He hit the reverse gear on the rigging and Alex began to rise back toward the shattered atrium as the fighting intensified. He directed the chain hoist to bring her back down outside the enclosure and she landed with a thud on the paving.
As the bullets flew over their heads, the masked man wordlessly ripped off her duct tape and freed her, but was then gone into the fray, stopping only to fire two rounds into a man running toward them. His bullets struck the man in the skull and sprayed high-velocity spatter all over wall behind him.
Alex took advantage of her new freedom and dragged herself away from the water with her arms in an attempt to hide behind Vetrov’s depraved viewing platform, but at that moment she watched with stomach-turning terror as the head of a crocodile emerged from the depths and headed in her direction, crawling through a hole in the enclosure fence made by one of the grenades.
Vetrov saw what was happening and smiled with a mixture of relief and amusement. “Sekhmet, my darling… kill her!”
She jumped with fear as the bullets traced over her head, the terror of her vulnerability coursing through her veins like never before. Back in the CIA, when she had been on active operations all over the world, she had known the feeling of adrenalin rushing through her system, and she had known gun fights where her own survival was at stake, but she had never seen anything like this. This was total war — an all-out, open fire-fight with dozens of machine guns and hand grenades. It was total chaos, far-removed from the world of covert intelligence and computer surveillance she had trained for. And now a crocodile was hunting her.
Other masked men stormed the room, rappelling down through the atrium and pushing deeper into the fight. They took out two more of Vetrov’s goons as the lead man drew closer to the panicking Russian. Alex was now beginning to wonder just who the hell this guy was, but her thoughts were disrupted by the sight of Darling Sekhmet crawling out of the water and moving slowly toward her.
She raised her weight up on the strength of her arms and started to pull herself back, dragging her powerless legs as fast as she could, cursing them for failing her as the crocodile’s jaws began to open and revealed dozens of hideous yellow teeth, much larger in reality than they had ever looked in the pictures she had seen.
Slowly it gained on her until it was a matter of inches from her legs. It stopped for a second and she looked deep into its reptilian eyes. It was looking back at her, studying her weaknesses, and then it lunged forward, its jaws opening faster than anything she had ever seen in her life. She screamed and instinctively shut her eyes tight as she prepared for the attack.
Then she heard three sharp cracks from her left, close by and deafening. She opened her eyes and saw the masked man had returned and fired three shotgun rounds into the crocodile’s head and exploded half its skull into oblivion. It now lay motionless and dead less than an inch from her legs. Slowly its jaws closed in response to the lethal attack.
The man wasted no time with pleasantries and shouldered the shotgun before snatching her up in a fireman’s lift and hurling her over his shoulder. With his arm wrapped tightly around her legs, he ran from the room. Her head hung down behind his back, and the last thing she saw from her new upside-down perspective was Maxim Vetrov ordering Kosma and the surviving men to retreat as another man in a black mask rappelled through the atrium room and descended into the chaos of the enclosure.
The masked man carried her along the same corridor Kosma has used to take her to the enclosure, only now she was being rescued instead of taken to her execution. Behind her, she heard the screams of dying men as the battle raged on. They turned a corner and went into what looked like a library, inside which were two people — an attractive woman with her hair tied back and a slightly younger man with messy hair and a Superman t-shirt.
“Take care of her,” screamed the man, and then he placed her down gently. “I’m going back to find Dempsey.”
The man slipped through the door and disappeared into the smoke.
“Hi,” the woman said. “I’m Lea, and this is Ryan.”
Ryan gave her the slightest nod and an awkward wave, but no smile.
“You must be Nightingale?” As she spoke, she and Ryan moved her to a soft chair and tried to make her comfortable.
“Er… sure, but you can call me Alex, I guess.”
“Sure thing, Alex. Good to meet you at last. Joe’s told me a lot about you.”
“Joe Hawke?”
Lea nodded. “Holds you in the highest of regards, he does.”
Alex’s head was still spinning from the action of five minutes ago. “That’s good to know. Is he here? When can I meet him?”
Ryan smiled and pushed some hair away from his face. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you just did.” He nodded at the door where Hawke had brought her into the room.
Alex watched their faces, and then glanced back over her shoulder at the door she had just come through. “Oh… got it.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Ryan said.
Lea raised an eyebrow. “Or not.”
“I’m sure I will, but I have to tell you something. It’s really important.”
Ryan sighed. “Most things seem to be these days.”
“Vetrov kidnapped me to get information — he wanted the name of someone I’ve been working with on the map — Dario Mazzarro. The thing is…” she looked down, ashamed. “I gave it to him. I was scared, I thought he was going to kill me. We have to get to Venice to warn Mazzarro before Vetrov gets to him.”
“We can do that,” Lea said.
“Hell yeah,” Ryan said. “I’ve always wanted to go to Venice.”
“There’s more than that, Vetrov also mentioned something about how he couldn’t fail like all the others because he knew the darkest truth of all.”
“Standard evil genius waffle,” Lea said. “Heard it all before.”
“No, he said he knew about the existence of a group called the athanatoi. I don’t know what that means but I have a feeling they’re behind all of this hell.”
Ryan jerked his head up and stared at Alex. “Say that again.”
“About the darkest truth?”
“No, the last thing you said — the people Vetrov said he knew existed.”
“The athanatoi.”
Ryan frowned.
“What’s the matter, Ry?” Lea was unsettled by the look of concern now crossing Ryan’s face like a shadow. “What does it mean?”
“It’s Greek — it means The Immortals.”
Scarlet, Karlsson and Lexi fired a ferocious volley of return fire at Kodiak, and forced the Russian to retreat behind a parked Nissan, but now the beating of the chopper’s rotor blades was louder than ever. A moment later it drifted into view above the towering Europa-Center building complex on the Breitscheidplatz just off Budapester Strasse where they were currently taking cover behind the thrashed BMW.
“That doesn’t look good,” Lexi said.
“Seconded,” Karlsson said.
“Thirded,” added Scarlet, craning her neck to look for an egress point. “Over there!”
She pointed to a large gatehouse complex on the other side of the street. It looked Chinese in its construction, and two large stone elephants stood silent guard either side of the gates. A large sign said Zoologischer Garten Berlin.
“You want to take us to the zoo?” Lexi said.
“Hey, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” Karlsson said, smiling. “Can I have an ice cream when we get in there?”