The Thirteenth Skull (Alfred Kropp #3)(23)

“Au revoir, Alfred Kropp,” Jordain Garmot said. He raised the black sword over his head, gripping the dragon-headed hilt with both hands.

“Saint Michael,” I whispered. “Save me.”

As if in answer, every window in the storehouse exploded inward and wide shafts of bright white light shot into the room.

05:03:42:19

It happened very fast.

Black canisters sailed through the broken windows, vomiting thick white smoke as they fell. My captors screamed at one another in French, except for the word “Kropp,” which I guess is “Kropp” in any language.

In seconds the room was filled with a thick, choking fog; it felt like someone was pressing hot matches against my eyes. I couldn’t see anything but could hear the sharp pop-pop of small-arms fire and the bumping and cursing that always came with people stumbling around in the fog. Someone yanked me to my feet and I instinctively flung my head back to butt him. He blocked my head with one hand and slapped a hood over my face with the other, I guess to protect my eyes from the tear gas.

“I am trying to help you, Miss Alfreda,” a voice purred in my ear.

Nueve.

He whipped me around, only I couldn’t see him through the hood. I heard a loud snap! and the handcuffs fell off my wrists and clattered to the floor. Then he lifted me right off my feet and slung me over his shoulder. The hood fell off my head.

He sprinted to the wall, grabbed a thick black cord hanging there, and pulled it through a harness he wore around his waist. He gave the cord three sharp tugs. The rope pulled taut and we began to rise toward the broken-out window.

I heard Jourdain screech in a voice filled with rage, “Alfred Kropp!” before we were pulled through the window and then straight up. An Apache helicopter was at the other end of the black cord, and soon we were six stories high, swooping over the rooftops of the Old City. Since I was slung facedown over Nueve’s shoulder, I had a real bird’s eye view of downtown Knoxville.

I shouted, “Why don’t they pull us up?”

“Too dangerous!” he shouted back.

Too dangerous?

We soared over downtown, past the First Tennessee Bank building and then Samson Towers, where this whole mess started, a dark monolith of glass and glittering steel; then we were over the river and the boats bobbed four hundred feet below my swaying head, anchored in the murky water. And there was the UT Medical Center and the Army Reserve base on Alcoa Highway, which we seemed to be following as it snaked through the foothills. We were heading toward the airport.

I guessed it was finally safe to pull us up, because the helicopter paused over the highway and we began to rise toward the open hold. I heard sirens below and, peering around Nueve’s torso, saw the spinning red lights of two motorcycle cops as they barreled around a hairpin curve, coming from the city. I slapped him between the shoulder blades and screamed over the roar of the helicopter: “Cops!”

Nueve spun us around so he could get a look. One of the bikes raced ahead, passing directly below us before disappearing around the next curve. The rider had something long and black, bigger than a rifle or a shotgun, hanging over his shoulder.

“Hey!” I shouted, hoping Nueve would hear me over the roar, but at the same time wondering what it would matter. “I think he’s got a rocket launcher!”

Nueve raised his arm and gave some kind of signal to the pilot. We stopped rising and the chopper took off again, banking to the right, taking us away from the road and over an open field.

The maneuver flung us backward and then into a spin, like a dead yo-yo at the end of its string, and as I spun back in the direction of the highway I saw it: the contrail of a surface-to-air missile rocketing toward the chopper.

My scream was buried in the wuff-wuff-wuff of the blades’ draft. A second later the chopper erupted into a fireball. For an instant, before gravity took hold, we hung in midair, and then we fell.

Fast.

It hadn’t been that long since the last time I fell to earth, except that fall began thirty thousand feet up, not a hundred, and that time I fell with an angel holding me, not an OIPEP agent who didn’t even have the good sense to bring a parachute to an aerial-rescue mission.

I didn’t look down. I just closed my eyes and waited for the end.

Then I hit water.

The chopper had carried us over a dairy farm, and the explosion had hurled us directly above a pond. I hit the muddy water facefirst, swallowing maybe a gallon of it. I broke the surface choking and spitting and coughing, opening my eyes to find myself face-to-face with a milk cow. The cow looked at me, I looked at the cow, and the cow cried chicken first: it bellowed a warning call to its buddies and whirled away, mud and cow crap flying from its hooves as it took off across the pasture. A big glob of the stinking goop landed smack in my eye.

Nueve appeared in the shallows beside me.

“Those weren’t cops,” I gasped. I had a very weird taste in my mouth, and I wondered if I’d discovered the flavor of cow poop.

“Who weren’t cops?” a deep voice intoned.

We looked up. Two people on horseback towered over us, an old man and a kid about my age.

“This is a national emergency,” Nueve said to the old man.

The old man glanced toward the burning wreckage of the downed chopper. “Sure looks like some kind of emergency.”

“We need to commandeer your horses,” Nueve went on.