by Alex Archer
Or perhaps it was the brooding presence of the mountain itself, the two-humped saddle shape, taller Vesuvius separated from ancient Somma by the Valley of the Giant. The old killer lay dormant now, although it had smoldered some a few decades ago.
Annja had studied enough geology to know that a sleeping volcano could wake quickly. It had been realized in her own lifetime that extinction wasn't necessarily forever, where volcanoes were concerned. And over four hundred thousand people lay in harm's immediate way if Vesuvius should suddenly take a mind to take up his bad old ways.
"What about equipment to read the scrolls?" Jadzia asked, yanking Annja somewhat guiltily back to the subject pressingly at hand. Merely our own survival, she reflected glumly. "I understood you were going to obtain the equipment to read the carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri."
"You mean the machines necessary to perform multispectral imaging and CT scans?" Tancredo asked. "Sorry. Hasn't happened yet."
Tom shrugged. "We have an American patron bankrolling much of this operation," he said. "He's real generous. But his generosity sort of hits Pause when it comes to shelling out millions of dollars for an undertaking that might take years before it can actually get started. If ever."
Annja's lips peeled back from her teeth in a grimace. She could feel Jadzia approaching a boil. But neither said anything.
"But it is a most important question," Tammaro said, back to speaking intelligible Italian again, "whether to concentrate our efforts on preserving the ancient treasures of Herculaneum and Lucius Piso's villa, or exploit them for the curiosity and profit of soulless – "
"Oh, put a sock in it, do," Tancredo said in startling English. "It's all about the bribes our wealthy patron can be held up for, and the whole bloody world knows it!'
Pellegrino showed a wavery smile to Annja and Jadzia. "Welcome to Italy," he said.
****
"Wait," Annja said, as the taxi rattled down a fairly rural road carved into the cold lava skirts of Vesuvius, where the picturesque gnarled evergreens and palms of the southeastern, seaward side of the mountain gave slow way to stands of alders and birch trees.
Their driver, a stout, sweating man with a mustache and a touring cap, had informed them before lapsing into silence that they must detour to avoid some kind of traffic lockup on the main road that ran along the curve of the bay. "You're telling me if I don't believe aliens are visiting the Earth in flying saucers then I'm buying into a conspiracy theory?"
"Don't be stupid," Jadzia said. That pet phrase as always hit Annja like a slap. "Listen to the words I am saying. The idea that aliens visit Earth is a hoax perpetrated by the government of the United States to keep people in a state of fear so they will docilely allow themselves to be stripped of their liberties. Do you understand me now?"
Annja turned away, frowning, and pretended to watch a broad-winged hawk out her left-hand window, almost immobile as it kited on thermals. She didn't have a ready riposte, she found; the behavior of her country's government certainly did little to dispel the notion it would whip up fake fears in the public for the very reason Jadzia claimed. But Jadzia's style of discourse turned every assertion into personal attack, which actually made it harder to agree with her on such occasions when she did say something sensible. She's like the anti-Dale Carnegie, Annja thought.
"So what do we do now?" Jadzia asked the question they had been avoiding in a flat tone.
Annja looked back. "Good question."
She gave a warning flick of her eyes at the back of the cabdriver's head. He had spoken fractured English when he picked the women up outside the dig site's wire perimeter. Europeans tended to speak a lot more languages than Americans did, especially cabdrivers, and most especially in a locale such as Naples, which had served as a liberty port for ancient Greeks and Phoenicians and every other fleet whose prows had plowed the blue-green furrows of the Mediterranean for the intervening millennia.
"You've got more experience with the...technology than I do," Annja said. "What would you suggest?"
Jadzia turned and stared at her with one brow furrowed and the other raised. "Hello," she said. "Do you think this is a place to be discussing this?"
