Before they could even work out their position, Hawke was on his feet, grabbing the gun from Baumann, and forcing the barrel to point down into the dirt as he raised the back of his hand into the Bavarian’s face at the same time. Baumann screamed as his nose smashed into pulp and then he staggered back into the wall.
Then pandemonium as Zaugg’s forces scattered to defensive positions and Grobel ducked back down into the water to save himself. Zaugg turned his gun on Hawke but it jammed.
In the chaos, Hawke grabbed Zaugg around the neck and held him at gunpoint, slowly pacing backwards away from the Swiss and toward the relative safety of his own people behind him.
“Put your guns down or I’ll kill him!” Hawke shouted, pushing the Uzi into Zaugg’s neck. He watched as Zaugg’s men looked to their leader for their next command. Hawke felt Zaugg tense with rage, and then reluctantly order his men to lower their weapons.
They began to put them on the dirt when everything changed.
“Not so fast!” a voice shouted behind him. The men stopped what they were doing and picked their guns back up. Before Hawke could react, he felt the muzzle of a gun pushing into the base of his skull. “All of you are to stay armed! It is you, Mr Hawke, who will be lowering his gun, or I will blow your head off.”
Only now did he recognize the voice.
Demetriou.
Hawke’s mind raced with possible plays, but he knew it was over.
“Release Herr Zaugg, please,” Demetriou said.
Hawke released Zaugg, who turned around slowly and took the Uzi out of his hands, grinning as he did so, and never taking his eyes from Hawke.
“Thank you, Yannis,” Zaugg said. “I knew I could rely on you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Demetriou stepped swiftly away from Hawke, covering him with the Uzi at all times, and moved over to where Zaugg was rejoining Grobel. Baumann was nursing his broken nose.
“You filthy traitor!” Lea said.
Demetriou shrugged his shoulders. “I have been working with Zaugg for many weeks. He promises me all the funding I need for my researches. When your team arrived at my office I knew all I had to do was play along and I could deliver you to him as easy as one, two, three.”
“Are you insane, professor?” Hawke said. “You can’t trust a man like Hugo Zaugg.”
“Well, I…” Demetriou began. Hawke wondered if he was thinking about the dead man on the spear further back in the complex — Zaugg’s canary in the coalmine. “I…”
Zaugg’s hoarse cackle filled the cavern. “This is actually most fortuitous,” he said, cutting off Demetriou’s reply. “I find myself wondering what terrors might lurk in this watery hole and then you turn up, the perennial bad penny.”
He pointed at the pool with the Uzi. “And I also wonder who among us has demonstrated an amusingly entertaining capacity to hold his breath for extended periods of time.”
Hawke knew where this was going.
“Mr Hawke — I desire of you that you climb into that pool and swim to wherever it leads and return with the news of your discovery. If you do not return, I will kill your friends. If you try and double-cross me, I will kill your friends. If you are not climbing into the hole in ten seconds I will kill your friends.”
For added effect, Zaugg cocked the Uzi and pointed it at Lea’s face. “I will start with this one.”
Hawke knew he had no choice, and watching the smug realization of his victory dawn on Zaugg’s face was almost more than he could bear. He moved forward slowly, silently mouthing the words “I’m sorry” to Lea as he passed her, and climbed down into the rock pool.
“Grobel!” snapped Zaugg. “You will go with him, and take this.” He handed Grobel the golden key. “If we have the right place then you will need it. If you too think about double-crossing me, simply remember that I know where your family lives.”
Zaugg tossed Hawke a dive-light from the pile of equipment at the side of the pool, and Grobel climbed down beside him, clutching the tiny golden disc in his hand. Before he went under the surface Zaugg handed him one of the harpoons from the equipment box.
Hawke dived into the black water, shining the light ahead of him. Behind him, Grobel tried to keep up, harpoon in one hand and disc in the other. The tunnel stretched ahead, narrow at first but gradually turning into a much wider space. After swimming for a minute or two it twisted upwards and Hawke realized they were at a dead end.
He turned in the tunnel and made a signal with his hands to indicate to Grobel that there was nowhere else to go, but then he noticed a small carving in the rock, lit for just a second as his light passed over it in the cold, watery darkness. He returned the light to it and saw it was the same shape and size as the disc.
Grobel swam forward and pushed the disc into the slot, twisting it to the left and then to the right. There was a judder almost like an earthquake and the end of the tunnel began to shift to the side.
It was a door fashioned from a massive boulder. They swam through the new aperture and Hawke saw a strange kind of mechanism was built into the rock. It looked like it was using gravity to slide the boulder downwards and to the side when the key released a metal bar from behind it.
Inside, Hawke saw the familiar sight of surface water above him. He swam up toward it and surfaced to see he was in another huge underground cave. He shone the torch into the blackness and was almost blinded by the flash of gold reflecting back at him.
It was an enormous pile of gold bigger then he could possibly have imagined before setting his eyes upon such a thing. In the distance was a heavy-looking stone monument covered in ornate carvings and the same strange, ancient inscriptions he recognized from the golden key — something told him it could only be the sarcophagus.
He had found the Vault of Poseidon.
Swimming back through the underwater tunnel, Hawke considered taking Grobel out and snatching the harpoon. It would be easy enough, he considered, but where would it get him?
He would have to emerge in the rock pool surrounded by Zaugg’s men. He would do anything to protect the others now, even Ryan who had saved his life back in the sea. He couldn’t risk their lives in some crazy attempt to play the hero.
He ruled out attacking Grobel and emerged in the other cave, crawling out of the rock pool soaking wet.
Zaugg was overcome with excitement when Hawke and Grobel gave their report. He had his team set up a pump connected to a generator and began to suck the water from the underground tunnel. His destiny was almost upon him.
Hawke joined the others while Zaugg oversaw his men as they put down a line of pipes and connected them to the generator set up in the bigger cave behind them. Its tinny engine roared in the enclosed space and started to fill it with fumes. They watched as the water was slowly removed from the tunnel and pumped into the larger cave. It spilled out and began to form an enormous pool.
Lea sidled up to Hawke in the semi-darkness. “If this is your idea of a date, Joe Hawke,” she said, “You’re not even getting to first base, never mind second.”
“Are you warming to me, Miss Donovan?”
“I could get a guy like you if I clicked my fingers,” she said, smiling, embarrassed by her words the moment they left her lips.
“Oh, you think so, do you?”
“Listen, Joe,” her words were quiet now, and vaguely hesitant. She looked at Scarlet who was standing closer to Zaugg’s team, and then to Sophie. “There’s something I have to tell you.”
“I know, you could have me anytime you please.”
“No, it’s important. I shouldn’t be telling you this but…”
“If it's about what you started to tell me in New York, you don’t have to justify anything to me. You don’t have to explain yourself, expecially if it’s about something that happened in the army.”