by Alex Archer
She had gotten far enough upslope for serious rock juts to flank her on the left—the direction the granite cliff now lay in relation to her. Tufted dry grass shielded her from the guys high right.
She came up to all fours. She scrabbled up the narrow draw until larger rock outcrops to either side protected her from the sides.
Full-auto volleys cracked off to both sides of her. Despite their advantage in height and firepower the ambushers acted tentative. Nobody wants to get shot, she realized.
Temporarily shielded, Annja scrambled close to the ridge top. She hoped to find a way to work around and catch the snipers on the granite knob unexpectedly from behind. If a straight-up counter-charge isn’t going to happen, she thought, there’s always a sneak attack. She could do sneaky.
Carefully she kept low, beneath the crest of the ridge. To silhouette herself against the painfully blue Himalayan sky and its light screen of white clouds would be to make herself the ideal target.
As she worked her way forward toward the cliffs she almost immediately saw the bent-over backs of a pair of men wearing bulky fur-trimmed jackets. One carried an AKM, the other a long black M-16. Fortunately their attention was fixed totally to their front as they picked their way to a vantage point from where they no doubt hoped to catch Pan, still popping off pesky shots from his Glock, unprotected. They were completely unaware of her.
Her own Glock was in her right hand as she moved toward them as fast as she thought she could without being heard. The noisy firefight helped. She was still a good twenty-five yards away from the men. A good shot herself, as well as a skillful combat handgunner, she carried an unfamiliar weapon with a shortish barrel. A shot she wouldn’t hesitate to take on the shooting range looked way too long to her here on this windswept ridge. And with both men carrying rifles, she couldn’t afford to shoot and miss. Both men had to go down, as close to the same instant as possible.
A firecracker ripple in the air right beside her made her heart jump practically through the roof of her skull. It was the sound of bullets, shattering the air at supersonic speed. She didn’t need the reports of another M-16 firing, arriving a half beat later, to tell her that someone had fired up at her from behind, narrowly missing to splash a burst of copper-jacketed .223-caliber needles off a flat rock nearby.
Annja had exactly zero good options. All she could do was act. She sprang into a full-on run at the men in front of her. All she had was hope that her combat-honed reflexes had chosen one of the alternatives that sucked least.
Loose gravel crunched and slipped beneath her soles. She was practically flying, miraculously managing not to twist an ankle or fall. Either would have finished her.
The closer of the two men was quick to respond. He turned toward her, bringing up his long black gun.
A wild burst cracked over her head, aimed at the clouds and distance-blue peaks far to the north. She pushed the Glock out on the end of her arm, locked the elbow and started cranking off rounds as fast as the handgun would cycle.
A fountain of empties spouted from the Glock’s ejector port, twinkling as they turned over and over in the intense mountain sunlight. Fortunately she ran under the glittering arch. No hot brass cylinders seared her face or touched her skin. A couple bounced on her left shoulder; most missed her.
She tried to keep the white dot of the foresight centered in her vision—and centered in the middle of the turning rifleman’s torso. She struggled not to yank the piece offline as she worked the long Glock double-action trigger as fast as she could. Her dead run, which she did not dare slow, and the weapon’s recoil didn’t help.
But she did enough. She actually saw the gunman’s round, stubbled face grimace in shock as her bullets hit him. He crumpled. His rifle clattered to the ground.
The gunfire stopped. Her ears rang from her own wild fusillade, but she could still hear the new gunman’s shots, as though from a great distance. Now, miraculously, he had quit firing for fear of hitting his comrades.
But her stubby Glock had its heavy steel slide locked back on its light polymer body. She had cranked through the whole 11-round magazine and the chambered round in dropping the first guerrilla. The Kalashnikov man had almost finished pivoting toward her, heavy rifle at his hip.
She dropped the empty Glock, formed her right hand in a fist and reached with her will. She felt the reassuring solidity of her sword’s hilt spring from nowhere to fill it.
