Canyon of the Sphinx (46 page)

It was a vicious tirade.
Christopher stood there, watching Kathlyn all but throw herself at Jensen. He
didn’t know what to do; he didn’t want to see her get shot. Suddenly, Kathlyn
threw out her arm and hit Jensen on the forearm, dislodging the gun. Like slow
motion, they all saw it fall to the cold, damp earth. In an instant, Kathlyn
and Jensen dove for it and the battle was on.

Kathlyn got hold of the gun
first. Jensen was right on top of her. They wrestled over it until Kathlyn
freed up a hand and grabbed Jensen’s hair. She pulled hard. Jensen howled but
she didn’t let go of the gun. She bit Kathlyn on the wrist, and she screamed.
But she, too, did not let go of the gun.

The hired help that Jensen had
brought with her came running. Christopher didn’t know if he could take on all
five of them, but he would sure die trying. He took out the first two with
crushing blows to the face. Suddenly, there were bodies coming out of the
shadows and the other three men were dropped in rapid succession. One of them
actually went flying through the air and into a tree, impaled by one of the
broken branches. Christopher turned around to see Marcus and Tony in a fighting
stance, looking to take on more. The Cavalry had arrived.

Marcus’s first instinct was to
move in to help his wife, but Tony stopped him.

“That gun is going to go off,” he
warned. “Stay back. Let me handle this.”

Marcus acted as if he hadn’t
heard him and Tony threw his arm across his chest to stop his forward movement.
As they watched in horror, Kathlyn threw her elbow into Jensen’s face and drew
copious amounts of blood from a split lip. Dazed, Jensen somehow got her fist
into Kathlyn’s throat. Windpipe momentarily compromised, Kathlyn gasped
horribly for her next few breaths, but still held onto the gun.

 Jensen twisted the weapon
around, trying to dislodge the iron grip. Enraged, and terrified that she was
going to be killed, Kathlyn took the chance of freeing another hand and slammed
her fist against the side of Jensen’s head. It was a horribly violent act, but
it did the trick. Jensen’s movements slowed and she almost lost her grip on the
gun. But her finger was on the trigger, and in her dazed state, she squeezed in
the last effort of a brutal struggle.

The gun went off and the bullet
whizzed by Christopher’s head. Marcus looked at Tony, his eyes wide with shock.

“What are you waiting for?” he boomed.
“If you don’t kill her, she’s going to kill Kathlyn.”

Tony had his gun leveled at the
writhing women. He hadn’t, until this point, squeezed off a shot because he
hadn’t wanted to take the chance of hitting Dr. Trent by mistake. The two were
all over the map, like a catfight. But the moment was critical and he would
have to take his best shot; he aimed the gun at Jensen’s bobbing head.

A loud gunshot pierced the air.
But it didn’t come from Tony. In fact, Tony’s weapon was blown right out of his
hand. Startled, and in excruciating pain, Tony went for the gun with his uninjured
hand, but a shout stopped him. Everyone’s struggles seemed to come to an unsteady
halt; Tony, Kathlyn, eventually Jensen. They all looked in the direction from
where the bullet came, straining to see a lone form emerging from the darkness.

 It was like the materialization
of a bad nightmare.

Mike Sutton came into view, the
ghostly moonlight casting pale gray colors onto his features. He had a gun in
his hand, pointed straight at Tony.

“I wouldn’t do that, dude,” he
said. “Might be hazardous to your health.”

On the ground, Kathlyn couldn’t
believe what she was seeing. But her shock was momentary. In a fit of rage and
horror, she yanked the gun from Jensen’s grip and threw her arm around the
woman’s neck. She pointed the gun at Jensen’s head.

“Drop the gun, Mike,” she said,
breathless from her fight. “I swear to God, I won’t hesitate. Drop it.”

Mike smiled thinly. He moved the
gun so that it was fixed on Marcus. “Do it and I blow his ass away,” he said
with equal coldness. “You drop the gun.”

