“Drop us is the right word…” Reaper said, his words trailing as he swung open the side door and flicked his cigarette out. Moments later he hoisted a parachute on his back and tightened the harness’s adjuster straps.
Ryan turned to ask Hawke what was happening, but Hawke was also putting a parachute on, securing the leg straps and clipping the v-rings into their snap fasteners.
“Joe, you’re not seriously expecting me to jump out of this thing?”
“You can if you want.” Hawke put on his helmet and tightened the chin-strap. “Or you can go back to Sion and wait with Eden. I thought I’d let you make the decision, mate. You saved my arse back in Greece and now I’ve got your back. I think you can do it, but if you want to go back I’ll understand.”
“Storming a mountain stronghold? What do you think this is, For Your Eyes Only?”
Hawke smiled. “I’m impressed you’ve seen the film. I was thinking more of Where Eagles Dare though, to be honest. Me being Burton, of course.”
“Yeah, right.”
“So, are you coming or not?”
He looked at Ryan. Ryan looked back, then peered over Hawke’s shoulder as he watched Hart, Scarlet, Sophie and the handful of soldiers and mercs hoisting their parachutes on, checking weapons and preparing to jump. The freezing wind from the dark night outside scratched at his face and whipped his hair around as his mind raced.
“Ten seconds to make up your mind, Ryan.”
“I’m just not that sort of person, Joe!” Ryan said.
“This isn’t about what sort of person you are now, Ryan. This is about what kind of person you’re going to be from now on.”
Ryan looked outside the chopper into the winter night. It was now hovering a few thousand feet above the peaks of the alps, and somewhere below he could see the faint twinkling of Zaugg’s compound lights in the frozen darkness.
Joe Hawke steered the parachute strongly to the right and made landfall in a flat snowfield a few hundred meters below Zaugg’s compound. He released his chute and counted the others down one by one.
Reaper was next to land, then Sophie followed by Scarlet. After that came the mercs and Swiss soldiers. Hawke watched with pride as he saw the figure of Olivia Hart emerge from the clouds and brake as she steered towards the landing ground.
She had executed a perfect tandem jump, and Ryan Bale, secured to her front, was smiling like the cat that got the cream as they came to a stop in the snowy field, even if there was a light green hue to his face as he took off his helmet.
The others freed themselves from their chutes and readied their weapons. Above the clouds they heard the sound of the Cougar’s rotors recede into the night as it flew back to Sion with Eden. Now they were truly alone.
“Okay, are we all ready?” Hawke said.
“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Sophie said.
“You sound nervous,” said Hawke. “Don’t be. Whatever they’ve got up there, down here we’ve got more.”
“How could we fail?” Scarlet said. “We have him.” She turned to Ryan who grinned sheepishly in return.
“But I’m a genius, don't forget!” he said, his voice barely audible in the laughter. “We’re generally too sensitive for this sort of thing.”
“I understand,” Reaper said, half-seriously. “By being too sensitive I have wasted my life.”
“Seriously?” Ryan said,
Reaper arched an eyebrow and then burst into more laughter. “Of course not — what do you take me for? I was quoting Rimbaud. A great French poet! You’d think a genius like yourself would have recognized it, no?”
More laughter, and Ryan blushed heavily.
Reaper brought a heavy hand down on Ryan’s shoulder, almost knocking him over into the snow. “Come on, kid… I only make the jokes. I know we’re all different, and we must all accept those differences.”
“Thanks, Reaper,” Ryan said.
Reaper gave a gallic shrug. “Hey, no problem. If we didn’t accept those different from us, people like you would be truly fucked.”
Yet more laughter and Ryan stomped off into the snow.
“Ryan — forget about it!” Hawke flicked a disapproving glance at Reaper. “He’s just French — forget about it, mate.”
Hawke had started to feel protective towards Ryan now — he had saved his life on the Thalassa after all, but it was more than that. There was the way he had tried to tell him that he wouldn’t get in the way if he wanted to pursue Lea, and then the tremendous effort it took to jump out the chopper. As far as Hawke was concerned Ryan Bale was all right.
They hiked the last few hundred meters until they were at the compound’s perimeter fence which they cut through with bolt-cutters in seconds and marched on the main building. Ahead of them, the Swiss Special Forces guys and Foreign Legion mercs had already taken out a large bay window and fought their way inside on the ground level. Hawke’s job was to secure the upper level.
They stopped against the back wall of a garage block to regroup, and he looked at his watch — time was getting short. He heard a crackling through his headset. It was Reaper. “Okay everyone this is it. Any man here kills less than five he buys the beer afterwards.”
“Less than five?” Scarlet said “Why are you making it so easy for us?”
Hawke heard Hart laugh through the headset.
“We go in through the top as usual,” Scarlet said. “Let’s do our thing.”
Reaper ran to the back of the house and placed charges on the rear doors. This would make another distraction when they entered on the upper level.
Hawke readied the Heckler & Koch HK416, a gas-operated submachine gun designed and built with startling German efficiency, and waited for the signal to go, which came a second later from Hart.
They skirted around the back of the garage block and along the low line of the stables until reaching the west wing of the house. Here they fired rifle-launched grapnels from their crossbows and rappelled up the side of the mansion. Moments later they were on the roof, an enormous maze of gray slate slopes and turrets.
Hawke could see out across the valley from here. It formed an enormous v-shape leading away from the mansion, with snow-capped mountains on either side, illuminated by a bright, full moon which shone intermittently through breaks in the clouds. They found the correct locations for their abseil down the back of the house to the third floor windows, where they positioned small explosive charges on the panes of glass.
Below they could hear a terrific gunfight as the other team fought its way inside on the lower levels of the house.
“Okay, everyone,” Hart said, her tone as calm as if she were giving someone directions to the local church. “We go in twenty seconds.”
“Roger.”
“Reaper, fire your door charges in three, two, one…”
Hawke heard two massive explosions emanating from the rear of the house. Reaper had successfully blown the doors in and caused the mother of all explosions. They fired their charges and the four windows on the third floor exploded inwards in balls of hot white flame. Seconds later they were inside the mansion and cutting their lines.
Hawke and the others entered the upper level, covering all angles with their submachine guns.
Inside, they fought their way through a hail of bullets to a locked door.
“Stand back!” Hawke said, and took a few steps away from the door. He ran back toward it and shoulder-barged it with all his might, smashing it away from its hinges and spraying splinters of wood into the room. A bullet fired from inside the room and whistled past Scarlet’s head, almost killing her.
“Now, that’s just not cricket!” she said.
“And that cat’s on her ninth life,” Hawke muttered to himself as they entered and cleared the room. They exited the room at the far end and found themselves in the main hall. An enormous sweeping staircase twisted away to the next floor below them. Faced with the enormity of searching a compound of this size, he knew it was time for help.