Paradox

by Alex Archer

  Annja spun clockwise and blasted a spinning back-kick into his gut.

  Air blasted from his lungs. Doubling over the kick he flew backward into emptiness. Then he dropped, trailing a scream that still seemed more of fury than despair.

  On the treacherous slick slope Annja's planted foot shot right out from under her. She didn't quite smash her own face on the ice but the ensuing belly flop knocked the breath from her as surely as her pistonlike boot heel had from the doomed Josh Fairlie. With the last of her strength she drove the her ax's spike down through the ice to keep her from slip-sliding away.

  Then, completely drained, she rested and breathed.

  For a whole minute.

  Then she started to move. "Up," she growled to herself. "Up…you…go." With the last word she summoned whatever strength she had and forced herself up off the ice and onto her feet.

  Levi lay huddled against the cliff holding his ankle with one hand. "Annja?" he called to her.

  "I'm fine, fine." She waved him off. "We need to move again. If we can get a little breathing room I'll bind the ankle. But we can't afford the time right now."

  "You need to rest," Levi said with concern.

  "I'll rest later," she wheezed. "Plenty of time. Alive or dead."

  * * *

  SHE USED HER LAST ICE PICKET to secure them for a final rappel down the ice face. She went first, descending among lava rocks and big black boulders onto a steep but manageable slope. Then she held the end of the line as Levi came down.

  She didn't look at Josh Fairlie, sprawled faceup on a slab of black rock nearby.

  Levi had no trouble bouncing himself away from the mountain face with his one good leg. When he hit bottom, though, his leg buckled.

  Annja was there, catching him with an arm around him, keeping him from going all the way to the ground, strewn with sharp black pebbles. She eased him to a seated position. Then and only then she turned and gazed down at the broken corpse.

  Josh's face was bone-white. The hazel eyes stared sightlessly back the way he'd come to this sorry state. His head was about half the normal depth; glistening red surrounded his dead face like a halo and ran down the side of the rock like wild long hair. She shook her head.

  "You don't go easy on yourself, do you?" Levi asked. "You don't want it to become too easy."

  "No. That's the fast track to becoming a monster worse than the ones I fight against. I don't lose sleep over the men I kill—they're always trying to kill either me or somebody I've chosen to protect. But I don't ever let myself take it lightly," she said.

  She knelt by the body and gingerly opened the thick yellow-and-blue jacket. Fortunately it wasn't soaked. She reached inside.

  "He was somebody's beautiful baby boy once. Some mother will probably cry her heart out when she finds out he died broken on this godforsaken mountain. What I did was right and necessary. He probably deserved it—as punishment, I mean, not just as an act of self-defense. But it's a terrible responsibility. And it has to be."

  Levi was staring at her wide-eyed. "What on Earth are you doing?"

  "Looking for this." She held up his Josh's black pistol. It was a SIG Sauer P226, very popular among government types, Annja knew from too much experience. Especially the U.S. Navy SEALs, one of whom Baron had been. She gripped the top rear of the slide with her left palm, pushed forward with her right enough to crack the chamber and glimpse the yellow gleam of a shell casing. Then she locked it up again, stuffed the pistol in her harness and quickly searched the body for extra magazines. She came up with two. She would have liked to count cartridges in the magazine in the well but there wasn't time.

  "Right," she said, rising and turning back to her companion. "Let me help you up. Time to go."

  The rabbi looked at her with pain in his eyes. "Annja, you've got to leave me," he said.

  "No." She knelt, slung one of his arms over her shoulder. His usual schoolboy gallantry forced him to get to his feet—foot—as best he could.

  "Come on, now," she said, "we need to keep moving." She started walking him downslope at an angle, both to make their three-legged descent easier and to head for the cover of a huge outcrop fifty feet away.

  "You're the rationalist, Annja. Be rational now. One of us has a chance to get away—you, alone. The two of us—one and a half…" He shook his head. "We have no chance. It's simple mathematics."

  "That's not how I do things," she said. "Now keep that foot away from the rocks or you'll regret it."

  "What will we do, then?" Levi asked.

  "You hop as long as you can. Then I carry you," she said.

  "But—"

  "Shut it and hop, please."

  He stared at her a moment. Then he did as she said. He was helped by the fact that she continued to move at an angle downslope. He had to hop or get dragged.

  Shots blasted after them. Annja set her jaw. Levi looked back once, then turned his face forward.

  A bullet cracked off stone and tumbled whining past them. The sound set Annja's nerves on edge. She kept moving. Levi hopped with redoubled vigor.

  They reached the outcrop, its black lava covered in razor-edged pockmarks. Annja dragged Levi hastily behind it. She heard the remaining Young Wolves baying to each other in angry frustration.

  "Wait one," she said, easing Levi down and propping his back against the boulder. She drew the gun and leaned out around the rock. She lined up the sights on the first face she saw, which she guessed from the dark goggles was Baron's, so that it seemed perched like an apple atop the white-dotted front sight. Then she squeezed off a shot. Followed quickly by another.

