In the purple shadow of a vertical rock face she could see Skarda on his knees, hands clasped behind his head, looking at a thin man in body armor with his back pressed against the rock wall, his left arm pinning Flinders against him like a shield, his right hand jamming the barrel of a Colt against her cheekbone.
Flinders’ face writhed in terror.
They’d sent a man around the long way, on the floor of the canyon.
Without hesitation April dropped down into the shadowed channel, still hanging onto the Glock, but thrusting her hands away from her body.
Momentarily startled, the commando spun toward her, ramming the barrel harder against Flinders’ cheek. But when he saw April’s outflung arms, he visibly relaxed. A savage grin split his darkly-tanned face into a spider web of wrinkles. “Gun down or woman dies,” he said in a thick Roman accent. Then into his throat mike he spoke a terse sentence in Italian.
With cool precision April bent to her knees, setting the Glock down on the flat rock, keeping her eyes fixed on the man’s face and shoulders. If Flinders were able to shift even an inch, she could easily shoot him. But the man was a pro—he knew it. Which was why he levered his arm more tightly across her stomach, hugging her closer to him.
Still grinning, he said, “Now knifes.”
April’s hand was just starting its move toward the chest sheath when Flinders’ right foot raised up and stamped down on the commando’s boot. But he was ready for it, shifting his leg slightly out of the way to deflect the blow.
But it was just a feint. Suddenly she sagged, her body going limp as if her bones had melted to jelly. Surprised, the man tried to tighten his grip, but she had already slipped down a few inches.
His eyes dropped.
Just for a moment.
With the speed of a striking snake April’s hand flicked toward her chest. A second later the back of the commando’s head was slammed against the rock, the black oxide blade of the Fusion Fulcrum driven through the frontal bone of his cranium.
A look of surprise froze on his face. Then he sank to his knees and flopped forward in a lifeless sprawl.
Tremors shook Flinders’ body. Tears rolled down her face.
Climbing to his feet, Skarda put an arm around her shoulders.
Her eyes pleaded with April’s. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You told me not to move and I did.”
April shook her head purposefully. “You’re an amateur. But it’s done. We won. That’s all that counts.” She bent, wrenching the knife from the Italian’s forehead and wiping blood and brains on his pant leg. “He must have told them he had us. When he doesn’t show up…”
Skarda nodded. To Flinders he said, “Okay, now get back into that overhang and stay there until we come back.” He showed her a warm grin. “And don’t move.”
___
Going flat on her belly, April snaked up the slope of a low ridge and looked down. This position spanned higher ground than where she had waited before, on a pyramid-shaped hump of tufa studded with basalt boulders. To the west, the sky was gilding rapidly as the sun lowered. It was getting harder and harder to probe for movement in the dense shadows.
Raising her head above a jagged fang of rock, she glanced to her left, where Skarda would be waiting with the Steyr. He was the worst shot of the two of them, and it would be easier for him to hit a moving target with the rifle on automatic. That left April with the Glock, her knives, and the Komar. In this light, the grenade launcher might wind up being her best bet.
For a long time she lay motionless, a mound of darkness in the deepening shadow. Then a sound came to her ears: the faint clink of metal on stone. Inching her head up, she studied the maze of stone formations just below her, concentrating on a narrow valley between two fairy chimneys that would provide the most logical access through the terrain.
Something moved in the shadows. The black outline of a man, glimpsed for a fraction of a second and then gone. Her eyes narrowed to slits. Without even the hint of a movement she waited.
Moments passed and then again the man showed himself, disappearing almost instantly. April calculated her odds. The sun was quickly burning itself out and in minutes the green-gold sky would pale and plunge the canyon into darkness. In this maze of rocks and hidden valleys stalking a man would be suicide.
She counted on Skarda knowing what to do.
Patiently she waited, easing one of the throwing knives out of its sheath. At this distance and in this light her odds of hitting him were vastly decreased, but that wasn’t her objective. Slitting her eyes, she watched the shadows.
Movement: the commando darting to the cover of a jumble of boulders and stone slabs.
Lifting her arm, April let the knife flash across the open space between them. It clanked off rock, an inch above the man’s head.
Whirling, he snapped up the snout of his G36 and sprayed the rocks in the direction of the throw. Bullets tore through basalt, chopping off huge chunks of jagged stone.
But April wasn’t there. She was already racing toward Skarda’s position as he sprang forward in a crouch and let loose with the Steyr, slamming the commando back against the rock in a spray of blood.
She reached his side.
“Good bird-dogging,” he said.
She shot him a terse grin and stared out into the darkness. “We’ve got one more and Jaz. Now they know where we are.”
