CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Hawke scrambled up from the wrecked motorbike and sprinted over to Snowcat, who was now lying in the gutter and surrounded by a mix of concerned and angry street traders. He pushed his way through the crowd and saw she was clutching her arm and wincing in pain. He could see blood just above the elbow of her suit jacket.
He moved down to her while keeping one eye on the street behind the bustling traders, who were now beginning to shout in Arabic at them. The white Escalade had slowed down to navigate through the bustling crowd. The crowd parted and the Escalade drew nearer like a lion about to make its death blow.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
She turned and screamed something in Arabic, sending the crowd running for their lives, and then she fired the Makarov at the Escalade, hitting the gas tank and exploding the vehicle into a massive fireball. “I think so,” she said. “It’s just a flesh wound.”
“Er…all right then,” Hawke said, seeing the Russian’s no-nonsense approach applied with such good timing. “Good, because I think we’ve outstayed our welcome — that fireball is going to have every cop in Cairo here in a few short minutes.”
He helped her stand. By now another large crowd of passers-by had formed to see what all the fuss was about, and Hawke tried to push his way through them but there were just too many.
Suddenly he heard another gunshot, close and loud. He ducked as the crowd broke apart and people screamed and ran for cover all over again.
“Get down, Snowcat!” he shouted, turning to pull her to safety, but as he did so he saw her standing behind him, smoking Makarov held aloft.
“What the..?”
“Russian way of dispersing a crowd,” she said coolly, and slipped the gun back inside her pocket.
“The Russian way, or your way?” he asked smiling, and pulled himself back up from the dusty street.
“A little of both, I guess.” He saw a sparkle in her blues eyes that he hadn’t noticed before, and guessed that just like him, she was happiest when in the field, on the edge of things.
“Well, in that case…” he stopped in his tracks.
“What is it?”
He pointed behind her and she turned to see what he was showing her.
They watched in horror as a fully-armed Boeing AH-64 Apache helicopter emerged from the Cairo smog and turned in their direction. Hellfire missiles, Hydra 70 rocket pods and, sitting right up front, a 30 mm M230 chain gun.
“This is turning into a really bad day,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief at what he was seeing.
“Tell me about it — that bullet just put a hole right through my best jacket.”
Hawke went to reply, but stopped when he saw the expression on Snowcat’s face.
“So what do we do?” she asked, pointing at the bike. We can’t out run it on that — it’s totally wrecked.”
She was right. The Kreidler had definitely polluted its last day, and was now nothing more than a pile of rusted metal and burned rubber with a badly bent front axle. Worse, the helicopter gunship was getting closer.
“No, we run over there,” he said, pointing at the Giza pyramid complex.
“Run into the pyramids?” she said, her eyes widening. “You have to be crazy! This isn’t The Spy Who Loved Me… I hope you realize that.”
“Yes, funnily enough I had realized that, but now it’s our only chance of surviving this.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Okay, crazy Englishman. Let’s do it.”
With no other choice and a fully armed Apache on their backs, Hawke led Snowcat out of the labyrinthine stacks of houses and across a wide boulevard shaded with beautiful flame trees.
The scene changed fast as they turned the corner. Behind them was the everyday life, junk and clutter of the Giza suburbs, but now they were in ancient Egypt. They stared right into the eyes of the Great Sphinx which sat in the bright sunshine a few hundred yards ahead of them.
Hawke watched as a large tour bus pulled up beside them and he turned to Snowcat.
“Follow me.”
“What are we doing?”
“We’re about to go on honeymoon together.” As he spoke he offered her his arm.
She slipped her arm through his and drew closer to him as they sneaked their way into the crowd of German tourists now filing out of the bus and making their way up the broad, gravel path which led to the Sphinx. The tourists stopped to look at the column of smoke rising silently from the roofline a few blocks away.
“It’s a barbecue,” Hawke said as he passed them.
A couple of men were selling hats and water in the shade of a date palm. Hawke stepped over to them and handed them a fifty dollar bill for two hats, which he and Snowcat immediately put on.
“Bastards won’t be able to see us now,” Hawke said as they made their way into the middle of the crowd.
Hawke turned to see the Apache gain height. It was trying to get a better view of where they were, but also making itself look more like a regular helicopter — just a black shadow against a bright blue sky and no one paying particular attention.
“I just don’t understand how the hell they got a sodding Apache on us so fast,” Hawke muttered. “But that’s a problem for later. For now, we have to give them the slip. We’ll pretend to be tourists until that bloody chopper gets bored and then we need to get back to the others as soon as possible… and you have some talking to do.”
“Agreed,” Snowcat said.
They walked amongst the tourists through the lines of market traders selling thousands of souvenirs — key-rings, paperweights, t-shirts, silk headdresses — and gradually drew closer to the Sphinx where the Germans stopped and took pictures.
“Smaller than I thought it would be,’ Hawke said, nodding at the Sphinx. “What about you?”
“Guess so. I’ve seen it many times.”
He nodded and turned to look at the Apache, pretending to point at the Sphinx as he did so. He estimated it was probably around two thousand feet now, and the pilot would be using a helmet-mounted display and zooming in on the crowd to identify them.
He’d known an Apache pilot when he was on tour in Afghanistan and knew how they worked. He knew how they were trained to take in two separate streams of information from each eye — the left one focussed on the cockpit and the right one focussing through the FLIR camera on the outside world. The fact he was being hunted right now by someone with those skills worried him a lot, but not as much as the problem he had with Maxim Vetrov being able to source an asset like an AH-64 and fly it in Cairo airspace at such short notice. Something wasn’t right.
Then things got much worse.
The Apache began to lose altitude and fly toward the crowd of tourists.
“They’ve found us!” Hawke shouted, grabbing Snowcat by the arm. “We have to get out of here — now they’ve located us we’re putting these tourists at risk.”
Out of nowhere, Hawke saw the familiar orange flash and puff of white smoke from the pylon beneath the Apache’s wing, and then watched in horror as a hellfire missile raced toward them. A second later they heard the screeching sound of the missile in the sky and hundreds of people on the ground looked up and saw the terror rapidly approaching them.
Hawke turned to the crowd and screamed. “Run!”
A wave of panic rippled through the crowd and people screamed and scattered for their lives. A cloud of dust rose up into the air from the stampede of people and camels and blocked Hawke’s view of the Apache but he was too busy sprinting for cover to notice.
He and Snowcat hurled themselves toward a low limestone-concrete wall and just cleared it as the hellfire exploded on the road behind them, throwing great piles of rocks and dust into the air amidst an enormous fireball. A thick black cloud of smoke rose into the air and in the distance they heard the familiar wail of sirens.