Sparks and paint flakes spat from behind the cockpit. His aim wasn’t at fault; as he’d feared, the bullet had glanced off the rotor and been thrown off target. Now he only had three bullets left.
And the Apache’s crew knew he was there.
Colonel Brik hadn’t heard the gunshot, the Apache’s roar and the insulation of his helmet blotting out most external sounds, but he couldn’t miss the sharp clank of a large-calibre bullet impact less than a metre behind his head. He swore, looking up to see a figure on the cliff. ‘Hostile, above! Take him out!’
The gunner searched for the new threat. The chain gun, slaved to his head movements, followed his gaze – only to clunk to a stop with a warning buzz as it reached the limits of its travel. ‘Can’t traverse!’
Brik was already increasing power. The Apache rose towards its prey.
Eddie took aim again as the gunship climbed. The chain gun was at maximum elevation; it would be able to target him in moments—
He fired. The second shot did no better than the first, the bullet twanging off the rotors. So did the third. Only one round left. The cockpit’s upper canopy came into clear view beneath the whirling blades, but he was out of time.
The cannon strained against its restraints, then finally found its target—
The Englishman unleashed his last shot.
It struck home, punching through the acrylic window into the cockpit to hit Brik in the head.
His composite flight helmet was built to resist normal small-arms fire, but the Desert Eagle’s half-inch-wide bullet was considerably more powerful. It shattered as it tore through the protective layers, but the individual fragments still carried enough momentum to rip into the top of the Israeli’s skull. Bone splintered, hot metal churning through brain matter like mixer blades.
The gunner fired the chain gun – as Brik’s spasming limbs sent the Apache lurching violently sideways. Eddie dived backwards as the first few shells hit the cliff, but the rest of the shots went wide.
The helicopter spun towards the ground. The gunner screamed, hauling frantically at his duplicate flight controls, but Brik still had a death grip on his own sticks—
The main rotor smashed against the sheer cliff below the cleft. The blades disintegrated, and the airframe plunged as gravity eagerly reclaimed its hold. The Apache hit the ground hard, the stumps of the rotors digging into the earth and flipping it over before fuel and munitions ignited, blasting the tumbling wreck into a billion blazing fragments.
The rumble of the explosion faded. Eddie shook off grit and crawled to the edge. The gunship’s burning remains were strewn below – along with those of the Land Rover, which had been parked beneath the passage. ‘Bollocks,’ he said as he recovered his breath. ‘Looks like we’re in for a long walk.’
He stood and went to the top of the ravine, looking into it with trepidation as he searched for Jared – only for his heart to freeze in fear. There was a figure lying unmoving below, but it wasn’t the Israeli.
It was his wife.
31
Eddie ran back to the chasm’s narrowest point and made a rapid descent. He dropped the last ten feet and shoved past Dalton, ignoring the politician’s questions as he ran down the passage. The limping Jared was ahead; he quickly caught up. ‘What the fuck have you done?’ he roared at the younger man.
‘I tried to stop her!’ Jared protested.
‘Not fucking hard enough!’
‘She got past me and ran off! I tried to catch up, but . . .’ He regarded his wounded leg. More blood had soaked the bandage. ‘Then the chopper started shooting.’
Eddie held in another curse and ran on, rounding a corner to see broken rocks strewn over the floor – and a dust-covered figure lying amongst them. He hurried to her. ‘Nina! Nina, are you okay? Can you hear me?’
No movement for agonising seconds as he checked for a pulse . . . then she painfully turned her head, squinting up at him. ‘Did you get it?’
‘Yeah, I got it.’
‘Hooray for us . . .’ She tried to sit up, but cried out as she moved her leg. ‘Oh! Damn, that hurts!’
He saw blood on her thigh and examined the injury. ‘Looks like shrapnel. Jared!’ he said as the Israeli hobbled into view. ‘The first aid kit’s in the bag – get that useless shithead Dalton to bring it.’
‘Is she okay?’ Jared asked, worried.
‘No,’ he snarled, ‘’cause you let her do your job! Go!’
