by Alex Archer
Lying on her side on a woven rice-straw mat, which offered no more cushion from the cold, hard stone beneath than a sheet of paper, Annja had drifted in and out of consciousness all day. Her eyes had grown accustomed to the cavern gloom. She knew she shared the chamber with the marshal’s surprisingly Spartan personal furnishings—a cot with a footlocker beside it, a folding table that evidently served as a desk, with a folding chair next to it. A low table next to the cot held a Coleman lantern, currently unlit, and what looked like a couple of paperback novels.
A second door led through the rear wall against which she lay. It was a blank square of blackness. She thought she felt a slight draft, indicating it led to another opening to the outside. She had writhed around earlier to peer down it, but had only seen the dark.
Annja might have gotten to her feet, explored where it led, searched Qiangsha’s trunk, the papers on his desk. No one had so much as peeped in at her since she was hustled inside, although she had heard voices off and on throughout the endless afternoon, and smelled periodic cigarette smoke.
But movement still made her dizzy. She saw no reason to take either the effort or the risk. She wasn’t here on an intelligence mission.
Whether it turned out to be an intelligent mission was a different question entirely. Right now it looked…not so much.
Marshal Qiangsha had commanded a sizable and relatively effective fighting formation for over ten years, according to Easy. Moreover, he had survived under the most intensely Darwinian conditions, facing constant threats from rivals—Karens, enemy Shan formations, the Tatmadaw Kyee, even the American DEA, which Annja gathered the common folk of Thailand and Burma regarded as just another ruthless ethnic army, no better than any other—and potential challenges from his own subchiefs. Like the cocky low-rent Napoleon who’d brought the news of Jerry Cromwell’s sudden fall from grace. Qiangsha had to be smart to have survived. And he was clearly a thoroughgoing professional, in his way.
Historian that she was, Annja knew disease killed far more soldiers than bullets or shells did. Even though they were natives, relatively inured to local contagion, plague would have winnowed the GSSA ranks if Qiangsha had not clamped an iron hygiene discipline on his troops. Whether he’d known it at the outset or had to learn it, Qiangsha clearly understood that.
He understood way too much, Annja feared.
She had taken a calculated risk coming here. Now she wondered in her aching head if she’d calculated well at all. Easy said they were much alike. Which, aside from strongly differing views on professional ethics and even more wildly divergent backgrounds, increasingly struck her as true.
And maybe that means I share Easy’s propensity for intellectual arrogance, just a wee little bit, she thought. Or was it some kind of smug subconscious racism that made me underestimate Qiangsha?
One thing was clear to her—if she did not see, and seize, some opportunity soon, she was lost. And so too were the Protectors. And the vast, untold trove of cultural heritage that was the temple complex. And the priceless Golden Elephant.
Overwhelmed, she lost consciousness again.
THE SOUND OF A BOOT crunching on stone roused her. Annja rolled over from facing the stone wall.
Light flared orange, then yellow, then white. Marshal Qiangsha straightened up from where he had just lit the lantern beside his bed. He smiled.
“It has been a good day,” he said. A flare of orange light from the doorway caught her eye. She glanced out to see a bonfire blaze up before the building he had chosen as his personal billet. Voices shouted and laughed to one another outside. “The Wa barbarians have been routed. We’ve won,” he proclaimed.
From the slight overprecision with which he spoke, Annja guessed he was drunk. That could be very good for her. Or very bad. Like, basically, everything here and now, she thought.
She forced herself to sit up. Though her head had mostly cleared, the exertion drained her; she slumped back against the wall.
Her shirt was untied and fell open. She still had the green sports bra on, and it was a pretty effective sight barrier. Still, she arched her back to thrust her cleavage, such as it was, toward her captor.
“I know where I stand,” she told the startled-looking marshal. “I’m completely at your mercy here. If I just vanish, who’d ever know?”
He blinked at her owlishly. “This is true. But why tell me this? Isn’t it against your interests?”
She smiled as seductively as she knew how. Given her track record, that wasn’t very. “I figure my best chance is to earn your goodwill. So I want to show you a victory celebration you’ll never forget,” she said.
Cross my heart and hope not to die.
“Ah,” he said.
“Do you want me tied?” She tossed back her hair. “I can do much better for you if my hands are free.”
He stared at her with one brow arched.
