The Spirit Banner

by Alex Archer

  "Very well. Keep me informed."

  "Of course, sir."

  He hung up the phone and leaned his head back against the seat behind him, his thoughts full of unanswered questions. Just what are you up to, Davenport? What had Annja Creed discovered in the text that his people could not? He looked through the windshield at the destruction his men were causing all around him. What did you expect to find here? He wondered.

  He stayed like that, thinking, until Santiago came over fifteen minutes later to report that, despite his best efforts, the monks had not given up a single clue to the tomb's location.

  Ransom nodded to show that he'd heard, but didn't answer right away. He spent a minute or two looking around him, trying to figure out what he had missed, but there wasn't anything obvious. So be it, he thought. At least I'll know that Davenport and his set of flunkies have no way of finding it.

  "Burn it. I don't want anything left for Davenport to search through," he said.

  "What about the monks?" Santiago asked

  "Kill them all" was Ransom's disinterested reply.

  20

  The men in the lead vehicle saw the smoke first. Jeffries radioed the sighting back to Mason in the middle car, and seconds later the rest of them saw it, as well. It drifted up into the sky in a thick column, ominously dark against the clear blue. Knowing there was nothing else in that direction but the monastery left little doubt as to where it was coming from.

  Someone had been there before them and it wasn't hard to guess who.

  "Damn! How did he know?"

  Annja didn't have to ask who Mason was referring to, but she thought it best not to jump to conclusions.

  They drove closer, their hearts heavy in their chests, and found no relief from their fears when, fifteen minutes later, they were finally close enough to see what had happened.

  A vast funeral pyre burned in the center of the compound, just in front of the steps leading to the main hall. The bodies of the monastery's former inhabitants could be seen in the midst of the vast flames, the occasional arm or leg jutting from the pile of wood and brush. Behind it, the once-beautiful buildings had been vandalized so badly that in some places they were hardly recognizable. Planks and beams had been torn down to make the pyre. The smoke it gave off had stained the vibrant colors—the brilliant reds, the stately gold, the mossy green—dark with soot.

  The place looked dead. Nothing living moved in the ruins.

  "Christ…" Davenport said, staring, appalled at the destruction in front of them, through the windshield of their vehicle.

  "Wrong savior," Annja quipped sourly, but she knew exactly how he felt. Whoever had done this had intended to get results. As she opened her door and got out, the heavy stench of burning flesh and hair assaulted her nostrils. It was an unmistakable smell; once you've encountered it, you never forgot it, and Annja knew it would be implanted in her memory for years to come.

  Whoever had done this was absolutely ruthless.

  Mason and Davenport got out of the vehicle and came up to stand beside her.

  "Think anyone made it out alive?" Mason asked.

  "Only one way to find out," she replied.

  Mason turned and signaled to his men in their trucks. The six security personnel quickly got out, drew their weapons and headed into the complex to search for survivors and any trace of whoever had done this.

  Annja stood still and let the feel of the place wash over her. Since accepting the sword, and the adventures that came with it, her danger sense seemed to have heightened. Fear, pain and sorrow washed over her, but she didn't get a sense that the killers still lurked in the ruins.

  She followed the others into the ruins of the monastery compound. The first few buildings they encountered were small outer buildings that looked as if they had been used as meditation chambers or meeting places. It was hard to tell exactly, since many of them had been torched and only the ruined shells remained. The larger, communal hall that served as the main meeting and meditation area still stood, though its walls were pockmarked with bullet holes and its door was partially smashed from its frame.

  It was toward this that Annja headed.

  She climbed the steps and went inside.

  It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the dim light. Once they had, she could see that the building consisted of one large room with a raised dais at the far end. Candles had once lined the walls, it seemed, but were now scattered across the floor. Blood stained the polished wood flooring in various places and had even splashed across one of the Buddha statues that filled the corners of the room.

  Annja walked to the center of the room, trying to piece together what had happened. The presence of so much blood told her that more than one lama had met his end in this room; the idea that blood had been shed in a place that devoted itself to serenity and higher value infuriated her almost as much as the death of the innocent monks did.

  She walked over to one bloodstain and reached out to touch it with the tip of her finger. It was still tacky, which meant it wasn't too old. A few hours at best, was her guess, though she wasn't a trained forensic examiner and couldn't be certain.

  "Ayyeeeeee!"

  The shrill cry came from behind her and Annja whirled in response, her hand already reaching into the otherwhere for her sword.

  A small, dark form hurtled at her from across the room. Annja's mind registered the details, which allowed her to react in time to avoid the sudden thrust of the knife as the boy closed in on her. Rather than slashing him with her sword, which had been her first intention, she left the weapon where it was and, instead, caught hold of his arm as the knife slid past her. She used his momentum against him, twisting back in the other direction and taking him with her in a perfectly executed judo throw.

