“Leave it,” Skarda said, his voice firm. “It’s not what we’re here for.”
From the hallway, April called out in a hushed voice. “Park!”
Stepping through the exit door, he found her standing over the body of a Swiss Guard, his red, blue, and yellow doublet in striking contrast to the drab surroundings of the archives. A long halberd lay across his chest, moving up and down with his regular breathing. Skarda knew that the Guards didn’t normally carry guns, but only ceremonial weapons.
“I just put him out,” she said. She pointed at a communicator on the floor next to his right arm. “But he’s probably already called for help. We need to get out of here now. Did you find it?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it’s here.”
“Okay. Let’s move!”
Racing back into the vault, he grabbed Flinders, hauling her out. Quickly he secured the doors.
They ran for the elevator.
___
When the elevator doors cranked open, two Guardsmen stood waiting for them, their halberds poised for attack.
The shorter of the two charged forward, lowering his pike, his face twisting with menace. Lunging forward, April grabbed the shaft, using the man’s forward momentum to drag him off his feet. His forehead slammed into the frame of the elevator car and he flopped backward, unconscious.
The second guard lunged, the point of his halberd aimed at Skarda’s stomach. Pivoting, Skarda grabbed for the pole, but missed. The man had anticipated the move and jerked the weapon to his left. Flinders cried out as Skarda stumbled. But the momentum of his lunge made the guard unstable on his feet and both men slammed into each other in a tangle of arms and legs.
With a quick step forward, April reached low and smashed her fist against the Guard’s jaw.
He was out.
On their feet, they sprinted for the reception area and the outer door. The men in suits gaped. Shouts rang out behind them. April burst through the door, seeing a Jeep idling at the curb. The Vatican State logo was painted on the side.
She vaulted into the driver’s seat with Skarda next to her and Flinders in the rear. With a squeal of tires they took off as three more Guardsmen erupted from the Archives entrance.
Barreling down the Via Borgo Pio, April screeched into a right turn on the Via di Porta Angelica. Straight ahead of them the northern wing of Bernini’s colossal colonnade encircled St. Peter’s Square.
“We can ditch the Jeep in St. Peter’s and get lost in the crowd!” April shouted. The wind rushing through the open vehicle tore her words away.
But Skarda was looking at the sky. He tapped her shoulder and pointed upward. She leaned forward, seeing two Mi-25’s speeding toward them past a backdrop of cirrus clouds.
“Great,” she muttered.
Glancing behind him, Skarda saw another Vatican Jeep crammed with Swiss Guards closing the gap. “Company!” he shouted.
Wrenching the wheel, April cut onto the Piazza Pio XII, the road that hugs the great circle of the Square, punching her foot down on the gas pedal. A truck blasted its horn, veering, and a group of women in shorts and halter tops scattered, yelling curses in Italian. On their left a parking area opened from the street. Downshifting, she ran the Jeep into a slot and they hopped out, running for the safety of the Square.
___
Tourists from all over the world thronged St. Peter’s Square, mingling with priests, nuns, and Church officials in a swarming, ever-shifting sea of humanity. Skarda looked up as they merged with the crowd. The two attack helicopters were clattering closer. Beside him, a middle-aged man also turned his face to the sky, then grabbed his wife’s arm, steering her toward the shelter of the colonnade, his face tight with concern.
Twisting around, Skarda looked back the way they had come. The pursuing Jeep had pulled up at the entrance to the Square and the Guardsmen were fanning out, moving into the crowd, looking for them. By now they had reached the obelisk, the eighty-three-foot-tall four-sided red granite pillar transported to Rome from Alexandria in 37 CE by the emperor Caligula and moved to its present location by Pope Sixtus V.
Flinders looked up at the sky, shielding her eyes with her right hand. “What are they doing?”
