by Alex Archer
“No,” Annja said, drawing it out, shaking her head. “I’d call it a pretty spot-on assessment. Even if a little uncomfortable.”
“We can never be a great team,” Easy went on earnestly, “precisely because we’re so much alike. Our strengths and weaknesses overlap, rather than complement each other. In the present case, however, two women who are our precise kind of crazy may be exactly what’s needed.”
“And if it’s not,” Annja said, “we probably won’t live long enough to worry about it much.”
“Here, now!” Easy said sternly. “I thought you were in charge of positive thinking.”
“Me? I thought it was your job!” Annja exclaimed.
They laughed. Probably, more than it was worth. But it kept them from breaking…
28
“The neighbors mocked him.” Jerry Cromwell’s voice rang through the camp of the Lord’s Wa Army, pitched in the middle of an ancient plaza. He had sworn to eradicate it as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. “Lord, how they mocked! But Noah worked on. He trusted in the Lord! The Lord of Israel, the Lord of Hosts!”
His voice, which sounded to Easy—lying on her belly in the underbrush—at once strained and over-enunciated, had electronic assistance. Dragging a generator up here made at least some sense. But who knew what possessed Cromwell to lug along speakers and microphones for a public-address system.
Apparently his followers felt reverence for his strident voice as it echoed among the crumbled massive cliffs of stone. In any event his actual sermon had to be translated by Wa translators with their faces hard beneath their distinctive yellow head wraps.
Their painfully young faces. Easy guessed the fallen preacher’s translators, like the dozen bodyguards who stood flanking him with M-16s leveled at their own fellows, ranged from twelve to fourteen. It didn’t make them any less dangerous, she knew—her own continent’s recent history bore ample witness to that.
Easy lay scarcely fifty yards from the nearest of them. Sixty from their gangly, pasty-white messiah.
It isn’t the marksmanship that makes the hunter, you see, she thought. It’s the stalk.
Elephant Calf Ngwenya had been born into a culture which, for all its pride in its modernity, was very different from the one in which Annja had been brought up. Although an upbringing in a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans, Easy reckoned, was likely to be considerably more Darwinian than girls of Annja’s race and class usually underwent. To Easy’s mind that probably accounted much for the fact that Annja was a heroine, and not another ineffectual, overeducated wimp.
Warrior-princess though she was—she had always tried, not always successfully, not to be too smug about that—Easy harbored strong ethical standards when it came to killing people. It was not all right unless they were actively committing aggression. Then they became not only legitimate targets, but it was also an act of virtue to kill them.
Jerry Cromwell and his fanatics fell into that category as far as she was concerned. Easy still felt bad about the lion after all these years. He was mighty, a truly impressive beast, guilty of nothing more than doing what was natural for him.
She would dampen her pillow not at all over Jerry Cromwell. In the unlikely event she survived, of course.
She ignored the insects crawling over her exposed skin, and the long, gleaming, diamond-patterned serpent coiled on a branch above her, which she had quickly determined was a constrictor, unlikely to bite unless she grabbed it, and not in the least venomous.
Every day at noon, rain, shine or war, Cromwell gathered his followers about him to preach to them. He wasn’t sufficiently crazy to pull fighters off the battle line to harangue them, though.
The Protectors were well aware of the Lord’s Wa Army. The people of the temple routinely scouted potential foes wandering into their district. They had told Easy, laughingly, about Cromwell’s preaching well before Annja arrived.
She understood his rationale—fanaticism was a flame that needed constant stoking. But any habit is a weapon to your enemies. One a huntress as skilled as Princess Easy planned to exploit.
She’d heard said of assassinations that anyone can be gotten at, no matter how well protected, as long as his or her would-be killer doesn’t care about getting away alive.
Easy fully intended to escape. Of course, she reminded herself silently as she wriggled a few inches forward beneath the boughs of a bush, noiselessly as the snake who watched unblinkingly from above, between the thought and the action falls the shadow.
