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  SILVER

  A NOVEL BY BRIAN JANUARY

  Be sure to read Emerald, the first Park Skarda-April Force thriller, available at amazon.com!

  Silver

  © Copyright 2011 by Brian January

  Published December 2011

  All rights reserved worldwide No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, transmitted, or copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author. You must not circulate this book in any format.

  This book identifies product names and services known to be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders. They are used throughout this book in an editorial fashion only. In addition, terms suspected of being trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks have been appropriately capitalized, although the author (Brian January) cannot attest to the accuracy of this information. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark, registered trademark, or service mark. The author (Brian January) is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

  BOOK ONE

  ONE

  Agia Galini, Crete

  WHEN Skarda grabbed the silver finger, he swung around and saw the man with the nail gun swimming straight at him.

  He spared a quick glance up. Twenty-five feet above his head the surface undulated like a liquid mirror. It might as well be a light year away. At his back the sheer face of a limestone cliff plunged into the mouth of a gorge crusted with sponges and anemones. No escape that way.

  Columns of sunlight slashed down through the dark blue water, spotlighting him.

  He felt like a target painted on a wall.

  The diver was coming faster now, narrowing the gap between them, the ugly muzzle of his weapon rising up for an easy shot. Skarda had recognized it immediately: a Russian SPP-1 “flying nail” gun, specially designed to fire four-and-a-half-inch steel bolts with lethal accuracy and penetration underwater.

  Bolts that would shred muscle and bone like wet tissue paper.

  In the watery light the nail gun flashed, aiming—

  Deliberately swinging his body broadside, Skarda painted a look of fear and surprise on his face. He watched the diver’s lips curve in a smile of cocky triumph as he centered the muzzle on his victim’s unprotected heart.

  The man fired. The bolt rocketed out in a surge of bubbles—

  Immediately Skarda kicked hard, twisting his body sideways. The missile darted past him, bouncing off the cliff wall half an inch from his bare chest, its reflection winking out as it sank into the gloom.

  The SPP-1 held a magazine of four bolts. Three left.

  He knew the man wouldn’t miss again.

  Opening his hand, Skarda showed him the two-inch lump of metal he’d found wedged in a crack in the limestone wall. It was an index finger bone, broken off just above the middle knuckle, and sheathed in tarnished silver.

  But within it, bright streaks of another metal gleamed in the diffused light.

  Recognition flashed across the diver’s face. His eyes narrowed dangerously. This was what he was here for.

  But the silver was what OSR had sent Skarda and April to Crete to find, too.

  With deliberate calculation the man lowered the gun, keeping his eyes fixed on his target.

  But Skarda knew he wouldn’t risk another shot—the impact of the heavy bolt could send his body into convulsions and the artifact would plunge into the depths of the bay.

  Metal flashed in the diver’s hand—

  A knife blade, catching the surface light—

  For a few horrified heartbeats, Skarda hung motionless, his mind going numb. A WASP knife! Connected to a thumb button on the hilt of the seven-inch steel blade was a CO2 cylinder that would inject a bolus of freezing gas into a victim through a thin tube that opened at the tip. At 850 psi internal organs would instantly freeze, then burst as the ball of gas inflated and expanded in matter of seconds.

  There was no time to hesitate. Feeding air into his vest, he shot toward the surface. He wanted the diver to think he was panicking, running scared. In a surge of bubbles the man followed, his right arm extended, thrusting out the knife in front of him for a killing strike.

  Blue light rushed at Skarda.

  He had almost broken through the bottoms of the waves when suddenly he kicked out, arching his back and emergency-flushing the BC, dropping like a stone in an arc that took him behind the diver, ramming against his tanks and wrapping his left forearm around the man’s neck.

  The diver tried to twist away, the WASP slashing a deadly arc through the water. Skarda drove his knee into the base of the man’s spine and grabbed his wrist, pinning it in place to hold the knife at arm’s length. The diver wrenched violently, struggling to get free. Summoning up every bit of his strength, Skarda tore off the man’s mouthpiece and vised his forearm against his windpipe, shutting off the oxygen supply.

  The diver writhed like a netted fish, but at last he went limp. His fingers unclenched, letting the knife go. Skarda lunged and grabbed the hilt. Then he threw an arm around the unconscious man’s shoulders and dragged him toward the surface.

  ___

  Up top, April Force stretched out her long legs on the foredeck of the Sea Ray 60 Sundancer. She was wearing a skimpy thong, relishing the clasp of the sun’s heat on her exposed skin, feeling the faint sheen of sweat evaporate in the offshore breeze that shivered her long, dark hair. She was half Native American and half French, descended from the line of some nineteenth-century mountain man whose name had long been forgotten by history. She was striking, with the high jut of her cheekbones softened by her European genetics and eyes the color of obsidian.

