Chapter 18
Hawker felt the sting of the dart hitting his body but he was already moving for cover and even as his muscles wrenched tight he fell behind the stone wall, his chest scraping against it and thus ripping the prong of the Taser out.
Spared the full burst of electricity, he still writhed in pain from the half second of shock.
He rolled over, angry at himself. He’d been waiting for security to come down in the elevator; in fact, he’d been counting on it. But the occupants of the car had doused any light inside it and the screaming Russian kid had distracted him.
He shook his head to clear it and looked around. Danielle was pulling the child into safety behind her with one hand and grabbing the carbine rifle he’d dropped. As she fired down the hall, a man screamed in agony at the far end.
“One down,” Danielle shouted.
A second wave of darts came flying in, which Hawker deflected with his backpack.
He pressed the detonator switch and the C-4 on the gate exploded, flinging it open and taking out the second guard.
Before they could rejoice, a third guard opened fire.
Bullets ricocheted around the brig and Hawker pulled a grenade from inside his pack. While Danielle fired back, he tossed the grenade.
The concussion knocked the remaining attacker down and Hawker ran to the man’s position, ripping the Taser-like weapon from his belt and using it on him. The five-second ride left the man writhing on the floor and Hawker guessed he would no longer be a problem.
He looked toward the elevator. A racket of the competing alarms poured down through the elevator shaft and in through the hole he’d blown in the wall. Out on the rocks, beams of light were playing through the smoke. Shouting could be heard.
It would take a minute or so for any guards to scale down from above, but exiting that way now would be suicide.
He shouted to Danielle. “Come on!”
Through the smoke he saw Danielle and the child trying to help another prisoner stand.
“Leave him,” Hawker shouted.
“I can’t,” Danielle said.
“We don’t have room. If this guy wants out he has to run for it …”
Hawker’s voice trailed off as realized the man had only bloodstained rags where his feet should have been.
“I’m not leaving him,” Danielle said. But the man pushed her away and then fell back onto his stone ledge of a bunk.
“Go,” he said in Russian. “Take him with you.” He pointed to Yuri.
Hawker looked at Danielle. “We only have room for three.”
Angry, she grabbed Yuri and tore him away from Petrov. The child began to scream.
“Give me a weapon,” the man said.
Hawker handed him a fragmentation grenade, in case he didn’t want to be a prisoner any longer. And then he turned and led Danielle and the child toward the open elevator doors.
“We’re taking the elevator?” she asked.
“Right now they’re cutting off the exits, surrounding the perimeter to try to keep us from escaping,” he said. “We’re going to head deeper inside.”
They piled inside.
Danielle pointed to the guard’s key still in the slot. “I’m guessing if we turn that, we go up.”
“Gimme a second,” Hawker said. He dropped down and pried open the control panel.
“What are you doing?”
“Overriding their computer,” he said, pulling out an electronic interface that looked like a comb connected to a calculator.
He pulled the elevator’s own mess of wires from the unit interface and jammed the comb side of his contraption into the same spot. He typed in 102 on the keypad and hit LOCK. The doors closed and the elevator began its express ride.
As it rose up, Yuri continued to cry. Danielle attempted to comfort him, holding him with one arm while gripping the assault rifle with the other. A modern woman.
Hawker checked his readout. They’d passed the twentieth floor and were accelerating. The device he’d plugged in had come direct from the manufacturer, via the NRI lab and Arnold Moore. Not only did it override the security protocols of the elevator’s main computer but with NRI’s reworking, it sent a signal to the tracking system, fooling it into thinking that the elevator was still in the subbasement of the brig.
While Kang’s security forces were surrounding the fort, scaling down the walls outside, and frantically pressing the elevator call button in the lobby, Hawker, Danielle, and the kid were passing right by them, headed for the roof.
He only hoped that Saravich and his helicopter would be there.
He pulled out three harnesses, each connected to thin steel wires with carabiners on the end. One for him, one for Danielle, and one that would go to Yuri.
“Put these on,” he said, stepping into his own.
Danielle slipped hers on, legs first and then arms. She helped Yuri into his. The crying had ceased, but his eyes remained red and swollen.
“How did you know I was here?” she asked.
“Moore sent me.”
“How did he know?”
“McCarter called in, after you were taken.”
“McCarter?” Her voice was suddenly filled with surprise and hope. “I thought he was …,” she stammered. “I thought I’d gotten him killed.”
Hawker smiled at her. He liked being the bearer of good news for once. “Apparently he’s tougher than you thought.”
For the first time since he’d known her, she seemed to be overcome with emotion. He looked up at the rapidly increasing number on the elevator readout. “Ninety. We’ll be at the top in fifteen seconds.”
“And then?” Danielle asked.
“There should be a helicopter waiting.”
“Why the harnesses?”
“There’s nowhere for it to land.”
The doors opened to a black night and an empty, wet roof.
“Where’s the helicopter?” Danielle asked.
Hawker stepped out. It wasn’t there.
The rain was still coming down at the same steady pace. Heavy gray clouds loomed close above them, lit by the city lights just as they had been on the night Hawker arrived. Perhaps it was the quarter-mile ascent to the roof, but the clouds seemed much lower to Hawker than they had when he’d stood on the tug in the harbor.
Ordinarily no one in their right mind would risk flying around skyscrapers under such conditions, but if Hawker was right, Ivan’s pilot would do whatever Ivan ordered him to do. And if Ivan wanted this kid back as badly as Hawker thought he did, the helicopter pilot would make the attempt even if the visibility dropped to zero.