Did I overplay my hand? she wondered as the moment stretched toward infinity.
Then inspiration hit. “Or are you afraid? You can’t take us Western women lightly, you know,” she said, challenging him.
He glared at her. Now Annja feared she had pushed too hard. Then he laughed. His laughter had a ragged edge to it. An ugly edge.
“You Western women,” he said, swaggering toward her, “are arrogant and spoiled. You always overestimate yourselves. As you underestimate us Asians.”
He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. “Ow,” she complained. “That hurts.”
He laughed. “See? You’re just a woman after all. And my men are right outside.”
He brought his hand up. With a snick he opened a lock-back folder. It was a good knife, she saw, a Spyderco. Or at least a pretty convincing knockoff.
“Really,” he said, reaching behind her, “what choice have you got, other than to do your best to make me happy?”
She gasped as the keen blade sliced her skin. The plastic restraint parted. Blood rushed back into her hands. It felt as if she had plunged them into red-hot sand.
She had been wondering if she could do this thing. It seemed so cold-blooded. But knowing his plans, it had to be done.
He was armed—he held a knife with a four-inch blade. She knew it would certainly serve to slit her helpless female throat when he was done with her.
She put her face to his ear. “What choice have I got?” she asked throatily.
He grabbed her hair with his left hand. And stiffened.
She stepped back. To give him a good look at the sword that had appeared from thin air an eye blink before she rammed it through his belly.
He opened his mouth. All that came out was a voiceless squeal. And blood.
She tore the sword free with both hands. Marshal Qiangsha fell to the stone floor.
The quick flurry of motion had apparently caught eyes outside. She heard voices coming closer. A shadow fell across the doorway.
Annja turned and bolted through the back door. She prayed it indeed led out into the night.
UNSEEN, THE ROOT ARCHED up out of the red clay earth and caught Annja’s right instep as if it had deliberately reached to trip her. Winded from her desperate broken-field run, still dizzy from aftereffects of the blow to the head hours before, she couldn’t prevent herself pitching into a bush. Another tree root sticking up from the ground gave her a savage crack on the forehead as she hit, causing a white flash behind her eyes.
If she had gotten a concussion earlier, it might have a friend to keep it company now, she thought.
She lay still. She had used up all her energy fleeing the tumult of the GSSA camp—and the angry pursuit hounding after her. Her last molecules of strength had been knocked out of her by the fall. For endless, horrific moments it was all she could do to lie there and breathe.
In the distance she heard the sporadic clatter of gunfire from the direction of the late Marshal Qiangsha’s camp. As she fought to stifle trapped-animal moans of pain and desperation, she heard the distance-dulled thump of a grenade.
The issue of who should succeed as marshal of the Grand Shan State Army was still being vigorously debated.
For all his apparent executive ability, Qiangsha had in the end just been the leader of a bandit gang. Like most such groups, the GSSA ultimately operated by the ethics of a wolf pack—the most dangerous male ruled. Like many leaders of such human packs, Qiangsha apparently had secured his own position in part by keeping his chief lieutenants in constant rivalry with one another. The theory was they’d be so occupied trying to pull one another down, and to prevent themselves being torn apart by ever-hungry rivals, they would leave the alpha in relative safety. Among others Adolf Hitler had practiced the technique, successfully enough, so far as it went.
But it meant that when the alpha was removed from the scene, no subordinate held a strong enough position to assert dominance and make it stick.
But dominance wars hadn’t stopped a smaller wolf pack from baying after Annja.
She knew she could not have run far. It was less than two miles from the middle of Qiangsha’s camp to the middle of the Protector village. But Annja had dodged and backtracked as she ran through the jungle, trying to lose her pursuers in the humid night.
She had failed. She had, however, succeeded in losing herself.
She had managed to bushwhack three of her pursuers and kill them with her sword. But always their comrades had been on her like rabid dogs, driving her away before she could scavenge a firearm. The calculus was inescapable—sooner or later they’d hem her in and finish her with gunfire. Or she’d simply catch a stray bullet from one of the random bursts the pursuers loosed periodically, in hope of just such a lucky hit on their prey.
“Move, damn you,” she gasped to herself. She got her hands beneath her, pushed herself upward from the warm, moist, fragrant earth.
Vegetation rustled behind her. She turned her head to look back over her shoulder.
