over and fell back over the rail, tumbling down into the sea.
Hawke threaded his arm up into the space between the goon’s arm and his own squashed face and used the force he was pressing down with against him. Instantly tumbling over with the sudden loss of the support his arm was providing, Hawke leaped to his feet and kicked him in the face.
The man screamed, but Hawke’s luck was out already. At the other end of the platform several armed men were pouring out of a stairwell and taking cover behind the engine room housing in the center of the substructure.
The goon was now on his feet and ready for revenge, but Hawke blocked his first strike and powered a hard fist into his lower right jaw. The man spun around like a top and then tumbled off the edge of the platform, screaming like a baby all the way down until he hit the surface of the raging sea below.
Scarlet glanced at her watch. “We’re really going to have to do something about that gut of yours. That was over two minutes.”
“I do not have a gut.”
“You tell yourself that.”
The banter was broken by more gunfire, and they dived for cover behind one of the four main support struts. They knew their time was running out. On the far wall Hawke saw the control mechanism for the main entrance to the platform’s topside and knew there was only one play.
“There it is,” he said. “That’s our way to the platform — this must be how people arriving by ship get up top.”
He leaped from the cover of the strut and sprinted as fast as he could toward the control panel. Anticipating a savage volley of defensive fire he wasn’t disappointed when they let rip with their weapons, and he immediately launched himself into a full-speed parkour roll. As he tumbled over on his shoulder against the cold, slippery steel rivets and plates of the platform floor, he heard the bullets from their automatic rifles tracing over his head and pinging off the scaffolding on the east side of the platform.
He came out of the roll running and then dived behind the main strut on the south side. Wasting no time he pulled the lever down and a bright green light on the control panel flickered to life followed by an ear-piercing klaxon as the Seastead’s entrance began to slide slowly open. He noticed that beneath them a bidirectional tidal gate was also opening allowing the sea into the area below the structure.
Still under heavy fire, he returned the same way he had come with a second parkour roll, only this time they were ready and their aim was better. He felt one bullet rip into the sole of his boot halfway through the roll. But then he was back where he started beside Scarlet.
“And that was forty seconds,” Scarlet said with a sigh. “I could have done it in half that time. You really do want me to start calling you Joe Pork, don’t you?”
“Try it,” he said. “If you think Cairo’s the worst I can come up with, think again.”
“Point taken.”
The entrance was now almost fully open and the men began to retreat up the ramp leading to the topside. They were fleeing the incoming danger now racing toward them thanks to Hawke opening the gates. Below, the storm outside powered the yacht into the heart of the Seastead’s docking area on the beat of the raging ocean below its hull. Boats didn’t have brakes, and Hawke knew it was coming in too fast. He winced as the savage pulse of the raging storm powered the boat’s bow into the steel wall at the end of the docking bay.
He guessed the yacht belonged to whoever owned this place, and after Ryan’s tattoo observation on the chopper there was only one intelligent guess as to who that was — the Oracle. The fact he had just trashed his yacht brought a quick smile to his face, but the mission had only just started.
“Come on,” he said. “We have work to do.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Deep in the substructure on the far side of the platform, Reaper, Lexi, Maria and Ryan were in hot pursuit of Dirk Kruger, Korać, Luk and Kamchatka. The former legionnaire’s eyes were peeled as they moved stealthily through the forest of support struts and pipes. Somewhere down here in this industrial jungle were four of the most dangerous men he had ever met, and now they were cornered animals, trapped on a maniac’s secret ocean base with no chance of escape except a violent and bloody shootout.
“It’s four on four,” Reaper said. “They’re ours for the taking.”