The man with the AK might have been fast enough to get a shot into her. Regardless of how seasoned a fighter he was, the sight of something simply impossible—a pointed three-foot length of razor steel appearing from nowhere—short-circuited all of his battle reflexes.
He might have been able to fend off the sword with his rifle. But he did the worst thing possible—threw it and his arms up by reflex to protect his face.
That wasn’t Annja’s target. She thrust home. With almost seductively little resistance the point took him in the sternum. Driven by Annja’s whole weight charging full speed, the sword slid right through him, thrusting out the back of his parka. She felt weird vibrations run up her arm as the blade grated alongside his spine.
She released the weapon and put her shoulder down as she ran into him headlong. As tackles went it might not have made the sports center plays of the day, but it served its purpose. They both fell over a low pile of rocks.
What might have been a bone-snapping impact was cushioned by the gunman’s body. He was limp as she fell atop him.
A shudder went through her body. Like it or not—and she didn’t—since acquiring the sword she had often been forced to experience a very intimate form of killing. But seldom had she felt one of her victims die.
Have hysterics later, she commanded herself, setting her jaw against a surge of bile from her stomach. The Kalashnikov lay by her victim’s outflung arm a yard to her left. She snatched it up. Bringing the stock to her shoulder, she came up and around into a crouch.
Apparently the M-16 gunner coming up behind took for granted his comrade would quickly overpower a mere woman—even a woman a head taller than he was. Her body, bulked out by her colorful down jacket, had blocked the sword’s apparition from his view. Or his mind had simply refused to process it. He had his gun lowered to a sort of patrol position, slanting before belly and hips, and ambled forward at a bowlegged gait.
His eyes barely had time to begin to widen at the unexpected sight of Annja popping up from behind a rock like a prairie dog. Then the hooded front sight blade of Annja’s scavenged AKM came up before her eyes. She hammered a 3-round burst through his chest and he went down.
From behind him another burst clattered. Without seeing the second shooter Annja ducked. He was good enough or lucky enough that bullets spattered the very rock she hid behind. The piercing wails of the tumbling ricochets chilled her soul. Have I just given the guys on the cliff a clear shot at my back? she wondered.
She couldn’t worry about that. Any more than she could give in to the fear that yammered like a frightened dog pack in her skull. The immediate threat was the guy shooting at her.
She did something she usually despised. She held the big Kalashnikov up over her head and shot blindly. The 7.62 mm bullets it fired carried more energy than the slimmer, faster M-16 projectiles. But the Russian-designed rifle also weighed about ten pounds loaded, which served to soak up a lot of the recoil. With her upper-body strength she could hold the piece overhead and at least hang on to it while she sprayed the landscape, hoping to force her attacker to duck.
She brought the stock back to her shoulder and came up behind it, just high enough to see and sight over the rock. Either her spray-and-pray had worked or her enemy had just ducked after shooting on general principles. He popped up quickly, though, bolt upright and firing furiously. He was about twenty feet to the right of where she expected him, down the slope toward the narrow valley where the rest of her expedition hunkered down.
Gritting her teeth, she swung the heavy weapon toward him, de
termined to end this, while there was still a chance the shooters on the cliff—now behind her—were more occupied trading shots with Pan than coming up to blast her in the back at point-blank range.
She saw something dark puff out the right side of the gunman’s head, just beneath his fur cap with the earflaps tied over the top. His head jerked and then he simply dropped like an empty suit of clothes slipping from a hanger.
The hearty crack of Lal’s Enfield echoed between the valley walls.
Annja threw down the Kalashnikov and slid forward over the rock to snag the sling of the first man’s M-16.
She spun quickly, ready to fire. She saw no one. She made herself take time to bust the curved black magazine out of the well. It still had rounds in it. She looked behind her, back along the ridgeline. Nothing. Turning back toward the unseen granite cliffs, she crept forward, keeping low.