From the canyon floor they heard a low shout. In a dodging crouch April raced for a broken rock wall, rising up to peer over it. Below she could see the third man running for the Eurocopter, where Jaz stood next to the open fuselage door. The rotor blades began to spin.
Unslinging the Komar, April settled it on her shoulder, unfolding the stock and raising the leaf sights. Uncapping the safety plate, she put her finger on the trigger button and sighted. The third commando was climbing into the chopper. Jaz hopped in after him, dropping to a crouch to haul the door shut.
Some sixth sense warned her.
Just as April fired she jerked her head up and launched herself from the open door, hitting the soft tufa with her knees, then rolling to her feet and pumping her thick-muscled legs in a desperate sprint for the rocks.
The grenade hit and exploded with a thunderous whump, lifting the chopper off the ground in a sheet of flame, pursued by a rolling red-orange fireball as the fuel tanks ignited. In moments the Eurocopter was a twisted mass of flaming wreckage, wreathed in billowing corkscrews of black smoke.
Skarda raced up and dropped down flat beside her, staring at the destruction below. She turned to him with a sour expression. “Jaz got away.”
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “Should we go down and look for her?”
April shook her head. “Too dark. Another time.” She climbed to her feet. “Let’s go get Flinders and get out of here.”
THIRTY-SIX
Paris, France
BELISARIUS looked without interest at the reflected lights dancing in the Seine along the Quai Anatole France and climbed into the idling limousine. Settling back onto the soft leather, he waited.
This meeting was different. There had been no request to buy another Vril bar. A suspicion of alarm flashed through his brain, but he pushed it aside. As long as he had more bars, he was safe.
But whoever the buyer was, he didn’t trust him.
Finally the metallic voice spoke. “How many bars do you have left?”
As he always did, Belisarius tried to analyze the tonal qualities of the unknown speaker. Male, American by the accent. But the pitch had been electronically lowered, stretching out the vowels and rendering the timbre deeper and more sonorous.
His mouth stretched in a tight smile. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
The buyer made no attempt to contest the statement. Instead he said, “Fifty million dollars for the rest of the bars.”
Fighting down an instantaneous surge of greed, Belisarius sat up and considered the offer. Figures raced through his head. He had twenty-three bar
s left. At two million each, sold individually, he would gain an extra four million by making this deal. Not quite the bonus he would like for the risk he would run. And then there was the oddness of this meeting. In the past, the transactions had been simple: bring the single bar to the limo, let the money transfer, leave the bar.
But now the voice betrayed a sense of urgency. Some plan was in motion and a large number of bars were necessary to carry it out.
In the leather-scented darkness, Belisarius felt his lips curve into an avaricious smile. “One hundred million,” he said.
It was a heady gamble, but once the final Vril bar left his possession, his safety net would be gone. He was a living witness, and the life expectancy of witnesses was many times very short.
But for money like this, it was worth the chance. He’d already anonymously bought a compound in Costa Rica, where he planned to have his face altered and live the rest of his days in luxury.
The voice didn’t falter. “One hundred million. Agreed. When the conditions are met, I will transfer the money to your account.”
“What conditions?”
“I want you to sink the bars to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Istanbul, Turkey
IT was almost two o’clock in the morning by the time April handed the Land Rover’s keys to the valet attendant at the Ciragan Palace Hotel. Skarda booked them into a suite overlooking the Bosphorus, but they were starving and too keyed up to sleep, so he ordered a plate of Adana kebabs and dolma for the women, and vegetarian beyaz peynir meze and cig kofte for himself, along with a bottle of Thracian Adakarasi.
After a few bites of the kebab, Flinders pushed her plate away. She looked up at both of them, her face pale and strained. “I thought I was going to die today.”
“I didn’t,” Skarda said.
She shot him an surprised look. “Why?”
“Because April was there.”
The point registered, but her face didn’t change. “You two are made for this, but I belong in a library. Ancient manuscripts may be less exciting, but they’re safe.” She looked at each of them in turn, her tortured eyes probing for an answer.
When Skarda spoke, his voice was kind. “We warned you it was going to get rough.”
“The offer still stands,“ April told her. “We can put you in a safe house until this is over. Out of harm’s way.”
For a long moment Flinders continued to stare at them, a surge of emotions cascading across her face. Then she turned to look out over the water, where reflections shimmered from the ever-changing sequence of colored lights on the Bosphorus Bridge. Finally she shook her head. “No. I have to see this through, no matter what. I owe that to the memory of my parents.”
“You sure?” Skarda asked.
She turned her head and looked him full in the face, her expression determined. “I’m sure. I’m just scared, I guess.”
April’s smile didn’t have a lot of warmth. “Scared can keep you alive.”
Flinders shrugged, her face defiant.
