Tear Of The Gods

This was her chance.

Annja slipped over to the corner of the tent and peered around it. From where she crouched she could see other guards moving around the camp, hunting through the tents, apparently searching for the torc. She thanked her intuition for making her grab it at the last moment; at least that would keep it out of their hands for now.

If she didn’t call undue attention to herself, she should be able to make it to the entrance and slip inside the tent without anyone on the outside being any wiser.

Taking a deep breath to calm herself, she released her sword back into the otherwhere and did just that.

The guards had their backs to her as she strode inside. They were having too much fun terrorizing the dig crew, particularly the female students, and Annja was able to cross most of the distance to them before one of her fellow coworkers called out her name in surprise upon seeing her approach.

“Annja!”

The guards whirled around, reaching for the guns they’d let hang free on the straps around their necks, but Annja was much too fast for them.

Her right leg was already coming up in a perfectly executed crescent kick that caught the first guard across the side of the head, driving him to the floor.

She didn’t let that stop her, though, using the momentum of the kick to spin herself around one hundred and eighty degrees, delivering a stunning hammer fist to the other guard’s face and then, when the blow momentarily stunned him, grabbed either side of his head in her hands and pulled it down toward her rapidly rising knee.

As he fell Annja was already turning back in the other direction. She’d seen the first guard trying to get back on his feet and she lashed out with a powerful side kick that knocked him into unconsciousness like his partner.

The whole thing had taken less than ten seconds.

Annja didn’t give the others time to think about what had just happened.

“Quickly, this way,” she said, rushing over to the rear wall of the tent. She snatched a knife off a nearby table and thrust it through the canvas, ripping downward with all her strength as she did so to create a big gash in the fabric.

“Run for the woods and get as far away as you can,” she said to the others.

“What about Dr. Novick?” one of the men asked.

“I’ll get him. Right now you have to get as far away from here as you possibly can. When you’re free, call the territorial police. Hurry now!”

As they began to file out one at a time into the growing darkness at the rear of the tent, Annja headed in the opposite direction. If they were going to have any chance of getting away, she had to create a diversion, something to keep the gunmen occupied. And she knew just how she was going to do it. She summoned her sword.

As she drew closer to the entrance to the tent, the flap was suddenly pulled back and Annja found herself staring down the barrel of the gun held in the lead mercenary’s hand.

She didn’t stop to think, didn’t look where she was going or what she might land on, just reacted on instinct and threw herself to the side.

He pulled the trigger.

The bullet that should have killed her merely grazed her instead.

It was enough to save her life, but not enough to keep her conscious.

The darkness claimed her before she even hit the ground.

9

Trevor Jackson was furious.

They’d been searching the camp for over fifteen minutes and still hadn’t located the necklace that he’d been sent to find. Perhaps he’d been a little too hasty in dealing with the prisoners, especially their inside guy, Novick.

The professor had led them to the tent containing the bog mummy and the artifacts that had been found alongside it, but the torc wasn’t there. Novick had sputtered in surprise, putting on a good act, but Jackson hadn’t believed a word he’d said. When the man wouldn’t reveal the location of the necklace, Jackson had grown impatient and put a bullet through his skull, figuring he didn’t need the man and that he’d simply find it himself.

Now he was starting to regret that decision.

With Novick dead, Jackson focused his attention on the other prisoners, fully expecting one of them to tell him what he wanted to know. It only took a few minutes for him to realize that there was a problem, however; they really didn’t know anything. The majority of them had spent the day down at the dig site and had only been rounded up when he and his men had shown up and forced them back to camp at gunpoint. Those who’d been in camp all morning said the same thing Novick had—the torc should be with the rest of the artifacts in the main tent.

Jackson had never been a patient man and at that point his day’s supply exhausted itself. “Get rid of them,” he’d told his men, and walked out of the tent where they were holding the prisoners just as the chorus of gunfire started at his back.