  She shifted. The sun was making her feel uncomfortably lazy, so she climbed to her knees.

  The cough of a boat engine made her swing her head around. A battered Cranchi power cruiser was chugging past the cliff edge, lurching to port, billowing out a plume of black smoke. Machine gun fire had chewed a ragged hole in the bow.

  She opened her throat mic. “Get up here.”

  Shoving to her feet, she moved to the stern. A minute later, Skarda surfaced, towing the unconscious man behind him.

  “Trouble,” he said. He showed her the knife.

  “Cool. WASP knife.” She pointed at the boat. It was drifting now, its engines stalled, still belching out smoke.

  Skarda glanced at the Cranchi, then hauled the diver closer to the gunwale. April helped him manhandle the man aboard.

  When he climbed on deck himself, he held up the finger. “He was looking for the silver.”

  Nodding knowingly, she eyed the artifact, then hooked her fingers under the diver’s armpits and dragged him aft, where she let him flop on the deck.

  She raced for the pilot’s seat.

  The Sea Ray was already moving when Skarda unhooked his BC vest and dropped into the chair beside her.

  The Cranchi’s position was shifting now, tugged by the current. As they got closer, they could see that the smoke was spewing from the engine compartment in the rear, also torn to pieces by bullets. April throttled back, easing the Sundancer hove-to. Her black eyes raked across the sky.

  Skarda secured a line and cupped his hands. “Ahoy! Anybody aboard?”

  Movement.

  A head raised up from behind the bullet-starred plexiglass of the pilothouse. A man’s head, streaked with rivulets of red.

  Something twisted in Skarda’s stomach.

  The Cranchi lurched as he jumped aboard. The door of the pilothouse was riddled with bullet holes and hung, creaking, by one hinge. He stepped inside to the stench of raw body odor. The man lay slumped over the wheel, his filthy white s
hirt soaked red and glued in wrinkles to his skin. He was in his mid-forties, dirt-stained, with a darkly tanned face and three days growth of beard. His right flank had been torn apart by slugs.

  Skarda recognized him from his dossier: Dr. David Blackpool, the archaeologist from Cambridge.

  And he had only minutes to live.

  He bent closer to the dying man. “Do you want something to drink?”

  Blackpool turned his head slightly and nodded, looking incuriously at this tall figure with the intense cerulean blue eyes who had appeared out of nowhere. Skarda searched through a drawer, finding a bottle of rum. He held it to the man’s lips, feeding the liquid to him one sip at a time.

  Coughing, Blackpool rolled his eyes at his benefactor. They were bloodshot and glazed with agony.

  And pleading...desperate. “You have to stop them,” he said in a cultivated British accent. His voice edged on panic.

  “Who?”

  With trembling fingers, he popped open a panel on the dashboard, groaning sharply at the movement. He pulled out a small, worn leather case and thrust it into Skarda’s hands.

  “Ariadne. It has to be Ariadne.”

  “What has to be?”

  One hand clutched weakly on Skarda’s arm. His head moved back and forth in frustration at his lack of understanding. “I was wrong.”

  Skarda’s eyes narrowed. He opened the case, seeing a half-inch-thick plaque of tarnished silver, about four by eight inches.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Blackpool’s mouth opened, but no sound came out. His eyelids fluttered and his body shuddered as a stricken expression crawled across his face.

  “Tell me,” Skarda insisted. “Where did you get this?”

  A groan escaped the archaeologist’s lips. Then the light drained out of his eyes and he sagged.

  From the Sea Ray Skarda heard April call out. “Park!”

  He stepped out on deck. She pointed at the sky.

  “Chopper. One plus a pilot. HK416.”

  Her eyesight was remarkable. In the Army she’d once hit a target dead center in a steady wind at 2,650 meters with a .50 caliber bolt-action rifle.

  All he could see was what looked like a giant black bird soaring nearer.

  The sight made him move. Freeing the line, he jumped into the Sundancer. Her black eyes questioned him.

  “Dead. It was David Blackpool.”

  Her face registered no surprise.

  He showed her the plaque. “He wanted me to have this.”

  “Part of the hoard?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. He was dead before he could tell me where he found it.”

  The chopper had darted closer now, filling the sky, the sound of its rotor like a thousand drums being banged at once. Now he could see it was a black Eurocopter AS-350, no markings.

  Spinning the wheel, April throttled hard. Foam churned as the Sundancer surged forward. Skarda glanced up, seeing a bearded man with an HK416 assault rifle strapping himself into position in the open fuselage door as the chopper banked to give him shooting position.

  The rifle stuttered. Bullets tore through the Sundancer’s wake, popping up fountains of water like mini depth charge explosions.

