Paradox

by Alex Archer

  Her first shot missed. She saw or thought she saw the second pluck the inner right hem of his jacket. He flinched. His arm, which had just come straight and level, jerked upwards a fraction. His gun roared, firing over her head.

  Releasing the sword Annja dropped her left hand to cover her right and the front of the gun's trigger guard, locking her arms into the steady triangle of a classic isosceles stance. She pulled the fore-sight back down to the center of Eli's blue flannel-check shirt, which looked darker than it had a second ago. She fired a quick double tap.

  He staggered and fell. His body rolled back out of sight behind the rock jut he was standing on. His gun clattered down into a tangle of sharp-toothed rocks and thorny brush where Annja knew with sick certainty she'd never have time to find it.

  Instead she turned around and scrambled quickly up the slope again, to pass above the two basalt columns she'd pressed between.

  Trying to move quickly from rock to rock she ran back to the north. She went past where Levi lay thankfully hidden from her sight. She was sure the danger now was advancing from that direction. Leif Baron either thought she was dead or thought Eli was. In either case he'd be moving in, whether to finish off just the rabbi or both of them.

  She didn't know where Bostitch was. She hoped he had the sense to just stay out of things and keep his head down. He'd hired an elite thug with a body like a cartridge with his head for the bullet. The wise thing was to let Baron do a bullet's job.

  Freed from the necessity of propping up poor half-crippled Levi, and the too-long present risk that a single misstep would plunge her a thousand feet to take a long nap on a hard-rock mattress, Annja sprang across the rocks and gravel with relative ease. She no longer felt stiff or sore. The turbocharge the gunfight with Eli had given her didn't hurt, either.

  She made no effort to stay quiet or unseen. She wanted Baron to home in on her, and not the defenseless Levi. What she was trying to do was attract attention while making herself a terrible target.

  She succeeded. As she anticipated, Baron spotted her first. She was jumping from one level to another four feet down when the first shot, snap-fired from about thirty yards away, passed through the space she'd occupied a heartbeat before. The second round of the double tap cracked somewhere high over her head.

  Loose chunks of rocks slid out from under her feet. Annja let herself sit down hard and slid down another dozen feet to the bottom of a narrow dry streambed in a crunching slide. She scrambled up a pile of granite rocks on the far side and peeked over.

  This time she saw Baron first. He was moving between boulders not twenty yards from her. Either he was lucky or his peripheral vision caught the quick purposeful motion as she thrust her captured handgun toward him. He vanished from sight even as the weapon bellowed and bucked her hand.

  She was down to her last half magazine. She thought she had about six shots left. She'd never quite got the hang of counting shots fired in the stress of combat. Nobody she'd ever talked to had, either.

  They played hide-and-seek with guns among outcrops six and ten feet tall. Annja ran a few paces, then bent between two rocks and fired two quick shots toward where she guessed her enemy was. He popped up over a rock seven feet to the left of that and fired two quick shots in return. She had ducked back already and was on the move to another spot.

  She heard Baron curse. She scrambled up an eight-foot chunk of granite and snapped a quick shot over the top toward the sound.

  He fired back. She had already turned and slid back down the rock.

  Been fighting a desk a little too long, haven't you, Jocko? she thought. You may keep your hand-eye skills sharp-shooting off your hundred rounds a day or whatever. But you've forgotten that you can't miss fast enough to catch up.

  Being well drilled in that philosophy herself, what Annja was doing—busting caps while scarcely aiming—ran totally against her grain. But she had a plan.

  If she hit him, bonus. But what she was mainly trying to do was get him to do what he'd just done—waste cartridges. She was well aware there were limits to how much ammunition the pursuers could have brought down the mountain with them.

  It wasn't that Annja was really counting on getting Baron to exhaust his reloads. She was just doing whatever she could think of to tilt the odds her way. She figured it was worth a try.

  And in any event, she knew with certainty that if she actually traded deadly shots with him, she'd die. She wasn't expecting to settle this with a firearm.

  She spent the next two shots sparingly. She kept moving fast among the field of big rocks and outcroppings. She doubted her opponent had any kind of hearing protection, any more than she did; all she could hear was the ringing in her ears, particularly loud crunches. And if Baron did have earplugs in he definitely wouldn't hear her moving.

  They kept closing the range between them, even if it was three steps closer and two steps back. Sensing she was getting near the former SEAL Annja scrambled up a big rounded granite boulder. She hoped to surprise him with a short-range shot from above.

  As she reached the top Baron's head popped up like a bald prairie dog, facing her not eight feet away. He had shed his jacket and wore only a black T-shirt despite the cold. Both off balance, they each snapped off a one-handed shot. Hers sent rock dust clattering against the dark amber lense of his goggles. His just missed the left side of her face.

  She turned at once and slid down the rock. The slide of her gun was locked back over an empty magazine.

