by Alex Archer
She stopped thrashing, planted her feet firmly beneath her and stood up straight, bringing her head back above the surface. She gasped in a lungful of air and then breathed a sigh of relief when she realized that the muck only came to her waist.
Her relief was short-lived, however.
As she looked around, the dim morning light revealed that she was standing in the middle of an active bog, surrounded by the partially submerged corpses of her former colleagues!
What had happened the night before came rushing back—the sudden appearance of armed intruders at the dig site, the demands to surrender the torc, the deadly gunfire when the archaeologists had refused to do as requested and her own struggle to get as many of her fellow scholars to safety in spite of it all.
The last thing she remembered was staring down the barrel of a gun and her last-ditch effort to get out of the way of the bullet….
Her head throbbed, a not-so-subtle reminder that she apparently hadn’t moved quickly enough.
She brought a hand up toward the side of her head, wanting to know just how bad the wound might be, but stopped herself when she saw the thick coating the peat bog had left on her limbs. There was already enough of it dripping from her head; rubbing it deeper into an open wound didn’t seem like a bright idea.
Despite the early hour, it was already light enough for Annja to see the bullet wounds and dark splotches of blood that stained the bodies around her. These weren’t strangers; she recognized several of them. She recognized Paolo Novick from his curly gray hair. The bright yellow of an NAU sweatshirt identified another body as that of Sheila James, one of the graduate students who’d come overseas just last week. There was Matthew Blake and Dalton Ribisi and… She turned away, shaking off the feeling of despair that threatened to overwhelm her. Several of the dead lay with their eyes open, staring into nothingness, and Annja had the sudden urge to reach out and close them, pulling the blinds on the windows of the souls that had long since fled.
Knowing how close she’d come to her own death, and seeing the deaths of others she cared about, set a red-hot fire burning in her veins.
A careful look around showed her that the shortest route to solid ground was directly behind her, where thick tufts of grass were growing along the bank. But when she tried to move in that direction, she discovered a new problem.
Her feet had sunk into the thicker silt at the bottom of the bog and were now trapped.
Visions of being sucked down beneath the surface swam in her mind and caused her to try pulling her feet free with brute force, yanking upward first on one and then the other. Rather than loosening the bog’s hold, however, all her actions managed to do was to get her feet to sink deeper.
She was stuck.
Annja opened her mouth, intending to call out, to see if there was anyone close enough to help. Surely someone else had survived the brutal attack. But then she thought better of it. While other survivors might be within earshot, so, too, might the very men who had slaughtered her friends. Calling attention to herself while she was trapped would just make her a target.
One that would be almost impossible to miss.
She was going to have to get out of this on her own.
Taking a deep breath to calm her already frayed nerves, Annja considered the situation. She knew she had to work with the bog’s natural qualities rather than against them, if she hoped to get out of this alive.
She slowly began to wiggle her left foot, gently rocking it back and forth. Each time she did so it let a little more of the water within the bog slide between her foot and the thicker particles of peat that kept it trapped. Gradually she was able to loosen the bog’s hold on her foot.
With one foot floating free she reached out and grabbed hold of the nearest corpse, using it to maintain her balance while she began to work on the other leg. The body was that of a blonde woman dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, though Annja made a point of avoiding looking at her face, afraid of seeing the face of another friend. Her efforts pushed the corpse a little deeper into the bog, but it maintained enough natural buoyancy that she could still use it to support herself despite that fact that it was now mostly underwater.
After several minutes she was able to work her other foot loose enough that she could lift it when the time came.
With her feet free, she had to fight the urge to lean forward, to power through the muck with big strokes of her strong arms, for she knew that doing so was exactly the wrong thing to do and would only leave her trapped again, perhaps in an even more precarious position. She knew the surface of the bog would support her if she let it; the corpses floating around her were proof of that. With that in mind she leaned backward instead of forward, letting her head and upper back come in contact with the surface of the bog. When she felt its chill wetness lapping at her skin, she lifted her legs and spread her arms wide, allowing the bog to bear her weight.
It worked!
She floated on the surface and if she’d held still an observer wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between her and any of the other dozen corpses surrounding her.
So far, so good. Now comes the hard part, she thought.
Solid ground was only fifteen, maybe twenty feet away, but if she moved too quickly she’d sink and wind up trapped all over again.
Slow and steady wins the race, she told herself.
Using the nearest corpse as a lever, she pushed it firmly toward her feet. The act sent her own body gliding across the surface of the water, taking her a foot or two closer to the bank and what she hoped was solid ground.
Little by little, she made her way to safety.
When the water beneath her grew so shallow that she was having a hard time keeping her feet up, she rolled over and discovered that the bank was less than an arm’s length away. Letting her feet down beneath her, she stood cautiously.
The bog immediately tried to tighten its grip.
