Clive Cussler: The Tombs

She looked down out the window and saw that a man had run to the aid of the fallen climber and another was picking up the aluminum ladder. When they saw Remi, they fired several shots in her direction. She ran to the opposite side of the second floor, holding on to the curtain rod, and hurried around the stairway.

It was as she had feared. Another man was on a ladder outside the window on that side. He used a tool that looked like a hatchet to break the glass. Remi was already moving, so this time it was easier to catch him before he was ready. She jabbed the long wooden pole through the broken window, still running. But this man still had the hatchet in his hand and he flung it through the window at her. She ducked to the side and it spun past her head and hit something behind her, but she managed to plant the pole in the man’s chest and kept running until he went over backward, clinging to his ladder.

Remi saw the control panel for the second floor’s systems. She dropped her curtain rod, ran to it, opened the cover, and turned on the switch for the second floor’s steel shutters. The lights dimmed, the motor gave a sickly groan, and the shutters came down only about a foot and then stopped.

Downstairs she could hear the booming of the battering ram again. She ran to the head of the stairs and looked down. Sam, Pete, Selma, and Wendy had pushed a lot of heavy furniture against the front door. A pair of desks were on their sides with some steel filing cabinets lying horizontally behind them. The four defenders stood in a twenty-foot circle, watching the door. Pete was on the left, aiming a shotgun, with Wendy on the right pressing the other shotgun to her shoulder, and Selma was at Wendy’s shoulder, aiming a pistol with both hands. Sam was in the center with one of Remi’s Les Baer Semi-Auto Match rifles. The sturdy steel front door had buckled a little from the constant pounding, and Remi could tell they were almost ready to bend backward enough to let the bolt slip.

As she watched and listened, the battering stopped. Then, from outside, came the sound of a car engine. It grew louder as it came closer, then louder still. It roared for a couple of seconds and then— Bang! —the car hit and the front door swung open. The desks and filing cabinets slid inward across the floor as a high-riding pickup, with a crash barrier mounted in front of its grille, appeared in the opening.

Sam had fired a couple of shots as soon as the door had flown open and there were holes on the driver’s side of the windshield, but there was no driver. Clearly the pedal had been jammed down with a weight or a stick and the truck aimed at the door.

Men in black clothes appeared a few yards back from the door, hidden by the high bed of the truck, and fired bursts into the house with automatic weapons.

Sam called out, “Get upstairs!”

Pete, Wendy, and Selma, firing at the open doorway, backed their way to the staircase near the center of the house. Sam fired well-placed rounds with the rifle whenever he could see an arm, a leg, or a weapon protrude from behind the pickup. As he did, he backed toward the stairs after the others.

Remi, who had been watching for more ladders, could hardly bear to see Sam down there alone, trying to delay the intruders. She stepped halfway down the stairs and fired rapidly at the opening with her Glock pistol. She was still firing when Sam reached around her waist, picked her up, and forced her up the stairs with him. They climbed the stairs backward, aiming and firing, keeping the intruders outside. Remi ran out of ammunition just as they made it up to the second floor.

As she reached for another magazine, Remi had one last look before Sam and Pete rolled the grand piano down the stairs. It tipped, turned, and then slid with a crash and a disharmonious vibration of hammers against strings, then jammed in the stairwell. But before it stopped, Remi had seen a dozen armed men rushing in past the broken front door. As she reloaded, Sam and Pete ran back to the gym area to get more objects to block the stairs. The first floor was lost.

THE SECOND FLOOR

SAM AND PETE PUSHED A HEAVY CROSS-TRAINING MACHINE, and then a treadmill, into the stairwell. These helped block the opening so it would be difficult for the intruders to hit anyone if they fired up the stairs, and the weight alone would probably keep them from trying to storm the second floor. Remi finished reloading and stepped back behind an overturned steel weight table and watched the stairway for any sign of activity. All at once, from the floor below, there was a furious rattle of automatic-weapons fire, none of it directed at the stairwell. “What are they doing?”

“Trying to fire upward at us through the floor,” said Sam. “They won’t have much luck because all the floors are reinforced concrete. Otherwise, we couldn’t have a pool up here.”

There was an abrupt noise that sounded as though the firing had grown into a military battle and moved outside. There was a loud, explosive bang. Pete and Wendy looked out the front windows. “Look!” Wendy shouted.

Outside, in the sky above the ocean, the air turned red, then blue, then white as flarelike pieces floated slowly down until they reached the black water, where they met their own reflections and were extinguished. “Fireworks!”

As they watched, a streak of golden sparks shot upward from a raft tethered to a boat out in the cove. When the projectile reached its apex, it blew up in a starburst, the fiery stars leaving behind burning trails like the drooping branches of a willow tree.

“They’re using fireworks to cover the noise!” Selma announced. “Or to explain it. People will think all the shots are part of a celebration.”

“Right,” said Sam. “A big blowout at the Fargos’.”

Another shell was fired into the air and its explosion was green. Another explosion replaced it with bright red, then yellow. Each change was punctuated by an initial bang and then a staccato barrage of pops like the rattle of automatic weapons.

Selma shouted, “The window! No you don’t!” There was another man on a ladder at the broken window where Remi had pushed the first man off. Selma held her pistol in both hands and fired four times before she hit him and he fell from the window. Pete picked up the curtain rod Remi had used and pushed the ladder away from the house.

“We’ve got to get the steel shutters deployed on this floor,” said Sam. “Wendy, turn off all the lights. Remi, if you see something down the stairs that looks like part of a human, shoot it. Pete, you watch the windows. If anybody shows up, do what Selma did. Selma, watch my back.”

Sam opened a small steel door in the wall by the front windows. He waited until the lights were off, then engaged the switch. The electric motor groaned, but the shutters descended only another inch or two. Sam took a small hand crank out of the box, knelt to stick it in a socket just above the windowsill, and turned it. The shutter lowered slowly down to the sill. He moved to the next window and knelt again to crank it down. But just as he did, a ladder appeared at the next one.

A man scrambled up the ladder, punched the window in with a hammer, and stuck his arm in holding a Škorpion automatic pistol. Remi shot the arm before he could fire. He dropped the weapon and made his way down a few feet, his arm hanging limp, and Pete pushed the ladder over with the wooden pole.

Sam cranked the shutter down over the window and moved on to the next one. As he cranked, the window next to it burst into a hundred shards as men outside fired at it. Sam shook his head to get rid of the glass in his hair and kept cranking. But after the next window, there was a sudden quiet. He looked up for a second, then ran to the other side of the house and began cranking shutters down.