Alex Archer - Seeker's Curse

The echoes of angry shouts and random shots flew around the rafters. The horde of pigeons that had been rousted by the enormous uproar now fluttered around in the shadowed eaves like smoke trying to escape a burning building. Annja started to run. If I follow the walls, she reasoned, eventually I’ll find a way out of here.

Shapes appeared ahead of her. She pushed off the wall with her right hand as she spun, adding momentum as she tried to dart into another aisle. A burst of full-auto gunfire ripped the air behind her.

Becoming aware that the rack of shelves to her right ran only about ten feet before another one began, Annja stopped and grabbed the uprights farther from the outer wall. She prayed that whatever was stored on them, too dust caked and cobwebbed for her to identify in the light and urgency, weren’t priceless relics. Or if they were, that they weren’t fragile.

Adrenaline gave her extra strength. With a couple of quick shakes the whole thing came toppling down across the aisle just as a couple of pursuers appeared. One of them threw up an arm before disappearing with a wail of despair beneath several hundred pounds of plundered antiquities and massive shelves. The other vanished behind a solid wall of dust, his path blocked by the shelves now propped at an angle across the narrow passage.

Annja ran on. A man dashed into the aisle ahead of her. Without time to think she swept her arm along the shelf beside her at a foot or so below her shoulder level. Another big dust cloud swirled out; at least one large pot flew through the clouded air right at the smuggler’s head even as he raised a Kalashnikov assault rifle.

He fired a burst straight up into the rafters, causing a brief shower of bloody feathers to fall on him as he warded off the pot with an upflung left elbow. Annja’s peripheral vision caught another pot lying on its side right in front of her just before she stepped on it, twisted her ankle and went down. Instead she rushed it with a swift soccer kick. It shot up at an angle and caught the gunman by evil chance, square in the crotch.

He started to jackknife. The sword appeared in Annja’s hand. She slashed down right to left, met brief resistance and raised a quick spray, black in the gloom. The man dropped onto his face to rise no more.

She vaulted the body and found herself back in the middle of the cleared space. Golden debris littered the floor. And facing her across twenty-five feet of fallen antiquity stood Bajraktari, his good eye and his bad wide.

He smiled and raised his gun two-handed. “Prisoner!” he exclaimed.

Above her Annja heard a crash, the tinkle of falling glass. Something sailed over the terrorist leader’s head to bounce with several dwindling thuds on the floorboards between them.

It looked like a short length of pipe with holes drilled in the sides and big hex nuts screwed onto either end. As it happened Annja knew at once what it was, having seen them demonstrated by some of her friends in Special Forces once upon a time. It was a U.S.-made M-84 stun grenade, commonly known as a flash-bang.

By reflex Annja had turned away, covering her face in her arms and just dropping. Bajraktari, she noted in the instant before she shielded her eyes, just stood there gaping at the grenade. He didn’t seem to recognize it. Then again, relatively few people who saw them in use close up and personal like that lived to recall the experience.

The blinding flash neither blinded nor stunned Annja, although she was temporarily deafened by the blast, which was beyond loud and hit her body like a big bat.

Survival urged her to pop right up again and run. Already feeling the effects of stimulus overload, her body was slow to respond. She got up to one knee with a high-pitched tone singing through her skull, aural aftermath of the shattering noise, and looked around. Maybe I’m a little stunned after all, she thought.

The tableau took her breath away. Sunlight of a sort, grayish and feeble by the standards of the outside world but almost dazzling in this dim hell, poured through a busted skylight. Men in black masks and bulky black suits slid down ropes from the gaping hole. One of them fired a machine pistol one-handed. The walls and rafters danced with muzzle-flames in all directions.

With the attackers, almost certainly Greek police or army special forces, and the Kosovars blazing enthusiastically away at each other, and dust and smoke everywhere, and pigeons flapping through the mayhem in frantic attempts to find their way out, the disoriented Annja felt for a dizzy instant as if she was starring in her own personal movie.

She glimpsed a big black-clad arm reach around Bajraktari’s neck from the rear, dragging the thoroughly dazzled gang leader back into shadow. Duka was doing his bodyguardly duty. Then two things kick-started her body and her brain back into lightning action. First, the sheer animal desire to survive, the same thing that had the pigeons so agitated. Her scattered wits had coalesced enough to grasp that lingering in the midst of a firefight in a darkened warehouse was no way to stay breathing.

The second was her intellect re-evolving toward human intelligence from about the level of moss. She realized that getting caught either by the smugglers, who would now believe beyond a doubt she had set them up even though it wasn’t true, and the authorities, who would know beyond a doubt she was trafficking stolen antiquities with well-armed criminals, which would be little better and possibly worse than catching a stray round.

She knew neither side was going to feel like listening to her explanations.

She darted into the nearest welcoming dark aisle as a random burst took out the lone light bulb hanging over the cleared space, adding to the darkness and confusion. Bad guys abounded, and if the cops had anything on the ball, there were going to be plenty of them, too.

Annja reckoned that increased her chances of escape. Everybody was so busy killing each other and trying not to get killed they likely had little attention to spare for a lone, apparently unarmed woman.

Hold that thought, she told herself, racing for the outer wall. She burst out into the corridor between it and the shelves.

A smuggler stood not twenty feet from her, holding an assault rifle. His eyes went wide when he saw her. He raised the rifle as she started to turn for a desperation dive back into the doubtful sanctuary of the aisle she’d just left.

A black-clad knee came up right between the gunman’s wide-braced legs from behind. The impact raised him onto his toes. His rifle came down and to his right and went off, a short burst kicking up long splinters from the floor and blasting another cloud of dust from the shelves.

The leg straightened, then slammed back diagonally across the gunman’s right shin, sweeping it out from under him. Pivoting from the hips, the man behind slammed him face first into the floor. Annja felt the impact through the soles of her feet. The smuggler made a quick grab behind him with his left hand. As he went down he clawed the black balaclava off his assailant’s head.

For a moment Annja and the counterterror operator, or whatever he was, stared at each other. He had a long, dark olive face and his curly hair was sweat plastered to his skull. His eyes were dark and piercing and very wide at the unexpected sight of a Western woman in tattered business clothes in the middle of a warehouse takedown in the back of beyond.

Annja’s gaze slipped past him and her eyes went wide. From the corner of her vision she saw a look of skepticism cross the operator’s face: You think I’m gonna fall for that old trick, lady?

As she opened her mouth to shout a warning, she knew she would be too late.

Either instinct or her genuine fear saved the operator. Twisting his upper torso, he threw himself down. As he did he yanked a handgun from his thigh-tied quick-draw. Two shots flamed out before he landed on the prone, motionless body of his first opponent.