The helicopters were swooping down lower over the Square, casting flitting black shadows over the crowd like gigantic birds of prey. A nervous muttering broke out, turning to shouts and screams as the choppers hurtled lower, whipping up a hurricane of rotor wash. People broke apart, running toward the safety of the colonnades on either side.
April was marking the progress of the Guards, who were still wading through the mass of tourists at the east end of the Square. Now they stopped and looked up, frowning and talking into their communicators.
The nose of the lead Mi-25 dipped and lowered. With a blast of white smoke a rocket streaked from the starboard pod, exploding in an area cleared of people. Chunks of cobblestones and travertine shot into the air and rained down. A woman screamed, shockingly loud. Tourists broke into a run, stumbling over each other, their faces contorted in panic, eddying around Skarda. On his right, one of the Guards had found a pistol and was pushing his way through the crowd, uselessly firing at the helicopters, the slugs bouncing off their thick armor plating.
On the fuselage of the nearest Mi-25 a door slid back. Three men in red rappelled down, their boots thudding against the cobblestones. Arcing their Ak-47’s into firing position, they faced the fleeing crowd. A wide circle of empty space cleared around them as people broke and ran in terror.
A Guardsman broke through the throng, shouting in Italian. One of gunmen swung around in a tight spin, his finger tightening on the trigger.
The man stopped in his tracks.
From the second Mi-25, Pakosz and Macek rappelled down, followed by Zandak. The men ran to the base of the obelisk, pressing blocks of yellow-colored plastic explosive into place.
“CL-20,” April said. “Nitramine explosive. A lot more powerful than C-4.”
More screams cut through the panicked babble of the crowd. The Guardsman with the pistol had worked himself to the edge of a knot of fleeing tourists. With a harsh cry he launched himself forward, running at the nearest commando, shouting in Italian. Macek whipped around, cutting him in half with a burst of slugs.
Screams filled the air.
When the charges had been set the men backed away, raising their rifles high and firing warning shots. By now the panicked crowd, streaming for the safety of the colonnades, had cleared a wider oval around the obelisk. Still, people swirled around Skarda, knocking against him.
A new sound rose to his ears. He looked to his left, seeing a dark gray helicopter approaching fast from the west.
“A109M,” April said. “Carabinieri.”
She meant the Arma dei Carabinieri, the Italian national military police.
Zandak glanced at the sky, but seemed unconcerned by the intruder. Taking a few more steps back, he pressed the button on a remote detonator and the CL-20 exploded.
Skarda reacted instantly, dragging Flinders to the ground, covering her with his body and clapping his hands over his ears. A few feet away April landed on her belly, throwing her arms around her head. This close to the obelisk, the explosion was deafening. Chunks of red granite rained down on them, thumping against their unprotected backs.
Rolling to his knees, he could see April already getting to her feet, wreathed by a corkscrewing column of black smoke that rolled skyward. The blast seemed to have done less damage than he expected, but the heavy granite base was fractured by lightning bolts of cracks.
In a deafening roar of rotor blades, the A109M swooped closer, too low over the Square, its beating blades driving off the few tourists who had remained to gawk at the spectacle.
Skarda ducked.
“Park!” April jabbed a finger at the obelisk. “Run!”
Skarda jerked his head at the column, seeing the jigsawing fractures snaking up the vertical shaft of the obelisk. He grabbed Flinders’ arm and yanke
d her to her feet. “Come on! We have to get out of here!”
April was already racing toward the southern colonnade.
With a crack like the sound of a tree trunk snapping the base of the obelisk blew into fragments. Then, swaying for a moment as if it were caught in a mini-earthquake, the massive stone pillar toppled, plummeting like a descending headsman’s sword onto the approaching helicopter, smashing it to the cobblestones in a swelling fireball that mushroomed upwards amid coils of thick black smoke. Multi-ton blocks of granite and flaming, twisted metal scattered across the plaza. From the tip of the column the capstone shot off like a champagne cork.