This time she was ready for it. Rather than fight it, she simply let herself topple forward like a downed tree. Her upper body easily reached the bank. Sinking her fingers into the thick grass she found there, she pulled herself up onto firm ground and crawled away from the bog’s edge on hands and knees.
Once she had her heart rate under control, she sat back on her haunches and thought about her next move. The sun was up now, its thin light breaking through the trees around her, and by its height she estimated that it was somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00 a.m., which meant that it had been at least that many hours since the attack had occurred. She had no idea if the killers remained at the camp or if they had fled once their job here was done, but it didn’t matter either way. There were things she wanted at the camp and that was where she needed to go.
She stood and did what she could to wipe off the worst of the muck from the bog, which wasn’t much. She purposely left the wound on her head alone; no sense messing with it until she had some way of cleaning it properly.
When she finished, she reached inside her sports bra and retrieved the torc from where she’d stashed it the night before. She had a bit of a bruise from where it had pressed against her tender flesh, but the torc itself was no worse for the wear. Not that she’d expected it to be; it had already survived a couple of thousand years in the bog.
Still, she was relieved that the killers hadn’t found it. With it in hand, her chances of discovering what this was all about, as well as who was behind it all, went up considerably.
It also told her that the killers, whoever they’d been, made mistakes. The bodies should have been searched before being dumped into the bog. If they had been, those doing the searching hadn’t been very thorough at all.
Not that she was complaining. A proper search would have shown them that she was still alive, so their poor effort had actually saved her life.
She stuffed the torc back into its hiding place and spent a few minutes searching through the tall grass at the edge of the bog until she found the trail the killers had used to get there. T
he added weight of the bodies they’d carried had pushed their footsteps deep into the soil and it was an easy matter to follow them back through the woods in the direction of camp.
It was cold and she was wet—not a good combination. Her first order of business was going to be dry clothes. After that she would figure out a more solid game plan. The authorities had to be notified, the bodies recovered from the bog, but before any of that happened she wanted a few minutes alone with whatever evidence the killers had left behind at the scene. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust the police to do their job; she did. This one just happened to be a bit more personal for her and she wasn’t going to leave justice in the hands of someone who might not care as strongly as she did about seeing it served up properly.
Craig’s smiling face flashed in her mind and she swore that she’d make those responsible pay for what they had done.
As the telltale flashes of color that marked the camp’s tents became visible through the trees, Annja slowed down. It wouldn’t do to just blunder into the middle of camp, particularly if the killers were still hanging about, so she stopped and listened instead.
Aside from the calls of a few morning birds, no other sound reached her ears. While that didn’t mean the perpetrators were gone, it was certainly a good sign.
Still, it wouldn’t hurt to be armed.
She reached out with her right hand and plucked her sword from the otherwhere. It flashed into existence in a heartbeat as it always did and just having it in hand was reassuring.
Cautiously she continued forward.
11
The camp had been ransacked. Several of the tents had been torn down entirely, while the contents of the others were strewn about, left to lie where they had fallen during what Annja assumed was the search for the torc.
She slipped from one piece of cover to another for the first several minutes, leery of suddenly running into any of the men she’d encountered the night before, but eventually she realized that the camp was deserted and that let her move about more freely in the open.
The killers, whoever they had been, had fled.
Her free hand touched the torc through her shirt. What was so important about it that someone would kill to possess it? she wondered.
The entire attack just didn’t make sense. While she knew there was a burgeoning trade in black-market artifacts, she wouldn’t expect a piece like the one she currently carried to be of particular interest. They’d only dug it up yesterday, for heaven’s sake!
She knew the only way information could have gotten out about the torc was for someone on the dig team itself to have relayed word of the find to the outside world.
Which meant one of the people she’d been working with for the past two days was responsible for the deaths of more than thirty others.
It wasn’t a comfortable thought. Realizing how close she’d come to dying sent a shiver down her back.
It also put a fire in her belly. She would find out who was responsible for this and bring them to justice, no matter what.
Annja came to her own tent and discovered, not surprisingly, that it hadn’t escaped the attention of the intruders. She picked up her clothes from where they’d been scattered about and pieced together an outfit of clean jeans and a fresh T-shirt. An oversize Henley would help ward off the cold. Annja stripped, leaving her muck-covered clothes in a sodden heap on the floor of the tent. Goose bumps rose across her body as the chill morning air caressed her naked flesh and she didn’t waste any time pulling on her new set of clothes. Her boots were unfortunately ruined, but some rummaging around in the other tents turned up a spare pair that was only a size bigger than her own. An extra pair of socks helped overcome the difference; it wasn’t perfect, but it would do for the time being.
