The Curse of Medusa

Hawke pushed the throttles forward and the powerful aircraft quickly gained speed. The runway grumbled angrily beneath them and the fire truck now fell far behind as they raced toward V1 speed.

Hawke pulled back on the yoke and the jet’s nose rotated. They lifted into the air high above Hailey and he retracted the gear. They were already flying at nearly two hundred knots as they passed the mountain line and shot up into the blue sky, tearing through a handful of cumulus clouds on their way up.

Hawke spoke quietly into the headset. “Ladies and gentleman, no one is more surprised than your captain that we are actually safely airborne, but pleased be advised to stay in your seats with your seatbelts on until we have reached cruising altitude and I’m absolutely sure I can keep this thing in the air. Thanks.”

Alex smiled. “You’ve done this before, right?”

Hawke smiled. “Yes and no. I’m properly trained to fly light aircraft but I’m a rotorhead really. The good news is I did take private lessons in these for a few weeks until the money ran out, so I know what everything is and what it all does.” He paused and narrowed his eyes with confusion. “Except that one,” he said, leaning toward a bright red button which read ESSENTIAL POWER. “I wish I knew what that one did.”

Alex rolled her eyes and sighed. “Very drole, Mr Hawke.”

Hawke said nothing, and set the autopilot to fly at a course of sixty-one degrees with a vertical speed of fifteen hundred feet per minute. When they hit their cruising altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, he began to relax for the first time, glancing over the controls with a mix of awe, respect and pride.

“Should be in Washington DC in around four hours,” he said, tapping the top of the instrument panel as if the aircraft were a faithful dog.

“Do we even have enough fuel?” Alex asked.

“Shit — I never checked that.”

Alex looked panicked. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What do you think? We have enough fuel, but the flight to DC is at the far end of this little baby’s range, so we won’t have much to spare if we’re pushed out of Washington airspace because of the attacks.”

“We’ll deal with that right now.” They both turned to see Jack Brooke standing in the cabin doorway once again. “I want you to radio whoever the hell you have to and tell them what happened back there, and that I’m coming back to the Pentagon to straighten this shit out.”

“On it,” Alex said.

Brooke leaned over the pilot’s seat. “And Hawke?”

“Yeah?”

“Back there, at the house when we were getting attacked.”

“Yeah?”

Brooke paused a beat. He looked like he was trying to remember something important. “Did you call my daughter a septic tank?”

“Er, well…”

“Get outta here, Dad!”

Without saying another word, Brooke turned and walked back to the passenger cabin.

“That’s my Dad, by the way,” Alex said, and offered half a smile. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“Come to think of it,” Hawke said, fixing his eyes on her. “I really don’t think you did.”

“I guess now you know why,” she said.

Hawke guessed it was supposed to be a joke comment, but her words were tinged with sadness, and she turned away from him to look out the window as they raced over Caribou Mountain and crossed into Wyoming.

“I need to stretch my legs,” she said. “Sometimes they kind of hurt.”

Hawke looked at her, concerned. “Are you okay?”

She nodded and smiled. “Sure.”

She unstrapped herself and walked into the main cabin. As she went, she pulled her phone from her pocket and made a quick call to an old friend.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Hawke stared out of the cockpit window across the American continent as the jet raced toward the nation’s capital. Of all things that could have crossed his mind, it was that this was the first time he’d been involved with anything like this without Lea Donovan, and it felt wrong.

He wondered again if he’d made a mistake back in Egypt when Sir Richard Eden and the others told him about the ECHO team and had invited him to join. He wanted to say yes — he had no job, for one thing, and these people had become his closest friends. But his pride had been wounded by their deceit, and he’d said he wanted nothing to do with them. He’d felt like a fool. The argument with Lea had ended in what he supposed anyone else would call a break-up, but maybe that wasn’t the right word.

He hadn’t heard from any of them since that day back in the desert when he’d turned his backs on them and walked away, and not for the first time he wondered what Lea and the rest of them were doing now on their private island — what had they called it — Elysium?

“You’re thinking about her, right?”

He looked up and saw Alex had rejoined him in the cockpit. He watched her sit down in the First Officer’s seat. Things had gotten so hectic in Africa he’d barely stopped to look at her, let alone talk to her face to face.