by Alex Archer
Holding her right hand behind her she summoned the sword. As she got in range she slashed diagonally, rising right to left. Then she cocked her sword quickly back and, barely slowing, cut forehand, from the right down to the left. Hoping the cuts had weakened the frame enough she planted her left foot, skidded slightly on the floor and thrust kicked the center of the window where the wooden struts crossed.
21
The window couldn’t have flown out into the morning air neater if she’d used precision demo charges. Annja jumped to crouch on the sill as the panes crashed into the street.
Almost directly below she saw Pan Katramados battling two Kosovars. Tourists and vendors scattered like a flock of frightened ducks. The man in front of Pan ducked at the sudden unaccountable explosion right above his head, then spun at the sound of shattering glass. Pan availed himself of the man’s distraction to give an elbow to the man trying to grapple him from behind. Then he whipped a front snap kick into the other man’s left kidney.
The smuggler gasped and fell to his knees. Annja’s weight, dropping from the floor above as bullets cracked out the gaping window frame, dropped him the rest of the way, facedown in broken glass.
Annja found herself kneeling on the prone man’s back. A pool of blood spread out from beneath his head. His legs twitched.
“Sorry,” she said by reflex.
Pan grabbed her hand and hauled her upright. He took off running uphill, towing her along like a tugboat. Normally she would have resented such treatment as macho condescension. This time she didn’t snatch her hand away. She found Pan’s strong, confident grip reassured her. And anyway, adrenaline notwithstanding, she could use the boost.
They made it up to another terrace and staggered around the corner to their left.
“How’d you find me?” Annja panted.
“Followed the crowd. Once I broke the arm of the man who had me, they lost interest in me momentarily. Especially the way Duka was clutching his knee and crying like a baby. The police took him and Bajraktari. The other gangsters took off after you.”
“So…where’re we going?”
Pan glanced back around the whitewashed corner of the building under whose overhang they huddled. “Right now I think, just away.”
He flashed her a quick grin. She grinned back. They ran.
Around the side of the mountain ahead of them, fifty or sixty yards, a pair of men in green camouflage came trotting. One carried a black submachine gun with a curved magazine winging out to the left of the receiver. Pan spit a word Annja would bet he wouldn’t translate for her.
Fortunately another street headed off up the mountainside between the guerrillas and them. We’re fast running out of village, here, Annja thought. And where we’re going to find safety I’ve no idea.
Still, Pan clearly had the right idea. With nowhere good to run to, their only real shot was to run away and trust in their resourcefulness to turn up something.
She liked that. She liked that he was resourceful. She liked that he appreciated she was, too.
As they neared the intersection a knot of tourists, chattering happily in German, spilled from a chai shop right into the path of the two guerrillas. The tourists shrieked like frightened cockatiels. The guerrillas got well tangled up with the panicking Germans. Annja and Pan pounded around the corner of a disreputable-looking hotel.
They ran straight into four men standing in the street arguing. Any doubt the Maoist guerrillas were working with Bajraktari’s Muslim bandits vanished. Two men were tall foreigners in black leather greatcoats, while two others were camou-clad locals a whole head shorter.
Engrossed in their dispute, they were taken flat-footed by the sudden appearance of their joint quarry. Pan was under no such neurological constraints. Brushing one guerrilla spinning, he put his head down and charged the nearer Kosovar, who turned toward him with a look of astonishment on his stubbled face.
Pan ran through him like an NFL linebacker taking down a wide receiver. His shoulder hit the man’s sternum with a brutal thud and drove him into the ground. The back of the Kosovar’s head smacked the ground. He lay dazed and breathless as Pan charged the next big foreigner. The man met the challenge with a very professional-looking sprawl, pushing the Greek cop down and away so he couldn’t tackle him.
The local Pan had slammed out of the way was still out of the fight. His partner whipped out a kukri and grinned at Annja through a wispy beard. Clearly he expected his big ugly knife to scare this soft Western woman into submission.