Inside of thirty feet the slope steeply dropped away right in front of her. She went to her belly and crawled up to peer through some tuft grass. The gray granite cliff proved to front a bluff thrusting out from the same ridge she was on, which curved out around to Annja’s right. She had an unobstructed view of a pair of gunmen crouched in a rocky, brushy perch, still shooting down into the valley at Pan and the others.
Anger filled her. She aimed two-handed over a rock at a fur-capped head and fired. She missed. Maybe the iron sight was off. Or maybe that was an excuse, and she’d pulled off. The enormous adrenaline dump her body had experienced had caught up to her. Annja felt clammy and sweat covered, and her fingers were as thick and clumsy as cold hot dogs.
But her first shot did make her target duck back in terrified surprise. After a second shot, which went even wider off target, both gunmen turned and rabbited out of sight, losing themselves quickly in the scrub.
She continued hunkering there for what seemed an eternity or two, tense behind the black rifle’s receiver, stomach churning with nausea and head ringing like a bell. She was trying to guard in all directions at once. Then a shout from back along the ridge made her whip back around, pointing the M-16.
A figure approached with empty hands held high above his head. A very tall figure, dark against the looming white mass of the mountain.
“It’s over, Annja,” the figure shouted to her. “They pulled back. They are gone.”
She threw down the rifle and ran to catch Pan Katramados in a bone-crushing embrace.
17
“He says he hears rumors of other foreigners about,” Lal translated as Prasad conversed with a wizened old farmer and his grandson, who led their yak by a brass ring through its nose. The beast took advantage of their temporary halt by dropping its big, shaggy, short-horned head to crop at some khaki bunch grass jutting up from a patch of snow. “They’re heavily armed, too. They are rude and make the people uncomfortable. But the word is also out they enjoy the protection of the local Party.”
“Sounds as if Bajraktari and company have joined the fun,” Pan said.
Annja looked at Lal in alarm. “Does he mean the Maoists? Why would they help ethnic-Albanian gangsters from Kosovo?”
“The Maoist Communist Party of Nepal recalls how Albania was the only other officially Maoist nation on Earth,” Lal said. “And that they kept the faith longer than China herself did.”
The answer surprised her. She had to remind herself the young man wasn’t just bright and well educated; he had also traveled a fair part of the world before returning to his mountainous homeland. It wasn’t quite so incongruous for a hill-man guide in a remote country to have a fairly sophisticated knowledge of the outside world as it might seem.
Pan, ever the policeman, had a more cynical take on the subject. “The lure of corruption knows no party bounds,” he said. “Any more than national borders.”
Through Prasad Annja pressed a few dollars on the elderly peasant. Nepal was one of the world’s poorest countries, and the resurging political strife wasn’t helping. The man seemed reluctant to accept until she suggested he could buy something for his grandson. The boy, with round brown sun-reddened cheeks and bright obsidian eyes, was clearly his grandfather’s special pet; the old man’s own eyes twinkled, barely visible within triangular slits in his deeply seamed, copper-colored face. He accepted with bows and profuse thanks.
The yak gave them a reproachful look as he tugged its broad head up and urged it under way through the hemlock forest. Apparently it thought Annja could’ve kept its master occupied a lot longer than that.
“Sorry,” Annja said with a little hand wave at the beast.
They climbed higher. The forest was still around them, except for a slight rustle of wind in the high boughs, the twitter of distant birds, the crunch of snow under their boots. They had come high enough that snow still lay plentifully if patchily on the ground. Annja, who had grown somewhat accustomed to the altitude, found her breath coming a bit short again.
Puffy white clouds concealed the dizzying heights of the White Mountain itself and its attendants to the west, as well as mighty Annapurna to the southeast, which they otherwise might have seen through breaks in the woods. The clouds concerned Annja, who wasn’t eager to get hit with a snowstorm. Prasad assured her one wasn’t coming soon.
“Still,” he said with his quiet smile, “where your path leads you will find snow aplenty.”
“Great,” Annja said.
