by Alex Archer
Erene was at her heels, pistol blazing in her fist. The flashes were strong enough to light the narrow stairs that led back up to the ground level. Stanley fell only once on his way up. Annja grabbed him and kept going.
Two guards at the entrance had their weapons up, but made their decisions to fire too slowly.
Annja threw the sword, piercing the heart of one man while she dived at the other, throwing her feet forward to take the man's feet out from under him as he fired over her head.
The man fell forward and slammed his chin on the frozen ground, knocking himself out. Annja grabbed the man's pistol from his hip holster as she rolled to her feet. Even as she was standing, she pulled the sword back into her hand.
Erene erupted from the catacombs. She fired the pistol with rapid but methodical deliberation, taking out three guards while bullets kicked chunks of frozen earth from the ground at her feet.
Another pair of guards stood at the nearby SUV. Erene stopped to reload her borrowed pistol with a magazine she took from the man Annja had killed with the sword.
On the run, Annja lifted her left hand and fired at the man in front of her, cycling the pistol empty. Some of the bullets hit him in the head and shoulders, but most tore into the front windshield of the SUV.
Then she ran for the man on the other side of the vehicle, diving past him as he fired his assault rifle on full-auto, narrowly missing Stanley, who was quick enough to dive to the ground.
Annja scrambled to her feet almost five feet behind her opponent. She swung a backhanded blow with the sword. By the time his body dropped, she was rounding the front of the SUV, heading for Stanley.
She helped the writer to his feet and guided him to the SUV. Looking inside, she saw that the keys were in the ignition. She opened the door and shoved him inside, then started to crawl in herself.
Erene ran around to the passenger side.
Gunfire blasted the windshield to pieces. Bullets cut the air around her. She had a brief impression of the gunner to her left, then he went down under a short burst of fire from Roux's captured AK-47.
"Annja!" Roux called, running up.
"You're still here?" Annja started the SUV. "Don't you think that's pretty foolish?"
Roux looked around. "Where's Garin?"
"Back there," Annja replied. "The old woman shot him."
Roux's face blanched and he swore. Then he bolted back toward the catacombs.
"Oh, now that's really stupid," Annja said.
Roux fired, killing at least one of the two men seeking to crawl out of the catacombs. Then he plunged inside.
Annja opened the door and slid out. She turned to Stanley and Erene. "Get out of here. Don't stop until you get to Liepaja."
Then she ran after Roux, stopping only long enough to grab one of the flash-bang grenades she'd noticed on one of the dead men's combat harnesses. She'd seen the grenades in action before and had a healthy fear of them. But they could also be useful. Especially in the dark in small, enclosed spaces.
She ran down the steps leading into the catacombs, but not before she saw that Stanley and Erene weren't leaving. They were arming themselves.
The idiocy was spreading.
****
Annja came up behind Roux, yelling to let him know it was her as he blasted a man back through the doorway cut into the wall. She underhanded the flash-bang through the door, bouncing it off the stone cube away from where Garin had been and hoping that it didn't carom over the edge.
"Cover your eyes," she advised, closing her own.
The flash-bang went off with a series of deafening detonations and bright flashes that pained Annja's eyelids. Even though she'd had her eyes closed and had turned away from the eruption of light in the other room, spots still danced in her vision.
Roux sprinted forward, slamming a fresh magazine into the AK-47.
I can't believe you're in here for Garin, she thought. But the relationship between the two men wasn't easy to describe. From father and son to mortal enemies wasn't a normal progression, but they'd done it. Either end of that spectrum manifested at the strangest times, though.
She followed Roux into the other cave, listening to the AK-47 roar without mercy.
Most of the men in the room were down. Annja was sure some of them were missing. She wondered if Roux's bullets had knocked them over the side or if they'd fallen over the edge while blinded by the flash-bang.
The old woman was standing against the wall with her small pistol thrust before her. Annja didn't know if the baroness was reacting to the sound of Roux's rifle or still retained some of her vision, but she started firing at once.
Roux fired again. The bullets slammed into the old woman and drove her back against the wall. She dropped to the ground without a sound.
No one else remained around Garin, who was deathly still on the ground. An overturned electric lantern played over him as he lay sprawled there.
Annja knew Garin had to be dead. The old woman had fired at least three times that she had counted, and blood had spread over the stone floor.
"Garin!" Anguish filled Roux's cry. The old man began tearing Garin's shirt open.
Some unnamed sense warned Annja of the men to her left. She turned, bringing the sword up as metal gleamed on an assault rifle thrusting out of the shadows.
Whirling, Annja drew an emergency light stick from her pocket and broke it against the stone cube. Pale blue light invaded the immediate vicinity, drawing four men out of the darkness.
One of them was Wolfram Schluter.
Gripping the sword in both hands, knowing that Garin and Roux were vulnerable behind her, Annja took the fight to her opponents. No matter what, she wasn't going to let them get past her. In his grief, Roux wasn't even paying attention.
Annja chopped through two of the rifles, causing one of them to misfire and the other to blow up in the man's face as rounds cycled through. His face a bloody mess, he screamed in agony and fell over the ledge. His screams lasted for a moment, then ended abruptly.
Ducking low, Annja sliced another man across the stomach, mortally wounding him. Footing became slippery with his blood.
She brought the sword down onto the last man's head, intending to go for Wolfram Schluter next. But the blade got caught in the dead man's skull.
Schluter fired at her, but she grabbed the heated barrel and shoved it away as it fired the last four rounds in the magazine. Unable to hold on to the superheated metal, Annja released the rifle and abandoned the sword, intending to call it to her again.
