She felt herself go dizzy, and her knees nearly buckled. She sucked in several deep breaths of air to calm herself and regain her senses. It was all too much to process. How could everything have gone so terribly wrong?
The answer came in the form of a voice from the darkness.
“It’s all over, McKee,” Pitt said. “It’s all over.”
Her despair turned to anger at recognizing the voice. Following the sound, she climbed down the steps to the topside of the basin and looked down. The naturally carved cavity was a near perfect rectangle, a dozen feet deep, and extending to the rear cavern wall. What sat inside wasn’t naturally formed, however.
It was a long boat, almost 90 feet in length, but with a narrow beam. It had stem and stern pieces that rose upward in tall spires, and a single high mast with a tattered sail. A half-dozen long oars slung over either side, their tips resting on the basin floor below. Aft of the mast was a lone enclosed cabin that stretched almost to the stern. McKee knew nothing of ship construction, yet even under the weak light of her flashlight she could see the boat was ancient.
She had little concern for the boat or its construction at the moment. Her only focus was for the man hiding in the shadows. She heard a scrape of wood on the far side railing and raised her Beretta, firing three shots into the darkness. The gunfire echoed through the cavern, gradually replaced by dead silence.
Near the bow, McKee saw a wooden ramp from the top of the basin to the boat’s deck. Striding to the ramp, she tiptoed across, realizing that the low-drafted boat was perched on supports, raising it well off the bottom of the basin. Taking a first step onto the deck, she heard a thunk on the side of the cabin. She turned and fired twice more at a shadow that vanished around the back end.
“It’s over for you, McKee,” Pitt’s voice called out from the stern.
She gritted her teeth. Her heart pounded, and her hands shook with an internal frenzy. Moving across the bow, she passed the center mast and heard another sound, this time on the right side of the boat. She raised her light, catching a glimpse of a man’s torso dropping to the deck. She raised her right hand and fired.
With her left hand holding the light, the pistol bucked in her right hand. She splayed a wild pattern of gunfire, kept shooting anyway, gradually zeroing in on her target. Pitt’s body jerked and bounded as she pumped shells into the dark figure, until the Beretta’s slide locked open with the expenditure of her last round.
She stepped toward her victim, the light in her hand finally held steady. In the distance, she could just make out the full shape of a man’s jacket, shredded by gunfire. Suddenly, the jacket moved. It didn’t roll about, but stood upright, elevating above the deck. McKee stared in shock, which turned to dread. The coat wasn’t occupied by Pitt. Rather, it was held up by one of the boat’s long oars.
Standing in the basin with his arms raised, Pitt had maneuvered the jacket about the boat, drawing McKee’s gunfire. He knew the difficulty of shooting a moving target with a handgun in negligible light and kept himself out of sight while sacrificing his coat. Pitt couldn’t hear the click of the Beretta clear its last round due to the echoes in the cavern, but he saw McKee’s light waver on his jacket, then turn to the ground.
McKee sagged in defeat. Stepping backward, she bumped against the boat’s mast and Pitt’s dangling anchor at its base. She stared at the anchor a long moment, then tossed the gun aside. Setting her light on the deck, she untied the rope from the stone, then stood and carried the mast line to the side of the boat. Without a word, she wrapped several loose coils about her neck and pulled them tight. Climbing onto the side rail, she leaned forward and jumped off.
In the otherwise silent cavern, Pitt heard the snap of McKee’s neck and then the tumble of her body as it unraveled from the rope and dropped to the basin floor. He slowly walked to the figure, approaching and turning on his light when he detected no movement.
McKee lay with a stark look on her face, blank eyes staring into oblivion. Her gold scarab