by Alex Archer
She now had the apple-seller’s ramshackle kiosk, as well as its neighboring booths, between her and the Kosovars. She heard them shout, their voices harsh and alien over the more musical cries from the locals. She heard more shots. Concern for Pan hit her like a stiff jab to the sternum. She absorbed it and ran on.
His wink had told her he was fine and that she should take whatever steps she could to get herself free. At this point she knew the best thing she could do for her friend was to get clear as quickly as possible, so he wouldn’t feel he had to battle the whole gang single-handed to cover her escape. If anyone knew how to handle himself when the hammer came down, it was Pan Katramados.
She took a rapid right. At once she saw she’d made the wrong choice—she was running right into a rough stone retaining wall that held up the hillside where the street ended. Another course of houses, with white-painted wooden walls and sun-peeled red trim, ran about eight feet higher up, on a level supported by the wall.
Or maybe I didn’t choose wrong, she thought. Right behind her she heard harsh shouts in a language that clearly wasn’t any kind of Nepalese.
Drawing a quick breath from her diaphragm, Annja raced straight at the retaining wall. As she reached it she jumped. The crudely dressed stones offered ample hand- and footholds. She stuck like a fly and swarmed quickly up and over.
A burst of gunfire raked the house wall to her right. Flying rock chips stung her hands and cheek.
More full-auto bursts snarled at her. They weren’t the deep stutter of a Kalashnikov, well-known and unmistakable to television viewers worldwide. And especially to Annja, who in the past couple of years had made something of a secondary profession of being shot at with AKs. The Kosovars were shooting machine pistols at her. Fortunately, the weapons, true fully automatic handguns, were simply too light to be controllable except for when firing single shots.
Not looking back, she sidestepped rapidly along the irregular lip of rocks that served as the foundation on which the house was perched with her back against the wood wall. She hoped her pursuers wouldn’t fire again. Aside from the danger to her, she worried the bullets might punch right through the planks and endanger any occupants of the little house.
Annja heard angry shouts in Albanian, as alien to this land as to Annja’s ears. They didn’t seem directed at her.
The village of terraces, over nine thousand feet up the Dhaulagiri Himal, was a trade crossroads for this part of western Nepal. Its inns offered convenient bases for those who wished to acclimatize themselves to the thin air, as well as those who didn’t care to venture higher into the howling ice and stone wastes above. It was also the last place climbing supplies were readily available.
That all meant the village hosted a contingent of the armed police force. The constables, Prasad had informed Annja and Pan before cutting them loose to wander on their own, were unlikely to let themselves get distracted by the current political uncertainty in Kathmandu. As cops, their first instinct would always be to preserve order. Second, no matter which party held power, the only engine that really drove Nepal’s creaky two-stroke economy was tourism. So above all the armed police would be on the alert to squash behaviors that might freak out—or, worse, physically endanger—the tourists.
Apparently Bajraktari’s goons were realizing that—a beat too late. In mere minutes the police were likely to be swarming the level beneath Annja like hornets. She didn’t want to hang around and deal with them any more than Bajraktari’s thugs did.
Not that Bajraktari’s goons were inclined to let her hang around. As she crept around the corner of the house she heard heavy footsteps pounding along the hard-packed soil behind her. Then angry shouts as she vanished from view.
Annja found herself on another terrace road. To her left a remarkably steep street climbed the mountainside, linking the levels. She decided to head around the face of the hillside to put some quick distance between herself and her pursuers. She didn’t think running straight uphill was such a great idea. She was almost two miles up and feeling the strain despite having spent a week getting to this altitude. It wasn’t enough time.
Quickly she walked along a street crowded close by houses on both sides. To her right stood mostly frame houses. To the left stood mostly two-story stone piles, some with a barren elevated yard surrounded by stone fences. The trim on windows, doors and pitched roofs tended either to green or blue.