But the key thing was she would take her shot. She would make her shot. And then the chips would fall where they might.
“And so the rains came,” Cromwell said. “And they fell and fell and fell—for forty days. And forty nights. Forty days!”
Easy could hear the way he used his tone of voice, his cadence, to stir the blood like a marching drumbeat.
The smell of the vegetation in which she hid was unfamiliar yet by no means strange. She felt a touch and froze. A lesser snake slithered across her left calf, then her right. She lay on her belly unmoving. She did not look back.
Best not to.
The serpent moved on. She couldn’t hear its rustling for the preacher’s declamations and the fervent responses of his congregation. Within a few heartbeats she forgot it. She focused her thought, her intent, her entire being on her stalk and its target.
She had penetrated well inside the Wa main camp. In itself that was small challenge, especially since she crossed the perimeter in the twilight half an hour before dawn, when human metabolism ebbed lowest and the guards were likely to be least attentive. The camp had been laid out without conspicuous regard to security. Apparently the great man believed his God would provide, or at least make up any shortfalls in his arrangements. Probably he couldn’t take seriously that anyone might dare to threaten him here, in the midst of his bloodthirsty flock.
She was close as she cared to get now. She had a clear shot of under sixty yards—a simple shot, she considered, for a true marksman, even over open sights. She had the most accurate of the captured rifles, which she had tested and sighted in the previous afternoon.
A clump of brush lay even nearer the ancient stone stairway to nowhere Cromwell used as his podium. She felt confident she could reach it but she wouldn’t. It was too obvious a lie-up for a sniper. The guards’d be on her in an instant like terriers on a rat.
Cromwell was working himself into a frenzy.
Wrapping the sling snugly about her left forearm, Easy propped herself on her elbows. She pulled the lightweight synthetic stock’s steel buttplate firmly against her right shoulder. Keeping both eyes open, she sighted. She drew a deep breath, let half of it go.
The trigger surprised her when it broke. It surprised others even more.
The front of Cromwell’s big oblong forehead blew out in a spray of blood and bone.
Easy let go of the rifle. It would serve no purpose now save to encumber her, for all its lightness. Instead she slid backward as quickly as she could and still remain relatively quiet. It was time to go. If she could.
Not that the noise she made particularly mattered. After a moment of staring in stunned silence at their living prophet, struggling to absorb the shocking fact of what they’d witnessed, the Wa faithful began to babble in terrified excitement.
The surrounding stone walls’ amphitheatric effect abetted the already poor directionality of human hearing. Unable to tell exactly where the killshot had come from, the martyred prophet’s bodyguards reflexively opened up with their assault rifles on the most obvious threat—Cromwell’s own congregation.
29
The captor behind Annja’s left shoulder gave her a rough shove. She stumbled. It was difficult to keep her balance with her hands tied behind her back. She went down hard, scraping her bare knees on eroded but still abrasive red paving stone.
The man who stood at the top of a brief broad flight of time-crumbled steps looked down on her with an expression she could only
describe as quizzical on his mustached face. Behind him rose a largely intact building about the size of a suburban ranch-style house. Its doorway was an oblong of shadow. The self-styled Marshal Qiangsha, unquestioned commander of the outlaw Grand Shan State Army, looked younger than Annja expected.
When he spoke his own dialect, his voice was a well-modulated baritone. His tone was low but penetrating. His voice gave the impression of being held in tight control.
I could be in trouble, she thought, if he turns out not to be the impulsive Third-World warlord type.
But then, she was neck deep in trouble anyway.
They had caught her that morning. Though she wasn’t the skilled tracker and woodswoman Easy Ngwenya was, she had skills of her own. She had infiltrated past the Shan patrols circling outside the perimeter of their central encampment with relative ease. The Shan militiamen seemed preoccupied with not stepping into any punji traps, being crushed and impaled simultaneously by diabolical deadfalls or getting picked off with silent darts.