‘Don’t be angry at him,’ Nina told her husband as the shamefaced young man turned away. ‘He wanted to do it, but I stopped him.’ She gestured towards the entrance, the passage now pockmarked with ragged holes. ‘And I’m glad I did, because if I hadn’t, he would have been killed.’
‘You’re glad you got a piece of shrap in your leg?’
‘Okay, maybe not glad exactly . . .’ She shifted position as carefully as she could to look down at her stomach. ‘God, I hope she’s all right.’
‘Me too. I’ll get that bit of metal out, then check if she’s okay.’
‘How? I don’t think we brought an ultrasound scanner.’
The corners of his mouth creased upwards, just a little. ‘Getting sarky? You can’t be that badly hurt, then.’
‘Yeah, you just keep telling me that and maybe I’ll start to believe it.’ Nina too managed a small, pained smile.
Jared soon returned, Dalton following with the backpack. Eddie took out the first-aid kit and cleaned Nina’s wound, then used tweezers to grip the protruding end of the metal shard. ‘Okay, this’ll hurt,’ he warned.
Her sarcasm was now more overt. ‘Yeah, I’m so glad you told me that in advance.’
‘Well, I could’ve just yanked it out without warning while I was in the middle of talking to keep you distracted, but—’ He yanked it out without warning.
She shrieked. ‘Aah! Son of a—Bastard—Shit!’
Dalton winced at the spurt of blood, but still found the time to be patronising. ‘The world’s most famous archaeologist, eloquent and classy as always.’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ the couple told him in unison. Dalton huffed.
While Eddie dressed the wound, Jared limped to the end of the passage and peered at the wreckage below. ‘They took out the truck!’ he said as he returned.
Dalton went in alarm to see for himself. ‘We’re stranded?’
‘Someone’ll be along soon,’ Eddie replied, unworried.
‘We’re in the middle of a desert! How can you possibly know that?’
‘Because when a twenty-million-dollar helicopter gunship crashes and explodes, the people who own it usually want to find out what happened pretty sharpish. And I doubt shooting at a pregnant archaeologist, a Mossad agent and an ex-president was an officially sanctioned mission.’ He looked at Jared. ‘How far away’s its base?’
‘Ovda? About thirty kilometres,’ the Israeli replied.
‘So I bet you there’ll be another chopper here in the next ten minutes.’
‘Hopefully not another gunship,’ said Nina. She drew in a sharp breath as Eddie finished working on her wound, then carefully sat up and regarded Dalton. ‘So while we’re waiting, Mr President, I think we should talk about Cross. Now that he’s tried to kill you, it’s safe to assume you aren’t best buddies any more?’
‘You’ve got that right,’ Dalton growled. ‘That son of a bitch! He used me!’
‘Matthew chapter seven, verse fifteen: “Beware of false prophets”,’ said Nina, to his annoyance. ‘He doesn’t care about your political rehabilitation, and he never did. He just saw you as a means to an end, a way to bring about the apocalypse. So maybe now you should stop thinking about how to protect him and start thinking about how to save your own ass.’
‘Not much point getting back into power if the world ends five minutes later,’ Eddie pointed out.
‘If you tell us where Cross plans to release the angels, I’ll do everything I can with the UN, Interpol and the US and Antiguan governments to explain
that you helped us try to stop him,’ Nina said. ‘If you don’t, and Cross succeeds . . .’ Her expression hardened. ‘I’ll let you twist in the wind by your balls as you’re brought up on charges of terrorism and mass murder. Good luck with your immunity deal, Mr President.’
Worry was clear in Dalton’s eyes, but he still jutted his jaw in defiance. ‘I’m not going to be intimidated into making deals. I was the President of the United States, not some two-bit police informant!’
Eddie advanced upon him. ‘If I chucked him off the cliff, do you think anyone’d really care?’
Dalton took a worried step backwards, but before he could respond, Jared looked around sharply. ‘Quiet,’ said the Israeli. ‘I can hear something.’
Nina picked it up a moment later. ‘Sounds like a helicopter.’ In the distance, she heard the thrum of rotor blades.
Eddie gave Dalton a last threatening glare, then started towards the entrance. ‘Be careful,’ Nina called. ‘They might shoot first and ask questions later.’
‘I’ll be ready to run, just in case!’ He looked down the valley.