Now he stood in the center of camp, weighing his options. Shaw would be expecting him to report in shortly and Jackson didn’t want to do that without having the torc in hand. Shaw was a harsh taskmaster; admitting he’d failed to secure the necklace might have some unhealthy consequences. No, the best thing to do was to hold off on making the call until he had the stupid thing in hand.

That would be better for all involved.

“Sir, I think we’ve got a problem.”

The sound of the man’s voice pulled Jackson out of his reverie. He turned to find one of his men standing nearby, extending a cell phone toward him. He took it, noting as he did that it was a recent-model BlackBerry much like his own, and then glanced at the screen. The number displayed there, the last number the phone’s owner had apparently dialed, was the emergency line for the regional police.

His man was right; this complicated things considerably.

Jackson checked the phone’s log and noted that the call had gone through about twenty minutes earlier. He guessed the phone belonged to the chick with the sword; the call had been right before she’d done her best to throw a wrench in his entire operation and it made sense that she’d have tried to get help before moving to stop them on her own.

He wondered what she’d said. She hadn’t been on the phone very long; the call had lasted less than a minute according to the log. How much information could a person relay to another in less than a minute? Had she had time to give the police their descriptions? Had she told them what they were looking for?

He didn’t know. That meant he had to treat it like a worst-case scenario and go from there, hoping that he covered all the bases.

With that in mind, he considered what he knew about the regional police force’s procedures in a situation like this. Their most likely response would be to do a quick flyby, probably via helicopter, to determine the reliability of the report itself as well as to assess the situation on the ground. If the flight crew deemed it necessary, a ground team would be sent in to investigate further.

The nearest airfield was more than fifty miles away. The report would have taken time to filter up through the channels as the initial responder tried to decide if it was an actual call for help or some crazy teenagers trying to have some fun. Since the call had come in on the emergency line, the origin point would have been automatically plotted and logged on the response board. It wouldn’t have taken long for the duty officer to note that the call was coming from the middle of nowhere, increasing the likelihood that it was authentic. Their inability to get the caller back on the line would have tipped the scales that much further into the “believable” column and a response team would eventually have been dispatched to check things out.

From the time of the call to the point where the response team’s transportation went wheels-up at the airfield would probably be fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, at most. Flight time was roughly another fifteen minutes, depending on course and airspeed, Jackson reasoned, so call it a good half hour, maybe forty minutes before they’d be over the site.

That meant they had anywhere between ten and twenty minutes left before company arrived.

Plenty of time, he thought.

He ordered several of his men to gather up the bodies of those who’d been killed when they’d first arrived and to dump them in the mess tent with the others. Three men were stationed inside the tent with orders not to open fire, no matter what happened, unless it seemed evident that they had no other choice in order to avoid discovery. Others were told to spread themselves out about the camp and to look busy. When the first response team arrived, Jackson intended to pass them off as the camp’s legitimate personnel. All they had to do was convince the flyboys that everything was A-okay and they’d buy all the time they needed to finish up what they’d come here to accomplish. It was already late in the day; no one wanted to dispatch a ground team at night if they could help it and the recommendation would be to wait until morning if there wasn’t clear evidence of a problem on the ground.

Jackson had every intention of showing them that things were just fine and dandy.

No sooner had they finished policing the camp and making certain the bodies were all out of sight than the sound of the approaching helicopter echoed through the trees toward them. Jackson stepped out into the open space at the center of the camp and waited for them to come into sight.

It didn’t take long.

The chopper was a small, two-man unit, the kind of thing he could knock out of the sky with a few well-placed shots from the pistol he carried at his hip. He restrained himself from doing so, though, smiling up at them instead and waving with one hand as he used the other to shield his brow. They circled the camp once, then again, before coming back to hover a hundred yards or so above him.

The downdraft from their rotors was stirring up dust and starting to pull at the canvas of the nearby tents, so Jackson began waving them off, figuring that’s what any good camp administrator would do.

To his surprise, it worked. The pilot gave him a thumbs-up sign and then quickly gained altitude before heading back in the direction they had come.