by Alex Archer
Levi had his head uplifted. "It's a jet, Annja. Looks like a fighter."
"Great," she muttered. "That's all we need. It probably hates us, too."
He slid his leg out from under her. "You should probably get up now," he said. "We've got a lot more immediate problems."
The world erupted in shattering noise. For a moment Annja imagined the ancient volcano had decided to wake up and spoil everybody's day at once. Then dirt thrown up by bullets striking too close for comfort rained down onto her face.
She snapped upright. Bostitch was stalking them. Tears gleamed on his puffy cheeks, shining like gold in the near-horizontal radiance of the sun. He pushed the stubby Kalashnikov out in front of him and ripped out another burst. Dirt spurted up between him and his prey.
Seeing Annja respond he raised the stock to his shoulder. From fifty feet away the hole in the muzzle looked her in the eye. She caught her breath and braced for a last desperate dive to the side.
It wouldn't work. But she was damned if she was going to die frozen like a terrified rabbit.
The muzzle bounced up and down. Up and down. She realized Bostitch was jerking the trigger. Bad form, that. Worse, from his viewpoint anyway, the weapon wasn't making any noise. No fire. No nasty little bullets moving at several times the speed of sound.
"Empty," he said. She could barely make him out through the ringing in her ears. It sounded as if Quasimodo had set up shop in her skull. "It won't save you. The Lord provides…I've got more…" he babbled.
She scrambled up. Pain stabbed through the joint of her hip. Her right ankle wobbled. She found herself tipped against Levi. She wasn't sure how he'd gotten to his feet unaided.
"Down to two legs between us," she said out of the side of her mouth.
She looked over her shoulder. Her tiny hope of possible escape died. The ground fell away not ten feet behind them as if severed by God's paper cutter. Down on the flats the Kurds were still firing enthusiastically. Through the grass at the brink she saw a little arc of green below.
They had nowhere to go. She took Levi's hand.
Bostitch had dropped the empty magazine from his weapon. He brought another orange plastic banana mag from a pocket of his jacket. He fumbled to stuff it into the rifle's well. His hands didn't seem to be cooperating with his eyes too well.
"I got you now," he said. "You can't escape."
Leaving his big unsteady hands to sort out the reload as best they could he lifted his face to show the victims waiting for his sacrifice a wide, gloating smile.
"It's the end. The end for you sinners. I'll be washed in the blood of the Lamb."
Over the madman's right shoulder Annja saw a speck appear against the sky. It was a small darkness above the great dark mountain. Setting sunlight glinted off a wing as it dipped forward and rapidly began to grow in appearance.
The magazine finally went home with a click. A screaming came across the sky.
Bostitch ignored it. He racked the charging handle to chamber a fresh round.
Something dropped from the sleek belly of the slender winged shape. It was a long, thin egg that twinkled in the slanting sunlight as it tumbled, end over end.
"You are weighed in the balance," Bostitch crowed in triumph, raising his short rifle.
Yellow light bloomed brilliantly behind him. A dark shape, the ruptured canister, tumbled at the front of what quickly became a rolling wave of flame.
"And you are found wanting!" Annja screamed.
At last some presentiment of the wrath to come made Bostitch turn. He dropped his rifle and threw up his arms in a futile attempt to shield his flesh from the tsunami.
It wasn't the water, but the fire this time.
Annja had turned, too. She dragged Levi over the cliff with her.
As they dropped toward the pond she heard Bostitch's maniacal shrieking as liquid hellfire consumed him.
She'd known from glimpsing a sliver of it that the pond lay below. Whether they could reach it by jumping she didn't know. Nor did she know if it was deep enough to safely break their fall.
It didn't much matter, she thought, oddly calm as they fell, still hand in hand. It's a quicker way to check out than Charlie's got. She pulled in the deepest abdominal breath she could.
Not really wanting to watch, Annja flicked her gaze upward as her feet reached the water. To her horror she saw that a glowing cascade of flame had rolled right out over the cliff into the air. It was falling right on top of them.
The water swallowed her. Somehow she still held on to Levi's hand as they went down through the cold liquid. Her feet hit silty bottom. Her right ankle panged. Her left leg flexed and absorbed the last of her momentum.
She'd shut her eyes when they hit. She opened them again. She clearly saw Levi next to her, looking astonished; the rounded mud bottom of the pool, the water weeds growing from it; the tail-flick of a startled fish fleeing the commotion. All lit by a weird yellow glow whose brilliance defeated the water's murkiness.
She looked up. A ceiling of fire hung a few feet above their heads. It was literally that—napalm burning on the surface of the pool. And they were beginning to bob right back up into the floating inferno.
Getting a fresh death grip on Levi's hand Annja went horizontal and began to kick for all she was worth. She gestured for Levi to swim with her. Or she hoped she did. And hoped he could see her signal at all. His goggles and glasses were gone.
