He dropped his guard—and she lunged. She had no patience for any further interference, especially from a nuisance like this boy. But the young man’s wrist turned with some skill and blocked her attack, making her stumble.
It had been a feint . . . clever
She regained her balance and eyed her opponent across the gap between their bouncing vehicles with renewed respect. He beckoned to her with his sword. He wanted a challenge.
So be it.
Across the chasm, the two swordsmen exchanged a flurry of blows, parries, feints, and ripostes. The boy completed a dancing bit of footwork known as a flèche, French for “arrow.” Impressive. Especially on a moving vehicle. She hesitated, and he used the advantage to push off his rear foot and lunge at her.
She knocked him back with a stinging beat-parry.
Impudent boy.
“You fight like all young men,” she called to him. “Eager to begin, quick to finish. A true master knows the pleasure of the long game.”
He glared over at her. “We’re still talking about sword fighting, right?”
With a flash of steel, he attacked as the vehicles drew closer again. He sprang up and got one foot on each vehicle. They parried and attacked. Steel rang out. They fought as the boy balanced precariously. There was no room to maneuver. It was all a matter of pure sword skill.
Glissade to forte . . .
Counter-riposte . . .
Coupé followed by an arrêt a bon temps . . .
The boy attempted to entrap her sword, but she avoided it with a perfect derobement. She counterattacked and stabbed forward. He blocked and shoved her back, but the vehicles began to drift apart under his hips, splitting his legs apart like a wishbone.
She paused, amused. “I adore young men’s minds. So open—so quick to expend their energies.”
It seemed unfitting to finish this match with her opponent so disadvantaged, but she had more pressing matters. She lunged for a killing blow, intending to spear him through the heart.
But at the last second, the two vehicles nudged back together—and the boy jumped high and twisted. Her rapier missed its target and sliced through empty air. Off balance, Spalko fell forward—toward the gap. The only way to avoid a deadly fall under the churning wheels of the two vehicles was to leap across to the neighboring duck. She crashed headlong into the backseat.
Her opponent fared no better. The boy landed in a stumble and toppled face-first into the backseat of her jeep. They had changed places. She sat up in time to see him scramble up with his sword in one hand. As he straightened, he lifted the burlap sack with the skull in the other.
He had captured her prize.
No!
Marion watched her son tumble into the other vehicle.
“Mutt!” she called out. “Get back in here!”
The Russian soldier behind the jeep’s wheel grabbed blindly into the backseat and managed to snatch a handful of her son’s collar. Mutt was yanked down. Their jeep slowed, while Marion’s duck still shot forward.
Fearing for her son’s life, she twisted around—and saved her own life. A sword stabbed through her seat back and lanced out where she’d been sitting.
Spalko.
So focused was she on Mutt, Marion had forgotten about the Russian stowaway aboard her duck.
Marion stomped the brakes hard. The duck jerked to a skidding stop, and the Russian woman went flying out of the backseat. She smashed clean through the windshield and rolled empty-handed across the flat, prow shaped hood of the duck.
The only thing that stopped Spalko from plunging off the front end was the machine-gun mount.
The Russian woman slid into it and spun the weapon around.
The machine gun’s muzzle pointed straight at Marion.
Spalko fired a wild chattering volley, shattering what was left of the windshield—but Marion ducked low and hit the gas. The duck shot forward again.
Thrown off balance by the sudden acceleration, Spalko stopped firing and held tightly to the gun mount.
Marion risked a peek up—and saw that her duck was barreling straight for the rear of the other jeep. She spotted Mutt staring back at her, his eyes wide with surprise. After Marion had stomped the brakes, the other vehicle had shot directly ahead of them.
The driver was still struggling with her son. Rather than slowing to avoid a collision, Marion punched the gas. Noting this, Mutt swung his heavy burlap sack and struck the driver in the back of his head. The soldier slumped, and the jeep suddenly slowed. Marion didn’t have time to react.
Her duck smashed into its back end.
