The Vault of Poseidon. Lost to mankind for thousands of years, and holding the greatest and most terrifying secrets in history. Now it was within Zaugg’s grasp, and only Hawke could stop him from seizing its guarded treasures.
The pilot decreased the power and lowered the collective. As they approached the ground, the trail of Zaugg’s destruction was clearer to see. A column of black smoke twisted into the bright blue Greek sky, emanating from half a dozen police cars, now burning wrecks at the side of the road which lead up from Sami to the acropolis.
“Looks like they were hit with a rocket launcher,” said Scarlet as she loaded her MP5.
Hawke nodded gravely. He wondered what other nasty surprises Zaugg had in store for them.
“That’s probably all the local law enforcement taken care of.” As he spoke, the chopper made its final descent and touched down just below the acropolis, as near as the pilot could get without putting the helicopter at risk.
They jumped from the helicopter and ran out from under the whirring blades.
“We don’t have much time!” he shouted at the others. “Let’s get on with it!”
He saw Ryan and Sophie exchange a warm glance as they left the chopper, and their hands brushed together for just a moment. Great, he thought. Now he finds love.
They hiked the half mile to the acropolis, where they were saved the effort of finding the entrance to Hades’s underworld courtesy of Hugo Zaugg who had beaten them to it. A great slab of stone that once formed the floor of the acropolis had been hauled away from the ruins, presumably by the Bell which was now long gone.
The sun beat down, hot for winter even this far south. Hawke squinted in the sunlight as he peered down into the hole. He saw a pile of rubble created by Zaugg’s descent maybe fifty feet beneath the surface. A warm breeze blew the scent of sea-salt across them as they stood on the cliff top. To his right, a single olive tree bent gently in the wind.
“So this is it.” Hart and Hawke set up the abseil line while the others kept a lookout for any approaching dangers.
Hawke scrambled onto his stomach and craned his head down into the hole, lighting his way with the flashlight.
“This is it, all right,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in the cavity below. “I hope none of you is afraid of small spaces.”
He crawled out again and sat up to look at the others.
“How small is small?” Ryan asked.
“It’s a good job none of you is a serious beer drinker, let’s put it that way.”
Lea smiled. “One thing I love about you is your honesty, Joe Hawke.”
“Then you’ll love it when I tell you Zaugg has a real head-start on us because all his glow-sticks are burned out.”
Hawke held the flashlight in his mouth and rappelled down into the void. It widened slightly as it got deeper, and the walls were roughly hewn out of the bedrock. It must have taken months of hard labor, he thought.
At around fifty feet down, he reached the floor — mostly sand with a few small rocks strewn about the place, untouched since the time of the ancient gods. He called up to the others and told them to come down, and moments later they were all standing in the small dugout at the base of the tunnel.
Ahead of them was another tunnel. Hawke led the way, shining his flashlight into the darkness ahead. The bright yellow light dissipated in the black distance of the tunnel, so he kept its beam fixed to the floor as they walked.
“It’s cold.” Lea shivered.
“As cold as a tomb,” Ryan added.
“There’s a turn-off here,” Hawke said. He swung the flashlight into another tunnel on their right.
“And one up there on the left as well,” said Sophie. Their voices echoed strangely in the tunnels.
Hawke moved the flashlight back around to the tunnel Sophie had found. There were steps in this one, and it descended even deeper into the earth.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Ryan said.
“Where’s your spirit of adventure?” joked Hawke.
“We’re not actually going in there, are we?”
“What do you think?”
They moved through the darkness for several more minutes before they reached what looked like a small room, carved painstakingly out of the bedrock. Hawke was finally beginning to enjoy himself.
Back in the SBS he had done all the usual Special Forces training — parachuting techniques, desert warfare, but after that they sent him down to Poole, in Dorset, where they gave him the specialist training in diving and just about anything else to do with maritime warfare.
He had also trained in pot-holing and caving, and had been part of the SBS commando team engaged in the fierce firefights in the Tora Bora cave complex where Osama Bin Laden was hiding. Not that he had ever told anyone that — no one except Liz.
Caves for him meant fun.
“It looks like an antechamber of some kind,” Lea ran her hands over the walls, amazed by their smoothness. “This place is the find of the century.”
Hawke looked concerned. “No, I think Poseidon’s tomb is the find of the century. This is just one more step on the way there.”
In the dust at their feet they noticed another burned-out glow-stick.
Hawke stared at it. “Zaugg again.”
They turned a corner and saw one of Zaugg’s men pinned to the cave wall with a spear through his heart.
“What the hell?” Ryan said.
“Did Zaugg do this?” Sophie asked.
“No,” replied Hawke, studying the path of the spear. “This looks like some kind of ancient booby-trap — look there on the wall and you can see where the spear came from, and if you look on the floor you can see where he stepped on a pressure pad of some kind built into the path.”
“Zaugg’s obviously the kind of guy to lead from behind,” Hart said.
Demetriou suddenly looked very nervous as they silently moved past the dead man and left him in his final resting place, where his bones would hang for the rest of eternity.
“Everyone be very careful where you step,” Hawke shouted. “This place is rigged!”
They kept going deeper into the complex and a few paces later they emerged into an enormous cavern.
“A place this size must have been an aquifer once,” said Lea. “No one could have carved something like this.”
“Unless they were a god,” Ryan said.
Moments later they found another hole in the ground.
Hawke began to lower himself down, negotiating the rough, crumbling edges of the ancient tunnel with care as he went. He reached the bottom and shone the flashlight around to find a tunnel stretching into darkness on the western edge.
Lea was next, then Ryan who was followed closely by Sophie and then Demetriou and Reaper. Hart lowered herself down last.
They pushed into the tunnel, Hawke staring up at the tiny aperture fifty feet above them and wondering if they would ever see daylight again.
They walked for several minutes, holding their silence and proceeding with a kind of anxious diligence, guns and glow-sticks raised and eyes adjusting to an even greater darkness.
“What are these marks in the ground?” Lea asked.
Hawke shone his flashlight to reveal gouge marks in the dirt. “Looks like Zaugg’s dragging a lot of gear down here. He obviously doesn’t want to leave empty-handed. And he’s taken a lot of care to take his abseil lines with him as well. Obviously doesn’t want anyone following him.”
Then Hart spoke, her authoritative voice shattering the silence. “Watch out, everyone! There’s another hole here — it looks like we’re going further down.”
They dropped a glow-stick down to reveal another descent of around fifty feet. Hart set up another abseil line, and a few moments later they were all together again on the lower level where a second tunnel now stretched further away to the west.