Before she could, Schluter reversed the rifle and butt-stroked her in the face, dazing her and driving her back to the edge. He kept up his attack, hitting her once more in the side of the head before she got a hand up.
You can't let him get by you, she told herself. He'll kill Roux.
When Schluter drew the rifle back, Annja shifted and launched a side kick. Her foot drove the rifle into Schluter's face and chest, ripping it from his grip. He reached for the knife at his hip, roaring with rage, then came at her.
Sweeping her left arm out, she blocked the overhead thrust, broke into his overhand strike the way she'd been taught, caught his wrist in her left hand, slammed his elbow with her right hand to make the joint bend, then spun and stepped back under his arm as she twisted the knife to bring it back toward him.
The knife went into Schluter's chest easily, propelled by his strength and hers. It pierced his heart and he crumpled to his knees, looking surprised. He tried to speak but couldn't. When life left him, he fell over onto his side.
Breathing hard, cut and battered, Annja looked around. No one else remained standing except Erene and Stanley at the doorway.
Roux was administering CPR to Garin, working hard in the familiar rhythm.
As she approached him, Annja felt sorry for Roux. He hadn't just lost an enemy; he'd lost a son. Tears tracked his cheeks.
"Roux," she said softly.
"He's not dead," Roux said. "His heart has just st
opped. That's all."
"There's nothing you can do. She shot him three times at close range. He never had a chance. He died trying to save me." At least, Annja was pretty sure that was what Garin intended to do.
"He's not dead," Roux growled fiercely. "He was wearing a vest."
Annja leaned in closer then, seeing that Garin had been wearing a Kevlar vest under his clothing.
"But the blood – "
"One of the rounds missed the vest and went through under his shoulder. If I can get him breathing again – " Roux was starting to flag.
"Let me." Annja performed the compressions, then leaned down to breathe air into Garin's lungs. When she did, he kissed her, long and tender, surprising her completely.
Annja recoiled and slapped him hard enough to turn his head.
"What are you doing?" Roux demanded.
"He's faking," Annja said, getting to her feet.
Garin started laughing, but that triggered a coughing fit that almost strangled him. "I wasn't faking," he said weakly. "Not at first. Roux got my heart going again, but I saw you sitting there and I wondered if you'd try to save me, too."
"It was a mistake," Annja assured him. "An aberration. It won't happen again."
"If it takes getting shot to get a kiss," Garin complained hoarsely, "I hardly think it's worth it. You didn't put any effort into it at all."
Annja slapped him again. Then she and Roux helped Garin to his feet.
Garin gazed down at the dead woman. Sadness showed on his face. "At one time, I really loved her. In all my years, I've never met anyone who attracted me the way that she did."
There was no mistaking the pain in his voice, but Annja didn't think it was all from the wound in his shoulder.
Epilogue
Erene and Roux tended to Garin. Certain that no law-enforcement people would show up for some time, Annja stared at the ruins of the church. What kept coming to mind was the entry in Ozolini's journal. The part about Thor's treasure being buried under the others.
She walked to one of the SUVs and got a shovel and pick from the back.
"Where are you going?" Roux asked.
"To check out a hunch," Annja replied. "The Roman soldiers buried in that catacomb weren't the only ones buried here. I keep remembering how the Curonians killed the priests who occupied this church."
"They hated them," Erene said. "All the old stories tell of the Germans who came to our lands and tried to subjugate our people."
"But what if they killed two birds with one stone?" Annja asked. "What if they killed all the priests so no one would know they buried Thor under their crypt?"
She walked the remains of the church and found where the apse had been. Crypts were usually constructed under the hemispherical section beyond the altar and to the liturgical east.
She broke through the tiles and into the crypt.
****
It took over an hour to dig through the bottom of the crypt. She knew where to dig because she'd struck the floor again and again until the sounds turned hollow.
Climbing down into the hidden crypt, using iron handholds mounted into the wall, she found the remains of the Viking who'd chosen to make Courland home.
His mummified remains lay in a small boat. Furs and blankets, leather pouches of food and carved items occupied the boat with him.
Roux, Stanley and Erene climbed down to join her.
"Not much in the way of treasure, is there?" Roux mused.
Garin kept bellowing from above, wanting to know what they had found.
In fact, there was no real treasure. A few silver coins and a bag of amber, which wasn't worth as much these days as it had been when Thor had been entombed.
But he had his amber ax. It was a beautiful piece of craftsmanship.
"Do you think he could call down the lightning with this?" Annja asked.
"I don't know," Roux answered.
"It would be cool if he had," Stanley said. Despite his violent adventures, he still carried a sense of wonder about him.
"What is it?" Garin demanded from above.
They ignored him.
"There's something about this handle." Erene's knowing fingers prized at the bottom of the handle. She used Annja's Swiss Army knife to pull the cap from the end. Inside sheets of calfskin parchment were neatly coiled within the hollow space.
Pulse pounding, Annja freed the parchment sheets from the hidden area and used a flashlight to examine them.
"What is it?" Garin demanded again.
A smile spread across Annja's face as she looked at the carefully drawn map and Norse ruins inscribed on the parchment.
"This is a map," Annja said. "Thor's trade map." She flipped through the other pages. "And this, from what I can decipher of it, is his life story. Where he went. What he did. How he came to be here." She'd studied Norse runes while at Hadrian's Wall. The Norsemen had left their mark there, too.
"Well done, Annja," Roux congratulated. "It appears that you've made a very significant find."
"Not me," Annja said. "Mario was the one who discovered this story and followed it here. I only picked up the trail he'd left. This is his find. I'm going to make sure he gets full credit for it."
"Mario would have wanted that," Erene said.
"I know," Annja said.