  She missed both times. On the second shot she actually saw black chips fly from the ledge three feet below where Baron's head had so abruptly vanished. She ducked back no less quickly.

  Missing didn't bother her…much. One of the trickier feats in marksmanship is shooting at somebody at a significantly different level than you are. And after all the difficulty in hitting a target down a sheer slope, with the added challenge of keeping one's own perch, was probably all that had kept them alive so far.

  Annja's main intent in opening fire was to show their pursuers that the prey could now reach out and touch them back. Chasing somebody armed with a gun is always a tough move because it's so easy for them to hole up somewhere and shoot you from cover or at least concealment, and a nice, stable firing platform. No matter how fanatical they were—and these boys did seem to be extreme in their devotion—they had to face the cold truth that if they all got picked off they'd fail their angry deity, rob Him of His chance to come back and scour the Earth in fire to show His love. They wouldn't be martyrs, they'd be failures. So like it or not they had to move more cautiously.

  It still sucks I didn't take out Baron, though, she thought. The security man really did seem to be that good. Given his battle savvy and his command skills she judged he made up half the effective strength of their opponents. Or more, given that it was down to him, Charlie, Eli Holden and ex-marine Zack Thompson. The ex-SEAL was equal to the rest easy, even if you didn't count Charlie Bostitch as a liability rather than an asset.

  "That should keep their heads down," she said, turning back to Levi and tucking the handgun away. "All right, up you come."

  His face was pale with the pain of his broken ankle. To her great relief he didn't give her any brave go-on-without-me guff this time. "Maybe I can hop along okay if I hang on to the back of your harness."

  "Try that," she said. "If you can't keep up I'll damned well carry you."

  "You wouldn't?" After a moment he shook his head. "What am I saying? Of course you would."

  "In a New York minute," she said as he latched on and she began to make her way down the rock-strewn slope.

  "You're insane, Annja Creed," she heard him say. "But I think now I know what they mean by divine madness. Truly, you are touched by the Creator's hand."

  "Whatever," she said. "Right now it's the Angels of Death up there I'm more worried about."

/>   * * *

  IT WASN'T EASY CLIMBING DOWN ARARAT. Especially with Levi left with only one working leg. Apparently Annja's new ability to shoot back was making the pursuers more cautious. She spotted them following a good five hundred yards back. Clearly they were waiting for better terrain to close in and finish their prey.

  She took advantage of their wariness to tend to Levi's left ankle. It was swelling ferociously. They had nothing that would serve adequately as a bandage; there wasn't any time to go pulling off harnesses and jackets to try cutting up a shirt to wrap the ankle. She knew none of those things would work very well anyway. Annja had Levi clamp his teeth on the nylon web tether of a quickdraw while she untied his boot and relaced it around his injured ankle as tightly as she could. He thrashed like a gaffed fish but managed not to pull away.

  Going down Ararat was still lots easier than going up the mountain. The fugitives weren't following anything close to the path they'd taken on the ascent. As far as the expedition was concerned they were in unknown territory. Because they couldn't reconnoiter, but had to take pretty much whatever route they could find on the fly, they couldn't avoid technical climbing.

  Oddly, that was easier on Levi than trying to pick his way down on his good leg. When they had to resort to pitons to keep descending she roped him close to her, and in daylight mostly unobscured by the clouds that began to reassemble in late morning they managed to find routes that offered pretty good handholds. The mountain's igneous rock was good for that, although it quickly sliced the socks Levi was using as improvised mittens to useless tatters. Then again, it was getting warmer as they continued their descent. The wind was only an occasional gust instead of a constant warmth-draining river of cold. And while they still had to navigate plenty of packed snow and ice they weren't on ice all the time.

  The day ground past in a haze of black rock and panting breath; of cloud shadows alternating with bright sun. Annja's body and limbs turned to lead somehow shot through with dull red pain. She ignored it and pushed on.

  As Annja expected the pursuit remained circumspect. The Rehoboam Academy types closed the distance again, but never that she could see to less than about fifty yards. Cover was abundant here, with big jagged boulders and black rock outcroppings. She didn't have too much trouble keeping something between them and their pursuers, although with avalanche damage steadily diminishing more than a few bullets came their way.

  For her part, any time Annja glimpsed a face above them she shot at it. It didn't bother her that she never tagged anyone. She didn't worry about conserving ammunition; three-high cap magazines were enough for lots of cautionary shots, and she didn't expect to win a firefight against four trained men. Anyway, busting caps at them periodically helped keep their minds right.

  "Good thing we're in a restricted military zone," she muttered as they made their way and she got ready to lower Levi down a narrow chute. She could chimney down like a monkey; but there was no way he was going to, with a busted or even sprained ankle.

  "Why so, Annja?" Levi asked.

  "Anybody on the mountain who isn't you or me," she said, "is the enemy. Down you go."