You got the wrong girl for that, Annja thought. It registered on her that the street was empty.
The guerrilla clearly felt smug about the lack of witnesses.
The sword flashed into existence. Just that single impossible thing was enough to take the starch right out of most opponents. This Maoist was made of tougher stuff. He stood his ground, bandy legs flexed, weapon loosely gripped in a hand almost the same color as the hilt. He looked like a man who knew how to use the unwieldy-looking short sword.
Moving too fast for finesse, and fearing at any moment to feel the slam of bullets between her shoulder blades from the other guerrillas right around the corner, Annja slashed for his face. He reflexively whipped his own steel around to guard his eyes. He punched his kukri up and to his own right, caught the sword flat to flat, and guided it right past him, leaning slightly back. He caught Annja with her sword arm across her body and too far off balance to counter a slash at her arm or face.
She did a sort of stutter step and kicked him in the groin.
The guerrilla was quick and managed to twist his hips just enough to catch her kick on the inside of his back thigh. But so strong were Annja’s legs and so great her momentum that sheer impact blasted him back three steps.
A catfight flurry in Annja’s peripheral vision showed her Pan was kickboxing enthusiastically with the second Kosovar. The first lay unmoving on his face. For a few vital moments she could concentrate on her own unexpectedly formidable opponent.
They went toe to toe, trading cuts. Annja didn’t try to chop off his blade again. If she got the shot she’d take it—same as any other opening. But he was smart and fast and good.
She yipped as the down-pointed tip of the kukri drew a line of fire down her left cheek. She thrust for her enemy’s face. He had to throw himself backward way off balance to avoid taking her tip through his cheek. Catlike, he leaped away to increase engagement range and allow himself to regroup.
Then he made his first mistake. His eyes slid past her to her left. That was an old trick she’d seen before. But with her own senses keyed to sharpness, and intently focused on her foe, she saw his pupils widen, too.
It was a purely physiological response. You could fake that. Conceivably. With weeks of specialized training.
Annja spun to her left, hacking savagely with her sword.
The kukri the first guerrilla, whom Pan had tackled, was bringing down at the back of Annja’s head was cut clean through with a musical twang.
Already chambering a kick with her right leg, she looked back over her right shoulder. The skilled swordsman closed on her, his own weapon cocked over his left shoulder for a death stroke. He’d made his second mistake. He’d focused too much on sword fighting, and not on just fighting.
Her back kick caught him square in the gut, lifted him and threw him back.
The other guerrilla stood flat-footed, staring at the mirror-surfaced end of his severed blade. Disregarding him, Annja spun and charged. The man she’d been dueling with brought up his blade. Still stunned and probably short on breath from the brutal, unexpected power of her kick, he was a beat slow.
Blood sprayed as she slashed his arm. Not waiting to see what effect that had, she brought the sword looping up to her left, around and down. Its edge bit into his neck and chest.
He fell. She opened her fist, releasing the sword, which was trapped by the severed ends of bones. It vanished.
The other guerrilla turned and ran scream
ing around the corner.
Annja looked quickly around. She had no clue why the guerrillas on the terrace weren’t all over them by now. But she saw no sign of them.
She saw Pan buckle his opponent with a savage shin kick to the outside of his left leg. As the man bent forward Pan caught him with a beautiful uppercut on the chin that straightened him right back up. Then he drove a sideways elbow smash into his face, sprawling him on his back in a spray of blood beside his moaning comrade.
As she ran past it was Annja’s turn to catch his hand. “Let’s go!”
By the time they reached the next terrace, Annja was almost reeling. Her adrenaline supercharge was running out. The thin air, accelerating the draining effects of fighting for her life, had her running on fumes, and thin ones at that. Pan labored at her side. His skin was sallow and his expression grim. He wasn’t in much better shape than she was.
Below them she heard shouting. A mixed group of guerrillas and Bajraktari’s men rounded the corner. Whatever had held up the guerrillas, they had gotten it sorted out. The pursuers stopped to gape at the fallen bodies. Then one of the Kosovars pointed up at them.
