He closed one eye slightly and raised the gun at her in a mock execution.
“Bang!” he shouted, and laughed violently.
Lea screamed and scrambled back on the floor, fear in her eyes.
“You really are insane!” she shouted, her voice hoarse with terror.
“No. I am a realist and will live forever!”
“You will die a failure just like your father!” Lea screamed, trying to make him lose his composure. It was her only chance.
“No! Silence!” Zaugg was spitting with rage now, barely able to control himself.
“The only immortal thing about you will be your reputation as a genocidal maniac!”
“You will die for this, and I will be your executioner.”
Zaugg raised the gun a second time, with murder in his eye, but a strong gust of wind rocked the gondola and knocked him off his feet.
Lea snatched her chance, and pulled herself up through the maintenance hatch in the top of the gondola as fast as she could. But before she was safely through she felt Zaugg’s hands swiping at her ankles.
He grabbed one and tried to pull her back inside the gondola, but she lashed out with her foot and kicked him hard in the face, sending him flying back inside the car.
She was breathing hard, adrenalin coursing through her system. She thought fast and slammed the hatch down, but now she was out of ideas. She was standing on the roof of a cable car five thousand feet above a rocky valley, swaying wildly in the freezing wind, blackness all around her.
The hatch slammed open.
Zaugg began to crawl out of the hole in the roof. He reminded her of a kind of black insect, crawling out of a hole on its way to a kill.
She had nowhere to run, but instinct made her look around for an escape route all the same. Nothing but mountain ridges thousands of feet away, their distant peaks dimly lit by a fleeting flash of moonlight through a thin break in the snowclouds. The grim howling of the snowy wind highlighted her terrible isolation in the middle of nowhere.
Zaugg was now on the roof of the gondola, grinning insanely. He wiped the blood from his face on his sleeve and spat a tooth over the side of the car.
It fell into the oblivion. “I told you not to defy me, Donovan.”
Again from instinct, Lea stepped back away from the horror of Zaugg, each step taking her closer to the smooth, cambered edge of the gondola. She felt herself begin to fall backwards, and wildly flailed her arms to grab anything to stop her slipping over the edge.
Her fingers made contact with a support beam holding the car to the steel cable and she grabbed hold of it with a second to spare before her legs slipped over the back of the gondola.
She screamed in terror, her legs kicking out in an attempt to clamber back on to the roof. One of her shoes fell off and tumbled out of sight into the swirling void below her.
Zaugg laughed and closed in on her like a cougar ready to pounce on a wounded deer.
Lea knew it was fight or die, and there was no Joe Hawke to save her now. She was as alone as she could be, and facing a cold-blooded killer with nothing to lose.
Zaugg was upon her, and reached out with his hands to grab her jacket. For a second she thought he was trying to save her, but then she realized he merely wanted to prolong her suffering. He took hold of her and roughly spun her around and flung her down hard on the gondola roof.
She hit the aluminum alloy roof with a metallic crunch and cried out in pain as her head struck the hatch handle. She rolled over onto her stomach and reached out to open the hatch in a desperate bid to get back inside and lock Zaugg out. It was her only chance now. She gripped the metal handle and tried to heave it up.
Zaugg padded over to her and stamped on her hand. The movement of the cable car as it trundled slowly down to the gound station and the wind cutting across from the west almost knocked him off his balance once again, but the look of determination on his face told Lea that this time he wasn't go to stop until she was dead.
He stamped on her hand a second time.
She screamed again — it felt like he’d broken her fingers.
She flipped herself back over onto her back and scrambled away from him like a crab.
He followed her to the other end of the gondola roof, his eyes narrowing now. He held his hands out, rigid like claws, and leaned forward to grab her throat. He was going to strangle her.
Hawke sprayed a great arc of snow into the air as he skidded to a halt. Without waisting a second, the sniper rifle was off his back. He kicked off the skis and ran over to a low rock which he used to steady the weapon.
He looked through the sights to see the tiny cable car suspended in the darkness, lit only by the greenish striplight inside the gondola.
“Oh my God!” he said. Zaugg and Lea were fighting on top of the cable car. For a while it looked like she was going to get the better of him, but after a few seconds the tables definitely turned, and Zaugg was on top.
He watched Zaugg pointing at her, and ranting. From this distance he could see everything but hear nothing — but what did it matter? He knew what the deal was up there.
He remembered his training, now nearly twenty years’ old, and slowed his breathing. He aimed the weapon. Zaugg’s head was in the center of his sights. Hawke knew there was a precision formula used by professional snipers, but it required time and a better knowledge of the distance. He had neither of those things, and could only make a rough correction based on a simple and quick guess of the wind speed, which he judged by watching how Lea’s hair was blowing around.
This was his moment to right the balance. This was his only chance to save her life. This is what he failed to do back in Hanoi all those years ago. This was as close to redemption as Joe Hawke was ever going to get.
He slowed his breathing again.
Then he squeezed the trigger so gently he barely touched it.
It took the 50 cal just over one and half seconds to cross the one thousand yards between the muzzle of the rifle and Hugo Zaugg, hitting him in the throat, which blew out in a spray of red mist.
Hawke watched the reaction through the sights.
Zaugg flailed around like a marionette with its strings cut, grabbing at his throat and staggering backwards at the same time. Incredibly, he made one final lunge at Lea with blood pouring from his throat. Hawke wondered how long before he passed out from the inevitable drop in blood pressure, but didn’t want to wait to find out.
He readied a second shot and fired again, this time hitting his target in the chest, causing another burst of red to spray out into the snowy air, and blasting Zaugg off the roof of the gondola into oblivion.
He spiralled down to the rocks, screaming for every single one of the seventeen seconds it took before his body smashed into the frozen granite with a distant thud. Hawke considered if he should have made it a head shot, giving him the mercy of being unconscious as he fell, but shrugged his shoulders and put the rifle back in the sling on his back.
Without sparing another thought for Hugo Zaugg, Hawke fitted his skis back on and started to ski down the mountain to be at the cable car when it arrived at the ground station.
“Joe!” Lea said, and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Thank God. I thought he was going to kill me.”
Hawke held her. “No bloody chance. I’d never let a tosser like that get the better of…”
Before he could finish his sentence, Lea stood on tiptoes, held his face in both hands and kissed him hard on the mouth. It seemed to last forever.
“Wow!” Hawke said. “That was longer than Zaugg’s death spiral.”
Lea sighed. “You are just so damned romantic, Joe.”