“Not too bad,” Hawke called back. “But it’s almost impossible to tell where…”
A second later he felt himself tumbling over to the right. His right boot was rapidly disappearing beneath the sucking surface of the quicksand under the water. Lexi screamed but immediately reached out and grabbed Hawke’s belt, almost toppling herself over in the process.
Hawke stayed calm. He knew a few old tricks to extricate himself from quicksand and panicking was the worst thing he could do. The extra agitation only served to force you deeper into the trap. He quickly prodded the sand with the butt of the rifle until he found a solid area and leaned into it as he pulled his boot out of the quicksand.
“Yeah…’ he said calmly. “Best not stand on that bit.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
A few minutes later and Hawke was leading the other members of the team away from the trial by earth and into the third chamber. Han had described how according to ancient Chinese philosophy this would be the trial by water, and being a former SBS man he liked his chances, even in this madhouse, but that didn’t stop him worrying about the others.
The reason he had been so sympathetic when Lea told him about her mistake in Syria was because of his own officer past. There was nothing he liked to talk about down that particular memory lane, but right now it rose to the forefront of his mind — now he was leading his team into danger. As a former Major in the SBS he knew what it meant to be in command of others and the grave responsibility that came with it. When they had busted him down to NCO it had come almost as a relief.
But his confidence was whittled away when he turned a bend in the tunnel and saw the size of the third chamber.
It was barely bigger than an elevator in terms of floor space, but the floor was nothing but black water.
“I have a really bad feeling about this,” Lexi said.
“Woah!” said Lea. “Flashbacks of our little holiday in Greece, or what!”
Hawke nodded grimly. When he first saw it, he had also thought of the cave system on Kefalonia where they almost drowned thanks to Zaugg and Baumann exploding a hole in the bottom of the bay, but this was different — this was altogether more claustrophobic.
“We have to be careful here,” Han said.
“This from the man who should be in hospital,” Lea said, shaking her head.
“The wound was cauterized,” Han said without emotion.
“You don’t need to remind me,” Lea said, shuddering. “I was there and I saw it…”
“Then let's get on,” Han said. “There are some people inside the cave system with whom I wish to have a short conversation.”
“Everyone stay here,” Hawke said. “I need to check this out.”
He jumped in the water. It was freezing cold and with no light there was zero visibility. He had trained in these exact conditions more times than he could remember, and not only that he had swum in them for real on a top secret mission along the Russian coast, although he was a much younger man back then.
But today there was more at stake than simply fixing a seabed listening device so the Royal Navy could track Russian submarines going in and out of Northern Fleet headquarters in Kola Bay. Today he was trying to stop an insane human-trafficking megalomaniac from getting his hands on what he was reliably informed would be the greatest power ever wielded by man. There’s your incentive, Joe, he thought.
Inside the submerged tunnel, memories of Kefalonia came flooding back to him again, almost literally. As he felt his way along the tunnel, pushing deeper into the filthy, near-freezing water, all he could think about was how close he had come to getting all those people killed back in Greece, and now the same had happened to Olivia Hart. For that, someone would pay a heavy price, but he realized the number of people lining up to get their revenge on Sheng was getting longer by the second.
After a while, he saw a grubby, orange light slowly begin to emerge ahead of him. He was nearly out of breath, and he knew he could hold his breath for a full five minutes. Back in the height of his SBS days he could do nearly ten, but that took a hell of a lot of training. How the others were going to hold theirs for so long he had no idea.
Now, he followed the light and swam smoothly upwards until his knees were banging against something — steps. He climbed up them and a moment later his head emerged into a dank little chamber lit orange by the fading, flickering light of one of Sheng’s glow-sticks.
So that was the trial by water — he made it look easy, but he knew ninety-nine percent of people would be dead if they didn’t have the sense to turn around before they got halfway, and he hadn’t even known how long it was when he started out. Normally he would never consider such a suicidal thing to do, but desperate times called for desperate measures, as his Dad used to say.
He took a second to get his breathing back under control and then went back into the water to tell the others the good news. He knew what he had to do, but whether or not he could do it was another thing altogether.
The chopper circled the Tokyo Bay Aqua Line main service area as they scouted for the enemy, and then began to descend. Scarlet and the others jumped out into the Tokyo drizzle, rifles slung over shoulders and pistols in their hands. Some members of the public looked startled but were moved quickly away by uniformed police officers. As they marched to the entrance they noticed another chopper with a rope ladder hovering a few hundred yards away.
“The gyrodyne!” Ryan said.
Scarlet nodded. “Ready to kick some arse?”
“Always,” Bradley Karlsson said, a wide grin on his face. “It’s what I live for.”
“Me too, so let’s go,” Sophie said, pausing for a second to make sure Ryan was ready. “Are you okay?”
“Of course he’s okay,” Scarlet boomed. “We need you more than ever now, Ryan, remember that. When we’ve blasted these tossbags into the next life it’s going to be down to you to disable that Tesla thing.”
Ryan swallowed hard but tried to look cool.
“No problemo,” he said, and rubbed a trembling hand over his face.
“You’re not breathing air into my lungs,” Reaper said. “I’d rather die.”
Hawke had expected that reaction from the former French Foreign Legion man, now unreformed Merc and all-round nutcase.
“You’d rather die?”
“Of course! I’m a Frenchman. It’s not necessary. I doubt it even works.”
“Of course it works,” Hawke said. “Regular inhaled air is around twenty-one percent oxygen, but exhaled air is seventeen percent oxygen. It works, believe me. I’ve been there before, and on both ends of it.”
Reaper was horrified. “You let another man kiss you?”
“It’s not a kiss, Vincent, it’s passing oxygen from one person to another.”
“You tell yourself that… and don’t call me Vincent. The answer is still no. Maybe if you were a beautiful woman like Lea here, but otherwise, no.”
“In that case I hope you can hold your breath for a full five minutes or you’re going to be dead.”
“Of course I can,” he boomed. “I think.”
Lea blushed slightly. “You think I’m beautiful, Reap?”
“Of course he thinks you’re beautiful,” Hawke said, annoyed. “He’s French. He’d hump a bicycle if you put a skirt on it.”
Lea was offended. “Well, thanks a lot!”
Hawke ignored her. “What about you, Han? How long can you hold your breath for?”
“Perhaps five minutes during meditation, but swimming under water… I don’t know, Joe.”
“Lea?”
“I have no problem at all with it, Joe,” she said, and winked at him. “In fact I might just pass out on purpose so you can rescue me all over again.”