Spalko went flying forward again, this time landing in the backseat of the jeep.
Right next to—
“Mutt!”
THIRTY-NINE
KNOCKED OFF HIS FEET after being rear-ended, Mutt heard his mother yell.
He turned in time to see Spalko lunge at him. Mutt scrambled to his feet and out of her way. Clutching the burlap sack behind him, he crouched and cocked back his other arm. He balled up a threatening fist. He had lost his sword, but he was not about to give up the fight.
Spalko barked to the dazed driver in Russian, and he pounded the gas and sped their jeep onward. Then she turned her full attention to Mutt, staring at him from across the span of the backseat.
“Hand over the skull,” she said with icy warning. “Perhaps I can use a boy like you, with your skill.”
“Fat chance, sister.” He lifted his fist higher.
Without even a menacing quip, she attacked with a flurry of kicks and flat jabs with the knuckles of her hand. He did his best to block her, but he failed as often as he succeeded. She was obviously skilled in martial arts. As his ears rang from a blow to the side of his head, anger blazed through him. He was tired of being a punching bag. With a growl, he took the offensive. What he couldn’t match her with skill, he’d have to make up for in brawn.
Mutt swung the burlap skull into her side, then followed it with a roundhouse punch to the jaw. She fell back, but not before snapping a kick into his stomach. He coughed, lunged, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and slammed her face into the front seat’s headrest.
They now seemed evenly matched.
Until . . .
As she turned and straightened, the top two buttons of her tunic popped open.
Mutt’s attention faltered . . . just for a split second. His gaze dropped for the fraction of a heartbeat. He was a guy, after all.
Spalko took advantage, smashing a fist at him. He yanked his head back, but he was too slow. Her knuckles pounded into his face, splitting a cut under his eye.
Blood flowed hotly down his cheek.
Spalko smiled at his stunned expression. “First time?” she asked slyly, seductively. “Your wound, I mean.”
His face heating up, Mutt attacked. Fury fueled his blows. But Spalko anticipated his reaction and used her skill against his wildness. Outmatched now, Mutt dropped back to the edge of the jeep. She closed in.
“To win a fight like this, you need balance,” she whispered at him. “Not force, not skill—balance.”
She attacked with a flurry of blows, using all her strength. A foot struck Mutt square in the chest with enough force to send him flying off his feet. He toppled backward and tumbled out of the racing jeep, arms cartwheeling. Spalko’s hand lunged out—and she plucked the burlap bag out of his fingers.
No!
But Mutt could do nothing to stop her from stealing the skull. He plummeted, expecting a hard collision into the underbrush. Instead, he struck with a clang onto the steel hood of a jeep racing alongside Spalko’s vehicle.
Twisting, he turned and spotted a familiar face behind the wheel.
“Dad?”
“Can’t stay out of trouble, can you, kid?”
Mutt spotted Oxley in the backseat, staring calmly at the passing scenery. The guy named Mac stood up from the passenger seat and offered a hand to help him over the windshield.
The jeep slowed und
er him.
Instead, Mutt swung around and pointed an arm toward Spalko’s fleeing jeep.
“What are we waiting for, old man?” he yelled to Jones. “She’s getting away with our skull!”
“That’s my boy,” he heard Jones mumble, and they leaped forward.
Mutt crouched atop the jeep, a living hood ornament. The canopy dropped lower through here. Leaves slapped at him. He lifted an arm to protect his face against the stinging barrage. He turned his face away and glanced behind. He spotted his mother’s duck trailing them, trying to catch up.
Mutt risked pushing a little higher to wave to her, to encourage her to hurry.
It was a mistake.
A low-hanging vine hooked his upraised arm and scooped him straight off the hood. A scream sailed from his lips as he was flung high and swept up into the treetops. The world spun in blurry shades of emerald.
Reaching the apex of his swing on the vine, he prepared to plummet to his death—but instead landed square on a thick tree branch, out of breath and off balance. He froze, riding on pure adrenaline, arms out for balance, fingers clenched in terror.
