by Alex Archer
Annja covered with her rifle until several commandos took up stations on the walkway covering the hold. Others ran to Wira to help him up. He shrugged them off, moved quickly to the fallen Sharshak’s side.
Hevelin already knelt beside the young Knight. His right arm hung to the deck, its midnight-blue sleeve glistening with the blood that had soaked it and run down to turn his hand into a gory claw. Sharshak lay on his back with arms outstretched. His gray eyes stared sightlessly at the dark overhead. Through the paint on his face his expression seemed to Annja to be one of peace.
Hevelin raised his blacked-out face to meet the young Sultan’s eyes. His own blue eyes ran with tears. Slowly he shook his head.
Wira laid his hand upon the older Knight’s shoulder. Then, rising, he helped the older man to his feet.
Realizing the commandos were in a twitchy frame of mind, and might react poorly to a foreigner approaching their Sultan with firearm in hand, Annja carefully laid down the Kalashnikov. Then she came down to join the tableau where the two men, Christian Knight and Muslim Sultan, stood facing each other across the body of a young man who had died to save a recent enemy.
Both Knights and commandos held themselves warily, alert for a fresh attack. But their eyes were turned outward—it was terrorist reinforcements they warded against. Knights went among the fallen terrorists making sure they stayed down with quick sword thrusts.
The victors’ body language no longer showed distrust of one another. They had fought, and won as comrades. It was a bond, Annja knew—since she shared it—as strong as family or nation or religion.
“Annja,” Wira said. “I’m glad you survived.”
“I am, too. I mean, glad you survived—both of you. And me.” She looked down at Sharshak. “I only wish he had. He was a sweet boy.”
“Many good men have died tonight,” Hevelin said in a voice thick with emotion. “Some of the best I called my enemies, until mere moments ago.”
“Enemies no longer,” the Sultan said. “I am pleased to meet you, Sir Knight. I am Wira, Sultan of Rimba Perak.”
He thrust out his right hand. Without hesitation Hevelin clasped it with his right.
“I am called Hevelin,” he said. “I am honored to take your hand in friendship.”
Somehow Annja lacked all heart to comment on the testosterone densely permeating the air.
“Annja,” Wira said, turning gravely to her. “I withdraw all objection to the Knights of the Risen Savior taking possession of this relic. Pending your professional judgment, of course—as I agreed.”
He swept his gaze back over Hevelin and his weary, bloodied comrades. “We may believe we serve different causes. But tonight we fought together for good. That transcends all in my eyes. Perhaps I am naive.”
“I pray more of us might become naive in such a way,” Hevelin said.
Annja stood, looking from man to man. Her eyes filled with tears. She blinked them sternly away.
“I honor both of you—all of you,” she said, unable to keep huskiness from her own voice. “Since we have fought so hard, and so many have died, to secure it—what do you say we see what it is that’s caused all this destruction?”
Wira looked to Hevelin. The old Knight shrugged. “It would be churlish to resist the request, under the circumstances,” he said. “All here have earned the right to see what they sacrificed for.”
Knights and commandos joined together to pry the lid off the yellow-pine crate. Several climbed inside, shifted out enough of the strawlike packing material to reveal the plain gray metal lid of the coffin itself.
It took four men, two from both sides, to lift the lid enough to slide aside so that all could see.
A collective gasp filled the hull. Annja’s breath caught in her throat.
After a moment she shook her head as if to break a spell. “You can cover it when you’re ready,” she said. “I’ve seen enough.”
Hevelin and Wira looked to her. “Cedric Millstone told me the Knights of the Risen Savior had prepared a special climate-conditioned vault to keep the artifact secure,” she said. “Shortly before he himself was murdered, by St. Clair’s little helpers, I suppose. Is it true your Order has such a facility in America?”
“It is, Ms. Creed,” Hevelin said. “There it shall stay safe—safer than it has been for the better part of a millennium. And hidden well away from public view.”
She nodded. “Then I think that’s best,” she said, as with a scrape of metal on metal the coffin was resealed, reverently, by the men in the crate.
“I never thought I’d say this,” she said, shaking her head, “but I don’t believe the world is ready for something like this.”
31
No sooner had the coffin been transferred to Wira’s flagship, the Berani, along with the wounded and the surviving Knights of the Risen Savior, than Wira received a shocking encrypted transmission from his capital. Lestari had brought proof to the Sultan’s security chief, Purnoma, of the identity of the traitor who had allowed the assassins into the palace grounds the night before. It was the Grand Vizier, Krisna, Wira’s friend and supporter since childhood. From diaries found in his apartments it seemed he was a far more devoutly fundamentalist Muslim than anyone had imagined.
