Tear Of The Gods

The role came with its own unique set of responsibilities, protecting the innocent seemingly first and foremost among them. Her own innate sense of justice seemed amplified when she carried the sword and she’d found herself forced into any number of situations that others would have simply walked away from as a result. Numbers didn’t matter, nor did the odds, only that she acted whenever possible to defend those who couldn’t defend themselves.

Like now.

Craig’s death made the intentions of the intruders quite clear. There was no way they were going to let the other dig workers live after witnessing Craig being killed in cold blood. That meant it was up to Annja to get them out of this alive.

Despite knowing that they would never get there in time, Annja pulled out her BlackBerry with her free hand and placed an emergency call to the regional police. She told the sergeant who answered her name and that the archaeological dig just north of Arkholme was under attack by armed insurgents. When he began to ask questions she hung up. She didn’t have time to sit there and chat with him; people’s lives hung in the balance.

As she slipped the phone back into her pocket, her fingers touched the torc. Something told her that it wouldn’t be safe there; if she was caught, her captors would find it in seconds. She took it out of her pocket and slipped it inside her sports bra instead. That way, at least it would pass a casual search.

Then she took a moment to consider her next move.

Clearly she couldn’t take them all on at once. But if she could even up the odds a bit, she’d have a better chance of succeeding in the end.

With that in mind, she faded back into the shadows, waiting for her chance at vengeance.

8

The gunman ordered his men to herd the rest of the dig workers into the mess tent behind them, and as they began doing so, Annja slipped around behind it and found a place to crouch down out of sight near one of the windows. From this position she could see and hear most of what was going on inside the tent, while potentially being ready to do something to help if an opportunity presented herself.

The lead mercenary stood facing the group, his gun still in hand.

“Where is Professor Novick?” he asked.

No one would look at one another, for fear of giving Novick away. They had seen what had happened to Dr. Stevens; it didn’t take too much imagination to figure out what was likely to happen to Paolo.

For a moment, Annja didn’t see him and she began to hope that he had slipped away in the initial confusion, but it was not to be.

“I am Novick,” a man said from the back of the crowd and Annja watched as Paolo stepped forward.

“You,” the man said, pointing at Novick, “come with me.” He turned and faced the two guards who had entered the tent with him. “If they try to escape,” he said, nodding back over his shoulder at the prisoners, “kill them.”

Paolo and the mercenary leader walked out of the tent, leaving the entire workforce guarded by only two men.

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.

Leaving the inmates in charge of the asylum, Jackson thought with a grin. With the immediate threat taken care of, he and his men would have all the time they needed to dispose of the bodies and find that damned necklace.

SEVERAL HOURS LATER Jackson found himself standing in the foyer of Shaw’s private estate, waiting for an audience with his employer. He’d been working for Shaw long enough to know that while he disliked incompetence, he hated those who shirked personal responsibility even more. Jackson stood a better chance of coming through this alive if he delivered his report in person, as backward as that might seem.

Surviving the next fifteen minutes was something he very much wanted to do.

Motion at the head of the stairs caught his attention and he stood straighter as he saw his employer come into sight. Shaw was still dressed; that was a good sign. That meant Jackson hadn’t had the misfortune of waking him from one of his infrequent periods of sleep. In the back of his head, Jackson rated his chances of getting through this five percent higher than he had a moment before.

But only five.

“Do you have my property, Mr. Jackson?” Shaw asked as he descended the stairs.

Nothing to do to play it straight.

“No, sir.”

That obviously wasn’t the answer Shaw had been expecting to hear. Jackson watched as a series of expressions crossed the other man’s face, everything from surprise to distaste, but thankfully outright anger wasn’t yet one of them.

Knock that percentage up a few more notches.

“Pray tell me why not,” Shaw said. His tone had gotten noticeably colder.

Like the good soldier that he was, Jackson laid out the events of earlier that evening in clear, concise sentences. Shaw didn’t say a word until Jackson got to the part about the woman and the sword.

“She actually attacked you with a sword?” he asked, though Jackson couldn’t tell if that was because Shaw didn’t believe him or if he found the whole situation as weird as it sounded.

Settling on the latter, Jackson replied. “Yes, sir. While I’m no expert on medieval weaponry, if I had to hazard a guess I’d say it was an English long sword. Perhaps something they uncovered in the dig?”

Shaw waved the question aside.

“What did you do with this woman?” Shaw asked.

“I shot her, sir.”

“Dead?”

Jackson thought about the way the woman’s body had flopped when they’d tossed it into the bog with the rest of them. “Yes, sir.” Though, now that he thought about it, he didn’t know what had happened to the sword.

“A pity. Might have been an interesting conversation there. Go on.”

Jackson explained how they’d tricked the team that had responded to the call for help, after which they searched both the camp and the bodies of the dead, but had been unable to find the torc anywhere. “Perhaps they packed it up and sent it back to Oxford before we arrived?” he ventured, looking for some reason, some excuse, why he was standing there empty-handed. He was not a man accustomed to failure and he particularly didn’t like the way that this assignment had turned out. It was always the easy ones….

“Give me your assessment of the police response,” Shaw ordered.

Jackson was prepared for the question and didn’t hesitate. “They have to send a team out to the site in the morning, sir. It’s standard operating procedure. They would have done so tonight if they’d had anyone reasonably close. The fact that the site is in the middle of nowhere played to our advantage.”

His employer considered his assessment for a moment and then nodded. “I want you on the ground with that regional police unit when it arrives in the morning. If the torc turns up, I expect you to do what is necessary to recover it. Are we clear?”

