The Spirit Banner

by Alex Archer

  Mason banked the fire, ensuring that there would be hot coals to restart it in the morning and they both retired to their tent.

  Annja, however, was unable to sleep. She'd had too many cups of coffee after riding in the truck all day and nature called. She really didn't want to go outside in the cold, but sharing the tent with two men didn't leave her any other option.

  Trying to be as quiet as possible so that she didn't wake her companions, she dug around in her pack until she located the packet of tissues she'd set aside for just such an event and then, flashlight in hand, stepped out into the night air.

  The moon had yet to rise and the camp was shrouded in darkness, but she refrained from turning on the flashlight as she didn't want to call attention to herself should anyone still be awake. She figured she'd get beyond the ring of trucks at the edge of camp and then switch it on.

  The dying embers of the fire gave her enough light to see by and so she crossed past its remains, headed for the trucks parked just beyond.

  In the darkness on the other side of the vehicles, a horse snickered softly.

  Annja froze.

  A horse? Way the heck out here?

  She waited, her pulse raising and her ears straining, trying to decide if she'd heard what she thought she'd heard or if she'd simply been imagining it.

  A few seconds passed and right when she had just about decided it must have been something else, a light chuffing sound reached her ears, as if a large animal had just blown air out of its nostrils.

  This time it came from directly behind her.

  Annja lowered herself into a crouch and quietly transferred the flashlight to her left hand. The hair on the back of her neck was standing upright and adrenaline flushed her system as she realized that the camp was more than likely surrounded.

  Whoever they were, they weren't here to welcome her team to the neighborhood.

  While Annja was trying to figure out what to do, the decision was taken out of her hands.

  A huge form came rushing out of the darkness ahead of her, moving so quickly it was upon her almost before she knew it was there. Only her heightened reflexes saved her as she dove quickly to one side, the club swung in her direction by the horse's rider missing her by scant inches.

  She hit the ground, rolled and came back up on her feet, drawing her sword from the otherwhere as she did so. "Mason!" she shouted, hoping to give the others some warning before they were run down in their tents. She could sense other large shapes moving out there in the darkness, but right then she needed to concentrate on the rider in front of her as he was reigning in his mount and turning around for another try at her.

  Good, she thought, turning her body slightly to one side, using it to shield her sword from the rider's sight. Come and get some…

  The rider did just that. He shouted in what Annja recognized as Mongolian, dug his heels into the flanks of his horse and tried to run her down.

  Annja stood her ground, waiting until the last possible second as the massive beast bore down on her position. When he was less than half a dozen feet away, she stepped to one side and brought up her left hand, simultaneously flicking the switch on the flashlight she held and shining it in the rider's face, hoping to blind him.

  It worked better than she expected. The rider threw up a hand, trying to shield his eyes from the light and unintentionally pulled back on the reins. His horse reared up on its hind legs, threatening to throw him off its back, and as it crashed back down to the ground Annja took advantage of the distraction to move up and inside the rider's swing.

  His club passed harmlessly over her head and Annja responded in kind, thrusting upward with her sword.

  Unlike the rider, Annja didn't miss.

  Her thrust caught him square in the gut and the forward momentum from his horse almost tore her sword from her grasp as it bolted away from this new threat. If she hadn't killed him with her first thrust, the resulting damage caused when she hauled her sword free certainly did the job. Annja wasn't waiting around to find out, however; there were more attackers still to deal with.

  No sooner had she turned to see if her shout had roused the others than two more men ran out of the darkness. The one on the right held a curved sword similar to a scimitar and the one on the left was carrying a tire iron. Neither of them seemed happy to see her still standing.

  Sorry to disappoint you, boys, she thought, and then took the fight to them, closing with the one carrying the blade. She made sure to keep his body between her and his partner, preventing the other man from closing with her at the same time.

  A loud pop sounded and suddenly the scene around her was lit as if by daylight. Someone must have shot off a flare. She could see the faces of the men in front of her now, hard Mongol faces with even harder expressions. Their eyes told her everything she needed to know; these men were intent on killing her and taking what was hers. So be it, she thought, now the gloves come off.

  She traded several blows with her opponents, still maneuvering to keep the two of them in front of her where she could see them both. The Mongol's sword was lighter than her own, but shorter, as well, which actually gave her the advantage. He'd obviously used the weapon in the past; he slashed and cut with an easy familiarity. But Annja had trained extensively with her sword since she'd acquired it and she used it as if it were an extension of her body. Very quickly her opponent tired of the exchange and that's when he made his fatal mistake, taking a half second too long to recover from a thrust that disturbed his center of gravity.

  Annja recognized his error and was moving toward him before he had a chance to do anything about it, knocking his sword to the ground with her own. She followed that up with a snap kick to his leg, viciously smashing his knee in the wrong direction. As he toppled toward her she swung her other hand, striking him in the temple with the flashlight.

