“He’s obviously never had Vimto,” Lea whispered to Hawke.
Hawke rolled his eyes and gave her a look.
“What?” she said. “Not the right time for jokes?”
“Vimto? What the hell made you think of that?”
Kodiak took a step toward them and aimed the Vityaz at them. “Silence, you scum, or I rake you with this!”
“Not an unreasonable request under the circumstances,” Hawke said.
“I mean it, you English vermin!” Kodiak came closer and pushed the cold steel muzzle of the submachine gun in his stomach. “Say one more thing, and I fire.”
Hawke knew the others were all looking at him, pleading with him to keep his mouth shut and right now it was the right play. There was nothing he could do but comply with his orders and shut his mouth, inwardly vowing revenge on the Russian hit-man.
Across the chamber, beside the fountain, Vetrov finished guzzling the water and turned to face them. His chest heaved up and down as the excitement of the moment coursed through his veins like fire. His arms and legs began to shake almost immediately.
Hawke took a step back and gave the others a look to do the same thing. He was starting to have grave concerns about the future of Maxim Vetrov, and it wasn’t that the Russian billionaire was about to turn into a living god and live forever.
“Ha!” Vetrov screamed, the veins bulging in his neck. “Ha! I am electric!”
“If you say so, matey-lad,” Hawke said.
Kodiak’s eyes widened and he too began to move away from Vetrov and the fountain. On seeing the former Spetsnaz sniper shying away from their boss, the rest of Vetrov’s goons followed suit and shuffled back toward the rear wall of the chamber.
“Behold as I become a god..!” Vetrov began to hyperventilate and Hawke saw his eyes were turning red. “Where countless others failed, I have succeeded. I have turned myself into a god!”
“A god-forsaken mess, I think is what you mean,” Hawke said.
Vetrov laughed maniacally and turned to stare at Hawke and the others. “When you are nothing but ashes I will rule the entire world. I am your god! I will live for…”
He stopped talking, a look of strained terror spreading across his face.
Hawke watched as he dropped to his knees and clutched at his throat.
“I…I…am your god…”
Vetrov’s eyes were now dark red with blood, and the veins in his neck and temples were bulging hideously and throbbing with the beat of his racing heart. He began screaming and tearing at his throat, his fingernails clawing into his own flesh and making it bleed.
“Help me! Kamchatka, help me..!”
Kodiak took another step back.
“Maybe a Panadol might help, mate?” Hawke said.
They watched in horror as Vetrov’s skin began to turn a pallid color like clay and drop from his face in dry peels. His hoarse, terrified screams filled the chamber as the realization of his true destiny dawned on him.
“Bloody hell,” Ryan said. “His eye just exploded!”
Vetrov fell to the floor now and began rolling around in the dirt, screaming and clawing at the ground, his agonized death throes convulsing his broken, decaying body.
“Looks like someone put a set of jumper cables on him,” Hawke said. “Which is funny because…”
His sentence was cut off by a deep, low rumble echoing inside the tomb. Seconds later it reached the inner chamber and sent chunks of rock from the ceiling crashing to the floor. A stalactite broke lose and skewered one of Vetrov’s men, and two more ran from the chamber in terror.
“Time to go, I think,” Kodiak said, watching his boss as he squirmed on the ground in agony. “But not for you, English vermin.”
He raised the Vityaz and fired at Hawke.
“No!” Lea screamed as she pushed Hawke aside, but she was too slow.
One of the bullets tore through her chest and she dropped to the floor of the chamber just a few yards from the convulsing Vetrov, who was now more a skeleton than a man, and yet still writhing in the dirt.
“Lea!” Hawke screamed. He dropped to his knees to help her while Scarlet took advantage of the confusion of the earthquake and gave Kodiak the benefit of a well-aimed and lightning fast Krav Maga slap kick. Her heel struck him like a sledgehammer and tore into his flesh.
He staggered back, dazed and bleeding, randomly firing off the Vityaz at the ceiling as he went, but before he could get his balance back, she planted a second slap kick on him, and Lexi did the same to the remaining goon, who hit the floor before scrambling away like a frightened crab.
Scarlet gripped Kodiak between her thighs in a scissor hold, and slowly his face began to turn purple.
“Shoot my friends and I have a tendency to lose my temper,” she said. “And you won’t like my temper very much, you little worm.”
She squeezed her thighs and further constricted his windpipe.
All around them the tomb was shaking.
“What the hell is going on?” Snowcat asked Ryan.
Ryan, who had joined Hawke at Lea’s side turned to face her in the confusion.
“Some kind of earthquake, I guess,” he said. “But a bloody big one. We have to get out of here, Joe!”
Hawke nodded and hoisted an unconscious Lea over his shoulder.
In the corner, Scarlet was literally squeezing the last breath of life out of Kodiak when Hawke screamed at her to move out. She stepped over his limp body, snatching up his Vityaz as she went. “Been waiting to do that since Berlin.”
“What about him?” Lexi said, pointing at Vetrov, who was now croaking on the floor and heaving hoarse breaths into his crumbling lungs.
“What about it, you mean,” Scarlet said, and fired a burst of rounds into Vetrov’s head, blasting pieces of the desiccated skull all over the fountain. “That’s you sorted then, you tit.”
A foot-wide split appeared in the roof of the chamber and cracked its way down the wall behind the fountain and started to snake along the floor.
“The whole place is breaking in two!” Ryan shouted, peering into the newly formed gap. He shook his head in awe. “It just goes on forever.”
“Right, everyone out…now!” Scarlet shouted.
They sprinted out the chamber and along the tunnel which led to the entrance, seeing daylight after what felt like the longest race of their lives. As they ran they saw the corpses of Koura and his men lining the tunnel, lying dead where Vetrov’s men had killed them. Finally they saw Mazzarro’s dead body with a single bullet hole in his forehead.
As they sprinted toward the light, the tunnel behind them began to collapse and they only just got to the entrance before the whole thing began to crush in on itself and spew a great plume of dust and ash out into the jungle — the last dying breath of the ancient tomb.
“When that thing collapses no one’s ever getting back in there, that’s for damned sure,” Scarlet said.
While the shockwave slowly dissipated, Hawke laid Lea down on the soft leaves of the rainforest floor. A few seconds later the final part of the tunnel shaft crumbled into itself as the weight of the mountainside pushed down onto it and sealed it forever.
Hawke looked down at Lea, dying in his arms. The race to escape the collapse of the tomb had knocked her from unconsciousness for a few short moments.
“You’re going to make it, right?” he said, tearing off her t-shirt to see the wound. There was a small bloody hole an inch above her heart.
She tried to smile at him as he studied the wound. “You better not fuck this up, Joe Hawke…” her words were faint now, and drifting into the steamy air of the jungle. All around them the cacophony of cicadas echoed off the trunks of the myrrh trees and from somewhere in the thick canopy above their heads they heard the calming call of a lone greenshank as it returned to the trees after the mysterious earthquake.