They were at an impasse. It would
be a matter of steel nerves and sheer will power to see who did or did not pull
the trigger first. Kathlyn would be damned if she was going to drop the gun,
but she didn’t want to jeopardize Marcus. Yet she knew if she lowered the
weapon, they would all be at the mercy of crazed criminals. Furious beyond
reason, she squeezed Jensen’s neck in a chokehold. Jensen started to gasp.

“I’m not playing games, Mike,”
she said. “Drop that gun or I will kill her.”

The gun in Mike’s hand went off.
The bullet grazed Marcus’ right shoulder and he flinched in pain. Kathlyn went
beyond rational thought at that moment; any bastard that threatened her husband
would have to pay. She removed her arm, wound her fingers through Jensen’s
hair, and pulled so hard that Jensen screamed in pain. She forced the woman up
to her knees, the gun still pointed at her head. For good measure, she yanked a
couple of times. When Jensen’s hand instinctively came up to stop the pulling,
Kathlyn smacked her hand with the gun so hard that it broke two knuckles. She
wasn’t going to stop, and she wasn’t going to give in. She was going to fight
until there was no fight left in her body. She was fighting for survival
against those who would see her and Marcus come to ruin.

“I can hurt her, too,” Kathlyn
said with deadly seriousness. “I can shoot her in the shoulder, too. I have as
many bullets as you do, only I happen to have one more. That bullet is for you
if you don’t drop that gun right now.”

Mike’s expression lost some of
its smugness. He looked at Jensen, weeping softly in Kathlyn’s grip, and slowly
shook his head.

“You never could do anything
right,” he muttered. “I told you to let me handle this, but you just couldn’t
wait until I got here, could you? What in the hell is wrong with you?”

That sentence said a great deal
and Kathlyn’s head spun with the implications. She was struggling to keep her
head, but both Tony and Marcus had been wounded and she was understandably
drawn to want to help them. But she was also insanely furious with Jensen and,
at the moment, was taking fiendish glee in subduing her. For all of the pain
the woman had caused her, Kathlyn wanted to make her pay. It was wrong and she
knew it, but that didn’t stop her from feeling the satisfaction, if only for a
moment.

 “Marcus,” her voice sounded
strangely cold. “Are you all right?”

He was several feet to her right.
She didn’t want to take her eyes off of Mike to look at him.

“I’m okay,” he said. “It just
nicked me.”

She nodded her head, satisfied.
“Tony, how are you doing?”

Tony was somewhere over near
Marcus. She could hear him. “It passed through my hand. Beyond that, I can’t
tell.”

“Do you remember Plan D?”

There was a long pause. “Plan D?”
Tony repeated.

“Yes,” she said. “D as in… duck!”

Simultaneous, Kathlyn raised the
gun and fired off three rounds at Mike. All of them missed. As he was running
back into the jungle, she took the butt of the gun and brought it as hard as
she could down on Jensen’s head. She didn’t want to have to worry about the
woman at the moment, and knocking her unconscious was the only thing she could
think of.

Stumbling backwards, she could
see Tony and Marcus dodging towards her. Marcus capped off a few rounds at Mike
as the man disappeared into a narrow sliver of jungle-like overgrowth. It was
like a finger extending into the dig site, creating a swath of growth in the
otherwise muddy clearing. But Mike apparently hooked back around and emerged on
the other side, swinging an arc so that he almost ran straight into Kathlyn
before Tony or Marcus could get to her. As she turned around to run for the
temple, Mike cut her off.

His gun was pointed in her face.
She froze and dropped Jensen’s porcelain Glock. Mike flashed a brief smile,
grabbed her by the hair, and shoved her in the direction of the Temple of
Blood.

Marcus, Christopher and Tony
could see what had happened. Marcus was nearly frantic, but Tony kept him in
check.

 “He’s got a gun to her, Marcus,”
Tony said. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Stupid?” Marcus repeated,
incredulous. “He has my wife!”

“I can see that,” Tony said, the
calm voice of reason in a universe of chaos. “We follow them, but not too
close. Don’t let them out of our sight. But not close enough so he can get a
good shot at us.”

“I’m coming,” Christopher, who
had hit the deck with the firing started, came racing up behind them.

 “Me, too!” Mark wasn’t far
behind.

