Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

And in that moment, Kari wrenched the revolver from Hajjar’s hand.

A single shot was all she needed to hit the guard square in the forehead. He collapsed instantly, dead.

The other guard was recovering, pulling out his gun as he twisted to face her.

Kari kicked again, using Hajjar as a human springboard to launch herself into the air. The chair and its occupant toppled over with a crash. She performed a perfect somersault as a bullet cracked against the wall behind her.

She was still upside down in midair as she pulled the trigger. The bullet exploded in the guard’s chest, blood spurting out as she flopped back to the floor.

Kari landed on both feet beside the desk, coat swirling like a cape. She gave the body of her former guard a cold look. “You were right about the martial arts.”

She heard a noise behind her and whirled. Hajjar had crawled from his overturned chair, flattening himself against the wall beneath the plasma screen. As he raised his hook hand to the carved skirting along the base of the wall, a twisted smile of triumph on his bloodied lips, the floor beneath him dropped away and pitched him into darkness. Before Kari could react, the trapdoor snapped back into place, only the tiniest seam in the marble giving away that it had even been there at all.

She hurried to the spot and pushed at the skirting, but although a piece of it moved under her touch, nothing happened. The trapdoor had some kind of lock or timing mechanism to prevent people pursuing its user.

The artifact!

Kari frantically searched the desk for the orichalcum piece.

It wasn’t there!

She must have swept it along with her when she slid over the desk, dropping it right into Hajjar’s lap. And now he had used the shah’s secret escape route to make his getaway with it!

Spitting a Norwegian curse, Kari dropped the revolver into a pocket, picked up the dead bodyguard’s MP-5 and hurried from the room.

The spiraling chute deposited Hajjar in a small room two floors below. Like the rest of the fortress the room was dark, but once his disorientation cleared, that presented him with no problems. He had prepared the room carefully with everything he might need should he have to use his emergency exit.

Not, he thought as his hand felt for the battery-powered lantern he knew was there, that he had ever actually expected to do so. Especially to escape from someone who just a few seconds earlier had been his prisoner! Qobras was right-Kari Frost was indeed more dangerous than she seemed.

He found the lantern and switched it on. The contents of the room were exactly as he’d left them. Hurriedly slinging a satchel over one shoulder, he dropped the orichalcum bar into it before choosing a weapon.

Hajjar’s disability limited him to relatively small and light guns, but that didn’t mean he was limited in terms of firepower. The gun he selected was an Ingram M11, scarcely bigger than an ordinary pistol but able to spew bullets at the frightening rate of sixteen hundred rounds per minute. This particular gun had a special modification ordered personally by its owner: the magazine, protruding from the bottom of the handgrip, ended in a drum, more than doubling its capacity. With only one hand, reloading was a task Hajjar preferred to delay.

There was one other weapon he chose. He unscrewed the steel hook from the metal cup covering the stump of his right wrist… and replaced it with a vicious, eight-inch serrated blade.

His pilot had standing orders in case of an emergency-get to the helipad and start the chopper. Hajjar had many enemies, and was under no illusions that the fortress was impregnable. Running from the danger and letting his men handle it was his preferred option.

But if he happened to run into any of his enemies along the way, he wanted to be prepared.

Nina went up the stairs and found herself in another corridor, this one lavishly decorated by someone with an apparent fetish for red velvet. Tall windows at each end let in enough light for her to switch off the flashlight. Through the nearest window she could see the surrounding mountains; the other one overlooked the courtyard at the center of the fortress.

From where she could hear gunfire. Chase and Castille were making their entrance.

She also heard running footsteps from around a corner coming towards her-probably somebody heading for the generator room to restore power. She ducked through the closest door. The brief glimpse she caught before closing it and plunging the room into darkness told her it was a library, the walls lined with bookcases of reference texts and historical tomes. Hajjar obviously liked to be as well informed as possible about the artifacts he traded.

Hands shaking, she pulled the gun from its holster, pointing it at the door as she backed away. The footsteps came closer.

If the door opened, would she have the necessary willpower to pull the trigger?

She didn’t need to find out. They faded, clattering down the steps into the basement.

With a sigh of relief, Nina turned on the flashlight again. A library would be a good place to hide out. It was unlikely that any of Hajjar’s people would feel the need to check a historical reference in the middle of a crisis. She just needed to wait for Chase to contact her again…

Suddenly Nina froze, puzzled. The room seemed a lot brighter, as though her flashlight had magically doubled in power.

Filled with dread, she turned.

Hajjar stood barely three feet from her, having just emerged from a room hidden behind a moving bookcase, a lantern hanging from a strap over one shoulder. He seemed almost as surprised as she was-but not so surprised that he didn’t think to point his sinister-looking gun at her.

“Dr. Wilde,” he said, running his gaze up and down her body before raising the blade attached to his right wrist to her throat. “Good to see you again.”

The courtyard was a long rectangle with the main gate at the center of the southern wall. Off to each side were large raised marble stands containing ornamental plants, three in each row. Chase and Castille took cover behind one of them as they got their bearings.

“The way down to the cells should be through that door,” said Chase, pointing ahead.

“She might not be in there,” Castille replied. “We should split up, so one of us can check the upper floors.”

“What about his men?”

“He’s a criminal, not a warlord! It’s not as though he has a private army.”

The door Chase had indicated burst open, five men armed with MP-5s rushing into the courtyard.

“On the other hand…” Chase grimaced as he opened up with his Uzi. Castille popped up and let rip with the G3 over the top of the plants. Two of Hajjar’s men fell immediately, blood splattering the walls behind them. The remaining three split up, two sprinting across the courtyard for the cover of the planter diagonally opposite Chase and Castille, the third diving behind the one ahead of them.

Chase hunted for an escape route. Besides the main gate, the nearest exit from the courtyard was through a set of arched French windows in the west wall, but reaching them would require a sprint of almost forty feet-with no cover. “Shit! If they pin us here for too long, those guys from the bottom gate’ll catch up from behind!”

“What about-” Castille began, just as the flowers above him blew apart in showers of petals. “Excusezmoi!” he yelled at the gunmen in complaint. “What about those windows?”

Chase followed his line of sight-ten feet away in the south wall were two windows, at roughly chest height. But they were each less than two feet wide. “Bit small, aren’t they?” He counted the shots from Hajjar’s men, already sensing a pattern. Pop up, fire a three-round burst, duck back while his mate repeated the process…