Solomon's Jar Read Free

its receiver. Annja stood up straight behind the weapon, grabbed the pistol grip, swung the butt around to her shoulder and boldly announced her presence.
    â€œHere I am!”
    Â 
    â€œW HAT HAVE we here?” the leader of the intruders asked sarcastically, putting his hands on his hips. “You here to do the right thing and give yourself up, save these good people a lot of suffering and dying?”
    Annja swiveled the barrel so it aimed straight at the freckled bridge of his nose. “Not a chance,” she said. “Throw down your weapons and walk out of here, and it’s you who’ll be saving yourselves.”
    â€œI think not,” he said. “I think I’ll just start executing one of these little people every count of ten, say, until you decide to surrender.” He raised his Beretta and aimed it at the head of a man who stood nearby.
    Annja pulled the trigger.
    Nothing happened.
    Safety, she thought, with a gut slam of shock. She knew pistols and rifles fairly well. But next to nothing about machine guns.
    She spun away as a trooper behind the leaderwhipped his AKM to his camo-clad shoulder and triggered a burst. The bullets cracked over her head. She dived over the tailgate as a grenade thumped in the bed.
    The explosion drove the big Ram down hard on its suspension. As it flexed back up, the fuel tank went up with a loud whomp, sending an orange ball rolling into the sky, trailing a pillar of black smoke.
    A figure reared up from the truck bed, all orange, waving wings of flame. Demonic screams issued from it.
    â€œBilly!” shouted the trooper who’d thrown the grenade.
    Frowning slightly, the leader raised a straight right arm, sighted down his handgun and squeezed off a single shot. The flame-shrouded head snapped back. The shrieking ceased. The figure settled back into its pyre.
    â€œSpread out. Find the bitch,” the redhead said coldly.
    â€œWhat about these people?” asked the tall black trooper.
    â€œThe hell with them. I want her dead!”
    Â 
    T HROUGH GATHERING EVENING , Annja ran.
    Not so much for fear of her own life. To her own surprise she felt little concern for that. Rather, for her mission. The thought that her mentor might have labored half a millennium to find the sword, and to find a new champion, only to have his labors made futile by such men as these made her blood boil.
    Her footfalls thudded in her ears, above the buzz of swarming insects and the swishing and piping cries ofthe birds that swooped between the trees in pursuit of them. She had no idea how many men hunted her through the hills. They seemed to operate in teams. Three times they had spotted her and opened fire with their false-flag Russian weapons. Fortunately her reflexes—or distance—had prevented her being tagged.
    That and her knowledge of the terrain. She had spent the better part of a month tramping these hills, looking for buried treasure: the cache where Brother João had hidden his voluminous journal from the planters and the troops who hunted him to steal his secrets. She had found it not two days before beneath a cairn of stones half-buried in a hillside, using clues left by the friar after he made his escape to Goa, India.
    She knew Chiriqui’s intimate environs far better than her pursuers were likely to. And they didn’t seem inclined to slow themselves down by dragging along a local to serve as a guide. Besides, she could see they were manifestly arrogant to the point of blindness, accustomed to believing themselves so superior to anyone else that they’d never think of dragooning help.
    She paused in the shelter of an erosion-cut bank, trying to control her breathing with a yoga exercise. The sun had gone from sight, although the sky remained light, stained with peach toward the west. The hollows and low places were filled with a sort of lavender gloom that was almost tangible.
    A deep ravine gashed the land just over the next