The burning Apache had left an unmissable marker of its position: a column of dirty black smoke. He leaned out of the ravaged chasm to scan the sky, quickly spotting the dark dot of an approaching helicopter. To his relief, it had the rounded profile of a transport aircraft rather than the narrow, angular shape of a gunship.
It took the chopper a few minutes to reach the crash site, circling overhead before descending into the valley. It was military, an Israeli Black Hawk in pale desert camouflage. It appeared unarmed, but all branches of Israel’s military were ready for combat at a moment’s notice, so Eddie decided to play things with care. He moved to the centre of the opening, waving both arms above his head.
The Black Hawk slowed to a hover, one of its side doors sliding open. A man inside stared at him through binoculars. Eddie changed his signal, spreading both arms and holding them up in a Y-shape to indicate that he needed help – and also to make it plain that he was not holding a weapon. The helicopter’s passenger looked back down at the wreckage, but it was obvious there was nobody alive in the flaming tangle of metal. Brief discussion with the pilot over his headset, then the man made an exaggerated thumbs-up gesture and the aircraft came about to head for the clifftop above.
The Englishman returned to the others. ‘They’re landing,’ he announced. ‘Jared, you do the talking. It’ll be better to have a Mossad agent tell ’em what’s happened rather than the bloke who just shot down one of their Apaches with a handgun . . .’
Members of the Black Hawk’s crew descended into the ravine on ropes to be given Jared’s account of events; unsure how to take it, and especially confused by the presence of a former world leader, they settled for lifting the injured out on stretchers before taking them back to their base at Ovda. Even without knowing any Hebrew, Nina and Eddie could tell that the crew were deeply suspicious of their passengers and their involvement in the loss of their commander’s aircraft, but it was also clear that the relatively junior military officers and men aboard did not want to tangle with the Mossad. One of Jared’s first requests – or demands – was for a field telephone, which he used to contact his superior in Tel Aviv.
That same superior arrived at the base by helicopter as the sun set two hours later, meeting its new acting commander before both men strode into the hospital ward where the rescuees were being kept under guard. ‘Sir!’ said Jared as they entered, jumping to his feet even with his injury and snapping to attention.
Eli Shalit was a small, thin man with prominent cheekbones and a bristling moustache. He waved a hand for the agent to sit back down, then cast his intense gaze over the room’s other occupants. ‘Dr Nina Wilde and Edward Chase,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Israel. And you too, Mr President,’ he added, with a distinctly dismissive nod at Dalton.
‘You know who we are?’ Nina asked.
‘Jared told me on the telephone, but I had also read his report on the events of four months ago, when he was seconded to the Criminal Sanctions Unit. Israel is very grateful to you both for helping to eliminate that nest of Nazis.’
‘Our pleasure,’ said Eddie, a little sarcastically.
Shalit gave him a cynical smile. ‘I know that you are not a great fan of the Mossad. But that does not lessen our gratitude. Now.’ He put his hands behind his back. ‘We have a situation, I believe.’
‘You could say that,’ Nina told him. ‘There’s a religious maniac about to unleash chemical weapons because he thinks that bringing about the apocalypse will let him learn all of God’s secrets. That’s definitely situation-y.’
‘Indeed it is.’ The Mossad official’s gaze went to Dalton. ‘Mr President, your presence here is causing some . . . trouble, shall we say, in our government. You had important friends here – I mean, have friends, of course,’ he corrected, in a way that suggested the slip was by no means accidental – ‘who saw to it that you were able to enter our country incognito, who provided you with help, resources . . . only now, I am told by one of my best men,’ a nod at Jared, ‘it seems that you are connected to an act of terrorism in the Caribbean, and to the madman who intends to carry out more of these acts. What do you have to say, Mr President?’
The colour had visibly leached from Dalton’s face; nevertheless, he drew himself up to stand tall and arrogant before the Israeli. ‘First, I would point out that I am in no way responsible for any of the acts carried out by an individual with whom I had the misfortune of being acquainted before I realised his true intentions—’
He paused at Nina’s disbelieving cry of ‘What?’, then continued: ‘Second, I would also point out that as soon as I realised these intentions, I disassociated myself with this individual and have done everything in my power to help track him down and prevent further loss of life.’