  But as her boots thumped onto the gritty ground at the base of the boulder her mind burned with a single image, branded on it in an instant. She'd seen Baron's identical black P226. It was identically slide-locked.

  "Can you hear me, Annja?" she heard him call from the far side of the boulder.

  She started moving up the slope. I know where you are, she thought. You know where I was.

  "I'm empty," Baron said. "All out of cartridges. You are, too, I bet. I saw your slide locked back."

  He was moving now, too. The weird acoustics in this Devil's rock garden made it hard to tell where.

  "You're going to die, Annja. You and the rabbi. You know that, don't you? You know I don't need a gun to kill you both."

  She stopped with her left shoulder almost touching the side of a granite rock ten feet high. It ended just a foot or two ahead of her.

  "You've got the Devil in you, Annja Creed," Leif Baron called. "You must be full of the Devil himself to get the kind of power you've showed. That's it, isn't it? You're full of the Devil."

  She ground her teeth and waited. He was getting close. She could feel him.

  "But I've got the cure for that, Annja. My knife. A good, sharp knife. It'll end your suffering, Annja. It'll cut the Devil right out of your black heart."

  The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere at once. The rocks were casting it back at her from every direction. The echoes seemed to mock her.

  "You'll love having that steel cleanse you, Annja. It'll feel better than the Devil's will. And the best part of it is—"

  She heard a crunch of gravel. He was right in front of her. He held a SEAL combat knife low by his right hip. Ready to plunge deep in her flesh and slice.

  "The pain will be over…."

  His voice faltered.

  Then he looked down to see the gleaming broadsword pressed right up against his six-pack. Two strong female hands clutched the hilt, with bones and veins standing in bold relief.

  "Mine's bigger," Annja hissed.

  She plunged the blade into him. Hard.

  Chapter 29

  "Come on, Levi," Annja said.

  She heard the brush stir. Levi's head appeared between the rock clump and the boulder.

  "You killed both of them? Baron, too?" the rabbi asked.

  "Eli and Baron. Yes."

  "I knew you could do it."

  "That makes one of us. But to my surprise, I did. Come on, take my hand. We're not off the mountain yet."

  "What about Mr
. Bostitch?" the rabbi asked as he got gingerly up on his one good leg. He swayed and had to grab her shoulder to steady him.

  She got them headed downward. Away from the crest. And toward bidding a none-too-fond farewell at last to the Mountain of Pain.

  "I didn't see him," she said. "Let's just hope he decides that what all the king's horses and all the king's men couldn't do, the king's better off not even trying. Or something. Losing all his acolytes and his superhuman killing machine must've shaken his morale. A little bit, anyway."

  Levi shook his head. "I don't know, Annja. He seemed pretty desperate. Men who don't think they've got anything left to lose strike me as good martyrdom candidates."

  "Oh, well," she said. "All I can think of to do then is stay frosty. And if he catches up with us we'll do our level best to make sure he gets to be a martyr."

  "I'm down with that," the rabbi said.

  * * *

  "SO WHO ARE THEY?" Levi asked in a whisper. While Annja had zipped her goggles in a pocket he still wore his. They were sort of holding his one-winged glasses in front of his eyes.

  The two of them lay side by side on their bellies, screened by brush and rocks at the top of a forty-foot bluff. Below them lay the stream, the base of the mountain and freedom.

  Across the stream from them a couple of hundred bearded men in long coats sat and smoked on the flats. The clouds still made a mean lead ceiling that seemed low enough to brush the hidden tip of the great mountain. The sun, a hard white disk of blindness, had just rolled behind the clouds. It had already shifted far enough south that it didn't shine directly in Annja's and Levi's eyes as they gazed west from the bluffs. But the late-afternoon light, mellow and yellow, unreeled long shadows along the ground toward them from the seated men.

  The waiting men all had Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled grenades near at hand. They appeared to be watching the cliff intently. If they were conversing Annja was too far away to hear. They weren't being boisterous about it. In fact they looked deadly serious, these bearded, smoking, well-armed men.

  "Kurdish militia," she said, sick to her stomach. "Peshmerga."

  "Is it just me, or do they not look too friendly?" Levi asked.

  "They don't look friendly. Something tells me they're our late guide Hamid's pals. Waiting here to make sure no infidels get down off their Fiery Mountain alive."

  "How'd they know we'd be coming down around here?"

  "Binoculars," Annja said. "Ears. Gunshots carry."

  "Oh. Yeah."

  She studied the situation. It didn't look good. There were some arroyos eroded deep into the reddish face of the bluff, steep but not sheer, that they could probably use to get down all right. If there weren't a hundred guns shooting at them.

  A hundred yards or so to the north the stream widened into a green pond where a rockfall had blocked its original course. After another hundred and fifty yards or so the bluffs petered out and gave way to a slope strewn with furniture-sized rocks that ran all the way down to the stream. The same thing happened maybe four hundred yards south, but with bigger and fewer rocks.