  His back hit the floor with an audible thud and Annja moved in quickly, kneeling on his chest and applying a wrist lock to maintain control of his knife hand.

  A boy of no more than ten or twelve stared up at her from a face stained with soot and fresh tears. He struggled to free himself, but grimaced in pain when Annja applied a bit more pressure to his wrist.

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Annja told him, but the scared expression on his face told her that he didn't understand.

  She looked up to call for help, only to see Mason hurrying toward her from the front entrance with Nambai in tow.

  "We heard a scream," he said. "Are you all right?"

  "I'm fine. Rambo here decided I made a good target."

  Mason looked down at the boy she still held securely in the wrist lock. "Does he speak English?"

  Annja looked at the boy. "What's your name?"

  The youth stared at her with anger in his eyes.

  "Come on, we're not going to hurt you. We're here to help."

  The boy said nothing.

  Nambai stepped forward and spoke softly in Mongolian. The boy looked between them for a moment, then answered his countryman in a voice sharp with anger. The two talked for a few minutes more. The sound of a friendly voice speaking his language must have helped, for the boy quit struggling and Annja was able to let go of his arm and help him sit up.

  Nambai turned to the others. "He says his name is Chingbak and he only recently came here as an apprentice to Master Daratuk."

  "Ask him what happened here," Annja told Nambai.

  The boy's reply was a bit longer this time.

  "He says men came in a helicopter, questioned the lamas and then tore apart the buildings looking for something. When they didn't find it they questioned the lamas again, shooting them when they didn't like the answers."

  "Is Master Daratuk dead?" Annja asked, watching the boy's eyes carefully while Nambai translated her question.

  The split second hesitation before Chingbak nodded his head told her he was lying. Obviously, he didn't trust them, not after what he had seen the other strangers do.

  "Tell him that if Master Daratuk isn't dead, we have a doctor and medicine with us, that we might be able to
save his life if we get to him soon enough."

  The boy stared at Annja after Nambai finished speaking, clearly weighing his options, then made up his mind. Getting to his feet, he led them off to one side of the compound, where he'd set up a makeshift shelter of partially burned timber and spare blankets. A solitary figure lay beneath it.

  At first Annja thought the old monk was dead. He lay so still that it was almost impossible to see that he was breathing. The condition of his body didn't make it easy to look at him, either; the material of his once-brown robe seemed to have become part of his flesh, so badly was he burned. He moved his head slightly when she knelt beside him, however, and she knew he was hanging tentatively to life. Looking at the extent of his injuries, Annja was amazed that he could do so; she knew bigger and stronger men who would have succumbed to wounds like that.

  She turned to call for the medical kit, but the Mason laid his hand on her shoulder and she understood the unspoken signal. As much as she hated to admit it to herself, there was nothing they could do for the old man, something Mason had understood immediately upon seeing his condition. The small medical kit in the truck wouldn't even come close to dealing with his visible wounds and they were more than two hundred miles from the nearest hospital. He would never live long enough to cross its threshold.

  The boy must have seen something in her face for he turned away abruptly probably not wanting a woman to see his tears.

  As Annja turned back to the old man on the ground before her, his hand came up suddenly, grabbing hers, and she could feel the hard tautness of the tendons in his palm where the fire had burned away his flesh. If the action caused him pain, he didn't give any sign of it. Instead, he pulled her downward toward his face.

  Realizing what he wanted, Annja turned her head so that her ear came to rest less than a half inch from his lips when he stopped pulling. He began to whisper to her, in a strange, lilting, singsong voice, in a language she didn't understand.

  But as he spoke, a picture began to form in her mind, an image of a long, slender object wrapped carefully in a red tangka which was tied shut with silk cords. She could see it there, hanging before her mind's eye, and as he continued to speak it began to grow more detailed, more solid, until she was almost convinced that she could reach out and take it from the thin air, just as she did with her sword.

  Through it all, he never let go of her hand.

  Eventually the monk's voice faded away into silence. Annja pulled her head back so she could see his face. He stared up at her with a surreal expression of peace and serenity on his face, given what he had just suffered through only a short while before, and then in clear and unaccented English, he said, "Go to the Buddha. Protect it."

  His grip went slack and he died without another sound.

  She let his hand slip out of her own and placed it gently on his chest.

  "What was that all—" Mason started to say, but trailed off when she held up her hand in a gesture for silence.

  She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge something from it, then stood and walked away.

  Leaving the shelter and its grisly contents behind, she returned to the main hall and entered through the shattered front door. Once inside, she walked over to one of the four identical statues of the Buddha that stood in each corner of the room. This one had been defaced and riddled with bullets by Ransom's men, but they had apparently thought it was too heavy to move for it still stood upright in its intended location. As if in a daze, Annja reached out and twisted its left arm just so.