****
Since they'd decided to move on to Herculaneum, Annja had gotten to know her rambunctious charge better. Flight schedules forced them to cool their heels in Alexandria for another day, staying out in public as late as possible, then diving undercover in a new hotel. Annja had attempted to reach Roux but found, as she often did, that he was nowhere to be found when she wanted his advice.
Annja fretted herself half-sick about the possibility she and the girl would be taken aside during the flight-security check at El Nhouza International Airport. In the current environment of unquestioning compliance with supposed security measures, no one would dare to comment at the sight of two foreign women being led to a discreet office in the back. And if they were never seen again, who would be the wiser?
But at least, Annja had thought, as she waited at an Internet café to hear back from her archaeological contacts about visiting Herculaneum, Jadzia has someone to watch out for her.
****
Annja resisted the urge to snap at Jadzia. You should at least try to act like the responsible adult here, she told herself in irritation.
Annja continued to exert a tyrannical rule over the girl. Her greatest weapon, she had quickly realized, was Jadzia's unexpressed but obvious fear the older woman might simply abandon her. Annja also knew full well that was the one thing she couldn't do. But it didn't stop her from ruthlessly exploiting Jadzia's fear of abandonment, and feeling both superior and guilty because of it.
It was hot in the cab and it smelled bad. The driver smelled like garlic and the decay products of one of those body sprays television ads assured American adolescents would make hot women want to crawl on their laps and lick their hair. Annja couldn't imagine anything making her want to lick anyone's hair. And most women she knew agreed with her that what the body sprays mostly brought to mind was toilet disinfectants.
"How stupid," Jadzia was saying, shaking her head and sneering with her arms tightly folded under her breasts. She wore a tight white sleeveless top that emphasized her attributes, and a red skirt so short it attracted way too much attention for Annja's taste.
"Listen," Annja said, "I'm getting tired of hearing that out of you all the time."
"Then quit being so stupid!" Jadzia snapped.
She was trying to think of some appropriate rejoinder, and coming up just as dry as usual, when the driver suddenly slammed the cab to a stop in the middle of the single-lane road. A green slope fell away down to a rocky-bottomed valley at their left. A four-foot granite wall held up a hillside covered with chunks of red-and-black lava rock to the right.
"Why are you stopping here?" Annja asked the driver in Italian.
He turned around and shoved a black Beretta in her face.
Chapter 7
The driver's beard-fringed mouth opened to reveal some seriously bad teeth and undoubtedly to emit some kind of cliché-riddled bad-guy speech along with tear-gas-like bad breath. Annja had long ago learned that like everybody else, thugs these days got their self-image from the movies. She felt a rush of hot air on her right hand and cheek as the cab's door was yanked open.
I'm just going to give up on taxis altogether, flashed incongruously through her mind. Like a striking adder her right hand flashed out, seized the cabbie's gun hand and twisted it inward against its wrist to point the Beretta at the windshield. It promptly went off, the crack skullcrackingly loud inside the glorified metal box. The sudden thunder startled the cabbie so much he dropped the handgun. It fell into the footwell.
"Help me!" Jadzia screamed as two men in balaclavas dragged her from the cab.
A third, with some kind of submachine gun slung mostly out of sight behind his back, leaned in to seize the bag with the scrolls. A whistling growl of fury and frustration vented from Annja's throat. Letting go
of the cabdriver's wrist, she seized the collar of his jacket, more scuff than leather, and flung him forward over his steering wheel. His head smashed right through the windscreen already crazed and weakened by the bullet. He slumped motionless across the wheel. Pink stained the snaggle-tooth fringes of the hole he had made.
The man who was still trying to find a handle on the green-and-purple satchel cursed in German. His words went a ways toward confirming Annja's gut impression that yet again they were being rousted by multinational Eurotrash goons. Spooked by the deafening gunshot, he jumped back, hauling on the strap of his weapon.
****
Annja had always enjoyed certain gifts, which she eventually came to understand were rare, although nothing abnormal.