Feeling slightly better, Annja turned her attention to the rest of her belongings. Her iPod and BlackBerry were gone, more than likely snagged by one of the intruders, but she found her wallet, camera and laptop computer tossed into a corner. The computer screen had been smashed, what was left of it still bearing the muddy impression of the boot that had done the deed, but a few minutes with a screwdriver she scrounged from elsewhere allowed her to recover the hard drive that contained all her notes from the work they had done to date. Even better, the camera looked undamaged. That was the first good news she’d had all day; with the data on the drive and the torc in hand, she had a much better chance of identifying it.
Once she did that, she could narrow the list of individuals who might have been interested enough in it to kill to possess it.
Annja searched through the other tents, looking for a working cell phone, but came up empty. She briefly considered going back and searching the bodies of the dead for one, but then decided against doing so. Even if she got lucky enough to find one, it would probably be too waterlogged to operate properly, anyway. And the thought of pawing the bodies of those she’d been working next to only hours before made her wince with distaste. They deserved better than that and she’d see to it that something was done as soon as she got out of here.
She considered her options. Without a working cell phone, she couldn’t call in help from the authorities. Nor was anyone expected to arrive at camp that day, which meant the assault could go unnoticed for days unless she got back to civilization and reported it. To do that, she needed to hike back to the staging area where she’d left her rental car.
It wasn’t a bad hike, she knew, but it would get hot soon, so she looked around until she found a shoulder pack and a few bottles of water to go inside.
She stepped out of the tent she’d been rummaging through and that’s when a sound caught her attention. It was faint at first, just a distant thrumming, but it slowly grew louder as it drew close to the camp. It only took Annja a few seconds to recognize the sound of an approaching helicopter.
She turned in a slow circle, trying to pinpoint the sound, or, even better, get a look at the approaching aircraft. She couldn’t see it yet, but she knew it wouldn’t be long. When it arrived, she had to be ready. If she could flag it down she could get the authorities on-site quickly before the elements had a chance to destroy too much of the evidence.
She glanced around, looking through the personal belongings scattered about the camp until she spied a bright red sweatshirt, then ran over and picked it up. It should be colorful enough to catch the attention of anyone looking her way, she thought.
The sound was loud now, filling the air with the steady rhythm as the rotors beat their way closer, and she moved into the center of the camp, only a few steps away from the spot where Craig had died. His blood had seeped into the ground, leaving a dark stain, and seeing it, Annja again vowed that she would make those responsible pay for his death.
She could see the helicopter now, moving in her general direction. Most of the body was black, with the section directly under the rotors painted a bright yellow, a color scheme she recognized as belonging to local law enforcement. She began waving her arms over her head, the red sweatshirt held aloft in one hand, doing what she could to attract the pilot’s attention.
But as the aircraft drew closer, her waving hands faltered and then stopped. She had that feeling again, that sense that something was terribly wrong, and ever since taking up the sword she’d learned to listen to such things. Doing so had saved her life more times than she could count.
The helicopter altered course slightly, now headed directly toward the camp, and that sense of impending disaster rose up inside her like a wave about to break.
She had to get out of sight and she had to do it now!
Annja didn’t stop to think, didn’t consider that she might be turning her back on the only help for miles around. Instead, she turned and ran between the nearest two tents, getting out of sight as quickly as possible.
Once behind the tent she’d been standing in front of, she circled around to her left, dashing between several others until she found a place where she could watch the helicopter without being in the open
.
The helicopter began its descent, the rotors pounding the air and whipping up a heavy breeze that tossed clothing and camp supplies about indiscriminately. Annja was forced to shield her eyes from the dust and dirt kicked up in its wake.
The aircraft settled to the ground in the center of the camp. Doors on both sides were thrown open and men wearing the uniforms of the regional police force climbed out.
For a moment, Annja thought everything was going to be all right. That feeling of foreboding must have been for something else. The police were here; she could breathe a sigh of relief and turn the investigation over to the professionals for the time being, at least until she’d had a chance to rest and get a better understanding just why someone would kill to possess the torc.
But as she moved to leave her hiding place, to call out to the police officers fanning out through the camp, her gaze happened to fall on one of the men at the back of the pack.
The last time she’d seen him, he’d just tried to put a bullet in her skull.
He was dressed just like one of the regional police officers, and from the easy way that he interacted with the rest of them, it was clear he wasn’t a stranger.
What on earth was going on?
One thing was certain: any hope of getting help from these men was gone. With the killer an accepted member of their group, she couldn’t trust that they wouldn’t shoot her on sight.
Quickly and quietly she eased her way back from the tents and then slipped into the trees behind them, headed deeper into the woods.
12
When she felt she was far enough into the tree line to not give away her position, Annja picked up her pace, headed on a course that would take her directly away from the camp on the straightest line possible. She knew the police would be fanning out, looking for both the perpetrators and for any survivors, and right now she couldn’t afford to be detained as either.