For a moment he fought her, wide-eyed, bubbles streaming out his nose and open mouth. She squeezed his hand hard. Cognizance came into his eyes. He nodded.
She let go to free their arms. Side by side they swam beneath the lethal glow. The need for fresh air tore at Annja's lungs. But she willed herself to keep going until they were out from under that hideous glare.
They came up against the accidental rock dam that had formed the pond. Annja braked with a hand and let herself shoot to the surface. She broke through.
The air was hot and stank of petroleum fractions. The fire had already started to die off into little patches of yellow flame, rocking on the water and giving off greasy black smoke. Levi came up splashing at her side. He thrashed his arms and shook his head wildly.
"Annja! I can't swim!" he shouted.
"I'm glad you didn't remember that when you were doing it a moment ago. Just put your feet down. Foot. You'll touch bottom," she said.
"Oh." He calmed down. A moment later, once more leaning together for mutual support, the two hobbled up the west bank of the pond, with the little waterfall outflow burbling right beside them.
They found themselves face-to-face with a line of bearded men with long coats, stalking toward them through the scrub beyond the streambed. Their shadows were grim decisive lines before them. They were fifty yards off; evidently they had withdrawn a healthy distance when the napalm-fall spilled over the cliff.
Now they were back, with weapons at their hips. Catching sight of the sodden pair they shouted in triumph. The Kalashnikovs came up.
Again the sky screamed. This time a strange snarling joined the jet engine's banshee cry.
The men in front of Annja started coming apart in quick sprays of red. It was as if they were strange puppets stuffed with firecrackers, not real living, breathing men. They weren't being cut down. They exploded.
A slim shape swept low overhead from right to left, passing above the smoking remnants of the men it had destroyed. If there were any survivors they had had the sense to go down fast and try their damnedest to become one with the planet. Annja whipped her head counterclockwise to see a fighter aircraft, its delta wings and a slim, tubular fuselage orange in the light of the setting sun, pull up from its strafing run. She could see the single yellow flame of its exhaust.
More snarling broke out overhead. Annja and Levi ducked as big noisy explosions started going off on the flats to the west of the stream. Clouds of dirt and smoke flew everywhere. Things flew through the air—rocks, shattered weapons, tubular objects shoddily wrapped in fla
pping cloth. Those last bits didn't bear too much thinking about. Especially when a detached arm bounced not fifteen feet away from Annja and rolled to a stop. The carnage was everywhere.
Annja realized that a pair of shapes like gigantic mutant dragonflies were hovering a hundred feet in the air, turning and dipping this way and that. They were behind all the racket. Machine cannons mounted beneath their domed bulging snouts and rocket pods beneath their stub wings were ripping holy Hell out of the peshmerga.
"Oh, my God, they're Hinds!" Annja exclaimed.
She glanced at Levi. He was staring slack-jawed up at the flying monsters. She wasn't sure how much he could see without his glasses, but whatever it was he saw, he wasn't making any sense at all out of it.
"You know," she said. "Russian helicopters. Like, from Soviet times."
She realized she was babbling. She also realized he almost certainly couldn't hear her. If the earlier outburst of fire from the Kurds had sounded like the Fourth of July, this sounded as if they'd decided to move the pyrotechnic display into the drained-out hold of an oil tanker.
Still, she felt relief. She was pretty sure. She didn't actually understand what was going on any better than Levi seemed to. But the horrible deadly aircraft weren't shooting at them. In fact they were shooting at the guys who were going to shoot at them.
"That has to be good, right?" she said it aloud, as if she'd spoken the thoughts preceding. Which was all good, since just now her thoughts were as audible as her words were.
What was going on around them didn't seem to be a battle as much as it was a massacre. Annja realized that if you had to be in a battle, that was definitely the kind of battle to be in. Provided you weren't on the side getting slaughtered.
She was pretty sure she'd feel horrible later for thinking that.
A sudden blast of wind beat down upon them. Annja looked up, almost overbalancing and toppling back into the pond as she saw another huge shape dropping toward them below a flashing circle of rotor.
It settled down to land on retractable wheels not thirty yards from them. Annja and Levi just stood and gaped despite the bits of dirt and dried vegetable stuff getting blown in their faces. It wasn't as if they were going to run from a helicopter. Even if they had all their legs in working order.
This was a different model chopper, looking even bigger than the huge, grotesque gunships, more resembling a pregnant guppy than an armed dragonfly.
A hatch opened in the side closest to them. Out spilled a bunch of guys in salwar kameez and Chitrali caps, serious beard shadows and angry moustaches, all of them carrying Kalashnikov rifles and one or two light machine guns with drum magazines. As the helicopter's twin turbine engines throttled down with a whine the Afghan-looking men fanned out to set up a defensive perimeter. In case anybody still cared.
