Zero Hour

The sniper opened fire once again, the shells digging chips out of the concrete and throwing up chunks of dirt. But the planter might as well have been a giant sandbag. It was too thick for the bullets to penetrate.

The helicopter began to drift sideways. Kurt had only seconds before the sniper found a clear line of fire.

He grabbed the wooden boat hook once again, the business end of which was now in flames. He gripped it near the center, ran forward, and hurled it like a javelin.

The helicopter was broadside to him now, and the fiery lance tracked toward the open cargo door like a heat-seeking missile.

It hit the target dead center, missing the sniper by inches but lodging in the cabin and spreading a wave of fire in the process. In a moment, smoke was pouring from the helicopter’s side door. Kurt saw the sniper’s body erupt in flames, and he could only guess that he’d hit a fuel or oxygen line.

The orange firelight surged through the helicopter as it began to turn. For a second, it looked as if the pilot would regain control and speed off across the harbor, but the angle of his turn tightened, and the helicopter began to corkscrew back toward the Concert Hall. By now, the interior of the cabin was an inferno, smoke billowing from it in all directions.

Burning and falling and accelerating at the same time, the Eurocopter flew right into the famous glass wall of the Concert Hall, shattering the fifty-foot panes of clear glass. Shards from the impact burst inward, while other sections dropped in huge sheets and exploded into thousands of fragments when they hit the ground.

The helicopter dropped straight down along with them, its rotors gone and its hub turning like a weedwacker that had run out of string. It landed with a great crunch. In moments, it was a barely recognizable hulk at the center of a small inferno.

By now, emergency units were arriving. A squad of patrolmen raced up on foot. Fire trucks were pulling in. Workers from the Opera House came ru

Kurt was pretty sure it wouldn’t help the occupants of the helicopter, neither of whom had managed to get free of the blaze.

He made his way over to Hayley and the lone survivor from the boat. The man was lying in Hayley’s arms. His blood had soaked her white dress. She was trying desperately to keep him from bleeding out where two bullets had hit him.

It was a losing battle. The shells had gone right through him, entering his back and coming out through his chest.

Kurt crouched down and helped her keep pressure on the wounds. “Are you Panos?” he asked.

The man’s eyes drifted for a moment.

“Are you Panos?!”

He nodded weakly.

“Who were those people shooting at you?”

No answer this time. Nothing but a blank look.

Kurt lifted his head. “We need help over here!” he shouted, looking for a paramedic.

A pair of men were ru

“I brought… what was promised,” the injured man said in an accent Kurt thought might be Greek.

“What are you talking about?” Kurt asked.

The man grunted something and then extended a shaking hand in which he clutched several bloodstained sheets of paper.

“Tartarus,” the man said, his voice weak and wavering. “The heart… of Tartarus.”

Kurt took the papers. They were covered with odd symbols, swirling lines, and what appeared to be calculations.

“What is this?” Kurt said.

The man opened his mouth to explain but no sound came out.

“Stay with us,” Hayley shouted.

He didn’t respond, and she began to perform CPR. “We can’t let him die.”

Kurt felt for a pulse. He didn’t feel one. “It’s too late.”

“No, it can’t be,” she said, compressing the man’s chest rapidly and trying to force life back into him.

Kurt stopped her. “It’s no use, he’s lost too much blood.”

She looked up at him, her face smeared with soot and tears, her white dress stained red.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “You tried.”

She sat back and turned away, looking exhausted. Her hair fell around her face as she looked to the ground. Her body shook as she sobbed.

Kurt put a hand on her shoulder and gazed at the damage surrounding them.

The wreck of the boat still burned on the promenade, while the blazing hulk of the Eurocopter lay where the shattered façade of the Concert Hall should have been. Volunteers were hosing it down, desperately trying to keep it from setting fire to the building, while onlookers poured from the keynote address on underwater mining, half of them gawking as the rest moved quickly in the other direction.

It all happened so fast. Chaos sprung on them from nowhere. And the only man who might have known why lay dead at their feet.

“What did he say?” Hayley asked, wiping the tears from her face. “What did he say to you?”

“Tartarus,” Kurt replied.

She stared. “What does that mean?”

Kurt wasn’t convinced that he’d heard the man correctly. Even if he had, it made little sense.

“It’s a word from Greek mythology,” he said. “The deepest prison of the underworld. According to the Iliad, as far below Hades as Heaven is above the Earth.”

“What do you think he was trying to tell us?”

“No idea,” Kurt said, shrugging and handing her the papers. “Maybe that’s where he thinks he’s going. Or,” he added, considering the grime, dust, and stench that covered the poor man, “maybe that’s where he’s been.”

FOUR

Red and blue lights flashed across the famous sails of the Opera House in series of intersecting patterns, while blinding white spotlights illuminated the wreckage of the powerboat and the charred shell of the dark blue helicopter. They remained where they’d crashed, smoking and smoldering, as fire trucks poured waves of foam onto both vehicles to prevent any chance of reignition.

The spectacle drew a crowd from both the land and the water. Police tape and barricades kept the shore-based onlookers at bay, but the number of small boats crowding the harbor had grown to more than a hundred. Cameras and flashes snapped in the dark like fireflies.

From the shadows of a doorway, Cecil Bradshaw of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation studied the man responsible for all the damage.

An aide handed him a dossier.

“This is awful thick,” Bradshaw said. “I need only the highlights, not every bloody clipping on the man.”

Bradshaw was a stocky man in his mid-fifties. He had pile-driver arms, a thick neck, and a short buzz cut. In a way, he resembled a giant human bulldog. He liked to think of himself in similar terms. Get on my side or get out of my way, he often said.

The aide didn’t stammer in his response. “Those are the highlights, sir. If you’d like, I have another fifty pages I could print out for you.”

Bradshaw offered a grunt in response and opened the file. He leafed through the pages quickly, studying what the ASIO knew about Mr. Kurt Austin of the American organization NUMA. His activities read like a series of high-stakes adventure novels. Before that, he’d apparently had a successful career in the CIA.

Bradshaw couldn’t imagine what strange permutations of fate had brought Austin to this very spot at this precise moment, but it just might have been a break the ASIO desperately needed.

Austin might do, Bradshaw thought to himself. He might do very nicely.

“Keep an eye on him,” he ordered. “If he’s as smart as the file shows, he’ll be trying to get information out of Ms. Anderson in no time. He does that, you bring them both to me.”

“Why would we want to do that?”

Bradshaw glared. “Did you get a promotion I’m not aware of?”