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cheese. When it struck his spine she felt a jar of resistance.
Annja turned, straightening her right leg to brake her forward progress and
drive her into a pivot left to attack the other gunman. She pulled the blade
with her. The first gunman jackknifed at the impact of the blade against his
midsection.
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The second attacker had wits enough about him to turn toward her. She brought
the sword around and over her right shoulder. The masked gunman raised his
weapon. She had the quick impression it was in an attempt to ward off the
sword stroke, not to shoot.
She cut him transversely, right down to left. Continuing the stroke up and
around, she cut him again left to right as if completing a giant X. He
screamed his partner must have screamed, too, but Annja never heard then
fell.
She glanced around and had to gulp air to keep from losing her breakfast.
Apparently expecting little resistance from a pair of pampered young
middle-class women, the two assassins evidently hadn't bothered with hot,
cumbersome body armor. The coroner is not going to like that, she thought.
The sudden roar of rotors made her look up. A blue helicopter with white trim
swooped overhead, lashing Annja with a horizontal storm of grit and debris.
For a moment she felt exhilarating relief the police!
Then the chopper settled down to a precarious flat spot on a slope fifty yards
above the road cut. The other two masked men dragged Jadzia, still kicking and
shrieking obscenities, toward it.
Annja took the obscenities on faith. She could no longer hear Jadzia for the
beat of the feathered blades. She felt a surge of admiration for the pigtailed
blond girl. She wasn't fighting effectually, but by God she was fighting.
One of her abductors swung up an Uzi one-handed and let off a burst at Annja.
Most of it hit the taxi with a sound like a woodpecker going after a derelict
washing machine. But enough bullets bit chunks out of the sod and kicked up
sprays of the crushed gravel lining the roadbed that Annja had to dive and
roll uphill for the dubious shelter of the shot-up car. She aimed for the
front, where the engine block could pretty reliably be counted on to stop
fast-jacketed 9 mm bullets that would slice right through the thin-gauge body
of the car.
When she peeked over the hood, the helicopter was rising against the great
gray mound of Vesuvius. Jadzia struggled against various sets of restraining
arms in the helicopter's open doorway.
No other attackers remained in sight. Annja realized she had never seen
whoever had opened fire on the cab first. Evidently that gunman or men had
also piled into the aircraft, probably from the other side.
The driver's Beretta still lay where she'd dropped it. Seizing it, Annja
snapped to her feet and bounded up the slope like a deer, holding the handgun
out before her like a probe. Her long chestnut hair had come loose from the
ponytail she kept it pulled into on most occasions. It flew behind her.
She pointed the Beretta at the streamlined hump on the aircraft's back from
which the rotor shaft sprang, knowing that was the weakness of any helicopter.
I can hit it, she thought. She had actually downed a helicopter once by
throwing a grappling hook on a nylon line into the rotor circle and fouling
the blades. Think what I can do with an actual weapon.
She did. And stopped, panting, and lowered the handgun.
I could shoot the chopper down, she realized, with Jadzia inside.
Across two hundred yards the girl's bright blue eyes caught Annja's as the
helicopter sucked its landing gear up into its sleek belly. And though the
sound of her voice had no hope of carrying past the noise of twin turbine
engines and great sweeping rotor blades, her mouth unmistakably formed the
words, "Help me."
"I will!" Annja shouted back, brandishing the pistol.
The chopper soared up and away to the northwest across the stunning blue sky.
Chapter 8
A hood was yanked unceremoniously over Jadzia Arkadczyk's pigtails. She was
thrust emphatically into a seat. Her wrists were yanked together before her
and a plastic restraint twisted around them. A gruff Italian-accented voice
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told her in English she should sit there and not cause trouble, or she would
regret it.
She sat and did not cause trouble. She regretted it anyway.
She wept. Hysterically at first. Then as she got tired, she subsided into
whimpering. That in turn dwindled as she got control of herself and she
realized it wasn't doing any good and it was making the sack enclosing her
head wet and hard to breathe through.
By the time she got that all sorted out in her head the helicopter had touched
down. Hard hands hustled her out into the afternoon heat. The pavement beneath
the soles of her Converse All-Star knockoffs was so hot she could feel it
through the cheap rubber. When she left the circle of ominous sounds made by
the idling rotor blades she was unsurprised to hear rising around her a
screaming hurricane roar from a horde of jet engines.
A few stumbling steps and she was being half dragged, half pushed up stairs
that rang metallic beneath her feet. Jadzia didn't even dare hope someone
would spot her, an obvious victim, being hustled aboard some kind of private
jet. Likely this was a secluded hangar at Naples airport, probably belonging
to her abductor could it be any other than one or another Satanic limb of
Big Oil? where no one would see.
Even if anyone saw, this was Italy, land of the red Brigades and the Mafia,
and more particularly Naples, which, like Marseilles, boasted a record of
piratical skullduggery dating back to approximately the dawn of writing.
Anyone who spotted her being kidnapped would simply pass it off as business as
usual.
"Dude? What the fuck?" an American-accented voice asked from up the ramp.
"Ran into some problems," the guy pushing her up on her left said with a
French accent. "Change of plans."
"Dude! We're supposed to take delivery of, like, two chicks and a bag."
"Shut up!" rapped a German voice, apparently from the guy who was towing
Jadzia up the ramp by her right biceps. "We speak more inside."
She hit a barrier of cool air and was swallowed within. A new hand took her
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