“Don’t kill you?” Reaper said, stony-faced. The bear-like Frenchman flicked a small stone over the cliff with the steel toecap of his combat boot and watched it fly out into the air above the ocean.
“I have money now! Look — gold! Look in the Jeep. More gold than you can imagine! I’ll pay you anything you ask. Anything! Look at the diamonds!”
Reaper offered the panic-stricken man a broad, generous smile. “But some things are too expensive to buy,” he said. “Including your life, it turns out.”
A short burst from the machine pistol induced a second of terrible convulsions in the man, who then slumped to a lifeless heap, his chest peppered with bullet holes.
“Turns out, mon ami, you can dish it out,” Reaper said, with satisfaction, “but you cannot take it. This is the right expression, no?”
Hawke nodded. “Yes, that’s the right expression.”
From their position on the cliff they watched Zaugg’s Jeep leading the others down the road. They got out of the rut in seconds and began their pursuit of the Swiss. A battle between saving Lea, punishing Zaugg and saving the world from this madness fought for supremacy in Hawke’s frantic mind.
“Do you think he knows it’s us in here?” Hawke asked as they drew closer to the convoy.
“The answer is yes because we’ve got company,” Reaper said, looking in the rear-view. It was a second Jeep from the front which had looped around and come in behind them.
Reaper stamped down on the throttle and the Jeep jolted forward in the scrub in a roar of revs and dust. The Jeep had a serious 4x4 capability and no trouble climbing the rocky slope ahead of them and regaining the higher ground where they joined another track and turned south in the search for the other vehicles.
Zaugg’s men in the other Jeep behind them drove over the body of the hired Greek lackey and swung around in the gravel. Moments later it was behind Hawke and Reaper and gaining on them.
Reaper floored the throttle while Hawke climbed over to the back seats and cleared a space among the loot-laden boxes.
“Let the dog see the rabbit!” Hawke blasted out the rear window with the Heckler and Koch MP7 machine pistol, showering the track behind with shards of the reinforced safety glass.
“I think we are the rabbit right now, my friend.”
“Where’s your optimism?”
Reaper laughed. “I lost it along with everything else when Monique divorced me. The bitch.”
The Jeep raced along the east coast path, a sheer drop of at least a hundred feet just a few yards to its right, and a thick row of impenetrable scrub and olive trees on their left.
Through the newly opened window to the rear, Hawke could see their pursuers more clearly now, especially now they were closing on them with such speed. There was a driver, and another man, presumably one of Zaugg’s Greek facilitators. This second man leaned out his window and aimed his gun at them. From where Hawke was sitting it looked like a Strasser hunting rifle.
“A shame we got such a crappy Jeep,” Reaper said, glancing in the rear-view mirror at the 6 litre bearing down on them.
“You can only play with the hand you’re dealt,” Hawke said. He fired the MP7 through the rear window and watched with pleasure as a line of bullets struck the Jeep’s grille and peppered across the hood and windshield.
The noise of the machine pistol in the enclosed cab of the Cherokee was deafening, but not unexpected to the two former soldiers. The other Jeep swerved violently for a few moments, causing the passenger to fire off a shot aimlessly into the air.
After he had composed himself, the passenger used his rifle butt to smash the windshield glass out and the driver was able to get back on track in his lethal pursuit of them.
“That bought us five seconds,” Reaper said. “Thanks, Joe.”
They followed the track down a steep incline, at one point striking a deep pothole and nearly veering off the cliff to the right.
The Jeep behind them accelerated, the driver clearly more familiar with the intricacies of the track than Reaper. “He must be another local.”
Hawke watched with horror as the passenger disappeared back inside the Jeep and fumbled around for a moment before emerging again with an RPG-7D, a portable, handheld anti-tank rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Developed by the Soviets in the early nineteen-sixties, it was cheap and readily available, used by armies, terrorists and guerrilla forces all over the world.
“Yeah, maybe we have a slight problem,” he called over to Reaper.
They were still hemmed in by the olives on their left, and the cliff-edge immediately to their right. Neither offered a realistic escape from their pursuers.
The passenger took a few moments to aim the RPG. He was clearly having trouble getting a fix on them because of the roughness of the terrain, and his reluctance to fire it made Hawke conclude he didn’t have an abundant supply of warheads with him in the Jeep.
Reaper called back to tell Hawke that a low, dry-stone wall had replaced the olives to their left, but before Hawke could reply there was a cloud of gray smoke from the rear of the RPG, and a bigger flash of white smoke from the front — the signature calling card of the RPG-7.
Hawke flinched as the lethal munition left the launcher, a second flash as the rocket inside the warhead fired up to propel it into their Jeep, screeching through the warm Greek day like one of the Trojan dragons sent by Poseidon to kill Laocoön.
“Then go left!” he screamed at Reaper, who instinctively swung the heavy 4x4 over to the left, sliding down a shallow embankment and striking the wall in a shower of white sparks. A terrific grinding sound filled the cab as the front wing of the Jeep scraped along the stones and slowed them down, flinging rubble behind them like gravel chips.
Reaper struggled to steer the vehicle away from the wall but keep out of the way of the warhead, which flashed past them and disappeared into the distance. A few seconds later they saw another puff of smoke and the crack of an explosion in the side of a hill a few hundred yards ahead of them.
With the danger past, for now, Reaper swung to the left and their Jeep scrambled up the rocky slope away from the wall, but in his zeal to escape he drastically oversteered and seconds later their Jeep almost drove straight off the coast path, forcing another correction on the part of Reaper to bring the vehicle under control.
Their hunter had gained on them significantly in the chaos of the RPG warhead, and Hawke saw they were preparing a second RPG.
He thought fast. Ahead of them the road was running out — they were now approaching the descent into Sami.
Another puff of gray and white smoke from the RPG.
“Go right!” screamed Hawke.
“Right! That’s the cliff.”
“Then get ready for a swim.”
Reaper swung the Jeep to the right, but more cautiously this time, as an error wouldn’t mean swimming, but certain death.
The Jeep skidded over to the right in a cloud of dust and gas fumes before running up on to the scraggy grass verge that precipitated the cliff edge. Reaper was on the left, so Hawke shot out the rear right passenger window and shifted across to get a better look.
“You have about an inch and we’re over,” he shouted, ducking instinctively as the second warhead raced past them, this time to the left, and ending its days in the same way as the first.
“Close,” Reaper said.
“Not as close as this,” said Hawke. He aimed the MP7 and fired another long burst of bullets at the Jeep. Closer now, their pursuers were an easier target, and the second volley tore across their Jeep from the top to the bottom, striking the driver several times in the head and chest.