Hawke recognized Smets was using Capoeira, the deadly Brazilian martial art which specialized in disguising lethal kicks inside other less dangerous moves. Now he was drawing on his entire body’s mass to fire his boot into Hawke’s flank like a lead weight on the end of a coiled spring.
Lea screamed out, and Hawke knew a successful strike would have powered a ton of force into his chest and smashed his ribcage, but he was trained in identifying moves like this. He evaded the flying kick with half a second to spare, tottering backwards and crashing into the wall-mounted plasma TV at the foot of the bed.
Smets was fully charged now and back on his feet, swiping uppercuts and shovel hooks at Hawke and anything else he could think of as he stormed forward to finish the Englishman off, but Hawke wasn’t going out that easy. He moved forward with his fists raised to meet the Belgian.
Smets pulled a second bottle from the cabinet and smashed the neck off, leaving another lethal razor-sharp weapon in his hands. He moved forward, a devilish grin on his sweaty face, but then things took a different turn.
Hawke heard it first — the smacking sound as the bands on the speargun struck the tip of the muzzle and fired the lethal barbed spear forward at a ferocious velocity.
The next thing he saw was the tip of the spear protruding through Smets’s abdominal muscles. The weapon had entered through his back and ripped through his entire torso.
Hawke knew it took a long time to reload a roller gun, but it was unnecessary, because now blood was bubbling out of the Belgian’s mouth as he looked down at the wound with a look of frightened confusion on his face.
Before Hawke could make another move, Lea brought the speargun crashing down on Smets’s head, striking the top of his skull with the stainless steel trigger guard. Smets went down like a sack of potatoes.
“Glad you could join the party,” Hawke said. “At last.”
“I was waiting for you to finish him off. What took you so long?”
Hawke gave her a look as he grabbed the Belgian by his ankles and dragged him toward the stairs to the lower deck.
“What are you going to do?” Lea asked.
“Show him how the SBS like to have fun.”
Hawke dragged him down the stairs and into Sala’s torpedo room.
The evidence of where he’d flooded it earlier was still obvious, but the clean-up had been good and it was all good to go.
He opened the hatch of one of the torpedo tubes and began to heave the heavy Belgian inside, literally loading him into the tube like a torpedo. As he went inside, Smets began to come to, and started moaning and then lashing out.
But Hawke moved fast. He forced the struggling man inside the torpedo tube and after taking a few kicks to the face finally wedged him in far enough to slam the door shut. The tube was basically part of the boat’s pressure hull, a little like an airlock, and as Hawke secured the internal watertight door and flooded the tube with seawater he heard the sound of Smets’s boots as the fatally wounded Belgian ferociously pounded against the door in a bid to escape.
With the pressure in the tube equalized to that of the sea outside the hull, Hawke activated the expulsion system as he had done with Ryan, forcing high-pressure seawater into the rear of the tube and blasting Leon Smets at great velocity into the icy water. That plus the speargun wound ought to be enough to take him out of the game, he thought.
Hawke ran up the metal steps from the torpedo room and returned to the opulent luxury of the main deck. He was met by the sound of yet more easy listening and Lea had lowered the lights.
“Honey, I’m home.”
Lea peered over his shoulder. “Is he gone?”
“Sadly, yes. A shame because it turns out he was a real blast.”
She looked at him confused. “Sorry?”
“Never mind. Now, where were we?”
She untied her hair and shook it free. It tumbled down over her shoulders and shone in the warm, low light of the cabin. “You were about to pop your cork.”
“Oh, really, Donovan. I hope the quality of conversation’s going to be better than that because it’s several days until we get to the North Pole.”
She frowned. “You’re not serious about that?”
“Sure, why not — where’s your spirit of adventure?”
“Won’t we get trapped under the ice or something?”
Hawke shrugged his shoulders and peeled off his wetsuit. “I don’t see the problem. That’s the one place on earth you can’t hear Ryan Bale.”
“I heard that too,” she said. “But I’m still not sold on the idea — can’t we go to Tahiti or somewhere instead?”
Hawke reached the bed and passed his hand over the stubble on his chin as he pretended to contemplate her suggestion. “No — the North Pole it is — I’m sure you’ll feel on top of the world before you know it.”
She rolled her eyes. “And you haven’t even fired your torpedoes yet.”
Hawke moved beside her in the bed. “You really are incorrigible.”
He slowly unzipped Lea’s wetsuit and moved his hands up her body as he started to kiss her. They rolled over in the bed and the Rán’s autopilot submerged the luxury vessel beneath the icy waves, pushing her toward the Arctic north.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
With Joe Hawke and his friends safely out of trouble (for now, at least…), this seems around the right time to talk about where I’m trying to direct the series. I have plans (and plots…) to varying degrees of detail for many more Hawke novels, and very specific detail for the next two. I can reveal the first of these will be called The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke 6) and deals with a very grisly theme indeed.
My rough idea is to bring together the various baddies who seem to have slipped the net through the series so far and re-unite them into some sort of dream-team (or should that be nightmare-team?) in Hawke 7. Here, the ECHO team will face their toughest challenge yet as they try to stop their greatest enemies from discovering the dark truth about the world in one of its most mysterious locations — a truth that has been lurking there for a very long time indeed… Or something like that, because it’s not written yet… although I will drop a hint now that a major character or two might get brutally killed in Hawke 7 (at least according to my plot outline;)…)
In other news, I’m also planning a separate international mystery thriller totally outside the Hawke universe, and with luck I hope to release that later in 2016 if I can, but it’s all very tentative at the moment.
Anyway, please let me thank you for coming so far with me on Hawke’s journey, and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. As ever, look out for updates on my website, Facebook page or Twitter account, and also as ever, I reply to all emails even if it takes me a few days to respond. I always appreciate constructive messages from readers and enjoy interacting.
My thanks to you, Dear Mystery Reader,
Rob.
JOE HAWKE WILL RETURN IN THE AZTEC PROPHECY
Other Books by Rob Jones
The Vault of Poseidon (Joe Hawke #1)
Thunder God (Joe Hawke #2)
The Tomb of Eternity (Joe Hawke #3)
The Curse of Medusa (Joe Hawke #4)
Valhalla Gold (Joe Hawke #5)
The Aztec Prophecy (Joe Hawke #6)