“I’m getting so sick of these guys,” Annja gasped. “What are we going to do now?”
“Down there,” Pan said, pointing to their left along the new terrace. “Somebody’s signaling to us.”
It was another group of Gaine singers. In a doorway behind half a dozen street musicians plying their odd stringed instruments a man in a red neckerchief stood beckoning them with frantic rolling hand movements. As soon as they made eye contact he stopped, sat down and began sawing his bow across his own eviscerated fiddle.
“Could it be a trap?” Annja asked.
“At this point, how much would that matter?” Pan asked.
“Good point.”
As fast as they could without calling attention to themselves they walked toward the band. A small knot of tourists had gathered about the players.
Several members of the ensemble left off playing to greet Annja and Pan with smiles, handshakes, backslaps, as if they were all lost cousins. They spoke enthusiastically in some dialect Annja thought wasn’t Gorkhali but couldn’t tell for sure. Their comrades redoubled their efforts, playing and singing to make up for their momentary absence.
Hands passed Pan and Annja promptly up stone steps to the red-roofed house. As the door was opened by a small wizened woman with a white cloth tied over her bun of white hair, a ripple of explosions behind them made Annja and Pan cringe and then whirl.
They saw strings of firecrackers rattling off like firefight simulators in the street, and Roman candles shooting glowing multicolored balls in the air.
Pan cursed and grabbed for his Glock in its shoulder holster. “They’ve betrayed us!”
Annja grabbed his arm. “Wait.”
He looked at her in slack-jawed, oval-eyed amazement. “That racket will bring the bandits!”
She smiled crazily at him. “It’ll bring everybody.”
For a moment he stared blankly at her. Then closing his mouth, he nodded quickly and allowed the smiling old lady to escort them into the gloom of the hallway.
22
“A most fascinating ploy,” Chatura murmured. He sat on a luridly colored cushion on the floor of a Party safehouse in the lower levels of the terraced bazaar town on the flanks of the Dhaulagiri Himal and sipped tea from a blue porcelain cup. “After you convince me of the value of keeping this Creed woman alive and free, that she might lead us to reclaim a great treasure in the name of the people, you strike to seize or kill her yourself. One might wonder whether you truly have the welfare of the people at heart, Enver Bajraktari.”
The Kosovar paced the room. Low, square ceiling beams endangered his head. Despite the heat radiating from the iron stove in the corner of the room he wore a wool sweater. He had his hands thrust into the pockets of his black trousers.
Chatura sipped. It was an oddly delicate gesture for such a no-nonsense-seeming man. “Not to mention using men whom I had lent to you to do it.”
“I saw the chance to act,” rumbled the bandit chieftain. “I took it. If I acted rashly, so be it. Allah saw fit to fill my veins with the hot blood of action, not the cool blood of a snake.”
Chatura’s thin lips twisted in an approximation of a bloodless smile. “An odd invocation for a follower of Chairman Mao. Fortunately, I need not rely on invisible spirits for my own cool blood. Or serpent blood, if you will. I find it interferes less with my judgment. Should I for the sake of argument accept your implicit claim that you acted because you saw an opportunity worth seizing—rather than in contravention of our arrangements of cooperation—it leaves the question of why your men sought to kill this woman and her companion.”
Bajraktari stopped and regarded the small man, sitting like an ungilded Buddha, with a dark scowl.
After a moment the Kosovar shook his head. “I owe the witch a debt,” he said, “of blood and honor. Her Greek love-boy, as well. But my own judgment was not totally overwhelmed with my desire for vengeance, comrade. It came to me that we had a chance to capture them. Then they would lead us to the treasure. But if they died—” he shrugged “—what of that? We would have their notes, their records. We would know as much as they. If they could follow those clues to the treasure, so could we. What I fail to understand is why we’re not scouring the town right now in pursuit of them, pulling down the buildings and digging up the cellars? They must be here somewhere.”