  “The Barrett!” April yelled.

  Snaking his hand under the dash, Skarda yanked the Barrett REC7 assault rifle from its Velcro straps. April wrenched the wheel, powering the Sea Ray into a zigzag course. Its hull jutted higher out of the water, boiling out a seething white wake.

  The gunman let loose another volley. Instinctively Skarda ducked as slugs whined over his head, raking over the bow with a noise like nails pounded into sheet metal. He rammed his back against the bulkhead, squeezing off a volley of bullets.

  No effect.

  He wasn’t the shot April was.

  Banking, the chopper swooped for another run.

  “We’re not going to make it!”

  Instantly she throttled back, slamming the engines to a dead stop. Grabbing the rifle, she squeezed the trigger in rapid succession as the Eurocopter clattered past them. The gunman flung himself to the deck, a line of holes blistering the bulkhead where his head had been moments before. In a hurricane of downwash the chopper’s rotor blades flattened the waves as the pilot slued around, maneuvering for another attack.

  Levering himself upright again, the gunman pitched forward in his harness, blasting. Slugs chewed up the deck.

  They needed cover—

  Jettisoning the rifle, April sprinted aft and jumped. At her heels, Skarda grabbed the BC and fins and vaulted over the gunwale, aiming his feet next to the wake of her splash.

  Swooping, the chopper roared lower and the bearded man let loose another fusillade, tearing up the rail behind him in a hail of splinters.

  ___

  Beneath the waves, April helped Skarda buckle into the BC vest. If necessary, they could share the air in the tanks to swim to safety. But they wouldn’t need it yet. When Skarda had commissioned the boat, he’d specified a couple of custom features: one was a quarter-inch-thick armor-grade steel plate to protect the engine compartment, and below it, above the keel, a hollowed-out rectangular space big enough for at least three people to keep their heads above water to breathe. This is where they surfaced now, sucking in air, as bullets hailed down on the armor plate above and slashed foaming trails through the water on either side of them.

  A lull. Skarda thought he heard the chop-chop of the rotor blades doppler away. “Think they’re leaving?”

  April filled her lungs. “I doubt it. I’m going to take a look.”

  She ducked her head and dove under the boat, surfacing in the dark shadow of the bow. From this angle she could see that the chopper had set down on a flat rocky area on the beach. The pilot still sat at the controls. A short drop down, the bearded gunman stood on a swath of sand looking out to sea, his hands cradling the HK416.

  She swam back. “Pilot and gunner on the beach. I’ve got them.”

  He nodded.

  Her head sank out of sight.

  ___

  As April kicked forward she shrugged out of the bikini.

  By now she’d almost reached the shoreline, so far unseen, or there’d be bullets punching at her through the water.

  ___

  On the beach, the pilot hopped down next to the bearded man, struggling a bit with a second rifle he’d fished out of the cockpit.

  The bearded man jerked his chin out to sea. “Think we got ‘em?”

  Following his gaze, the pilot shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably.” A frown crossed his face. “Wouldn’t they would have floated up by now?”

  Then the bearded man’s jaw dropped.

  In a cascade of water, April surged up out of the tide, completely naked.

  The two men stood rooted in place, gaping at the beautiful woman rising from the sea. It gave April the precious seconds she needed. In a heartbeat she sized them up—the bearded man was the most dangerous: the barrel of his gun was already rising. But the pilot just stood there, goggling at her.

  Lunging forward, she snapped her right leg out in a stamping kick, smashing the pilot’s kneecap with the outer edge of her foot, splintering the bone with an audible crack. The man shrieked and she grabbed his rifle as it dropped from his hands, jerking it up and squeezing off two shots into his chest.

  By now the bearded man was moving fast, his finger tightening on the trigger. But she was faster. Her rifle hammered out two more shots, hitting him in the heart and head. With a surprised look he jerked back, slumping to the beach.

  ___

  Skarda was crouching over the diver when April surfaced at the stern and climbed aboard, still naked.

  The man lay on his back, his right flank torn open by slugs from the HK416. He moaned.

  In a pile to Skarda’s left lay his scuba gear, the nail gun, and the WASP knife.

  Skarda climbed to his feet as she came up. His eyes told her the man was dying.

  Again the diver moaned
. Then suddenly he jackknifed forward, screaming in pain. With a lunge he snatched up the WASP and slashed out at Skarda’s thigh—

  But April moved like a striking cobra, grabbing his wrist and driving his arm down. The point of the knife pierced his abdomen.

  Her thumb depressed the CO2 button.

  With an horrific scream the man convulsed as the gas instantaneously froze his intestines. His stomach exploded to the size of a basketball and burst, spraying the deck with red gore.