He walked to the edge.
God, it was a long way down, and with not even a fence or a wall on this roof, just a sharp, flat edge, like some infinity pool. He pulled back feeling dizzy from the false sense of movement created by the uplighting and the sheets of falling rain.
“Where is our ride?” Danielle asked impatiently.
Hawker listened through the rain. He heard nothing, until the muted sound of a distant explosion echoed through the night. A slight vibration was felt even on the roof.
She looked at him and then turned away. They both knew what that meant. Petrov had used the grenade, either on himself or the guards or both.
“At some point they’re going to realize our elevator is not stuck at the bottom floor,” she said.
“You think they’re smart enough to pop open a door and look up?” Hawker asked.
“Sooner or later.”
As if to affirm her thought they heard the sound of heavy machinery whirring, slow at first, then louder and faster. The second elevator car was moving.
“Looks like they chose sooner,” he said.
“I hope you have a backup plan.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Great.”
Hawker pulled a pistol from the satchel, took cover behind a huge air-conditioning unit, and waited. Danielle crouched down beside him, pulling Yuri close and pressing the carbine into her shoulder.
The elevator pinged.
He could see the light beneath the doors. He raised the pistol, aiming. The doors opened … to nothing. The car was empty.
“Put down your guns!” a booming voice shouted from behind them.
Hawker cringed. The stairs.
He dropped his weapon and heard Danielle’s rifle clatter to the rooftop.
“Turn around.”
Hawker turned slowly to see three guards flanking a heavyset Chinese man. He didn’t know him by sight, but Kang’s head thug was a man named Choi. Hawker guessed that’s who he was looking at.
“Get on the ground!” Choi shouted.
As Hawker put his hands on the rooftop, he caught the sound of a reverberation. As he lay flat, the sound grew rapidly until a sleek, European-built helicopter came roaring up over the side of the building.
He looked up just as shots began to rain down from the open door of the helicopter.
Two of the guards went down. Choi and the other scrambled for cover.
The helicopter swept past and turned around.
Hawker grabbed his weapon and began firing, pinning down Kang’s people in the stairwell.
The helicopter had turned and was coming back. It trailed a steel cable. As Danielle took over the firing, Hawker dove for the wire and grabbed it.
“Come on!” he shouted.
Danielle raced toward him, dragging Yuri.
The helicopter hovered, but shots rang out and sparks could be seen where shells hit the fuselage.
“Hurry!”
Hawker clicked in and then locked Danielle and the kid in as well.
The helicopter peeled off as Choi and the guard came out of the stairwell firing.
Hawker fired back, just as the slack was used up. With a jolt they were yanked off their feet, flung over the edge of the tower and falling.
The three swung through the air like jumpers on some absurd thrill ride, arcing toward the water, accelerating forward like a giant pendulum. It was an insane rush, racing at a hundred miles an hour through the dark and the rain with nothing around them, and the waters of Victoria Harbour a thousand feet below.
They swung forward and up, weightless for a second before dropping back. After two or three smaller arcs they were stable, trailing beneath and behind the helicopter as it moved across Victoria Harbour.
The rain stung their faces like pellets from a gun. Hawker gripped Danielle and Yuri tightly to reduce the friction and the swaying. The helicopter’s winch could not raise the weight of three people at once, so the plan was to get over to the Kowloon side, land, and then disperse.
Danielle held on tight. “Who’s flying this thing?”
“No one you know,” he said.
She shouted above the wind. “What aren’t you telling me?”
He tried to explain his allies. “These guys are Russian.”
“I thought Moore sent you.”
“He did,” Hawker said. “But I needed help, and they sort of made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
Hawker squinted at her, the wind stinging his eyes. He could see Danielle shivering in the cold and rain, but they were descending and slowing. In a few minutes they’d be down on the ground.
“They want this kid back,” he told her. “Kang was using him to blackmail one of their scientists, the kid’s mother.”
Danielle cocked her head as if she’d heard him wrong. “They lied to you,” she said. “Yuri’s an orphan. They’ve been doing experiments on him.”
Hawker cringed. He figured Ivan had told him only half the truth, but this was not what he’d expected.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as I can be,” she said.
He looked at the kid and then back at Danielle.
“I’m not giving him back,” she insisted.
He didn’t know what to say, how to explain just what kind of a man Saravich was. How there would be no compromise.
“I gave someone my word,” she said. “And I’m not going back on it.”
Her eyes were unyielding. Despite the wind and the spray and the rain, she glared at him.
He watched her glance toward the shore. Fifty feet high now, five hundred yards from land, they were doing only thirty knots.
“You don’t understand!” he shouted. “I made a deal with them.”
She pulled free from his grasp and stretched upward, reaching for the steel line.
“Well, I’m breaking it.”
Before he could stop her, she pulled the release bar and the three of them dropped like stones.
It’s amazing what the mind can do in the blink of an eye. It took all of a second and a half for the distance to be used up, but as he tumbled through the darkness, two complete and distinct thoughts ran through Hawker’s head.
First: that if they somehow survived the fall, he was going to kill Danielle for causing it. And second, if they did survive the fall and he relented on his first thought, where the hell could they possibly go, that Ivan wouldn’t find them and kill them both.
And then he slammed into the water like a man running full force into a solid brick wall.