Jackson nodded. There was a reason he knew so much about the regional police; he’d been on the active duty roster for the past seven years, ever since mustering out of the regiment. He’d expected Shaw to give that very order and had already made sure that he’d be assigned to the duty in the morning. With dawn only a few hours away, it meant even less sleep than he’d expected to get, but beggars can’t be choosy. He was just happy to have escaped his employer’s wrath.

“I want that torc, Mr. Jackson.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Good enough.” Shaw turned and headed back up the stairs, but stopped before he’d gotten more than a few steps away. He turned to face Jackson once more.

“This woman, the one with the sword. Do we know who she was?”

Jackson nodded. “An American archaeologist named Annja Creed.” He took a photo out of the file folder in his hands and passed it to Shaw. The picture had been taken on-site and showed Annja’s still and bloody face.

The other man stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it back.

“She was a pretty thing, wasn’t she?”

10

Annja came to with a start.

She was on her back, staring up into the sky. Light was just starting to peek over the horizon, which meant she been out for several hours, maybe more. Her head hurt something fierce and when she tried to move it she was nearly overwhelmed with a wave of dizziness that threatened to return her to the darkness from which she’d just come. She closed her eyes, gritted her teeth and fought it off.

The ground beneath her rolled gently, reminding her of how it felt to drift on an inflatable raft in a swimming pool, but in her pain and confusion she didn’t pay it any mind.

Until she tried to sit up.

She put her hands down flat on either side, barely registering the cold, clammy feel of whatever she’d placed them upon, and tried to lever herself into an upright position. When she did, the surface she was laying on shifted dramatically beneath her, tilting to one side and dumping her face-first into a thick pool of muck.

In her surprise she panicked, flailing her limbs, feeling the muck pulling at her, dragging her down, but then her feet hit the bottom and she realized she wouldn’t drown if she could just get control of herself.

She stopped thrashing, planted her feet firmly beneath her and stood up straight, bringing her head back above the surface. She gasped in a lungful of air and then breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the muck only came to her waist.

Her relief was short-lived, however.

As she looked around, the dim morning light revealed that she was standing in the middle of an active bog, surrounded by the partially submerged corpses of her former colleagues!

What had happened the night before came rushing back—the sudden appearance of armed intruders at the dig site, the demands to surrender the torc, the deadly gunfire when the archaeologists had refused to do as requested and her own struggle to get as many of her fellow scholars to safety in spite of it all.

The last thing she remembered was staring down the barrel of a gun and her last-ditch effort to get out of the way of the bullet….

Her head throbbed, a not-so-subtle reminder that she apparently hadn’t moved quickly enough.

She brought a hand up toward the side of her head, wanting to know just how bad the wound might be, but stopped herself when she saw the thick coating the peat bog had left on her limbs. There was already enough of it dripping from her head; rubbing it deeper into an open wound didn’t seem like a bright idea.

Despite the early hour, it was already light enough for Annja to see the bullet wounds and dark splotches of blood that stained the bodies around her. These weren’t strangers; she recognized several of them. She recognized Paolo Novick from his curly gray hair. The bright yellow of an NAU sweatshirt identified another body as that of Sheila James, one of the graduate students who’d come overseas just last week. There was Matthew Blake and Dalton Ribisi and… She turned away, shaking off the feeling of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. Several of the dead lay with their eyes open, staring into nothingness, and Annja had the sudden urge to reach out and close them, pulling the blinds on the windows of the souls that had long since fled.

Knowing how close she’d come to her own death, and seeing the deaths of others she cared about, set a red-hot fire burning in her veins.

A careful look around showed her that the shortest route to solid ground was directly behind her, where thick tufts of grass were growing along the bank. But when she tried to move in that direction, she discovered a new problem.

Her feet had sunk into the thicker silt at the bottom of the bog and were now trapped.

Visions of being sucked down beneath the surface swam in her mind and caused her to try pulling her feet free with brute force, yanking upward first on one and then the other. Rather than loosening the bog’s hold, however, all her actions managed to do was to get her feet to sink deeper.

She was stuck.

Annja opened her mouth, intending to call out, to see if there was anyone close enough to help. Surely someone else had survived the brutal attack. But then she thought better of it. While other survivors might be within earshot, so, too, might the very men who had slaughtered her friends. Calling attention to herself while she was trapped would just make her a target.

One that would be almost impossible to miss.

She was going to have to get out of this on her own.

Taking a deep breath to calm her already frayed nerves, Annja considered the situation. She knew she had to work with the bog’s natural qualities rather than against them, if she hoped to get out of this alive.

She slowly began to wiggle her left foot, gently rocking it back and forth. Each time she did so it let a little more of the water within the bog slide between her foot and the thicker particles of peat that kept it trapped. Gradually she was able to loosen the bog’s hold on her foot.

With one foot floating free she reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest corpse, using it to maintain her balance while she began to work on the other leg. The body was that of a blonde woman dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, though Annja made a point of avoiding looking at her face, afraid of seeing the face of another friend. Her efforts pushed the corpse a little deeper into the bog, but it maintained enough natural buoyancy that she could still use it to support herself despite that fact that it was now mostly underwater.

After several minutes she was able to work her other foot loose enough that she could lift it when the time came.

With her feet free, she had to fight the urge to lean forward, to power through the muck with big strokes of her strong arms, for she knew that doing so was exactly the wrong thing to do and would only leave her trapped again, perhaps in an even more precarious position. She knew the surface of the bog would support her if she let it; the corpses floating around her were proof of that. With that in mind she leaned backward instead of forward, letting her head and upper back come in contact with the surface of the bog. When she felt its chill wetness lapping at her skin, she lifted her legs and spread her arms wide, allowing the bog to bear her weight.