by S. A. Beck
“Help us! Police!”
“Quiet!” Yuhle bellowed. “You’ll get us in trouble!”
Footsteps stomped down the stairway on the other side of the door. The bolt slid back, and the door opened.
The guard stormed in, shouting something at Otto in Russian and getting ready to kick him.
Just then, Yuhle snuck up behind him and put the rope around his neck. He pulled, sticking a knee in the small of the guard’s back to get some leverage as he strangled him.
The guard’s eyes bugged out in pain and surprise. Otto yanked the rope from around his legs and scrambled to his feet.
The guard remained surprised for only a moment. In a lightning-fast move that Otto didn’t fully see, he managed to twist around, knock Yuhle’s knee away, and flip him so he landed with a thud on the floor. His glasses skittered away.
Otto used his rope like a whip and smacked the guard across the face, catching him in the eye. As Otto wound up for another swing, the guard punched him. He was half blinded from the rope, so the punch didn’t connect properly, but even a glancing blow on the side of the head sent Otto staggering.
Then the guard’s attention got distracted by Yuhle grabbing his legs and trying to pull him down. That didn’t happen, but it did get the guard momentarily off balance and bought Otto a precious second to recover.
“Run!” the scientist shouted.
Instead Otto whipped the guard again, only to have him grab the end of the rope and yank it out of Otto’s hand.
“Run!” Yuhle repeated, struggling with the man’s legs and keeping him immobilized for the moment. “Get the computers. They’re more important!”
The desperate command woke Otto up to priorities. He bolted out the door.
Beyond was a flight of bare concrete steps. He raced up them and found himself in a large room that looked like a work area. The first thing he noticed was Dimitri at a table a few feet away, hunched over a map. Also on that table were the laptops of the Atlantis Allegiance, open and connected to heavy cables that led to another laptop that had some sort of program working on it.
Otto didn’t have time to see anything else. He ran for Dimitri, who was too startled by Otto’s sudden appearance to do anything except stand there and stare until Otto’s fist connected with his jaw and sent him tumbling to the floor, unconscious.
Otto looked around. Another table by the wall held some more computers, all switched off, and piles of books and some of Mali’s old medieval manuscripts. He glanced at the computer with the program running. All the writing was in the Cyrillic alphabet, and more Russian script was appearing in a dialog pane. A progress bar showed the figure “97%.”
Did that mean it was almost done? Was this the computer hacker cracking the codes to the Atlantis Allegiance computers?
A cry of pain from the cellar pushed Otto into action. He pulled the cords out of the Russian computer. The dialog pane and the progress bar froze.
He turned to grab the computers, but at that moment the guard appeared at the top of the stairs. Also, a door opened to his right, and another guard, equally huge and looking equally pissed off, burst in.
They closed in on him, hemming him in as he backed up to a corner of the room, the laptops clutched to his chest. The guard from the cellar drew his automatic pistol.
This is it, Otto said to himself. This is how I’m going to die.
Just then, the dull thud of an explosion echoed from the open door to his right.
Chapter 14
AUGUST 15, 2016, TIMBUKTU
4:00 P.M.
* * *
Jaxon was frantic. After a brief breakdown in the desert that delayed them a couple of hours while Vivian fixed a cracked radiator cap, they had come back from the refugee camp to find their hotel rooms looted and Yuhle and Otto gone. The man at the front desk had been knocked out from behind and hadn’t seen anything. The two had simply vanished, along with all the computers and spare weapons. At least the thieves hadn’t gotten the last of the healing water Jaxon had found in the desert. That had been in an ordinary-looking plastic bottle on a shelf, and whoever had robbed them had obviously not thought it was of any value.
Vivian didn’t want the police involved, so she gave the hotel worker some shut-up money and tried to call Grunt, who had not checked in for far too long. No answer. That made them even more worried. Helpless to do anything about whatever the trouble might be in Marrakech, Jaxon and Vivian concentrated on the problems in Timbuktu. They had spent the rest of the evening scouring the streets of Timbuktu for any sign of their friends, finally giving up in the small hours of the morning. Then, after sleeping a few hours, they waited until the manuscript museum opened. It was a large, modern building built by the French government to preserve Timbuktu’s massive collection of medieval manuscripts. They asked to see Dimitri Rublev. The workers there said he hadn’t come in that day and had left early the night before. That struck them as odd, they commented, because he came in every day, usually staying from opening time to closing. “I hope he isn’t sick,” one curator said.
The museum people offered to call him, but Vivian said no.
“We have to catch them by surprise,” Vivian told Jaxon as they left the building’s cool interior and returned to the furnace of the Saharan morning. “We don’t want him knowing we’re after him.”
“What makes you so sure Dimitri was involved?” Jaxon asked.
“I suspected him from the start. I’ve been asking around about other foreigners in the area. Everyone notices them because there are so few. It turns out there are a lot of Russian researchers working in Mali and Mauritania. Mostly archaeologists and historians like Dimitri.”
“You think that the Russian government is after my people too?” Jaxon asked, her heart sinking.
“I wasn’t sure before, but I am now,” Vivian said, checking her weapons as she drove the Land Rover through the streets of Timbuktu.