Nina almost laughed at his sheer gall. ‘You are so full of shit! If it wasn’t for you, none of this would ever have happened.’
‘We made an agreement, if you recall,’ Dalton pointed out. ‘I give you information about Cross’s plans, and in return you make it unequivocally clear to all the relevant authorities that I helped you try to stop him. You were the one who offered that deal, Dr Wilde. I agreed to it, so I expect you to honour it. And your husband too,’ he added, with a warning look at Eddie.
The Englishman glowered back at him, folding his arms. ‘Don’t remember shaking on it.’
‘Eddie,’ said Nina reluctantly. ‘He’s right, we need him. And we can’t afford to waste time – Cross and the Fishers might be halfway to their targets already.’
‘Don’t I even get to punch him in the face?’ Eddie asked, clenching one hand into a fist. Dalton twitched.
‘As much as I’d like that, no. Not this time.’
‘Next time, then,’ he muttered, before nodding to the politician. ‘Okay, we’ll put in a word for you. Won’t be the one I’m thinking of right now, though.’
‘You’ve got your deal,’ Nina told Dalton. ‘Now it’s your turn. What’s Cross’s plan?’
Dalton took a couple of heavy breaths before answering, aware that whatever agreements were in place, he was still linking himself to the cult leader’s plot. ‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘Simeon and Anna Fisher are going to take the statues to Mecca, and to the Vatican in Rome.’
‘As opposed to the Vatican in Hogfoot, Arkansas?’ Nina said scathingly. ‘Yeah, I know where it is.’
‘Mecca. And Rome.’ Shalit turned from side to side as if looking towards each of the two cities. ‘I would not describe either as a close friend to Israel – though one is far less friendly than the other. I am sure you can guess which. But it is not in Israel’s current interests that it is destroyed. We have enough enemies without arousing a billion and a half angry Muslims against us. And they would rise against us, even if we had nothing to do with it.’ Another edged smile at Eddie. ‘Those with no reason to hate us will still take any reason to fight us.’
??
?They’re going to release the gas there?’ Nina asked.
‘Obviously,’ Dalton snapped. ‘On the flight over, Cross kept saying how the timing was perfect. The Hajj is on in Mecca right now, so there are Christ knows how many Muslims there on pilgrimage, and the Pope has an audience in St Peter’s Square tomorrow, which will also have thousands, tens of thousands of people watching. That was what he wanted: maximum victims, maximum impact.’
‘It’s also what you wanted,’ Eddie said, disgusted. ‘Typical fucking politician. You’re already trying to distance yourself from it!’
‘So that was how the two of you planned to set off a religious war?’ asked Nina. ‘Attack Mecca and the Vatican, let it come out that American evangelical Christians were responsible, and watch the fireworks while you set up Fortress America?’
Eddie shook his head, speaking before the politician could issue another denial of his direct involvement. ‘That’s what I get for missing Sunday school. I never read the bit of the Bible where Jesus says that mass murder is brilliant. Oh, wait, that’s because it doesn’t fucking exist!’
‘You’re not Christians any more than Jim Jones and his crazies were,’ Nina told Dalton.
‘Don’t lump me in with those loons,’ he replied. ‘I had nothing to do with Cross’s followers. They joined him because they wanted him to bring about the end of the world.’
‘Which he did, for them.’
‘Yes, he did. And don’t forget that you’re a part of it too,’ Dalton went on, jabbing an accusatory finger at her. ‘You found the angels for him.’
Nina gawped in sheer disbelief at his attempt to swing the blame back on to her. ‘Only because Eddie and I were kidnapped, on your orders! Jesus!’
Shalit held up a placatory hand. ‘Dr Wilde, we have the information. The question now is: how shall we act upon it?’
‘We’ve got to stop ’em, obviously,’ said Eddie.
‘Yeah,’ agreed Nina, turning to Shalit. ‘You need to contact the authorities in Rome and Mecca, tell them to watch for Simeon and Anna.’
The Israeli spymaster smiled mockingly. ‘I am sure the Saudis will be happy to obey the Mossad.’ Even Dalton smirked.