  "They'll be keeping an eye out to see if we try going down there where it gets less steep," Levi said.

  "That's about how I've got it sized up. How're you feeling?" Annja asked.

  "I hurt. I'm running on empty."

  "Me, too. But we may need to hike for a few more miles. Work our way around the base of the mountain until we get out of sight of the reception committee. We could try to slip past the inevitable patrols under cover of night. That kind of thing."

  He sighed. When he looked at her his eyes seemed to gleam moistly behind his thick glasses.

  "This isn't going to end, is it, Annja?"

  "Oh," she said, "it'll end."

  "It won't end well, I mean."

  "Probably not. You weren't planning to live forever, were you?"

  "I was sort of hoping."

  She laughed quietly. Then she clamped down hard when it threatened to run away with her. "Me, too. Well, we can go on hoping for a while yet. Let's get rolling before our poor overworked muscles set up like freshly poured concrete."

  She started to slither back away from the edge. Gunfire erupted behind them. The shock and sheer cataclysmic noise took her breath away. A line of earth geysers zipped by them on the other side of Levi, outbound toward the patiently sitting men.

  She caught a glimpse of those men throwing away their smokes and jumping to their feet, snatching up their weapons. Then she twisted her body to stare back at the mountain.

  A rumpled figure stood on a granite knob a hundred yards away with Ararat's black cone rising behind him. It was Charlie Bostitch. He had his jacket hanging open, his gut hanging out and lank hair hanging almost in his eyes.

  In his hands he held an object maybe two feet long. With a sinking heart Annja made it out through the gloom as a folding-stock AKSU short assault rifle. Unlikely as it seemed, it almost had to be the weapon that had gone over the cliff with Hamid. Evidently the Young Wolves had found it. That legendary Kalashnikov toughness meant it was actually still in working order. That had to be more than you could say for its former owner.

  "I can't let you slip away from me, Annja," Bostitch shouted. By the throb of his voice she could tell he was crying. "Not alive."

  "Get ready to run for it," she said quietly to Levi.

  "Run?" He looked at her incredulously.

  "Hop," she said. Then, pitching her voice to carry to the man on the boulder pulpit, she shouted, "Sure you can, Charlie. It's over. You lost. Give it up. Anyway, all the peshmerga in this part of Turkey are waiting at the foot of this cliff to carve us like Christmas turkeys."

  Bostitch shook his head. "That doesn't matter to me. It makes no difference whether I live or die. My Lord's waiting on me, Ms. Creed. I just have to make sure you can't pour your poison in the world's ear."

  He started down the side of the rock. As he did he loosed another burst of gunfire. It didn't come close to striking her. Annja winced anyway; that abbreviated barrel made the AKSU loud.

  "You're Jezebel," Bostitch shouted. "You're the Whore of Babylon. I should have known you were wicked when you introduced lust into my heart. When you tempted me. You brought this on yourself. Now you have to pay the price," he ranted.

  "Now would be good," she told Levi.

  Clutching his hand she set off at a trot, though she ached to sprint. But Levi could never keep up with her trying to run on one leg; and she wouldn't be setting any records trying to carry him, either. Bostitch had started off down the south side of his boulder. She took them north.

  A whole Fourth of July's worth of gunfire broke out from the Kurds on the ground. What they thought they were shooting at Annja had no clue. The angles were wrong for any of them to see them or Bostitch.

  It sure didn't help the situation. Bostitch paid no attention. Maybe he didn't notice the fireworks. He sprayed another burst after his fleeing prey.

  Somebody at the back of the pack must have tried a long lob shot with an RPG, which could fly for over a kilometer. The rocket motor burned itself out while the projectile was still climbing toward those sinister clouds. Annja never saw it coming.

  The rocket-propelled grenade didn't hit close enough to hurt them with fragments or blast effect. But suddenly the earth just erupted in a twenty-foot column of dirt and smoke with a yellow jet of flame at its core, ahead and to the right of Annja as she and Levi ran their three-legged race to the north. The noise was terrific, laced with harmonics too high to actually hear but that seemed to shoot through Annja's brain. She shied away.

  The sudden shift in direction caused her to put a foot wrong. A chunk of rock the size of a cantaloupe turned beneath her right boot. Pain stabbed through her ankle and then her hip as she fell, headlong and twisting.

  She cracked her head on a somewhat larger rock, half-buried in the ground.

  She didn't lose consciousness. Not quite. But for a while her world was a hell of bright flas
hing lights and vertigo and a sense that her stomach had turned into a washing machine gone berserk.

  When her senses cleared she lay on her back with her head cradled on Levi's right leg, which was cocked back toward his body as if he were trying to sit half-lotus. His left leg with its injured ankle was stretched out straight across the black ground.

  She blinked her eyes reluctantly back into focus. She realized the rushing, screaming roar that filled her head wasn't actually in it. Instead it passed overhead, seemingly across the sky.