Provenance by Alex Archer

Author:Alex Archer [Archer, Alex]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction - Adventure, Fiction - Science Fiction, Pirates, Women archaeologists, Swords, Adventure stories, General, South China Sea, Science Fiction, Adventure, Relics, Good and evil, Fiction, Science Fiction And Fantasy, Adventure fiction
ISBN: 9780373621293
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2008-03-09T18:00:00+00:00

17

Bima grunted and sagged against Annja. Her left arm went around him. She felt wetness on her palm on his back.

She pulled him quickly into her small cabin, sat him gently on the deck, then lowered him to his back. He resisted briefly when she tried to pull the rifle away from him. She twisted it free, took hold of the pistol grip herself. She snapped off the safety as her new friends had shown her how that afternoon.

A man appeared in the door. He was smaller even than Bima and wore a dirty yellow rag tied around his head. He held a Kalashnikov leveled from the hip.

Instinctively she fired a burst into his chest. He fell over backward.

Holding the SAR-21 toward the open door she quickly knelt to examine Bima. The lower left front of his khaki uniform was maroon with blood. She guessed the slug had hit him in the lower back on that side and punched out through his belly. The good news was there was a distinct, small hole visible in the blood-soaked cloth. The bullet hadn’t tumbled through his viscera like a miniature circular saw.

If it had nicked his kidney, he’d probably be dead before he could get any kind of treatment that would do him any good. If it hadn’t, and if he was very lucky, he might not bleed to death.

First things first, she told herself. He was moaning and stirring feebly. She straightened, went to the door, took two quick looks around the doorframe, left and right down the corridor. She made sure to poke her head out at a different level in case somebody had spotted her the first time.

She saw no one. She heard plenty, though. Shouting and shooting.

A lot of shooting.

She grabbed the dead man by a foot clad in a filthy tennis shoe and dragged him inside. The dark rubber runner on the deck might hide the blood trail and it might not. A body lying right outside the doorway would be a dead giveaway. It was a slim hope. But from the sound of things, slim hope was the best she could wish for.

She shut the door and locked it from the inside. It would certainly not stop bullets, nor probably repeated kicking. But she had reflexively pulled Bima out of line with the doorway, and thus a probing burst fired blind through the door. And any attempt to break the door down would make enough noise for Annja to prepare a lethal reception.

Again it was a thin advantage. Better than none.

A nasty crack vibrated through the deck and bulkheads, a sharp sound scarcely muffled by distance. She guessed somebody had just laid into the vessel with an RPG. She knew it was the favored weapon of the modern terrorist.

Or the twenty-first century pirate.

She went quickly to the porthole. She could not see the main deck fore or aft. The superstructure spanned the hull from beam to beam. What she did see was blinding yellow-white and blue light beams stabbing the Ozymandias from several directions.

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