The head guide now carried an AKM muzzle down. Annja carried a similarly slung M-16. Another cousin to Lal and Prasad, Pritam, carried the other salvaged M-16. Pan, interestingly to Annja, preferred to tote the other Kalashnikov taken from the four guerrillas who had died on the heights.
They had found the sniper who had fallen off the cliff from where the original ambush had been launched. He was broken across a rock with his rifle next to him. It was another Kalashnikov. Its stock was split but it proved to still fire. One of the locally hired Sherpas who hadn’t quit in the wake of the attack and the death of a kinsman, a national army vet whom Lal vouched for, carried it. A few turns of black electrical tape had patched the stock.
As a foreign national carrying an automatic weapon Annja had begun feeling a little dubious about the prospect of being caught by a government patrol. She said so. But Prasad and Lal made light of that concern.
“Government patrols don’t come here now,” Lal said.
“Technically,” Prasad said, “Jagannatha’s men are government patrols.” That left Annja feeling sobered.
In Nepal it seemed the difference between rebels and police depended on political tides in the capital that shifted literally from minute to minute.
She was intrigued at Pan’s response to taking part in killing what might have been called fellow law-enforcement officers. He’d shown no reaction. He was first and foremost a warrior, a soldier, an elite special operator. Cop was his current assignment, not his identity. His ethics on the subject were simple, having apparently been forged in the brutal war in Afghanistan—anybody who shot at him, he killed, and he didn’t lose any sleep over the fact that she could tell.
But that didn’t mean he was sleeping peacefully. From the way he thrashed and called out in his sleeping bag at night he was having his dreams again. The dreams of that ancient Macedonian general who seemed so much like him. Whether it was that other Pan whose trail they followed, she couldn’t say. But he never had any nightmares over killing people who were trying to kill him. Any more than she did.
“How do you know our attackers were this major’s men?” Pan asked. His instinct had been to hang around to examine the bodies in detail after the firefight. Prasad and Lal had had none of that. One Sherpa had been killed; two others quit on the spot. The Magar guides feared the guerrillas might return with reinforcements.
“It was a professional ambush,” Lal said. “The ambushers didn’t dump their whole magazines at us instantly the way bandits would. Or even most guerrillas. But Jagannatha knows his trade.”
“How do you know we weren’t hit by Jagannatha himself,
then?” Pan asked.
“Because we are still alive,” Prasad said matter-of-factly.
18
As they walked a precipitous path away from the latest shrine they had uncovered they found a party of peasants waiting silently for them on the rocks above the trail. Annja felt a crawling at the nape of her neck.
It had been the richest shrine found yet. This one was public, or at least not hidden. Another cairn of rocks with a cheap gilded-plaster statue of the Buddha within, presiding over offerings of dyed plastic flowers, joss sticks, crumpled Nepali banknotes and wallet-size photos of those for whom blessings were sought. It was like a hundred small popular shrines she’d seen all around the world, from Mexico to the Philippines.
But a secret compartment in back held a cavity, perhaps a cubic yard in volume, that contained offerings of jewelry, gold and silver, including coins that dated back a millennium or more, as far as Annja or Pan could tell. They had carefully documented all in sight—and left it covered back up, undisturbed.
She felt Pan’s big hand descend on her shoulder. She could feel the power of his gentle squeeze reassuring her. She patted his gloved hand with hers. It was cold up on the open slope, the morning breeze brisk.
Prasad and Lal spoke to the waiting peasants in low tones. They were three young men and an older one. Though short and not prepossessing at first glance, the way they held themselves on their bowed legs suggested the remarkable strength so many Nepali hill folk possessed.
The peasants were unarmed, except for the big knives at their belts. Annja had learned better than to underestimate those. They in turn did not seem in the least intimidated by the long-arms the party still openly displayed.
“The last thing we need,” Pan said quietly by her ear, “is to have to fight people trying to protect the same treasures we are.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes from the men. He had echoed her thoughts exactly.