Whether she learned them or they were simply part of her being, some began to manifest by the time of her earliest memories. From the outset bigger and older girls in the orphanage tried to intimidate her. First, because she was a quiet, skinny child who sought shelter from the prevailing grimness of her surroundings, as well as a sense of rootlessness she would not be able to articulate to herself until her teen years, by almost compulsive devouring of books. Second, because though the sisters found her willful, and some endeavored for years to break that will without success, the older, slower-thinking girls accused her of sucking up to the nuns by always having the right answer in class.
But imposing on the withdrawn little slip of an Annja Creed turned out to be like imposing on an alley cat. When her enemies tried to ambush her on the playground she became a whirling ball of fury. Sheer ferocity, plus an absolutely indomitable refusal ever to acknowledge herself beaten, taught the other girls the wisdom of leaving her alone. As many times as Annja was knocked to the ground, so many times she got back up – always ready to fight.
Her cannier self-defense mentors, when they learned about Annja's youthful encounters, informed her she already had most of what it took to defend oneself successfully – awareness, the ability to think tactically and presence of mind. The SAS veteran who had introduced her to defensive handgun shooting claimed that keeping presence of mind was the strongest indicator of surviving a fight or any other crisis.
The mental parts – what she had always had to an unusual degree – were what really counted. The rest was technique. Granted, physical skills might well make the difference between living and dying. But without those vital mental attributes, even the most physically formidable, expensively trained and fabulously armed man could be caught off guard and killed with remarkable ease. Annja had seen that for herself more than once, since her destiny had come upon her.
****
And now it was that ability to keep cool, to retain her presence of mind instead of falling into helpless panic or flailing-blind anger, that kept Annja alive in the killzone of a lethal and well-laid trap.
Annja dived over the seats. For a heart-stopping moment she fumbled around, the sunlight streaming in the open door seeming to dazzle her eyes rather than aid sight. At last her hand closed around the black rubber grips of the driver's fallen Beretta. She flopped onto the backseat with her back against the left-hand door and brought the pistol up one-handed.
The guy in the balaclava had his hands on the fore-and-aft pistol grips of a Beretta submachine gun. As the barrel rose to blast her, Annja made her eyes focus on the foresight of her own weapon. She pointed it at the center of the dark silhouette against all that Mediterranean sunlight and squeezed off two quick shots.
The man jerked to the impacts but did not go down. Body armor! flashed across Annja's mind. Her left hand found her right, wrapped around the fingers to steady her Beretta in an improvised firing position. As the submachine gun's briefly interrupted upward progress resumed, she made her own firearm line up the dark bulb of head like a pumpkin on the post of her front sight.
She squeezed the trigger again. The Beretta rocked in her hand. The head jerked. Pink mist sprayed out into brilliant sunshine. The man dropped instantly.
Impacts filled the cab with jackhammer clamor. It sounded like a hailstorm in the middle of Kansas. Since the sky had barely a cloud to its name and this wasn't Kansas, Annja reasonably reached the flash conclusion it was bullets, not hail. Somebody outside her field of vision was conducting reconnaissance-by-fire on the cab. Or, basically, just shooting the hell out of it in hopes of hitting her.
Jadzia was being dragged up the slope. She wasn't going peacefully. Annja saw the blond girl catch the man on her right with a brutal kick to his shin. It didn't hit right to pop the knee. He backhanded her savagely for her pains.
The cab shook with more bullet strikes. Annja was out of time with no way to help her charge. She twisted in the seat, kicked at her door with both legs. With a squeal of metal, it popped not just the lock but its rusted hinges, and flew clean off the car. It landed on the white roadside gravel with a thump.
Annja was already diving out of the car as bullets stitched the seat. Emerging into the noonday sun she registered two more attackers not twenty feet downslope. They aimed machine pistols at her but didn't fire. From the width of the eyes behind the holes in their face masks, the sight of the rear-left door exploding clean off the taxicab had momentarily paralyzed both of them.