Salif was still in the back seat. He had stayed with them after they had dropped off the refugees with the Atlantean community.
“I can have our people check around town,” he offered. “We will not be noticed like you will.”
“All right,” Jaxon replied. “But please hurry. We don’t know what they’re doing to our friends.”
Salif organized a couple dozen Atlanteans to spread out through the small city. They quietly asked around each neighborhood whether a group of Russians lived in the area. One woman went to the very fringes of the northern edge of town, and there, in a dusty neighborhood looking out over the desert, heard that some foreigners had just rented a house there. The woman took it upon herself to do a bit of spying and came back to report. By then it was midafternoon, and Jaxon was getting increasingly desperate.
“They are in a big concrete house,” the woman said. “I saw Nadya, Dimitri’s friend, plus many strong men I didn’t recognize. I think they are all new arrivals. One always stood by the door smoking, but I think he was really there as a watchman.”
Jaxon thanked her and got directions to the place, and she and Vivian set out in the Land Rover. Salif they left behind, not wanting to put the kind Atlantean in harm’s way.
“Once we get there, I want you to hang back, honey,” Vivian said. She was fully armed and had stuffed some small grenades in the pockets of her jacket. Sweat poured down her face, but she had put on the extra clothing because she needed the pockets.
“You can’t go in there alone!”
“I don’t see what choice I have. At least I have some stun grenades. Thank God I brought some along to the refugee camp. Whoever broke into our rooms took all the rest. I don’t even have enough ammo for this fight.”
“I can help. I’m Atlantean,” Jaxon objected. “I’m stronger and faster than you are.”
“And you have no military training and are too valuable to lose.”
Jaxon remembered how Vivian had crept away while they were dying in the desert, so Jaxon could have the last of their water. When she
had found the mercenary lying nearly unconscious in the sand, she had said the same thing about Jaxon being more important.
“I’m not buying that this time,” Jaxon objected. “We have to save Yuhle and Otto, and the only way we can do that is to work together.”
Vivian shook her head, a lock of her long blond hair falling out of her headscarf.
“No,” she said. It sounded final.
Jaxon bit her lip. If Vivian thought she was going to sit back and do nothing while her friends were in danger, she had another thing coming.
But what could she do? Jaxon felt a sudden rush of fear. What good was a bit of strength and speed when faced with guns?
They passed through the crowded center of Timbuktu with its adobe mosques and old homes to a newer area. The buildings, mostly ugly concrete blocks, stood more widely apart. Goats nibbled on sparse grass in the open, windblown lots between them. Through gaps in the buildings, they could see where the neighborhood ended and the land opened up into desert. The afternoon sun shone harshly on the brown sand and the gray concrete, making everything uncomfortably bright even through the tinted window.
Vivian stopped the Land Rover, and they got out.
“You stay here,” the mercenary ordered. “According to the directions that woman gave, the Russians are in a building just around that street corner and to the left. I’m going to sneak in and surprise them. Do you know how to drive?”
“Sort of.” One of her foster parents had taught her the basics.
“Great. You’ll be our getaway driver. Here are the keys. Get in the driver’s seat and wait. We might need to get away fast.”
“All right,” Jaxon said. She had no intention of following orders but knew they had no time for another argument. “Good luck.”
Vivian nodded and loped off down the street. Four little girls playing a game with pebbles in one of the empty lots stared at Vivian curiously. Jaxon figured that foreign women didn’t go jogging in their neighborhood very often. When the girls noticed Jaxon hanging out by the Land Rover, they came over.
They made a half circle around her and stared up with big, curious brown eyes. All wore threadbare but clean djellabas and headscarves. Their little brown bare feet were powdered with pale sand.
One nudged another. The one who got nudged, who looked about eight, stepped forward and asked something in Arabic.
Jaxon grinned at her. “Sorry, I’m trying to learn Arabic, but I don’t even know enough to know what you asked, let alone answer you.”
This brought forth a chorus of giggles.
“Hello, what country?” the one in front recited in heavily accented English.
“America,” Jaxon said, giving Vivian a nervous look as she disappeared around the corner. “Look, I don’t have time for a language exchange right now. I’m about to risk my life trying to save my people here.”
She locked the Land Rover, pocketed the keys, and hustled down the street. To her dismay, the little girls followed her.
Jaxon turned. They stopped. “Look, I can’t have you tagging along. Get going.”
She motioned for them to leave. All that earned her was more giggles. They imitated her motion and giggled some more.
“No, I’m serious, get going!”
“Geeet goeeinggg!” the girls imitated.
Jaxon rolled her eyes. Normally this would be funny and cute, but this was not a normal day.
Actually risking my life has become way too normal lately, Jaxon thought.
“Move!” she shouted, kicking sand at them.
They stared at her, confused. Irritated, she picked up a pebble and threw it at them, taking care not to hit them.
“I said move!”
Two ran off. One burst into tears. The fourth gave her the finger.
“You watch too many American films, kid,” Jaxon told her and ran after Vivian. While she felt bad about bullying a group of little girls, at least they weren’t following her into a gunfight anymore.
Jaxon rounded the corner just in time to hear the first explosion.
