Hawke slowed his breathing and remained calm. The image of Hugo Zaugg trying to kill Lea on the cable car entered his mind. For a second he was standing in the snow of the Alps and taking aim through the sniper’s rifle, but then the cold of the snow was washed away with the heat of the Egyptian desert — now it was another woman’s life in his hands.
He raised the pistol and cradled it with both hands. He squinted as he took aim, and prepared to take the shot. He knew bringing down a chopper with a single shot from a handgun was going to be hard work — almost impossible, some would say, but he also knew it had been done before.
In terms of its capacity to remain airborne, any chopper, Apaches included, was a very delicate piece of machinery. As a helicopter pilot himself, Hawke knew the function of the tail rotor was to stop the rest the machine spinning around under the force of the main rotors. It applied a counter torque to the force created by the main engine, and kept the whole thing airborne and stable.
Firing at the main rotor blades would achieve nothing. It was common knowledge among those who’d been there that Huey pilots back in the Vietnam War would use their main rotor blades to clear landing areas by pruning tree branches.
He’d done something similar on a mission in the Sierra Leone jungle, hovering his way down into a hole in the trees and having to slice his way back out of it because the downwash had sucked the canopies back over the top of the chopper. It was messy, and noisy, and wrecked the blades, but it was easier to replace a blade than a Special Forces operative so the Top Brass turned a blind eye. The tail rotor, on the other hand, was nowhere near as robust, and yet crucial to the stability of the aircraft.
“Fire!” Snowcat screamed. “They’re getting too close to me!”
“No, we have to wait until they slow down or their speed will stabilize the chopper after I hit the rotor.”
Having reached their target, the Apache slowed to a hover and turned gently in the hot air to fire the chain gun at the Russian agent for the second time.
“Hawke, this is getting a little too real right now!”
“Another second…”
A slow breath, a gentle squeeze of the trigger.
He fired the penultimate bullet in the Makarov’s magazine and hoped for the best.
He wasn’t disappointed.
The bullet struck one of the tail rotors and because of the chopper’s reduced hovering speed there was no longer enough lift on the vertical surfaces of the machine to help stabilize it.
Hawke watched as the pilot reacted to the loss of the tail rotor, altering the pitch of the main rotors and adjusting his speed, but it wasn’t enough. Finally he tried to cut the engine to allow autorotation — the force of the air rushing up as they descended — to force the rotors around, but they didn’t have the height.
They had been too greedy in their pursuit of Snowcat and a controlled descent was impossible. It plummeted toward the ground and just before it hit, Hawke directed his final shot into the fuel tank and the crippled helicopter went up in an enormous explosion, leaving nothing but a burned out shell amidst a hot fireball that fell through the sky and crashed into the sand at the southern edge of the Great Pyramid.
As the explosion dissipated and the smoke and dust began to clear, he saw Agent Snowcat was lying in the hot sand, motionless. He ran to her, and checked her vital signs. She was still alive, but her breathing was shallow and she had a flesh would on the side of her head. It looked like she had been knocked unconscious in the shockwave of the chopper when it exploded.
Hawke pulled her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and pocketed the Makarov before making a call to Eden. Both men of few words, it took just seconds to establish that Ryan had nailed down the Karnak Temple as the location of the other half of the map, and that Eden would send a chopper to pick them up and take them to the airport.
One step backwards, and two steps forwards, Hawke thought. That’s how you get where you want.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Joe Hawke watched the runway turn into a blur and then drop away beneath them as the small jet raced up into the Egyptian sky. Far to the west, he saw the massive city of Cairo sprawling either side of the Nile, and rising up behind Giza were the famous pyramids, lit bright yellow in the hot sun. He could still see the columns of smoke from the carnage he had left behind in the shape of a burning Apache, and he guessed by now it would be surrounded by emergency crews, army and police.
As they briefed him on what they had discovered about Osiris, he sensed more tension than was normal among his friends. Ryan was even quieter than usual and seated at the desk on the starboard side of the Gulfstream, buried in a laptop, and Alex was opposite him leafing through Mazzarro’s notebooks.
As for him, he watched Snowcat gently breathing on the couch, still unconscious from the shockwave of the explosion back at Giza. Lexi had tended and dressed the wounds on her arm and head and said they weren’t serious.
Hawke heard the Russian’s words again — what she had said about how his enemies were closer then he thought — and glanced at the faces of his friends for a few seconds. Could it be true that one of these people had ordered the hit on him in Cairo? Now, in their company, it seemed an even more unlikely possibility than it had done in the heat of the fire-fight down in the pyramids.
He watched Scarlet rise from her seat. She wasted no time in hitting the mini-bar, and cracked open a vodka miniature, downing it in one. “Better,” was all she said as she pulled a second one from the fridge.
She turned to Hawke. “Tough day at the office, darling?”
“You could say that,” he said. “We spent half the morning on a guided tour of Cairo courtesy of some kind of renegade British Special Forces. They even laid on a helicopter.”
“A helicopter?” Eden said, eyes narrowing.
“Apache,” Hawke replied. “Big black thing with more arms than an octopus. British, as well.”
Eden frowned. “I was afraid of this.”
“Afraid of what?” Hawke asked.
“I’ll explain later — our Russian friend is waking up.”
Hawke watched as Snowcat slowly came back to life after the shockwave, and he offered her some water as she sat up and rubbed her head. She mumbled some words in Russian and blinked a few times to regain her focus.
“How long was I out for?” she asked, looking down at her wristwatch.
“Less than half an hour,” Hawke said quietly. “We’re on a plane going to Luxor.”
“Woah — things move fast around you, Mr Hawke.”
“They seem to, yes,” he said, smiling.
He gave her more water and some time to regain her composure, but his compulsion to know the truth moved him to speak with her about his wife. He had waited long enough.
As he spoke, she unbuckled her seat belt and pulled a hair tie loose, shaking her long, blonde hair free.
“So you want to know what I have to say?”
He nodded. “First, I want your real name. I’m not calling you Snowcat for the rest of the mission.”
She smiled and dipped her head in agreement. “My name is Maria Kurikova.”
“Thanks, and pleased to meet you, Maria. I’m Joe, so you can leave the ‘Mr Hawke’ stuff at the door, all right?”
She smiled and nodded her head.
“So why are we going to Luxor?” she asked.
Hawke explained. “Apparently Ryan and Alex worked out that a French Egyptologist called… what was his name again?”
“Champollion,” Ryan called over.