“Okay,” he said. “Fair enough. You’re in.” He hunched forward. “So let’s go over what we know. The Nazis turned the orichalcum into bars and transported them somewhere during the war. We know Jaz and whoever she works for want the orichalcum badly, probably because they want to melt the Arctic ice cap to get at the oil. And whoever Zandak works for, they want it badly, too.”
April finished off a kebab and licked her fingers. “Options?”
Flinders pushed the grape leaf of a dolma with the tines of her fork, then set it down and adjusted her glasses. “I’ve been thinking about what my parents were working on when they disappeared. Remember I told you about the Nazis and their search for Vril? Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel, the feared SS, were obsessed with Aryan mysticism and occultism, and with the search for Vril, the energy source supposedly derived from the Schwarze Sonne, the mythical Black Sun. They believed that whoever possessed Vril would become masters of the world. In the late thirties Hitler was sending out teams to explore caves and mines all over Europe to look for Vril. He was also looking for a race of supermen living in subterranean caverns who were descendants of an advanced antediluvian civilization whose city was inundated by a great flood—in other words, Atlantis. But the Nazi’s version of Atlantis was that the continent of Hyperborea or Thule, located in Antarctica, and its supermen were the originators of the Aryan race, whose duty it was to exterminate all ‘lower’ races. Obviously, Vril was what the Nazis called orichalcum, but I don’t think Hitler really knew what it was. They just developed their own mythology, according to their needs. But in the end, it’s all the same isomer, and now we know that both the Atlanteans and the Nazis mined it.
“But back to my parents. On May 9, 1926, Richard Byrd, who was then a U.S. Navy aviator, and his pilot Floyd Bennett claimed to have flown over the North Pole in a Fokker F-VII Tri-motor, starting from the Svalbard Islands, north of Norway in the Greenland Sea. The flight made him a national celebrity, even though it’s doubtful that he ever reached the Pole.Subsequently, he flew several missions over Antarctica and was promoted to Rear Admiral.
“During World War Two the Nazis were supposed to have established a secret U-boat base in ice caverns in Neuschwabenland in Antarctica, so in 1947 Byrd—already experienced with polar flight—took part in ‘Operation Highjump’, a task force sent to investigate the claim.
“Now here’s where it gets interesting. During his research my father came across a secret diary written by Byrd in his own hand. It gave the details of a clandestine mission Byrd flew over the Arctic in 1946 to look for a secret Nazi research base established there during the war, just like the one in Antarctica. Byrd wrote that he had seen the entrance to an ice cavern with supply crates outside it, marked with swastikas. This is why my parents went to the Arctic. My father was fascinated by Vril.”
Skarda lifted up his chin, considering her line of thought. “So what are you saying? The Nazis might have brought the isomer bars to the Arctic to experiment on them?”
“Why not?” Flinders asked. “By the end of the war they knew they were losing, so they were experimenting with the atomic bomb—anything to find a way to win. So why not the isomer? But they wouldn’t have known what we know—that you need a concentrated beam of light to activate its potential energy.”
“Where is this diary now?” April asked.
“I don’t know. I guess my father took it with him.”
“Do you remember where this base was?” Skarda asked.
A apologetic expression crumpled her face. “You can’t forget—I was about twelve. I was more interested in boys than in archaeology. But I do remember my father talking about Ostrov Gukera Island, which is part of the Franz Josef Land archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. If Byrd took off from the Svalbard Islands, he would just have to fly northeast for two hundred or so miles to reach Ostrov Gukera.”
Skarda reached for his Stealth.
___
Gulf of Mexico
When Skarda’s message came through, Candy Man was chomping a huge bite out of his latest creation: frozen pepperoni pizza smothered in chocolate sauce and chunks of Dove candy bars.
The words appeared on the screen: “Need NASA GPR data for Ostrov Gukera Island, Franz Josef Land, Arctic Ocean. Looking for an ice cavern big enough to be a concealed research base.”
Candy Man’s fat fingers flew over the keyboard. “no prob.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Istanbul
IN the muggy night Skarda sat alone on the terrace of their suite, watching the sprinkling of lights on the Asia side of the strait. His eyelids drooped and his muscles ached, but he couldn’t turn off his thoughts. He knew it was useless to try to go to sleep.
The sound of a soft footstep made him turn his head. Flinders stepped out onto the terrace, easing down into the chair next to him.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
He smiled at her
, nodding. “Yeah.”
“Me, too. I guess I can’t put the day out of my head. I’m still shook up.”
“It’s peaceful out here.”
“Yes.” For a while she looked out over the water, watching a luxury yacht, its sails lowered, powering to the south and the Sea of Marmara. Then she broke the silence. “You and April make a good team. You complement each other.”
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