The first thing she saw was a large concrete block of a house with shuttered windows. A muscular man lay on the ground next to the front door. It lay open, and smoke issued from it.
“You sure know how to make an entrance, Vivian!” Jaxon said with a laugh.
She felt the old thrill again, the same thrill she had felt when she and Brett Lawson had gone hunting criminals in the worst neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The thrill of purposely going into danger.
Jaxon picked up speed until she was beating the average Olympic sprinter. Not enough to win the gold, perhaps. She needed some practice.
The thought amused her so much she almost overshot the house. She had to dig in her heels, plowing a pair of deep furrows in the dirt road, in order to stop in time. A nervous face stared at her from an open doorway across the street. The door quickly slammed shut.
Jaxon hurried past the unconscious body of the sentry and to the front door, took a quick peek inside to make sure no one was waiting to shoot her, and entered.
Like with most houses in this region, the first room was a large sitting room for guests and socializing. Vivian’s sense of socializing was to toss a stun grenade inside. Two men who looked Russian lay on the thick carpet, out cold. One had his head resting on one of the many pillows that lined the edges of the room. If it weren’t for the smoke hanging in the room and their rumpled clothing, they would have looked like they were taking a nap. Gunfire echoed down the hallway leading off into the rest of the house.
Jaxon peeked around the corner and saw Vivian at the end of the hallway, firing into a room at someone Jaxon couldn’t see. The mercenary ducked back as bullets pockmarked the concrete wall. She reached into her pocket, pulled out another stun grenade, and tossed it into the room.
A flash and a deafening boom. Vivian peeked around the corner. Jaxon moved to join her.
Just then a doorway between her and the mercenary opened, and a muscular man gripping a pistol jumped out and aimed at the back of Vivian’s head. Jaxon’s ears rang from the explosion of the stun grenade, and no doubt Vivian’s did too, because she didn’t turn at the sound of the Russian’s approach.
Jaxon rushed down the hallway and slammed into him. Even though the man was twice her size, he flew forward as if he weighed no more than a pillow. His arms gyrated as he tried to regain his balance, his gun firing harmlessly into the ceiling, and he landed hard at Vivian’s feet, knocking himself out on the concrete floor.
The mercenary turned in surprise. She gave Jaxon a thumbs-up. Words were pointless, thanks to the ringing in their ears.
Vivian motioned for her to leave, the same motion Jaxon had tried on the little girls a couple of minutes before. Jaxon was tempted to give the same response. Instead she just shook her head.
This was no place for an argument. Vivian peeked around the corner. When no shots came, Jaxon did too. Another man, this one with an AK-47 assault rifle, lay stunned on the floor. A door lay open at the opposite end of the room. They ran for it.
Halfway across the room, a man popped out from the other side of the doorway and aimed a pistol. Jaxon’s hand whipped out, grabbed a chair she was passing, and flung it at the gunman.
It missed, splintering against the doorframe, but it came close enough to make him duck back around the corner.
Vivian shoved her aside and got next to the doorway. She thrust her arm around the corner and took several unaimed shots, poked her head around the corner, and then eased into the doorway.
The man lay dead just on the other side. Three bullets had found him, two in the chest and one in the face. Jaxon retched and looked away. Suddenly this wasn’t so much fun anymore. That could have been her. That could have been Vivian. It was bad enough it was him.
She dared another glance at the dead Russian, unable to look away. His face bore a look of surprise, like it had never occurred to him that it could end this way. Jaxon wondered if he had family back in Russia
somewhere. Of course he did. Most people weren’t orphans like her. Most people had family in their lives. Loved ones. A pool of blood spread out on the concrete floor around him. Its edge reached Jaxon’s shoe. She shuddered and pulled away.
I helped do that to him, she realized. These people kidnapped my boyfriend and ended up making me an accessory to murder.
Why couldn’t people just leave the Atlanteans alone? Why have all this killing in the first place?
Jaxon stood stunned for a moment. It took her several seconds to snap out of it, and when she did, she discovered that Vivian had disappeared.
A roar of gunfire from another room told her where she had gone. Jaxon hurried in that direction, eager to get away from the body in the hall. She came to another doorway, paused, and peeked around.
It looked like a computer lab. Vivian huddled behind an upturned table next to Yuhle and Otto and exchanged fire with a couple of Russians hiding behind a doorway on the opposite side of the room. Several shattered computers lay strewn on the floor between them. The Russians had the better cover—concrete walls instead of a thick wooden table, and their steady fire kept her friends’ heads down. Bullets chewed up the table.
Jaxon ducked back into the hallway, her stomach twisting when she saw she had left bloody footprints on the floor, and went to a little side table that sat against one wall with a vase stuffed with plastic flowers. She grabbed both and got back into the fight.
First she tossed the vase, which smashed against the doorjamb the Russians hid behind. It made them flinch, giving Vivian enough time to return fire.
The Russians recovered the next instant. One shot at Vivian, forcing her to drop to the floor once more, and the other aimed at Jaxon.
Using her superhuman speed, she easily ducked behind the doorway before he even got to fire. The bullet planted itself harmlessly in the far wall.