To her right the houses gave way, affording her a breathtaking view of the gray terraces marching away beneath her. The buildings gleamed white beneath colorful rooftops. Outdoor markets sprouted like fields of colorful mushrooms in spaces between. It was a good day for business.
A pair of locals approached from the other direction. Annja went tense as she saw they wore green-and-brown camouflage-pattern shirts. She made herself relax. Nothing would make the local cops or military types more suspicious of you than freaking out when they got near. It tended to trip their predatory instincts.
She was just wondering where exactly these cops expected that camou pattern to help them blend in when she noticed that the two men’s trousers didn’t match. One pair was brown, the other faded blue, probably Western castoffs such as many folk hereabouts wore.
Annja felt her blood chill.
Guerrillas. She word thrilled down her nerves. She kept herself calm. At least they carried no visible firearms. And the bazaar town was neutral territory; Prasad had explained that, too. The guerrillas had their needs the same as any. Including, none too surprisingly, some neither Prasad nor his nephew showed any inclination to explain to her.
Something else struck her about them as they swaggered closer. They’re not Jagannatha’s men, she thought. They seemed both harder and softer than the men she had fought in that hill valley. Harder edged, but without the air of real physical and mental hardness. Their several-day beards looked way too deliberate, not the scruff that sprouted from the cheeks of men who were preoccupied with survival in harsh and dangerous terrain. Jagannatha’s guerrillas who had attacked them consisted of recruits and veterans alike who had committed to a tough road—no matter that they had simply, and lethally, underestimated their would-be victims.
This pair struck her more as street punks. As if they expected to command fear because of their colors, not respect based on who they were.
She set her vision to soft focus, expanding her peripheral vision at the expense of detail. As they passed her they laughed with each other, probably at some sexist joke.
The second they thought they were past her field of vision they wheeled and struck like cats.
The closer one snatched at her arm. Annja back kicked him in the gut. Her heel caught his solar plexus; the air gushed out of him and he sat down hard on the bare gray dirt.
His partner came at her from straight behind. He had drawn a big kukri from underneath his untucked shirt. Annja’s instantaneous counterattack on his partner had the same effect on him they intended to have on her. He lost focus, goggling in amazement at his buddy unexpectedly sitting, holding his belly and gasping like a landed catfish.
Annja just kept spinning. A wheeling kick of her right foot caught the inside of the wrist that held the kukri. He kept his grip on the hardwood hilt but the impact flung his arm wide.
Annja kept both her forward and rotational momentum, blasting her wide-open opponent with a spinning back kick. It was the most powerful blow she knew how to deliver. It caught him in the sternum with a thud like a sledgehammer hitting a fencepost and knocked him back three feet.
To both of their surprise that put him a foot past the edge of the terrace. For a moment he seemed to hang there in midair. His brown eyes, panic wide, locked with hers. He began to windmill his limbs like a cartoon character and dropped out of sight to crash through the roof of a shed six feet below.
Then a heavy weight slammed down on Annja’s back.
20
Annja Creed had made the same mistake her foe had. She’d been hypnotized, however moment
arily, by an unexpected twist of events. She knew she was luckier than she deserved to be that the second man hadn’t recovered enough of his wits along with his wind and just plain planted the enormous angled blade of his kukri between her shoulder blades.
Instead he’d jumped on her. She felt his breath hot and desperate on the nape of her neck. He was strong; his arms clamped her like barrel hoops.
She slammed her head back. She felt teeth scrape the back of her skull, felt the crisp tweak of his nose breaking. He squealed. His powerful but clumsy grip slackened.
She reached back and blindly grabbed the first purchase her fingers found. It turned out to be the guerrilla’s shaggy black hair. She threw her upper torso forward, twisting her hips at the same time to add serious torque.
With a despairing wail the guerrilla flew right over her head and out into space. A hefty thump a beat later indicated he’d escaped his comrade’s fate. He hadn’t hit the shed. Instead he’d done a face-plant on the beaten-dirt street beyond.