Why he had helped his young charge for so long was anybody’s guess. It would remain so. Although several of his confederates in the palace had been rounded up, the aged Grand Vizier had produced a hidden Kahr handgun and gone down fighting, taking two of Purnoma’s men into death with him.
Annja saw the news hit Wira like a blow to the gut, as they stood in the red-lit electronic wonderland of the Berani’s high-tech bridge.
Annja gratefully accepted the captain’s offer of his cabin to sleep, after she had cleaned up. There would be no rest for Wira or his crew.
SULTAN WIRA professed himself unable to pardon the three surviving pirates who had helped fight the terrorists. After all, they were wanted by a number of nations, for innumerable crimes. He ordered them confined to a cabin in the Sea Scorpion overnight.
But Wira did not order the door to the compartment in which the pirates were confined locked. Nor did he order it guarded. Nor did he order the several small boats bobbing alongside the pirate flagship, including the ones that had brought the Knights after their mother ship dropped them off and steamed away, to be watched.
In the morning the pirates were gone. So was one of the small powered craft.
No one seemed the least bit concerned. Annja knew she wasn’t.
I don’t know if what they did down in the hold redeemed them from whatever crimes they committed, she thought. But then again, I don’t know it didn’t. In this case, judgment was not hers.
She felt content with that, as she stood on the afterdeck of the sleek fifty-five-meter Berani, sipping a cup of steaming coffee with plenty of cream and sugar from the warship’s galley. The sky was the color of the coffin. Ragged pale clouds skimmed gray waves beneath the overcast. It was surprisingly cold. Annja wore a long gray sweater that came down to the thighs of her slacks, and the ends of whose sleeves provided fine insulation for her hands as they gripped the metal cup.
A half-dozen wrecks, still drooling thin gray smoke, dotted the sea. One was a hundred-foot Rimba Perak motor launch. The others were Red Hand junks. Their high sides, once painted gaudy scarlet and gold, with huge eyes staring from the bows, were blackened and streaked almost beyond recognition.
The Sea Scorpion floated a quarter mile astern of the warship. Annja regarded it in the murky dawn.
She heard a step, looked around. Wira approached. He wore a black pullover similar to hers, loose black sweatpants and black athletic shoes. His lush blue-black hair was tied back in a neat queue from his tapering, handsome face.
He lit up as she turned and saw him. “Annja,” he said, coming forward and raising his hands.
As if in a dream she raised her own. He took them. She barely managed to keep from spilling her coffee, but no thought of pulling
away entered her mind. His kissed her once, lightly, on the lips.
She shivered.
“I’m proud of you, you know,” he said. He let go of her left hand, to her relief, since it held her cup. As if leading in a dance he turned her to face aft, side by side with him.
“I’m proud of us,” he said. “All of us. We have shown that courage and goodwill can triumph. Maybe I’m childish, but that encourages me. No matter how small or temporary it may be.”
She smiled and sipped her coffee. “I’ve found, Wira, that there’s not much point in worrying about the continuance of evil and suffering in the world. They’ll always happen. All we can do by reminding ourselves of that, when we do get a win, is discourage ourselves from trying the next time.”
He nodded. “Imagine how terrible a place the world would be if we didn’t try.”
She sighed. “That’s true,” she said. “Yet I can’t get too comfortable with it.”
“How so?”
“Well, nobody wakes up in the morning and says, ‘How can I be evil today?’ Except for maybe a few especially messed-up adolescents. Even serial killers, even sociopaths without any real sense of right or wrong, tend to come up with rationales for doing what they do.
“It often seems to me that the most horrible things are done by the people who are most passionately convinced that they’re right. The good of humankind, or of the planet, can excuse a lot of bad behavior, it seems.”
“Like my commandos? Or our former foes, the Knights of the Risen Savior? Or you and I, for that matter?” Wira asked.
“No. Or anyway, I like to think not. I mean, we fought for the right—for good. But you and the Knights fought passionately against one another. For good. And here’s the real kicker—so do the Sword of the Faith terrorists. Don’t they? Even Cyrus St. Clair. He did what he did thinking it was for a higher cause. I’m sure he died believing himself the greatest of patriots.”