Below, the jeeps raced away without him.
Perched on the branch, he turned.
Fifty small faces stared back at him.
Startled, he screamed.
Fifty faces screamed back at him.
Monkeys.
They scattered, leaping onto vines and swinging away.
As they fled through the upper canopy, it gave Mutt an idea.
When in Rome . . .
Mutt grabbed a nearby vine and gave it a fierce tug, testing his weight against it. It held. Satisfied, he clutched hard and kicked off the branch.
He swung through the air after the monkeys, matching their stride and rhythm, moving from vine to vine, following their flight.
With this strange band of brothers, Mutt headed after the fleeing jeeps.
FORTY
“NOW, WEREN’T WE chasing her before?” Mac asked.
Indy scowled and twisted around. He had caught up with the Russian woman’s vehicle a moment before. Then the overgrown trail had suddenly narrowed, one side falling away into a steep ravine, and Indy had been forced to shoot ahead of Spalko to avoid tumbling to his death over the cliff. The pair now raced along a tortuous course at the edge of the ravine. Sections crumbled with their passage. He caught glimpses of sharp rocks and white water far below.
At the moment, Indy was at a disadvantage—not only did he have to forge a fresh trail through the fallen trunks and rocks, but Spalko, who had taken the wheel, could ram him from behind and send his vehicle careering off the edge.
And apparently that idea had not escaped her.
Spalko gunned her engine and sped toward them.
“Maybe we should have let her go ahead of us,” Mac said. “Ladies first, and all that.”
“I don’t need a backseat driver.”
“I’m not in the backseat.” Mac leaned out his door and looked straight down to the rocks below. “Though I wish I was.”
Unable to go any faster, Indy was helpless to prevent their being rear-ended by Spalko’s jeep. He fought the steering wheel to keep them on solid ground. The jeep fishtailed. One of the back wheels sailed out over open air and spun.
“C’mon, c’mon . . . ,” Indy urged.
Spalko revved her jeep again behind him, clearly intending to knock them off the cliff. It was just the two of them. They’d left the rest of the convoy behind. Marion had slowed to search for Mutt amid the canopy. Hopefully she had found him, and the pair had made their escape. Indy intended to do the same.
He popped the gears, frantic to get moving, to get away from the edge, but his engine stalled.
Bloody hell.
He glanced over a shoulder and saw Spalko grinning behind her wheel. Her jeep lurched forward, gained speed, and barreled toward him.
Indy restarted his own engine, threw it into first gear, and punched the accelerator. Wheels spun, churning up the cliff’s edge, and a large section of the cliff broke away behind him. It forced Spalko to momentarily veer off her deadly trajectory. She slowed, cleared the crumbling section, then sped at him again. There was no stopping her.
That is, until a large shape dropped out of the trees that overhung the trail.
Indy noted the flap of a biker’s jacket as the form fell.
It was the kid!
Mutt crashed on top of Irina Spalko and knocked her out of the driver’s seat. Uncontrolled, her jeep swung straight for the edge of the cliff.
“Mutt!” Indy hollered.
What was it with people yelling at him today . . .
. . . especially parental figures.
Mutt knew what he was doing. Well, mostly.
He yanked the wheel with one hand and pulled the jeep away from the cliff’s edge. With his other hand, he reached over and snatched the burlap sack, snagging it off the seat where it had rolled.
A soldier in the backseat lunged for him—but Mutt had not come alone. Monkeys rained down out of the treetops. Angry monkeys. No one messed with one of their own. With screams of fury, they bit and clawed into the Russian.
“Thanks, amigos!” Mutt called out.
He shoved up onto the driver’s seat and hurdled over the windshield and onto the hood. He danced across the front of the jeep as it slowed underfoot. Once close enough, he bounded from Spalko’s jeep and landed in the back of Jones’s foundering vehicle.
Still rolling, Spalko’s jeep tapped the rear bumper of the other vehicle. The impact was just enough to shove Jones’s jeep onto more solid footing.