But the guards closer in to the great man’s headquarters were more alert.
The first guttural shout from behind her confirmed she’d been caught by Shans. Surprisingly, the militiaman followed his challenge with, “Stop! You! Hands on head now!”
Kneeling, Annja straightened and clasped her hands obediently behind her neck. She had been crouching in what she thought was pretty good concealment, actually, a minivan-size clump of vegetation growing beside a roughly triangular, free-standing fragment of wall, eight feet tall and made of weathered three-foot blocks. All around her ruined stones rose like a Cubist rock garden. The marshal had chosen one of the more intact concentrations of ancient structures in the area, a mile or two from the central complex, as his current base of operations.
“Come out now,” the Shan commanded. Annja stepped gingerly from the brush.
She found herself surrounded by the muzzle brakes of at least four AKMs. Annja wasn’t the tactician Easy was. But she knew face-up fighting—and firearms handling. She knew perfectly well that if she simply dropped down flat on her face her captors would immediate cross-fire each other, dumping their entire magazines basically into one another at point-blank range.
She also knew the odds were pretty good at least one of them would be left functional. The thought of what he’d do to her for pulling a stunt like that drove the notion right out of her mind.
“You spy,” her interlocutor said in his rough-and-ready English. “CIA.” He grinned at her.
“I’m a photographer,” she said. She used as thick a French accent as she thought might be understood by a guy whose English comprehension probably wasn’t the greatest, and who was almost certainly used to hearing it spoken exclusively with an American accent. Burma’s British colonizers had left a long time ago; the Americans had played in this particular murky pool way more recently, not to mention their culture covering the world like an old-time paint ad.
As for playing French, she guessed it was a fifty-fifty split whether the GSSA currently hated Americans or loved them.
She nodded toward the camera hanging on a strap around her neck. “I am a photographer,” she said. “Une journaliste.”
The guy grinned and nodded. He was short a front incisor. The beard that fringed his mouth was scraggly.
“You spy,” he affirmed cheerily.
A hand grabbed her arm. By reflex she pulled back.
It was a bad move. She knew that even before a Kalashnikov buttplate slammed into her right cheek. The stroke blindsided her, caught her totally off balance. A fat yellow-white electric spark flashed through her skull, behind her eyes but dazzling her like lightning hitting twenty feet away. She went down hard. She hardly felt the jar on her tailbone.
As she sat there shaking her head slowly and trying not to vomit from the nausea that roiled like a storm-tossed sea in her belly, she became vaguely aware, above the ringing of her ears, of somebody shouting in Shan. She couldn’t be sure but it sounded like abuse. Apparently the English-speaker was the patrol leader, and giving the man who’d unloaded on her a good ranking-out.
That encouraged her. Reputedly Marshal Qiangsha had an eye for long-stemmed Western roses. The squad leader’s fury suggested she was going to live a bit longer—be marched into camp, probably into the presence of the man himself. Instead of being marched fifty yards or so into the jungle and shot.
Hands caught her arms, hauling her to her feet. This time she was ready, more or less. She wouldn’t have fought them even if she could. But the way her head reeled, it was all she could do not to pitch straight forward.
Her captors held on firmly, pressing their hips against hers to keep her upright. They jerked her hands behind her back. Something hard and narrow was looped around her wrists and yanked painfully tight. By the way it bit her flesh, thin on the bone there, she guessed it was a nylon tie.
THE MARSHAL EXCHANGED clipped phrases with the men who had captured Annja.
Given the way the man’s shoulders slumped, the big boss was taking his turn dressing down the guy who’d hit her with his rifle. It wasn’t very satisfying as moral victories went. She feared she’d gotten concussed. And she doubted Qiangsha was going to let her go by way of compensation for the abuse she’d suffered at his minion’s hands.
He turned to look at her. He was actually somewhat handsome, in a lean and hungry way. His head was bare. His olive-drab uniform was crisp and clean and pressed to knife-edge creases. Apparently the job description of marshal of the Grand Shan State Army did not include belly-crawling through the jungle.