  Though she secured herself well to the top, and used figure eights to brake the rope as she played it out and let him down by degrees, she still had to let him down fast. It was rough. His wounded foot banged at least twice against the unforgiving black stone walls, eliciting choked-off yips of pain. The sheltered scholar was not strong, quick, or tough. But he was showing incredible fortitude.

  At last she got him to the bottom, if in a little more limp a heap than she would have liked. Feeling a rising sense of urgency she unroped, recovered her protection and, putting her back to one wall of the crevice and her boot soles to the other, free-chimneyed rapidly down to join Levi.

  "Let's move," she said, hoisting him up and slinging his arm around her neck. "I've got a bad feeling—"

  With a scream of rage a large male body flew at her from the rocks to her left.

  Chapter 27

  With no choice Annja let go of Levi. He went down like a sack of grain. But she managed to turn to face their attacker.

  He had sprung out of a fissure between two large rocks, reaching with both hands for her throat. She grabbed his forearms and hung on. They felt like blocks of wood.

  No trick could have enabled Annja to keep her feet against the impact of the mass of such a large and muscular young male body. Without conscious intent she allowed herself to be thrown over backward. In combat it was always better to go down under your own terms than get knocked down. She knew—she thought—no rock waited immediately behind her to snap her spine or implode her rib cage.

  As she fell Annja got the cleated sole of her right snow boot into her assailant's midriff. Pain shot through her back as she landed hard on lumpy but mostly level rock. She ignored it, concentrating on her technique, such as it was. Pulling her opponent's arms over her head, urging his flying mass past, she thrust hard with her right leg.

  It wasn't pretty, but it was effective. The Young Wolf flew right over her to smack against a big rock.

  It was a crude circle throw. Ideally you finished the technique by pulling your opponent's head in toward you, helping him tuck it so as to land safely on his shoulder and roll out unharmed. Annja would've been fine if Zach Thompson had come down face-first and busted his neck. He didn't, but her move got him away from her.

  Not bad, given that she'd only done the throw a few times.

  As she sprang to her feet the careful, ever-meticulous part of her mind filed a quick note to herself—not the first such—to practice grappling combat more. She pirouetted to face the man who'd jumped her.

  He was already up and starting toward her again. She'd recognized the sturdy, blond ex-marine immediately. His clean-cut face was white with adrenal rage and twisted like a rag. His out-of-control landing against hard stone must have at least painfully jolted him, if not cracked some ribs or worse. But in his current state he felt no pain.

  He also moved much too quickly for Annja to summon the sword. She launched a front kick for his groin or lower belly, hoping to jolt him enough to increase engagement distance. Closing fast, he batted her leg away with his left hand and punched her in the face with his right.

  The blow missed breaking her nose but filled her vision with a yellow-white flash of pain anyway. Still, it had been clumsily delivered. Had he gotten a full running-start strike in it could have broken her neck. Ears ringing, she staggered back, bringing up her hands to push-block a follow-up blow.

  She deflected a straight left from her face. It was a feint. His right fist caught her in the belly. She bent over, the air smashed out of her lungs. He tried to follow it with an elbow smash to the face, stunning her or breaking her neck. Either would've been fatal; the first would simply have taken more time. Far too much time, if he let his friends catch up and got creative….

  But Annja still had her presence of mind, battered and half-blinded as she was. And she had the reflexes of a cat. She just managed to turn her body in so the rising elbow caught her in the left shoulder.

  The blow straightened her up and knocked her back. She slammed against a rock wall. Her head snapped back and cracked into the rock. Lightning shot through her brain and her stomach lurched.

  She didn't lose consciousness. But for a moment she lost control over her limbs and mind. Her body sagged against the cold, merciless rock as her thoughts spun, fraying like tissue paper in a washing machine.

  I'm going to die, she knew. He's going to beat me to death. Her wits were too scattered to focus her will enough to summon the sword before he was all over her.

  But somehow he wasn't.

  Annja forced herself to concentrate. Forced her vision to narrow to a field where her eyes could make sense of what they saw. She forced her brain to process the inputs of her eyes.

  She saw Zach Thompson looking away from her, down and back at Levi. The skinny rabbi was clinging to Thompson's leg with both arms.
His lips had peeled back into his beard, which had grown out over the last few days into a curly brown tangle. His teeth were clenched. His legs trailed back after him over the dark rock.

  Thompson cursed and backhanded Levi in the face. Levi grimaced. His goggles came off, his glasses went askew on his nose. He screwed his eyes shut tight and still hung on.

  Growling inarticulately the Young Wolf knotted his hand into a fist and drew it up to his ear to smash the rabbi in the face.

  Sheer outrage did for Annja what all the power of her own will couldn't. Snapping herself together she launched herself from the rock. Her right hand formed a half fist. The sword filled it.

  "Ahhhh!" Annja screamed, partly to distract him from beating down the helpless Levi, partly to vent the white-hot rage that filled her and drove out all traces of pain and fatigue. She held the sword back over her shoulder two-handed, as if it were a baseball bat.