Skarda stared in disbelief, the aftershock of the blast still ringing in his ears. Smoke stung his eyes, making them water. But through the churning cloud that blanketed the plaza he could see a dull glint of metal flung ahead of the shattered obelisk that resolved itself into the shape of an inverted turtle shell, tarnished blue-green by verdigris.
And there was another object, too.
One he couldn’t make out through the smoke.
Flinders was shouting something to him, but his hearing hadn’t cleared. She dragged him closer, so she could put her lips to his ears. “Alexander the Great’s breastplate!” she yelled, pointing at the turtle shell. “The one Caligula stole from his tomb! He must have ordered it buried in the capstone after his death!”
Boots pounded through the smoke. Men in red jumpsuits were racing towards the breastplate.
But April had seen it, too.
Changing direction, she broke into a sprint, dodging past them. Skarda saw her stoop on the run and snatch the other object from the cobblestones.
Immediately rifle barrels snapped up—
But Zandak snapped out an order.
The guns dropped.
She cut left, catching Skarda’s eye, her left hand jerking toward the southern circle of columns.
“Come on!” he yelled.
Grabbing Flinders, he took off after her. Closer to the colonnade, the smoke was thinning out. He could see April darting in between the Doric columns, glancing back at them. In a moment they had caught up to her.
With a grin, she brought up her right hand. She was holding a rectangular-shaped object, about a foot-and-a-half long, whose top end had been shaped into a half circle. Its intense emerald-green surface reflected daylight, outlining the strange glyphs that crawled across its face, carved in bas-relief.
Flinders gasped. “The Tablet!”
April handed it to her. Taking out his Stealth, Skarda snapped photos of the artifact as Flinders’ trembling fingers traced over the ancient letters.
Then the sky above was torn apart by an ear-splitting roar. April jerked her face up, seeing one of the Mi-25’s swooping toward them.
“Let’s move!” she yelled.
With an ear-piercing bang the row of columns next to them exploded. Skarda ducked, dragging Flinders closer to him. The beating of the attack helicopter’s rotor blades was like a volley of gunshots in their ears., threatening to blow them to the ground.
Legs pumping hard, they cut across the Via Paolo VI onto the Piazza del Sant-Uffizio, racing past the Palace of the Holy Office. Eating up the distance behind them, the Mi-25 swooped lower, buffeting their backs with its rotor wash. The Gatling gun stuttered into life. Hot 12.7mm rounds tore up the air over their heads, chewing up the asphalt and slamming into parked cars in a storm of crumpling metal and glittering fragments of flying glass.
Holding his arm in front of his face, Skarda gritted his teeth and kept going. But in a flash he realized the gunner was deliberately aiming over the heads. They’d seen the Tablet in Flinders’ hands and didn’t want to risk damaging it!
Then a new sound caused him to twist his head around: two more Carabinieri choppers zooming in from the south, their pintle-mounted machine guns churning out a lethal stream of .50 caliber bullets at the Russian gunships.
Abruptly the Gatling gun broke off. The Mi-25 slued, veering around in a tight arc to face the A109’s as the Italians zoomed in to attack. In the background Skarda could see the second Russian chopper still hovering over St. Peter’s Square.
Running beside him, Flinders had broken into a stumble, her lungs heaving with exertion.
“Come on!” he yelled. He pointed at April, who was cutting a hard left into a side street, packed with parked cars. “We can duck behind those cars!”
They raced after her, diving into the protection of a minivan and crouching low. Skarda raised his head. From the wing pod of the lead A 109 an infrared homing air-to-air missile streaked out, rocketing toward the Russian chopper. The Mi-25 stood its ground. Then from its nose a laser beam shot out, targeting the missile and instantly jamming its sensors. The rocket zoomed past the chopper in a wake of white smoke, plowing into the roof of the Palace where it detonated in a gout of flame, scattering roof tiles.