  Down he went.

  Now that his partner was no longer in the way, the second man suddenly rushed toward Annja. Luckily, she'd caught sight of him as the first man dropped to the ground and she was already responding. As her body twisted to the right in the follow-through of her strike, she planted the foot she'd just kicked with firmly on the ground and spun on it, bringing her sword up and around her body in a downward swing that brought to bear all the momentum of her moving form. The edge of the blade caught her new assailant in the collarbone and kept going, cutting him diagonally from shoulder to hip.

  Gunfire sounded from behind her and she instinctively threw herself to the ground, scrambling to find cover but finding only the body of her dead assailant to hide behind.

  Another volley of gunfire sounded, this time nowhere near her, and then she heard Mason's voice calling her name above the din.

  "I'm here!" she shouted in return and then cautiously poked her head up to look around.

  Mason and his men stood in a loose circle in front of her tent with Davenport in their center, guarding him quite literally with their bodies. Between her and the rest of the team were the bodies of almost a dozen Mongol men and two of the horses they had ridden on. They were all dead, the majority gunned down in midassault by Mason's men as they had reacted to Annja's warning cry and rose to defend their employer. Annja herself had accounted for three of them, including the one she'd struck with the flashlight.

  It had been close. If she hadn't needed to use the bathroom, things might have turned out rather differently, Annja realized.

  Mason rushed over to her, anxious for her safety, and as he came toward her, Annja made sure to release her sword, letting it vanish. She didn't want the hassle of explaining how she had suddenly come into possession of a medieval broadsword; if asked, she'd say she had disarmed her opponent and used his weapon against him.

  Suddenly exhausted, she climbed to her feet in time to meet Mason.

  "Are you all right?" he asked. Without waiting for an answer he took hold of her upper arms and turned her body this way and that, looking for injuries.

  His concern surprise
d her. Was there more here than just an expedition leader worried about one of his people? It also made her a little uncomfortable. He must have sensed it, too, for he abruptly let her go with a smile.

  Unfortunately, not everyone had escaped unscathed. Both Harris and D'Angelo had been wounded and needed medical attention. Kent did what he could with the medical kits they had in the vehicles, but he told Mason he wasn't sure if they could continue the journey, given the extent of their injuries. If their conditions grew any worse in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, he recommended that they return to Ulaanbaatar where they could be treated properly.

  While Mason was talking to Kent, the others had stoked the fire back into a roaring blaze to provide some warmth and then turned the trucks around so that the headlights were pointed into their camp, giving them the light they needed to conduct a search as they sought to understand who had attacked them and why.

  Jeffries and Williams dragged the bodies into a line near the fire, then Annja and Mason went over them one at a time under Davenport's watchful gaze. While they did that, Jeffries, Vale and Williams did a quick canvass of the area around the camp, just to be certain there weren't any more attackers lingering in the perimeter.

  Their assailants had all been Mongol men, locals it seemed. Their clothes were mostly handmade and had been repaired more than once. Their weapons were traditional, as well: clubs and hatchets and scimitars. But the money in their pockets was new and, more telling, it was foreign. American dollars, crisp and shiny, as out of place as a whale in a jewelry shop.

  Putting it all together, they came up with what would have been considered a paltry sum back home.

  "A hundred bucks!" Mason raged. "They were willing to kill us for a hundred lousy bucks?"

  "It must have been Ransom," Annja said.

  "But how?" Mason wanted to know. "How is that bastard tracking us so effectively? How does he know where we are all the time?"

  The same thought occurred to them both.

  "The trucks!" they said in unison.

  It took them almost two hours, but they finally found the transponders hidden in a crevice in the well of the spare tire in each of the vehicles. One-by-one they were carefully removed and laid out beside one another on a folding table Davenport had taken from their tent.

  They were small, rugged units, designed for use in harsh environments, and they probably would have gone undetected if it hadn't been for the failed attack and the recognition that someone else besides the bandits themselves were behind the assault.

  Annja wanted to destroy them at once, but Mason overruled her. He called Jeffries and ordered him to see if he could round up any of the horses the bandits had been riding.

  He borrowed a piece of paper from Annja and tore it into three long strips. He quickly wrote something on each, then wrapped them around the listening devices. By that time Jeffries was back with the horses and Mason dropped one of his little packages into the saddlebags on each horse. For the time being, the horses were tied to the front grilles of the vehicles to keep the animals from roaming during the night.

  Mason intended to make good use of them come morning.

  25

  After untying the horses and letting the animals roam where they wanted, they continued on, making their slow way across the shattered landscape. Hopefully it would take Ransom a while to discover the ruse and by then they would be well on their way to their next destination.