Wira frowned. “I find what you say uncomfortable,” he said slowly. “But I cannot refute it. So what can we do, then? To ensure that we do not commit great crimes, in the name of the greater good?”
I wrestle with that all the time, she thought. She ached to tell him, to confide. The truth—the whole truth. To be able to share her deepest secrets with this man, this cheerful, quick-minded friend, this strong and vulnerable leader.
But she couldn’t. And that was the problem. It had begun to gnaw at her belly last night when she should have been deep in the sleep of the exhausted.
“I wish I knew for certain,” she said, shaking her head. “It seems pretty horribly unfair that one of the surest ways to turn into a monster is to try too hard to do the right thing.”
“I wonder,” the Sultan said. “Might the road to perdition be the easy route, the morally expedient route—accepting that the end justifies the means?”
“That could be,” she said. She looked at his profile, well-chiseled and strong, as if to drink it in with her eyes. “I’ve never accepted that. Maybe that’s what saves my soul.”
He looked into her eyes and smiled. “But don’t let’s be gloomy,” he said, suddenly seeming as boyish as he had wise beyond his age a few moments before. “You yourself said we needed to let ourselves have our wins. Let’s celebrate this one.”
She smiled, a bit wanly, and nodded, brushing back a wisp of hair the heavy sea breeze had plucked loose to tickle her nose and cheek. “You’re right.”
“I know your business here is virtually concluded, Annja,” he said.
Here it comes, she thought.
“But I find I’m not eager to see you go. Why don’t you stay? Not—professionally, as it were. As my guest.”
“That’s very sweet,” Annja said. “And I’d really, really like to.”
His face clouded. “I sense the unspoken but.”
She nodded. “But I can’t. I have a life. A career. And a destiny. And it isn’t here in Rimba Perak.”
He drew in a deep breath. “Well, perhaps it might help if I—”
She held two fingers up to his lips. “Please,” she said. “Don’t even say it.”
He quieted. He might have taken umbrage. She knew he wouldn’t, and he didn’t. Instead he looked hurt.
It tore at her heart.
“Wira.” She reached to touch his brown cheek. He took her hand and kissed it. “I’m not what you need. You have your position to consider. Politics—national and regional. Even global. I’m a nobody.”
He grinned ruefully. “It’s no longer the fourteenth century, Annja. Marriages are no longer arranged for dynastic purposes.”
The words hit her like a hammer in the heart. Blast him for finding a way to say it, she thought.
“All the same,” she made herself say, “political considerations inform everything you do. They have to. I know how seriously you take your job. And anyway—you need someone who can be an adjunct for you.”
He shook his head. “I’d never ask a woman to be no more than an ornament,” he said. He grinned. “Even though you are highly ornamental.”
“You’re sweet. But even so, you need a woman who can assist you. Serve as diplomat—administrator—problem solver.”
“Doesn’t the ability to be my best bodyguard count?”
“How long could you keep from feeling resentment, if you felt—however politically incorrect or regressive it might be—that you were hiding behind a woman’s skirts?”
He shook his head. “Naturally one likes to think better of oneself.” But he didn’t contradict her.
“Wira, I care about you. Very much. I have great respect for you. I like you.” She sighed. “And that’s why I’m leaving as soon as we get the details wrapped up for dealing with the coffin.”
He pressed his lips together. She could feel the emotional pain and turmoil beat from him like sunlight off waves. There was nothing she could say to make it any easier on him.
To say nothing of her.
All this time the Berani had been bearing off to its starboard. Now it moved beam-on to the drifting pirate flagship. A naval officer in short-sleeved whites appeared and saluted crisply to the black bill of his cap.
“Awaiting your command, Your Majesty,” he said.
Wira had turned to snap to attention and return the salute in a way the toughest drill instructor could find no fault with. “Carry on, Lieutenant,” he said crisply. “Execute the fire mission.”
“Sir.” The officer turned away and spoke quickly into his headset in Malay.
Wira turned back to Annja. He held wide his arms.
“Annja,” he said, “since we have to part—”
She was already in his arms. She could hear no more of what he said. The world had erupted in an Armageddon of noise.
Rockets streaked overhead, trailing tails of yellow flame garish against cloud. The Sea Scorpion, still holding the bodies of Eddie Cao Cao and his crew, and liberally splashed with the contents of its own fuel tanks, erupted in a colossal yellow fireball.
As the shockwave of the distant blast rolled over Wira and Annja, their mouths met in a final farewell kiss.