Now the second Carabinieri zoomed west, trying to maneuver around to the rear of the Russian gunship. Over the Square, the second Mi-25 was speeding toward them, swinging east to fly around in a circle.
A new noise added to the din. With a grind of gears, a 6x6 truck accelerated forward on the Via Paolo VI, the driver standing on the brakes and wrenching the wheel in a tight turn so the bed of the truck faced the Square.
The second Russian chopper zoomed closer, heading for the colonnade. Two men hopped out of the truck, throwing back the canvas covering. From this angle Skarda could see them hauling out what looked like a length of silver pipe attached to a rail guide. Manhandling it into position, they aimed it skyward.
April saw it, too, nodding in admiration. “EMP pulse gun,” she said. “Watch what happens to that chopper.”
Skarda watched the men aim the EMP at the oncoming Mi-25. He heard nothing, saw no muzzle flash. But ten seconds later the gunship seemed to freeze in mid-air, its engine abruptly quiet, as if someone had switched off all its power. Yawing back and forth, the huge ship spun as the pilot fought the cyclic control, and then it was losing altitude, still propelled by its forward momentum, its rotors whipping the air in autorotation. It dropped like a stone, then was yanked back up again, its fuselage twisting to and fro. Skarda could see the pilot inside his bubble canopy, frantically working the controls. Then suddenly the chopper swung around, dropping backward in a violent hooking arc, as if an unseen hand had jerked it with a string, yanking it across the Square above the heads of the horrified fleeing crowd.
Seconds later it collided with the dome of the Basilica, top-first, its titanium blades spinning like a buzz saw, carving into the masonry of the dome with a splintering crunch-crunch-crunch until the fuselage rammed against a supporting arch and exploded in a blast of flame and smoke.
From the rear of the 6x6 Jaz hopped down, hefting a G36, bracing her legs wide and spraying the remaining Mi-25 with bullets as it roared around to face the Carabinieri chopper. A rocket streaked out from the Russian wing pod, blowing the speeding A109 to fiery bits.
Completing its circle, the Mi-25 hovered to face Jaz. For a moment it hung motionless. Then a swath of .50 caliber rounds spat from the Gatling gun. Jaz ducked low, dodging right, leaping for the cover of a parked Fiat. Skarda watched a hurricane of bullets rake over the cab and engine compartment of the 6x6, then tear up the street in a straight line directly at the Fiat, blowing up big chunks of asphalt and almost cutting the little car in half. The Fiat exploded, hit by a rocket.
Unfazed, Jaz shot to her feet, firing another burst at the Mi-25, now swooping past low over her head. Before it could complete its turn, she broke and ran, racing in Skarda’s direction. Bullets smacked and ricocheted all around her, spanging off metal and thunking into the ground, tearing up furrows of flying divots of grass and dirt along the parkway in the wake of her pounding feet.
Skarda looked skyward. Another Carabinieri chopper clattered into sight, firing two rockets from its wing pods. The Mi-25 broke off its attack on Jaz, veering around to face the new threat, its laser beam lancing
out. The rockets veered off course, one blowing a huge crater in the street, tossing an SUV on its side, the other exploding against the side of a building.
Jolting to a halt, Jaz braced her legs and emptied her magazine at the tail of the Russian chopper, tearing up the ninety-degree gearbox. Spirals of oily black smoke spewed upward, torn to tatters by the rotor wash. The Mi-25 yawed right, spinning hard, but the pilot pitched forward on the cyclic to compensate.
The Russian gunship was in trouble.
Clear of the threat now, Jaz took off running toward the line of parked cars, her legs pumping furiously. She had just made it past the bulk of the minivan when April stepped out, throwing out her right leg and pivoting behind her, locking her forearm across the blonde woman’s neck.
But Jaz was faster.
Dropping her rifle, she rammed her chin to her chest, simultaneously reaching around and clamping a vise-like hand April’s wrist. Then she spun her around, throwing her heavy muscular arms around her midsection in a bear hug.
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