  They hadn't made much distance by midday and any hopes of making up the time lost quickly disappeared when the road petered out shortly thereafter. One minute it was there, the next it disappeared from beneath their wheels and they discovered that they had reached the limit of human expansion, at least in this day and age. As a result, their pace slowed even more.

  On the bright side, they began to see returning signs of life in the landscape around them as they left the road farther and farther behind. First it was just the occasional small bush, hardy little plants that could withstand the climate of the polluted area to the south. Then bushes and grasses began to show up with more regularity—scrub, rye, sage grass and the like—until the land ahead of them became carpeted in vegetation.

  Midafternoon brought them to a wide-open plain on which a massive herd of gazelle grazed. They scattered as the trucks moved among them, and at one point Mason sped up alongside the racing beasts, clocking their speed at just under thirty-five miles an hour. Shots rang out from the vehicle behind them and Annja knew that they were going to have fresh meat for dinner that evening.

  As the herd raced ahead, Mason brought the truck over a gentle rise and there ahead of them loomed the Hentiyn Nuruu Mountains, tall snowcapped peaks that rose in a ragged line that stretched out toward the horizon. In their midst was one that was larger and more prominent than the rest: Burkhan Khaldun—God Mountain.

  Mason let the truck roll to a stop and Annja climbed out for a moment. There weren't too many westerners who had the opportunity to see what she was seeing and she took her time, savoring the view. Somewhere, amid those peaks and valleys, the greatest warrior the world had ever seen had been laid to rest more than eight centuries before. And she was determined to find him.

  It was at that point that they ran into a problem with their local guides. Up until then Nambai and, by extension, his grandson had been keeping them on track, even after the road had stopped and they had been forced to cut across country. But now, with the mountains looming ahead of them, Nambai had a change of heart.

  He refused to take his grandson any farther into the heart of the Ikh Khorig.

  When questioned, he mumbled something about a dream he'd had the night before in which the spirits told him that none of them would return alive from such a trip. He was willing to risk his own life, and those of the foreigners who had paid him, but he would not risk the life of his daughter's child.

  Neither talk nor threats could change his mind. Even Cukhbaatar's pleading didn't work. The man clearly believed what he had seen was an omen and nothing was going to alter that fact.

  Mason paced in frustration, venting his anger on anyone who got too close. Turning back wasn't an option. They had come too far to have to backtrack and then retrace their route. Ransom was sure to get ahead of them if they were forced to do so and that was simply unacceptable.

  But Mason couldn't leave the young man there to await their return, either. Recent events had clearly shown that those on their tail were willing to kill to stop them from reaching their goal, and Cukhbaatar would be a prime target for them.

  Finally he stopped pacing and pulled Kent to one side. "How are our wounded doing?" he asked.

  Kent glanced over at the truck where the two men were resting. "Harris is doing okay. The knife wound he took to the shoulder seems to be responding decently to the sulfa powder and it hasn't started bleeding again, which is a good sign. D'Angelo, on the other hand, is a mess."

  "Can he go on?"

  The other man shook his head. "Not if you want him to have use of that leg for the rest of his life. That hatchet must have been dirty as hell because I can't get a hold on the infection and I'm afraid it's going to spread. If it does, he'll wind up losing the leg before we make it back to civilization."

  "All right. Thanks," Mason said, clapping the other man on the shoulder to let him know that it wasn't his fault that the news wasn't good. Things go wrong sometimes on an op; that's just the way it goes.

  D'Angelo's medical condition made Mason's decision easier, though. Because Kent was trained as a medic, Mason ordered him to take one of the trucks and accompany Harris, D'Angelo and Cukhbaatar back to the city. In the meantime, the rest of them would continue on in the other two vehicles. That would give the wounded men the medical care they needed and satisfy Mason's obligation to Nambai, all in one fell swoop. It was the best he could do under the circumstances.

  They divvied up the supplies, making sure both groups had what was needed to continue on their way. Farewells were exchanged,
and with a last, parting wave Kent and his crew piled into their truck and headed back toward Ulaanbaatar and civilization.

  The rest of the group continued on. Mason, Davenport, Annja and Nambai were in the lead truck now, with Jeffries, Williams and Vale bringing up the rear in the other, the carcass of the antelope Vale had managed to bring down tied to the roof.

  As the day grew longer they left the plains behind and, after passing through a region of rolling hills, began to climb through a series of interconnected alpine valleys. They were slowly gaining in elevation as they went and the air took on a bit of a chill, causing several of them to break out warmer clothing. Near the end of the day they came upon a pristine mountain lake and despite the bone-chilling temperature of the water, they all took the opportunity to take a quick dip and wash up. The men went first, laughing and roughhousing the whole time, and then Annja took a turn, with Mason standing guard.