It shot forward.
“Are you nuts, kid?” Jones scolded.
“No more than you!”
Mutt dropped into the backseat right next to Oxley and patted the professor’s knee. Oxley stared at the gift that Mutt had delivered. The professor ever so gently took the burlap bag, peeked inside, and with a contented smile slipped the skull free. It shone brilliantly in the dappled light.
They’d made it.
Mutt glanced behind him—just in time to see Spalko rise up in the passenger seat of the jeep. She hiked back her arm, a sword in hand—the one Mutt had lost when Marion had rear-ended the jeep. She hurled the blade like a javelin. It sailed straight for the back of his father’s head.
Mutt leaped to block it with his own body.
If anyone was going to kill Jones, it wasn’t going to be her!
But Oxley merely lifted the skull high into the air. The sword’s trajectory shifted—drawn by the strange hypermagnetic properties of the skull—and slapped against the side of the crystal with the ring of a struck bell.
Indy glanced back, oblivious of the close call. “Ox, quit playing with that thing before someone gets hurt.”
Behind them, Spalko’s jeep roared back to life and chased after them down the trail.
It wasn’t over.
A mile back, Dovchenko followed in the wake of the chase, trundling along in the troop transport with the sheared-off top half.
Seated behind the wheel, Dovchenko crouched forward. His lips were set into a hard line. His eyes were twin spears of ice.
As he drove, he gathered stray soldiers along the trail, slowly building a force, massing like a storm front. And also like a storm, Dovchenko sought his own path, regardless of the contours of the land.
Once he had retrieved enough men, he turned the troop transport off the winding, meandering trail and headed across the raw jungle. The truck aimed in a straight line toward Jones. Dovchenko had one goal in mind as he wiped the drip of blood from under his nose.
The American would suffer.
FORTY-ONE
INDY FLEW ALONG the edge of the cliff. Off to the right, the ravine grew less steep. He caught more and more glimpses of white water. A river, flowing heavily, churned in the channel below.
Ahead, the trail suddenly swung away from the ravine and climbed up a steep rise. Indy gunned the jeep and flew up the trail.
He could not see what lay over the crest of the hill, but he knew what chased behind him. Occasional rifle blasts echoed. It was only the twists of the trail that had kept them alive.
Yet Indy also suspected that Spalko pursued them with a measure of caution. She no longer sought to ram them. Even the shots were more threatening than serious. She could not risk having the jeep go tumbling over the cliff. Not as long as they possessed something she did not want lost to the river.
Indy glanced to the rearview mirror. Oxley cradled the crystal skull in his lap, as if holding a child. The professor wore a beatific smile of contentment. At the moment, the skull was protecting them from the worst of Spalko’s wrath. But she would never stop pursuing them until she recovered what had been stolen from her.
Their only hope lay in losing her in the jungle.
With this in mind, Indy pushed the accelerator to the floor. The jeep shot ahead faster. Cresting the top of the steep rise, his vehicle went airborne for a few feet—then struck hard, jarring them all.
As they careened down the far slope, Indy spotted a sight ahead that made no sense.
Filling the jungle before them, crossing the entire breadth of the trail, rose a mountain of loose dirt and sand. It was as if a hundred dump trucks had come out into the middle of the jungle and unloaded.
Indy couldn’t brake in time.
The jeep hit the slope and climbed halfway up it—then they lost all traction as the tires churned the loose dirt. The jeep sank in up to its axles. The engine stalled.
In the sudden silence, the roar of a second engine sounded behind him.
Indy stared back at the ridgeline.
Time had run out. They’d never make it over this sandy hill. The footing was too loose, the slope too steep. They’d have to double back the way they’d come, find somewhere to hide.
“Time to go!” he yelled.
The group piled out different doors and slipped and skidded down the slope, retreating the way they’d come. Mac helped Oxley, who clutched the burlap bag with the skull. Indy grabbed Mutt by the elbow and dragged him faster down the hill.
But they were too late.