For a moment she panted with hands braced on thighs. This altitude’s killing me, she thought. She frowned. She made herself quit bracing like an asthmatic and breathing through her open mouth like a fish. She forced herself to stand upright and breathe from the diaphragm. She drew air deep into her lungs, causing the illusory sensation she was inhaling clear down to her pelvis. It was the quickest way she knew to reoxygenate herself.
But she could do nothing about the thinness of the air. Still woozy, she continued the way she’d been going. Though her instincts screamed at her to run she made herself stick hands in her jacket pockets and walk. Her stride length enabled her to cover ground at a pretty good clip without drawing eyes the way breaking into a run would. This level didn’t show much traffic. It seemed given exclusively to residences.
Although interrupted occasionally by seemingly random vertical jogs, probably having to do with harder veins of rock making it more difficult to cut, the terraces gave mostly good sight lines until they curved around the mountainside. Glancing back, Annja saw another pair of men appear on this level. Their height and long black leather coats, marking them distinct both from the diminutive locals and the tourists in their gaudy Alpine gear, told her more than she wanted to know about their identity. They moved purposefully after her. Too careful themselves to run, they seemed confident in their ability to chase her down.
Ahead of her another cross street took off up the steep slope. She turned rapidly into it, prepared to fly into action if any enemies lurked in ambush. No one leaped at her. The street was narrow, though, barely wider than her own arm span. Or so it seemed, anyway, so closely did the shops and hotels and tea shops and camping-gear booths impinge on the street. A man trotted by carrying a shoulder yoke with a steaming brass kettle on one end and a cluster of flagons tied to the other.
She climbed. The altitude was affecting more than her lungs. The long muscles of her thighs burned with exertion that back home in Brooklyn she’d barely have felt. Her stomach felt queasy and her head light.
She risked a quick look back. The Kosovars had followed her into the street. They swiveled their heads as if searching. Not for her, she guessed; she was in pretty plain sight, though twenty or thirty yards uphill. They must expect reinforcements, she thought.
The possibility of hollering her head off came into her mind. Almost as quickly she dismissed it. No telling what might happen. If the police detained her, whether for her own protection or investigation, how could she know they weren’t corrupted or corruptible? Bajraktari’s gang appeared to have had no trouble turning cops across a quarter of the world.
And the fact that guerrillas were walking out openly suggested they had power here, too. Whether the Maoist guerrillas were actually in league with the Kosovar artifact smugglers she didn’t know for sure. If both groups were after her, it hardly seemed to make much difference.
Ahead of her lines had been strung from building to gray stone building across the street. Strongly patterned carpets had been hung out on the lines for display. That they fairly obstructed the street didn’t seem to bother anybody. People simply pushed through them.
Annja forged in among the carpets. They were heavy, rough, warm in high-mountain sunlight crackling with ultraviolet. They smelled of lanolin and the harsh chemical aromas of dye.
She turned back, holding up a side of a carpet with the back of a hand. The tall black-coated men following her had sunken dark eyes and olive cheeks covered with black stubble. One had a dusting of gray on his chin. Both of them were reaching inside their greatcoats with their right hands.
If she needed confirmation they were on her trail, to hunt and kill, she had it.
On she swam through heavy aromatic waves of woven wool. Glancing over the swaybacked lines she realized why nobody seemed to take much exception to the blockage of a thoroughfare. It didn’t go through. A rough and ready stone wall rose abruptly a few yards past the rugs, to meet eaves that swept out as dramatically.
Annja had sought refuge in a dead end.
She pushed though the next-to-final carpet wall, mere seconds from being trapped like a rabbit.
But I’m out of sight here, she thought. That gave her options.
A quick look both ways showed recessed doorways. They weren’t recessed far enough to conceal her in daylight. To her right, though, stood the four-foot-tall white shape, startling by its very familiarity in these exotic settings, of a covered metal trash bin.
It wasn’t good cover. But it was better than nothing. And the alternative looked like nothing.