“Softly, softly, comrade,” Chatura said. “The police are reactionary. The recent gunfire—and fatalities—have them swarming like angry hornets. They’d be happy to fight us, and they command more force in this city of bourgeois tools than we.”
Indeed, he thought, the Central Committee might deem us rogues, and decide we might make a good bone to toss the dragons of reactions in Kathmandu as a peace offering. And perhaps not without justice. For once we have secured the treasure, they shall surely be among the last to know.
From the room’s corner a groan escaped from a great duffel-bag shape heaped horizontally on a pallet. Bajraktari walked over and hunkered briefly down to feel the sweat-glossed forehead of his henchman Duka. The man stirred and a peevish moan escaped bearded lips. His boss spoke a few low words in his native language. His tone was oddly soft. He swept the stiff black hair back from the fevered brow and stood.
“I hope he’s ready to walk tomorrow,” he said.
“We have provided him painkillers and a leg brace,” Chatura said, not much interested. “Not to mention that our physicians slid his patella back into place. He looks to be a strong man. Perhaps he will keep up.”
Bajraktari frowned furiously. Chatura gave him a look of studied blandness.
Bajraktari chose to let the matter drop. “And what of this Jagannatha? It is rumored he closes in on the Westerners, as well.”
Chatura nodded and set down his cup. “We shall rendezvous with him north of town. I will instruct him to join his men to mine. Under my command, of course.”
“But what if he makes trouble? Your men all say he’s a lone wolf who hates Western decadence more than he loves the Little Red Book.”
Chatura rose. “Then I shall teach him the difference between being a wolf and being a dog.”
“BOO!” PAN KATRAMADOS SAID to the little girl in the long native-looking red dress. She giggled. Her two little friends also giggled. They ran off as an old man approached.
Annja took a sip of salty tea with yak butter. I’m afraid I’m starting to get used to this stuff, she thought.
The older man sat down cross-legged on the colorful rug across from them. Lal sat down beside him.
“Please thank Sachchit Gaine once again for us,” Annja said.
Lal bobbed his head, smiled, and spoke to the elder. The old man nodded and smiled.
Once inside the red-roofed house they had been led down a dark stone stairway, and then taken by underground tunnel to a neighboring house, which on the
surface was separated by almost forty yards of open gray ground with only a few sprigs of dry weeds. There they were ushered back up into a whitewashed hallway, rushed out the back through a couple of what Annja could only describe as bare backyards marked by stone boundaries. Beyond them the ground dropped six or eight feet, held up by retaining walls of stone. Farther out the town petered out into a shield-like sheet of rock with gleaming ice patches.
At last they had come to this house, a pleasant three-story structure with a green roof. They’d been surprised, if pleasantly, to meet Lal. He assured them they would be safe, and that his uncle would join them shortly.
“He says the Gaine are pleased to be of help,” Lal said. “These foreigners who hunt you have acted very disrespectful toward them.”
“I can imagine,” Annja said. “That’s kind of a habit of theirs.”
“What I still don’t understand,” Pan said, “is how you managed to locate us. Or anticipate us. As it seems you did.”
Lal grinned. “My branch of the Magar clan have always maintained good relationships with the hero singers, the Gaine. Though we had business to attend to we asked their help in looking after you. Also we had some of our younger kinfolk keep an eye on you.”
“That little boy in the bazaar—” Annja said.
“Hi,” a voice said from the hallway. Annja saw a familiar figure in a long blue plaid shirt standing there.
“Hi, yourself,” she said.
“I believe you have met my third cousin, Yuvaraj,” Lal said.
Pan laughed. “We never suspected him. When he grows up he should come work for Hellenic special forces. He could be a Pathfinder, like me.” A cloud passed over his face. “Or perhaps best not, after all.”
“How’d you let Lal know we were coming this way?” Annja asked the boy, to end the uncomfortable silence.
Yuvaraj smiled. With an upward wrist flick he whipped open a cell phone.
Annja laughed.