Scarlet decided she wanted to try that door.
Hawke and Lea could still hear the sound of machine gun fire and grenades as they made their way to far side of the complex. It was about five hundred yards from their current location and they were desperate to get in on the action.
“Good job we knocked out that gun nest,” Hawke said. “Sounds like Cairo’s having a great time.”
“Sure sounds like it,” added Lea, “But what do we do now?”
“There’s not much we can do — not while we’re here. We have to get to the others, see if Han’s still alive and somehow get after Sheng. We also have to inform Lao about the yacht and Tokyo.”
“You really think Tokyo was the target?”
Hawke nodded. “I know we didn’t hear much, but they said Tokyo several times and something tells me they weren’t talking about their favourite baseball team. They’ll be well on their way by now — and did you see the chopper on the helipad?”
Lea nodded.
“The smart money’s got to be on them using that as soon as they’re in range of Tokyo.”
They waited a few moments, and then made the final few yards of their journey to meet up with Scarlet and the others. The gunfire at the main house was heavy, and it sounded like the fighting had quickly become a ferocious, no-holds barred war for supremacy of the island and the airfield, at least until Sheng was safely airborne.
They were almost at their destination when just inside the main courtyard a man saw them approaching and raised his weapon, but the noise of a grenade explosion startled him. Hawke saw his chance and fired, hitting the man in the throat and bursting it open with savage accuracy. He fell back in a crumpled heap, and Lea snatched up some of his grenades. With the way now clear, they smashed their way into the compound’s outer section and got one step closer to the rest of their team.
Now, inside the main yard, Hawke finally saw Scarlet Sloane and Lexi Zhang fighting a rear-guard action in the face of overwhelming force, delivered courtesy of some of Sheng’s most determined fighters — what looked to Hawke like a team of heavily-trained mercs.
Hawke unleashed a burst of fire from a submachine gun in a bid to provide some cover and distract the men from closing in on Scarlet and Lexi.
Lea threw a grenade and five seconds later a terrific explosion ripped through their offensive position and blasted two of the men back through the air like dolls, killing them instantly.
Hawke and Lea leaped up and made their way across the yard to Scarlet before the enemy had a chance to regroup. A second later they crashed behind a wall beside Scarlet and her team. A round of friendly nods went around as the bullets traced over their heads, but now, at least, they were together again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“I am so pleased you finally decided to show up,” Lea said.
Scarlet smiled. “I knew you’d miss me, darling. You can thank me for rescuing you later. That’s two nil, I believe…”
“It’s so nice to see you, too,” Lea said through clenched teeth.
Scarlet snorted. “I’m just grateful you never tried to hug me.”
Hawke smiled. Same old wisecracking Cairo — that meant she was up for the fight.
“Hey…” Lea said in response to Scarlet’s jibe, but Hawke hushed her to point out Hart’s team who were joining them from the southeast. They took cover with them behind the wall and began a consolidated fight back. A few minutes later and most of Sheng’s men had either been killed or were retreating.
With a lull in the fighting, and everyone grouped together at last, Hawke spoke up. “Okay, listen up everyone! This is the situation — Sheng and Luk are retreating from the island and almost certainly on their way to Xian to raid Qin’s tomb — it looks like he got the final location by torturing Han.”
Ryan’s eyes widened. “The map’s in Qin’s tomb?”
“Yeah.”
“How do we know that?” Ryan asked excitedly. “I know archaeologists recently found some kind of new annex there — it must be to do with that!”
“Before Sheng’s goons killed Jenny Tsao, she told us all she knew, and the rest came from the tattoo on Han’s back.”
“Tattoo?”
“We’ll fill you in later. According to Tsao, the Emperor Qin couldn’t translate the map and so it was useless to him. So enraged was he at his failure to crack the code that when he found out he was dying from the mercury poisoning he ordered that the map be buried with him in his tomb so that no other man could ever hope to use it to gain immortality for himself.”
“And that’s why he built the famous Terracotta Army…’ Ryan said, his voice trailing away in wonder. “What a bastard.”
“Exactly,” Hawke said. “According to Tsao, Qin surrounded his tomb with thousands of soldiers with the basic idea of protecting him in the next world. It took over seventy thousand men to create the necropolis, and the whole place was booby-trapped with crossbows hidden in the walls. If that weren’t enough, his son, Qin Er Shi, the second emperor, dictated that all his father’s wives who had failed to bear any children for their husband should be buried alive with the dead emperor.”
“Sounds like they were all crackers to me,” Hart said.
“Not so crazy. Tsao told us it was probably to stop rival claims for the throne. To top it all off, it was decreed that all the men who had built the tomb and who knew what treasures it concealed — like the map, for example — couldn’t be trusted to keep it secret, so they were sealed inside the tomb just before it was shut off for ever.”
“Imagine what it was like if you were one of those men sealed inside, just after the last stone had blocked you in,” said Ryan, his imagination running riot. “They probably ate each other.”
“Thanks for that, Ryan,” Lea said.
“That is the story of the first emperor’s death,” Hawke said, proudly.
“Now that’s what I call a state funeral!” Scarlet said.
“But where does Khan tie into all of this?” asked Ryan.
“Genghis Khan found out about Qin’s search for the map, and in his quest he managed to uncover the truth about the emperor’s success in finding it in the west, and his failure in not being able to translate it. Khan obviously knew Qin had hidden the map in the tomb when he was buried, and set out to retrieve it, but according to the last few verses in the chapter he too died before he reached the tomb.”
“So now we know that the map Zaugg was after…” Lea said.
“And Genghis Khan,” Hawke said.
“And Qin Shi Huang,” said Ryan.
“And don’t forget Sheng Fang,” Lexi said, scowling.
“What they were all after,” Lea said, “was raided from Poseidon’s vault by Qin and was in his tomb here in China the whole time.”
“Where it’s been for the last two thousand two hundred years,” Ryan said.
Hawke nodded. “So our job is to get that map back and that means we have a date with a few thousand terracotta soldiers and one of the world’s most famous tombs, but first we have the little problem of getting off this insane island — and you,” he said, turning to Scarlet, “have a little date in Tokyo.”
“Why’s that, darling?”
“Because that’s where the Lotus and her mysterious Russian friend are going to activate the Tesla machine.”
As he spoke, Bradley Karlsson pulled a phone from his pocket and moved a few yards away to make a call, fast and quiet.
“Tokyo?” Ryan said, almost in a whisper. “That’s one of the most geologically unstable cities in the world.”