Down from the chopper stepped a tall pale-skinned man, inexpressibly natty in a fedora and a tan London Fog coat.
"Ms. Creed," he said politely, above the shoop-shoop of the big slowing rotors. "Rabbi Leibowitz."
"Are we rescued or being taken prisoner?" Annja asked feebly.
"Yes," the man said.
"All right," Annja said. "This is officially too much."
And she passed out from exhaustion.
Chapter 30
Annja opened her eyes.
There was a nurse doing something next to her bed by a cheery yellow light. Or Annja thought she was a nurse, from her crisp white-and-green uniform and the little white old-timey cap perched atop her head.
Apparently sensing the patient had awakened she turned to smile at Annja. She was a young woman, pretty, dark, with raven-black hair bobbed short beneath her paper cap.
She left the room without saying anything. A spray of cheerful yellow flowers stuck up out of a pearlescent ceramic vase on a table beside Annja's bed. Annja didn't know what they were. Maybe some kind of daisies? An ethnobotanist she wasn't.
Beyond the flowers stood another bed. In it Rabbi Levi Leibowitz, dressed in white pajamas with gray pinstripes, lay propped up against a pile of pillows. He had a bandage plastered right across the bridge of his nose. He blinked at her through what she dimly understood must be new glasses perched on the bandage and smiled shyly.
"Levi," she croaked. "You made it."
"Hi, Annja," he said. "You, too. I guess our gods won out after all."
"What's with the bandage?" she asked.
"Zach Thompson broke my nose, remember? They fixed it. Cosmetic surgery. They seem pretty good at it."
"Who?"
"The doctors here."
"Where is here?" she asked.
"Welcome to Yerevan," a masculine voice said from behind her. She had only heard that dry tone and clipped intonation once before. Even so, she knew there was no way she would ever forget it.
"Who are you?" she said, fairly certain she had a good idea. She turned to look at the man who sat in a wooden chair beside the window. The bright morning sun rushing in obscured him in its glare.
She decided to test her theory. "So the United States is currently friends with Armenia?" she asked.
"Armenia is friendly to us. And that's what really matters, isn't it?" the man said.
"I suppose. Yeah," she replied, not sure she really wanted to know what was going on. It was never a good thing when government agents showed up out of nowhere. Even if they did save your life. She had the sinking feeling there might be people out there who knew more about her than she wanted them to.
The man crossed long slim legs and leaned forward slightly to clasp his knee with pale spidery hands.
"I have to thank you both for the show you put on. It made for highly entertaining viewing," he said.
"What are you talking about?" Levi asked.
"You didn't have a satellite tasked to watch us?" Annja asked.
"Oh, no." He shook his narrow head. "You did, however, occupy the undivided attention of your own personal Global Hawk remotely piloted aircraft."
Feeling suddenly weary Annja shook her head. "We never had a clue."
"That's kind of the point of a spy drone, isn't it?"
"So what about those aircraft that…rescued us, I guess?" she said.
"Rescued you, indeed."
"The Hinds and the fighter plane, whatever it was—"
"Sukhoi Su-17. Fitter-C. Ground attack plane, actually. Rather elderly but gets the job done. We can all aspire to that, can't we?"
"Were they Armenian?"
"Oh, yes."
"But…we were in Turkey."
She sensed as much as saw his thin smile.
"Hot pursuit of Muslim terrorists covers a multitude of sins, in these years of the Long War, " the man said.
"I see. And those dudes with you in the helicopter?"
"Baluchi mercenaries. Don't waste your breath asking," he said politely.
"'Course not," Annja replied wearily.
He leaned back and draped an arm over the back of his wooden chair.
"I'd like to offer you both, on what we might call an official unofficial basis, the profound thanks of the United States of America."
"What for?" Levi asked.
"You've helped to tie up a number of ends, which, if left loose, posed major threats to national security."
"Like what?" Levi blurted.
"Leif Baron, for one. He'd become a loose cannon. He spent so much time working among and with Islamic crazies that some people were starting to say he'd forgotten which side he was really on."
Annja frowned. She couldn't quite buy that. Baron was a psychopath and a fanatic, but treason would violate his self-image. And he was unlikely to join Muslims waging war against Christianity.
Or am I wrong about that? she found herself wondering. It wasn't as if she'd actually known him well. Maybe Baron the religious zealot had found not a new faith, but rather alliance, with spirits far more akin to his than those of the West's decadent materialists, who seemed bent on abandoning all religion. She'd read right-wing Ame
rican fundamentalist tracts in praise of Islamic fervor.
She said nothing. Arguing with government mystery men was not a fruitful pastime.
But Levi didn't know that yet.
"That doesn't make any sense," he said flatly. "I can't believe the government would carry out such a convoluted scheme, just on, what? The off-chance of eliminating a single suspected rogue? It's just too…too Rube Goldberg. There's got to be more to it."