Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

“Only amateurs talk,” Chase said to a nod of agreement from Castille, before turning his attention to Nina. Worryingly, she hadn’t responded in any way to the shooting, simply standing there. “Dr. Wilde?” She stared blankly at him. “Nina!”

She blinked. “What?”

“Nina,” he repeated, “keep your eyes on me, okay? Just keep looking at me, and take a step forward.”

“Okay…” she replied numbly, taking the step. Emotion began to return to her face-but not fear or shock. Instead, it was almost bafflement. “Why do I have to look at you?”

“Why, what’s wrong with looking at me?”

She took another step. “Well, er…”

Chase pouted. “Aw, thanks!”

“Nothing! No, there’s nothing wrong with your face!”

She waved her hands in frantic apology. “I just wanted to know why you want me to keep looking at you.”

He took hold of her hands, then quickly whisked her out of the compartment, stepping over the body of the soldier. “I just didn’t want you to see the guy with half his head missing, that’s all!”

She glanced down at the soldier, whose leg was sticking out into the corridor. “What, as opposed to the guy with the sucking chest wounds who just got blown away right in front of me?”

Chase shook his head. “Can’t please some people…”

“Oh my God!” she suddenly shrieked, the full impact of what had just happened finally hitting her. “You shot him while he had a gun to my head! What if his finger had twitched or something? He could have killed me!”

Castille emerged from the compartment, handing Chase his Wildey before using the key to unlock Nina’s handcuffs. “Actually, that hardly ever happens.”

“Not if you get ’em in the head,” Chase added. “Hit them in the body, that’s a different story. Hydrostatic shock, muscle spasms… But a clean head shot, almost never. He wouldn’t-”

Bang!

Nina shrieked.

“Ah,” said Castille apologetically, looking back into the compartment to see smoke rising from the barrel of Mahjad’s pistol, “he was a twitcher. I should have taken his other gun as well, n’est-ce pas?”

Nina glared at Chase. “I said almost never,” he complained as he checked his gun, then slid it back into its holster beneath his jacket. “Anyway, the trigger pull on a Wildey’s a lot more than that crappy little Chinese pistol he had… and why are we even talking about this? We need to get out of here!”

“How?” Nina demanded as she rubbed her sore wrists. “We’re still stuck in the middle of Iran! And what about Kari?”

“I’m working on that.” Chase glanced down at the dead soldier. “Is he the guy who had all our stuff?”

Castille nodded, pulling a satchel from the body. “Here.”

Chase quickly rummaged through it, taking out a mobile phone. “Here we go! Just hope I remembered to charge the battery.”

“What are you going to do?” Nina asked.

He smiled. “I’m going to phone a friend.”

Kari paced across the tiny room. Hajjar’s home, she’d seen from the helicopter, was no mere house in the country. Perched on a crag in the Zagros mountains, it was a mixture of palace and fortress, accessible only by air or along a single winding road.

And like any self-respecting fortress, it had its own dungeons.

No dank medieval cells here, though. The building’s overwrought architecture told Kari that it had been constructed some three decades earlier, bankrolled by somebody with lots of money, no taste and a domineering ego. That suggested the former shah of Iran. Some kind of retreat, a fortified Camp David with high walls and ridiculously ostentatious design.

Whatever its original purpose, it was now Hajjar’s domain, and Kari got the feeling she and Yuri Volgan were far from the first occupants of the dungeons.

Volgan, in the next cell, was being little help. Hajjar’s betrayal had sent him into a state of shock, and the mere mention of Qobras caused him to panic.

She turned her mind to Hajjar. He was playing an extremely dangerous game by trying to ransom her, almost certainly unaware of just how dangerous. Her father would move heaven and earth to get her back safely… but there was no way he would let the matter end there once she had been returned.

And nor would she.

She wondered how long it would be before Hajjar summoned them. Presumably he was trying to contact Qobras and her father, to make his financial demands of them both.

She had to use that time to attempt an escape.

“Excuse me,” she said, walking to the cell door and addressing the guard sitting outside. “I need some help.”

The guard frowned. “What?”

“I need to… you know.” She wriggled her hips, hands still cuffed behind her back. “Go.”

“And?”

“And , I was hoping you could take me.” The guard walked to the door, running his gaze over her figure. Kari gave him a look of innocent pleading. “Please?”

The heavyset, bearded man smirked. “Let me guess. You’ll ask me to open your coat for you, and then help you with those tight leather trousers, and I’ll get all hot and excited because I’m a repressed Iranian man faced with a beautiful blond woman, and then you’ll ask me to take off your handcuffs, and I’ll do it because I’m thinking with my dick, and then you’ll do some fancy martial arts to knock me out and escape. Is that about right?”

Kari shot him a sour glare. “You could have just said no.”

The guard laughed and returned to his seat. “I don’t get paid all this money to be an idiot. Nice try, though.”

Annoyed, Kari turned her back on him. Now all she could think about was what to do when she needed to use the toilet for real.

With Chase and Castille carrying the wounded Hafez, his leg hurriedly bandaged, they made their escape from the train.

Nina had no idea where they were going, or what Chase planned to do when they got there. His phone conversation had been entirely in Arabic, and in his rush to get away from the train before Iranian forces arrived he hadn’t been forthcoming with additional information.

The terrain was less severe than the area where they had met Hajjar, but it was still slow going, especially with an injured man. Fortunately, there was also more vegetation, and by the time Nina heard the first buzz of an approaching helicopter, they were in the cover of a wood half a mile from the railway line.

“So where are we going?” she asked. “Who’s this friend that you called? And how’s he going to find us? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

Despite his pain, Hafez managed a smile. “Eddie has many friends,” he said. “All over the world.”

Nina looked across at Chase. “Even in Iran, where you’ve supposedly never been before?”

“Hey, I’m a popular guy,” he said with a shrug.

“His reputation precedes him,” added Castille.

“I’m sure it does. But if I can butt into your mutual admiration society, how about letting me in on your plan?”

“Well,” said Chase, “first thing is to get a lift out of here. There’s a road about a mile to the south. Some one’s going to pick us up.”

Nina surveyed the unfamiliar landscape. “How’s your friend going to find us? You don’t even know where we are!”

“I just described the landmarks. Easy enough to find ’em on a map.”

“Really?”

“It’s not hard; basic stuff. Then… we go and get Ms. Frost.”

“You know where she is?” Castille asked.

“Hajjar’s got a little country cottage about thirty miles from here. We’ll drop in and say hello.”