Unfortunately Annja's forward momentum was not going to let her get a shot at them. She opened her hand and let the Beretta fall. As she tucked her head and shoulder for a forward roll she half closed her hand and reached with her mind –
She took the first fall on her left shoulder and rolled through.
As she came up she took hold with her left hand the hilt of the sword that had appeared in her right. The sword that had once belonged to Joan of Arc now belonged to her. Though it rested in some otherwhere she couldn't truly understand, she could summon it at will and was growing more confident using it.
The mystic blade caught the first gunman at the waist. Driven by Annja's powerful muscles it cut through cloth, skin, fat and muscle as if through soft cheese. When it struck his spine she felt a jar of resistance.
Annja turned, straightening her right leg to brake her forward progress and drive her into a pivot left to attack the other gunman. She pulled the blade with her. The first gunman jackknifed at the impact of the blade against his midsection.
The second attacker had wits enough about him to turn toward her. She brought the sword around and over her right shoulder. The masked gunman raised his weapon. She had the quick impression it was in an attempt to ward off the sword stroke, not to shoot.
She cut him transversely, right down to left. Continuing the stroke up and around, she cut him again left to right as if completing a giant X. He screamed – his partner must have screamed, too, but Annja never heard – then fell.
She glanced around and had to gulp air to keep from losing her breakfast.
Apparently expecting little resistance from a pair of pampered young middle-class women, the two assassins evidently hadn't bothered with hot, cumbersome body armor. The coroner is not going to like that, she thought.
The sudden roar of rotors made her look up. A blue helicopter with white trim swooped overhead, lashing Annja with a horizontal storm of grit and debris. For a moment she felt exhilarating relief – the police!
Then the chopper settled down to a precarious flat spot on a slope fifty yards above the road cut. The other two masked men dragged Jadzia, still kicking and shrieking obscenities, toward it.
Annja took the obscenities on faith. She could no longer hear Jadzia for the beat of the feathered blades. She felt a surge of admiration for the pigtailed blond girl. She wasn't fighting effectually, but by God she was fighting.
One of her abductors swung up an Uzi one-handed and let off a burst at Annja. Most of it hit the taxi with a sound like a woodpecker going after a derelict washing machine. But enough bullets bit chunks out of the sod and kicked up sprays of the crushed gravel lining the roadbed that Annja had to dive and roll uphill for the dubious shelter of the shot-up car. She aimed for the front, wh
ere the engine block could pretty reliably be counted on to stop fast-jacketed 9 mm bullets that would slice right through the thin-gauge body of the car.
When she peeked over the hood, the helicopter was rising against the great gray mound of Vesuvius. Jadzia struggled against various sets of restraining arms in the helicopter's open doorway.
No other attackers remained in sight. Annja realized she had never seen whoever had opened fire on the cab first. Evidently that gunman or men had also piled into the aircraft, probably from the other side.
The driver's Beretta still lay where she'd dropped it. Seizing it, Annja snapped to her feet and bounded up the slope like a deer, holding the handgun out before her like a probe. Her long chestnut hair had come loose from the ponytail she kept it pulled into on most occasions. It flew behind her.
She pointed the Beretta at the streamlined hump on the aircraft's back from which the rotor shaft sprang, knowing that was the weakness of any helicopter.
I can hit it, she thought. She had actually downed a helicopter once by throwing a grappling hook on a nylon line into the rotor circle and fouling the blades. Think what I can do with an actual weapon.
She did. And stopped, panting, and lowered the handgun.
I could shoot the chopper down, she realized, with Jadzia inside.
Across two hundred yards the girl's bright blue eyes caught Annja's as the helicopter sucked its landing gear up into its sleek belly. And though the sound of her voice had no hope of carrying past the noise of twin turbine engines and great sweeping rotor blades, her mouth unmistakably formed the words, "Help me."
"I will!" Annja shouted back, brandishing the pistol.
The chopper soared up and away to the northwest across the stunning blue sky.
