At that moment Sheng screamed a raft of orders at Luk, who had been watching his dear leader with increasing suspicion over the last few moments. As Sheng disappeared inside the sarcophagus to claim his prize, Luk moved forward to follow his instructions, which although delivered in hysterical Cantonese were obvious to everyone: kill Hawke and the rest of his team.
Above them, Sheng emerged from the sarcophagus with a small roll of parchment held together with a tiny red ribbon. He held it aloft and laughed madly. As he did so, they heard a rumbling sound and then a dark liquid began pouring from the holes built into the walls of the inner tomb.
“What the hell is that stuff?” Lea said.
“A kind of pitch,” Reaper said.
“What?”
Hawke coughed. “It was used as an early kind of thermal weapon. I don’t know how old Qin managed it, but any minute now I’d be very surprised if it didn’t…”
“Catch on fire?” Lea said.
Hawke nodded. “How did you know?”
“Look over there.” She pointed to a platform behind the sarcophagus and they all saw the tell-tale sight of flames, small, but lots of them and rapidly growing in number.
“Some kind of ancient mechanism’s ignited the oil,” Hawke said.
Reaper sighed. “Which is not the best news I’ve had this week — and look.” He gestured to the base of the sarcophagus where the oil was collecting in a pool. Slowly the flames from the top level were travelling down the rivers of oil all over the tomb.
With the exception of Luk, Sheng’s goons looked at the fire and then ran from the chamber. Luk was panicked, but a few more screams from his boss and he sprinted forward and lunged at Lea with his knife. She took a step back and his momentum carried him forward into the loving arms of Vincent Reno. Reaper tiger-punched him in the throat and he collapsed in a wheezing heap at his boots.
Lea wasted no time in lashing out and struck Luk with an eye-watering roundhouse kick to the back of the head which sent him flying over in an arc and crashing down into the dirt on his back.
He scrambled to his feet and stared wide-eyed at the fire. His eyes darted over to Sheng who was now giving him more orders.
“Kill them! Kill them now, Luk! That is an order from your god!”
Luk looked at the fire and then back at Sheng, and then finally to Hawke and the others, perilously close to the lethal flames which grew larger with every second. The heat was rising, and the sweat poured down from his forehead and trickled into his panicked eyes, which now flicked over to the tunnel that led back to the five trials and ultimately to safety. Without saying another word, he dropped the knife and turned on his heel. A moment later he was in the tunnel and out of sight.
Sheng stared with obvious shock and horror at the desertion.
“Looks like your Luk’s run out, Sheng!”
Lea rolled her eyes and moaned. “Oh, for the love of God, Joe.”
“What? I literally just cannot help it.”
“I worked that out the first day I met you, you fool.”
“You forget that I have this!” Sheng screamed, waving the map in his hand. “And this means unrivalled power. Luk will certainly rue the day he deserted me, but I have greater things to consider, such as how to dispatch you annoying and pathetic mortals.”
Sheng pulled his gun, held it level and prepared to fire it, but as he did so the flames licking at the rope holding one of the beams aloft above his head finally finished their work, and the rope snapped.
Hawke winced, Lea averted her eyes.
Sheng heard it and flicked his head up to see the cause of the noise, but all he saw was the sight of a heavy wooden beam falling toward his face. Half a second later it smacked him hard in the head and knocked him from the ledge. He tumbled off the top of it and crashed into the base of the tomb with a sickening crunch, his neck broken and bent round at a terrible angle.
“That’s for Hart,” Hawke whispered to himself.
Now, the fire was all consuming, its white and orange flames licking the sides of the support beams holding the temple in place around them. The highly flammable tar mixture continued to pour from the hundreds of holes all around them, and the flames leaped from one stream to the next until the entire chamber was ablaze.
Hawke tried to shield his face from the tremendous heat but it was too much. He could feel himself burning and took a step backwards. Through the shimmering inferno he saw the unmistakable figure of Lexi Zhang as she lunged forward and grabbed the map from Sheng’s dead fingers. Her figure rippled mirage-like in the heat as she struggled to cover her mouth with her hand.
“Lexi, I’m coming!” Hawke shouted, taking a step toward her, but the blaze was too much even for him and no matter how hard he pushed himself to go forward his basic survival instinct stopped his feet from going another step.
Lexi waved the map at him and tried to get across the burning river of tar, but then something terrible happened. He watched in horror as she took a misstep and began to windmill backwards over to the ledge. Hawke watched in terrible slow-motion as she slipped over the edge, her arms flailing to try and stop herself going back. In her hand was the cursed map of immortality, flashing in the firelight, and then…
Then she was gone, over the edge, her screams receding into the black pit as she slipped away from them, from life. Hawke stood motionless for a few seconds, taking in what he had just seen. This terrible place and that damned map had taken Sheng and rightly so in his view, but now it had taken not only Olivia Hart but also Lexi Zhang — the Agent Dragonfly he had met in Zambia all those years ago — and now she was dead too, another life claimed by the madness of greed and the lust for power.
“Joe!”
He turned to see Lea holding her hand to him. She was shielding her face from the heat with her other hand and coughing violently in the smoke. “Joe, it’s time to go! We have to go now before we all die in here!”
“She’s right, Hawke,” shouted Reaper. “This is one fire not even we can put out.”
“We must leave!” Han shouted.
All around them the fire grew stronger and closer.
Lea beckoned Hawke over with her hand “She’s gone, Joe! She’s dead, and so is Sheng. We have to get out of here now!”
Hawke snapped back into the moment. Lea and the others were right. All the others were dead, and they would be too if they didn’t get out of the tomb in double-quick time. He holstered his gun and jogged over to Lea without looking back for Lexi once. He knew she was gone, and more than that, she had died trying to retrieve the map for him and that was something he was going to have to live with, but now was not the time to think about it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Hawke was watching the sun set over Kowloon Bay when Lea stepped out onto the balcony with two glasses of chilled vodka. Tonight should have been about celebrating but instead he felt like a total failure. He had led a mission where Olivia Hart, Sophie Durand and Lexi Zhang were killed.
“How’s Ryan?” Hawke asked.
Lea handed him a vodka and turned to look over her shoulder. She was looking back into the room where various people were mingling and fighting for conversation time with Jason Lao, Sir Richard Eden or Frank McShain, who seemed especially pleased with himself thanks to the retrieval of the Tesla device and its delivery back into the safe hands of the US military. But as she looked, she did it as if she were looking for Ryan, but it was a token gesture. They both knew Ryan wasn’t at the party. He hadn’t come out of his hotel room since their return to Hong Kong.
“I don’t know… This has hit him pretty hard, Joe.”
Hawke bit his lip. “I know. Who can blame him? He isn’t used to losing people around him — not in this way, at least. And it’s my fault.”