Marcus held up a hand. “Mark, go
back with Otis and Larry,” he snapped. “And don’t tell Andy about his brother’s
involvement, at least not yet.”

Mark did something he wouldn’t
have normally done. He grabbed Marcus by the arm and stopped him in his tracks.
“Look,” he said. “I’ve known Kathlyn since we were in high school. Everything
she’s been through, I’ve been there. I know her; I know how she thinks. I have
to be here to help.”

Marcus knew how dedicated her
team was to her. He didn’t have time to argue with Mark. He passed a glance at
Christopher and knew there was no way to stop him, either. Strange thing was,
he didn’t want to stop him. He wanted the help. The four of them took off
running in the direction of the temple mound.

 Back at the scene of the
fighting, Otis and Larry bent over Jensen to see if she was still alive. Otis
picked up the gun that had been shot out of Tony’s hand, inspecting it to make
sure it hadn’t been damaged. It was a good gun, able to take a beating. He
glanced at the unconscious Jensen, speaking of beating. She deserved far worse
than she got.

It was Otis who tied her up like
a pig on a spit.

***

In the jungle, they had nowhere
to go. Mike could have kept them running for days. But he knew that wasn’t
feasible. His mind didn’t work very fast, but it worked fast enough. Coming to
the hole that led to the entrance of the Temple of Blood, he shoved Kathlyn
inside with a gun to her behind as a threat if she didn’t enter. She did, and
he followed.

 Inside they found some equipment
left behind on their first and only day of exploration. It was as black as tar
a foot beyond the entrance hole, but there were several flares off to the
right, neatly stacked. Both Mike and Kathlyn could see the butt of them. Mike
grabbed one and struck it.

Brilliant red light suddenly filled
the entry way, reaching into the black chamber beyond. Mike handed her the
flare. Taking the shovel leaning up against the moss-covered stones of the
arch, he began swinging at the entry. Great clods of earth broke forth like an
avalanche, partially filling the hole.

“What are you doing?” Kathlyn
demanded. “You’ll bury us alive!”

Mike stopped as if he hadn’t
considered that. He wasn’t familiar with anything at this site; he’d only just
come to the town this evening after a two-day trip from the States. He didn’t
know anything.

 “There’s another way out,” he half-asked,
half-demanded.

“There’s no other way,” Kathlyn shouted
back him.

He would have liked to have hit
her, but he refrained. He had seen her fighting with Jensen and knew she packed
a wallop. “It didn’t collapse all the way. It’ll give your husband second
thoughts about coming after you. I can get a good shot right at his head as he
comes through that tunnel.”

Kathlyn was furious, terrified.
Arguing with him wouldn’t do any good. “Now what, Einstein?”

Mike set the shovel down, the
expression on his face suggesting that he knew that he was in over his head. It
was deathly quiet inside the temple, no shouting or bullets flying. He wandered
towards the archway, trying to calm himself down, torn between thinking of his
next step and the eerie surroundings. He kept the gun leveled in Kathlyn’s direction.

“What is this place?” he asked.

She was quickly realizing she had
fallen into the hands of an idiot. “It’s a temple,” she said. “Mike, what’s
going on? I thought you were on our side.”

He shrugged, inspecting the
moss-covered stone. “Ten million dollars is a lot of money.”

“So she finally suckered you in.”

Mike gave her a look that
bordered between shame and threat. “It wasn’t a matter of being suckered in,
dude. She just had to make it worth my while.”

Kathlyn drew in a long, slow
breath. “So you’re going to live on the run your entire life? You’ll never be
able to live freely in the United States or any other allied country. You’ll
always be looking over your shoulder for the law closing in on you. Is that the
kind of life you want?”

“For that kind of money, I’m
willing to chance it.”

“Fine,” Kathlyn’s patience,
whatever was left of it, vanished. “Then let me out of here and I’ll make the
necessary arrangements. But you and what’s-her-name are going to have to
promise to leave me and my family alone if I do this. If you ever try to come
back and mess with us again, I will call out the bounty hunters and Interpol,
so help me. I’ll kill you myself.”