“They’re not slowing down,” Ryan said.
Hawke knew what was coming next and frowned. “Foot must be wedged on the throttle.”
Gaining speed the dead driver slumped forward and pulled the wheel down hard to the right. This caused the car to turn sharply and tip over on its side in a cloud of sparks and burned rubber smoke.
Devlin made a move. Breaking free of the group, he darted across ten meters of open ground. He was heading for the cover of the crashed police car but Bruno chased him down with a spray of gunfire from his machine pistol. Devlin dived for the cover of the upturned Beetle with a second to spare but Bruno continued to pepper the bottom of the car.
Hawke cursed but reacted in a split-second: he put Bruno under heavy fire, emptying his entire magazine at the Italian with the idea of driving him back into cover.
But it was too late: Bruno’s rounds had hit the VW’s exposed gas tank and caused the battered police car to explode in a monumental fireball. Chunks of contorted, deformed car parts hurtled through the air, transforming the Beetle into a colossal fragmentation grenade. A twisted car door slammed down into the ground a few meters from Reaper and his sub-unit. It was still on fire from the blast and left a trail of black smoke arcing through the sky behind it.
“Where’s Danny?” Lea said. “Do you see him?”
Hawke strained to see through the smoke and detritus of the burning Beetle wreckage. Devlin was undoubtedly brave, but he was starting to become too unpredictable. He guessed too many years at Flynn’s had taken a toll on the former Commandant and now he was just a shadow of his former self. “I see him,” he said. “He’s over there behind the wall to the left of the main entrance.”
“He must have made a break for it when you were firing on Bruno.”
“He’s causing more bloody problems than he’s solving right now,” Hawke said.
“He just risked his life, Joe!”
Hawke said nothing, but reloaded his Glock and swung the gun up for a second go at Bruno. The Italians were now well inside the station and receding into the shadows beneath the Amsterdam Centraal sign hanging above the main entrance.
Hawke heard Reaper’s voice in his earpiece. “Are we chasing the rabbits down the hole?”
“We have no choice,” the Englishman said. “They still have Kloos.”
Thanks to the gun battle outside, the vast station interior was now as empty and silent as the square out the front. With the rest of the team fanning out behind him and taking up an offensive formation, Hawke crossed the beautiful Main Hallway, gun raised into the aim and sweeping it from side to side to cover all angles. Somewhere in here Zito and his men were getting away with Kloos.
“Any sign of them?” Scarlet said through her palm mic.
“Not yet,” Hawke said.
A flock of pigeons flew up from the end of the platform and disappeared into the vast roof of the station above their heads. Hawke spun around and aimed the gun in their original location, certain the other men had startled the birds, and he was right.
Zito and his men were at the far end of the southern platform now. He was leading them off the platform and along the rails leading out to the station’s eastern exit. Hawke watched the small group of men through the sights of his Glock as he fired on them once again. The sound of bullets roared in the cavernous space and Zito’s response was to dash behind a filthy blue and yellow commuter diesel.
Seconds later they were all hidden by the train except for one straggler. Hawke fired again and struck the man. He collapsed onto the rails while a grisly bloom of brain matter and blood was illuminated by the light flooding into the opening at the eastern end of the station.
Hawke lowered his gun. Zito and his men still had Kloos and now they had cover as well. He heard them as they ran along the rails behind the stationary diesel train. “Sounds like they’re trying to get out along the rails.”
They hopped off the platform and used the parked train for cover as they closed in on Zito’s snatch squad. Approaching the engine at the front of the train, they heard the sound of another kind of engine — a speedboat was roaring into life somewhere to their left.
A look of confusion crossed Hawke’s face. “What the hell?”
“The IJ,” Ryan said.
“Explain in two seconds, dorkmeister,” Scarlet said.
“It’s the main body of water in Amstersdam and it runs just north of this station.”
They sprinted to the end of the rails and emerged into the daylight to see Zito and his men hauling Dr Kloos into a speedboat parked up on the south bank of the IJ.
“Where does it go, mate?” Hawke said, squeezing the grip of his Glock out of frustration.
“Right out into the North Sea.”
The boat ripped away from the bank, and Zito waved at them cheerily with his gun hand as they pushed out into the middle of the massive river.
Knowing the chase was over, Ryan fired up a cigarette. “They could rendezvous with anyone at any number of locations in the city or the plan might be to go straight out to sea and hook up with a boat or something.”
“This day is just turning into a massive pile of fuckery,” Scarlet said, snatching the cigarette from the young man’s lips and taking a long drag.
“Hey!” Ryan said.
Hawke sighed as he watched the boat slip away. “You can say that again, Cairo.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Hawke got into the Suburban, slammed the door shut after him and brought his fist down on the dashboard with a hefty smack. Losing Kloos like this was a major tactical error. Not only had he allowed the professor’s life to be put at severe risk but Giancarlo Zito now had the opportunity to get the missing information he needed in order to track down the sword. Kruger would be beaming at his success, and there was only one antidote to that: take that success away from him and kill him with it.
Everyone else was already in the vehicle, and Devlin had just told a joke but only Lea was laughing. “And do you remember that time when Benny went on leave and we put his car up for sale?”
Lea laughed again and raised her hand to her mouth to cover the laugh. “Oh God, I do! Poor bastard had phone calls requesting test drives all through his holiday.”
“Back to Kloos and the manuscript people,” Hawke said, glancing at Lea. “This isn’t a holiday.”
Her face dropped. “You don’t say? Jeez — we were just talking about old times.”
Devlin said nothing.
“We have to get to Wales in a hurry,” Hawke said. “It’s not going to take long for Zito to get what he wants out of Kloos, and when he does the sword’s his for the taking. That will make Kruger happy, and anything that makes that son of a bitch happy makes me unhappy.”
“Got that right,” Ryan said.
“Can you get us to the sword with what Kloos gave us, mate?”
“Maybe. I’ll give it some thought on the plane.”
Reaper slammed the SUV into reverse and spun the wheels as he brought the vehicle out of Kloos’s side street and onto the main drag. Hawke glanced out the tinted window at the people who were now daring enough to venture back into the city again after the violence around the station.
As if she had read his mind, Lea leaned forward from the middle seats and handed him her iPhone. The day’s horror had already made it to the international press, and there was even a picture of the M-Squadron outside the station on the front cover of the New York Times. The headline ran: TERROR COMES TO AMSTERDAM. Looking closely in the rear of the image Hawke saw Reaper behind one of the trams. Luckily the Frenchman’s face was obscured by the distance.