“You are American?” he asked, in clear English.
She made a snap decision. “Yes,” she said. Disoriented as she was, she hoped that was the right thing to say. Clearly he wasn’t an illiterate bandit toting ten pounds of wood and stamped Russian steel in lieu of a spear like the goon who’d hit her, or even the English-speaking squad leader. She didn’t trust herself to match wits with him just this moment.
His high brow furrowed as he studied her. The whole right side of her face felt numb, as if she’d had a shot of dentist’s Novocain. All too soon that would give way to a headache like a wedge being driven into her skull. She suspected half her face was puffed like a blowfish’s.
Still, the marshal seemed to like what he saw. A spill of her hair had come loose and hung down over her left shoulder. She wore a lightweight and light-colored blouse, its floral pattern serving as minor camouflage in the brush, breaking up her silhouette a bit. It was tied up to bare her flat midriff and a generous expanse of lime-green sports bra. Cargo shorts left her long legs mostly bare.
Though she usually preferred to wear short pants and sleeves in the bush anyway, she was dressed that way on purpose.
Qiangsha weighed the camera in his hand. “Nice,” he said. “I haven’t yet seen this model. I’m an amateur photographer myself.”
“I’m not a spy,” she said. “I’m a photojournalist. Uh, freelance.”
For a moment she thought he might smash Patty’s camera. Instead he handed it to a subordinate. He had just acquired a new tool for his hobby.
“And the difference between that and a spy is what?” he enquired.
Annja’s normally quick wits now seemed to have their feet stuck to flypaper. She had no answer.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
Again, the risk of a lie didn’t seem worth the downside if he caught her. “Annja Creed. I work for the Knowledge Channel.”
He smiled warmly, almost welcomingly. Her heart rose.
“Outstanding,” he said. “They’ll doubtless be willing to come up with a most handsome ransom. In the meantime—”
A shout brought his head around. His face clouded. Annja turned her own head, at the risk of both a clout from one of the guards still hovering near to her.
A party of eight or ten men had swung into view around the corner of a structure wholly overtaken by the forest. They were led by a small man, even for a Shan, with a la
rge head, who wore a simple blue band instead of a turban. From the way he swaggered, and the fact he wore a handgun holstered at his hip the way the marshal himself did, Annja guessed he had more than just a small-man’s complex going on. Nor was he a mere noncom like the man in charge of the group that captured Annja. Such would never dare carry himself that way for fear of being swatted down hard. He had to be one of Qiangsha’s chief lieutenants. Not the best beloved of them, by the look he exchanged with his leader.
The newcomer gave her a quick glance. For all its swiftness she had the feeling it had totally undressed her. He spoke to his nominal master in Tai Shan.
Qiangsha’s answering tone sounded pleased. They exchanged a few more words. The lieutenant and his entourage wheeled smartly and strutted away.
Despite what even a befuddled Annja thought was a pretty impertinent departure, Qiangsha now was smiling.
“It seems, Ms. Creed, your countryman, that nitwit Cromwell, has met with sudden misfortune,” Qiangsha said. “It’s given me the chance to see off those headhunting little Wa bastards once and for all. Then we’ll settle with the local savages who have been giving us fits, and finally get settled in.”
He looked past Annja to her guards. “Put her in my quarters,” he commanded, still in English. “Guard her well. If anything happens to her, or she escapes—”
He continued his instructions in his own tongue. The stained-oak face of the man at Annja’s side went ashen.
Qiangsha nodded briskly and strode off down the steps. The guards seized Annja’s upper arms and thrust her up time-eroded stone steps and into cool darkness.
30
The rectangle of light that was the doorway was no longer the blinding white glare it had been for what felt to Annja like days. Evening had settled onto the cluster of semipreserved buildings where Marshal Qiangsha had set up his headquarters. The sky through the opening was dark blue brushed with pink and yellow.