No sooner had she crouched down between the trash can and the wall than the first pursuer pushed between carpets not ten feet from her. She followed him with one eye peering around the side of the can. He held a Skorpion machine pistol loosely in his hand.
Apparently convinced their quarry had bolted clear to the blank stone wall that blocked the alley, the Kosovar forged straight on through the next line of carpets without glancing to either side. Can it really be this easy? Annja thought before she could stop herself.
But the next man through was clearly wary, frowning with eyebrows like smudges of coal on his dark face, his head on a swivel. He was clearly more suspicious than his comrade.
As he turned his face her way Annja melted back behind the can. She knew nothing would grab his attention like rapid motion in his peripheral vision. She might as well whistle out loud.
Boots crunched on hard-trodden soil. She could feel his presence looming, closer and closer. She smelled the sweat and harsh tobacco that permeated his clothes.
As she heard a sharp intake of breath from almost on top of her, she formed her right hand into an open fist and drove hard with her legs.
The second Kosovar held his weapon, a Beretta 92 semiautomatic, muzzle high, unusually good firearms handling for a goon. It was also, for once, lethally wrong. He opened his mouth to shout to his comrade as he tried to bring the piece down to shoot the woman springing at him like a tigress.
The sword slid into his open mouth like a ghastly parody of a tongue drawn in shining steel. He seemed to melt straight down to the street.
Some lucky combination of instincts made her simply release the sword. As soon as her fingers left the hilt, it vanished. She hurled herself backward into the recessed doorway as a burst of gunfire ripped out from up the short street. The rippling crack of the pistol rounds were oddly muted by the heavy carpets. They shook violently. Dust blossomed from them as the bullets ripped through to smash against the stone on the left side of the doorway Annja had backed into. Ricochets tumbled away.
As if of its own volition Annja’s right hand found the door latch behind her. Before her conscious brain could tell it to leave off the futile effort, certain the door was locked, the latch opened. Without conscious intent she pushed the door open and half stumbled into cool darkness.
The corridor smelled of dust and varnish. Music tinkled from somewhere overhead, faint as fairy bells. She saw a set of ricket
y-looking wooden stairs. She bolted up them.
Behind her, footsteps hammered. Boots squeaked on boards as the Kosovar raced in pursuit. Annja’s head swam. She turned, reaching behind the small of her back. Her legs buckled beneath her, landing her on the third step from the top.
The Kosovar rounded the base of the stairs and started up. He saw her and smiled. The gun in his hand was swinging toward her.
She pushed the Glock 23 out to the full extent of both arms and squeezed the trigger. The pistol bucked in her hand. The flame was pale yellow but dazzling in the gloom. The noise and muzzle-blast reflected off the close confines was like steel trap jaws slamming shut on her skull.
The man collapsed, tumbling back down the stairs.
Somebody shouted below, his voice harsh and foreign. Death brushing her with its wings and her killing her assailant face-to-face triggered a fresh adrenaline surge. It turbocharged Annja’s oxygen-hungry system like a jolt of nitrous oxide to a racing engine. She jumped up, took the last steps at a bound.
At the top she found a fly-specked window overlooking the street of the carpets. Turning, she saw a hallway with doors to both sides, all closed. Another window opened at the far end, admitting a yellowish light.
Stuffing the stubby Glock back into the holster inside the waistband of her pants she ran for it. As she did someone below fired up through the floor. It wasn’t a machine pistol cycling low-powered pistol rounds, but a full-bore Kalashnikov. The jacketed .30-caliber bullets kicked up six-inch splinters from the floorboards amid geysers of dust and mold.
Shooting blind, the gunman failed to lead his target enough. That could change in a hurry if the window wouldn’t open. Annja knew better than to try the Hollywood stunt of running into it full speed and trusting momentum to carry her on out into the street. Like as not, she’d bounce, leaving her stunned, possibly broken and exposed in the middle of the hallway when her pursuers came up the stairs. And if she broke through, the windowpanes would turn into numerous shards, each sharper than any scalpel, and slice her to streamers.