  With a soft hiss, the statue tilted backward on the hinge built into the rear portion of its large, rectangular base, revealing the dark square of an opening beneath its ponderous bulk.

  Annja grabbed one of the nearby candles and held it over the opening, revealing the set of well-worn steps leading downward into darkness.

  Without hesitation, she started down.

  21

  Behind her, Annja could hear Mason and Davenport scrambling to catch up. Mason was shouting for her to wait, that she didn't know what was down there, but she ignored him. After all, she did know, didn't she? The dying lama had shown her—somehow.

  The stairs became a narrow corridor running directly ahead for another twenty feet before opening into a small room at the end. It wasn't much, just a ten-by-ten-square-foot room hewn out of the rock beneath the temple. A table made from a huge slab of marble stood against the back wall, as far from the door as possible. On it rested an ornate chest covered with gold and precious jewels that reflected the light from Annja's candle back at her in a thousand refracted patterns.

  "Is that what we're looking for?" Davenport asked, his voice a hushed awe in the near darkness, as he stepped up next to her.

  Annja nodded, not trusting herself to speak. As certain as she'd been that Curran's journal had been authentic, she expected that her hunch as to the present location of the sulde would turn out to be, as well. She didn't have to look inside to know it was in there; she could almost feel it.

  The chest was unlocked.

  Inside was the object she'd seen in her vision; a long, slender package wrapped in red cloth and tied with strips of silk.

  Annja lifted it out of the chest, laid it on the floor and carefully untied the silk strips that held the bundle closed. Silk was an amazing material, she thought. Even after all this time it was soft and supple, the way it was created to be, and Annja had no problem untying it.

  The red wrapping turned out to be a gorgeous tangka, one of the traditional decorated banners that were so much a part of Mongol culture in the past. Its surface was covered with images of the gods and with the many symbols that stood for eternity, long life, good health and other positive omens. The vast majority of the tangkas had been destroyed by the Soviets in the 1930s when they had razed the Buddhist temples, Annja knew, and the archaeologist in her instantly noted that this was a magnificent specimen.

  Inside the wrapping was a black sulde.

  Annja felt the thrill of discovery course through her. She had been right! After being smuggled out of the monastery back in the 1930s, it must have been returned to its original hiding place once it had been deemed safe to do so. While the rest of the world was looking for it elsewhere, the sulde was right under their noses all along.

  It was a brilliant strategy and it had worked like a charm. Apparently, no one else had suspected it until they had come along.

  As she held the sulde up in the light, a slight breeze blew through the room, ruffling the long strands of horsehair that hung off the shaft of the spear just below the blade. For just a second she thought she heard the distant sounds of battle: the thunder of hooves on the plain, the clash of bodies, the shouts of the victors and the cries of the wounded. Then the room was still once more and all she heard was their breathing in the small chamber.

  Apparently, Mason and Davenport hadn't noticed anything unusual, for they didn't react in any way other than with excitement over the find, and so Annja decided to keep what she had heard to herself. She'd become attuned to all sorts of strange things since taking up the sword and she'd learned that other people weren't always on the same wavelength. No sense in getting everyone worked up, she decided.

  "I don't believe it! You did it, Annja!" Davenport cried.

  "Okay," she said, grinning with excitement right along with Davenport. "We've found the sulde. Now what?"

  The two men looked at her in surprise.

  "What do you mean, now what?" Mason asked.

  "What do we do with it now that we've got it?" she said.

  "You don't know?"

  Annja snorted. "It's not like it comes with instructions, Mason."

  "'Beneath the watchful gaze of the eternal blue heaven, the spirit of the warrior points the way,'" Davenport said, repeating the first lines of the hidden message. "If the eternal blue heaven is the open sky above, and the spirit of the warrior is the sulde, as we've already decided, then according to Curran, the spear should point us towar
d the next clue, right?"

  "Right," Annja agreed.

  "So which direction was it facing when we took it out of the chest?"

  Mason glanced at the chest, did some rough calculations based on where the room was situated with regard to the main hall above and then pointed off to one side, "East."

  East? Annja thought. Back toward Ulaanbaatar? That didn't make sense.

  She said so to the others. "Genghis was a nomad, through and through. The one city he did build, Karakorum, was built to house his overflowing treasury. His conquests had simply generated too much wealth for him to carry around. But he never spent time there to any great length and certainly didn't see it as vital to the running of his vast empire. Why would Ulaanbaatar, a city that didn't exist at all in his day, be any different? And why would his followers put his tomb in a place that was so far from what he considered home?"