A Shan stood eight feet away. He grinned as he raised his big rifle to aim at her.
His head suddenly jerked to the right. Dark fluid jetted from his right temple. He slumped straight down to the ground like an imploded building collapsing.
Annja heard the high sharp crack of the handgun shot that had killed him. Another man burst into the moonlight several paces behind, thrusting his Kalashnikov before him. Before he could spray the prone and still-helpless Annja he dropped the heavy weapon, clapped a hand to his left eye and uttered a shrill scream. A wood sliver, doubtless tipped with poison, that had just been blown into his eye from a bamboo pipe.
Gunfire crashed out to either side of her. She had already heard someone walking toward her from the direction she had been running. She looked around.
A small, emphatically female form strode toward her. Gunfire flashed from its right hand, then its left.
Easy Ngwenya knelt by Annja’s side. “Lord, girl, you look a fright. Are you all right?”
“Never…better,” Annja croaked. She sensed Protectors slipping past like shadows. Shadows that occasionally paused to reveal themselves in shattering blasts and jumping flares of full-auto gunfire. Few shots came back in reply. The surviving pursuers had already turned and fled back the way they had come.
“What…took you?” Annja said. “Couldn’t find me?”
“My dear girl, neither the Shans nor the Wa answer nature’s call without the Protectors knowing within moments what they had for breakfast, to be perfectly crude. And anyway, you and your fan club were about as subtle as water buffalo stampeding.”
“I thought speed was more important than stealth,” Annja said, sitting up. The African woman had holstered her left-hand piece and offered her a canteen. She accepted and drank desperately.
“Wise choice,” Easy said. “But therein lay our problem—we had the devil’s own time intercepting you. When you were keeping away from the Shans, you also kept away from us.”
Annja spit. Her mouth felt like an old gym shoe. “Qiangsha said Jerry Cromwell’s dead.”
“Oh, yes.” Easy smiled and nodded. “Curiously enough, the wound proved instantly fatal. I rather feared he’d live on for days without his head, like a roach.”
Annja shook her head. “And the Wa?”
“Gone with the proverbial wind. Apparently they took their prophet being struck down in their midst as a sign the Lord had withdrawn his favor from them. The GSSA did their brutal best to reinforce the impression. The last living Wa was off the mesa by sunset.”
“Last living?”
“A few were unwise enough to straggle. The Protectors can be remarkably vindictive. They aren’t given to torture. Inflicting sudden death—that’s another thing.”
She stooped to wind Annja’s arm over her shoulder. “And now we’d best be getting back. While our Shan friends are occupied killing each other, the Protectors are going to encourage them to move their dispute elsewhere.”
“But they still outnumber the Protectors!” Annja said.
“To be sure,” Easy said. With surprising strength she pushed off, hoisting Annja to her feet with little help from the larger woman. “But with them split into multiple factions, demoralized by recent events, and with the Protectors fighting the sort of battle they know best—sniping from the trees and the like—I doubt they’ll have much stomach for staying where they’re so obviously unwanted.”
31
“Seriously, Easy,” Annja said. “We need to work this out.”
“Well,” Easy said. Was the lightness in her voice real or feigned? “The villagers did give us free rein to do as we will up here.”
It had been a brisk climb through stinging morning sun up the sheer face of the red pinnacle to the Temple of the Elephant. Despite their bruises and residual exhaustion from their recent adventures, the two young women had climbed with vigor. We’re nothing if not resilient, Annja reflected.
“I doubt that means they’ll let us steal their price less idol,” Annja said. It gave her a jolt to recall that she had come here at great personal cost—and as she could never forget, far greater cost to her companions—to do exactly that. But I didn’t know about the Protectors then, she thought.
It sounded lame even inside her head.
“We agreed, did we not,” Easy said, “that we’d get up here and then see what we might see? After all—”
She started to say more. But then they mounted high enough on the steps inside the temple’s spacious foyer to behold the Golden Elephant itself, its golden glory brilliantly lit by a ray of morning sun through the arched entryway.
Annja stopped. She couldn’t seem to breathe.
“Oh, my God,” Easy said.
“This changes things,” Annja managed to say.
“Quite.”
“Ladies,” a male voice said in musically accented English from behind them, “there’s no need to fight. As entertaining as that would be to watch, I’m afraid I cannot take the risk.”
The two young women spun in place.
“Giancarlo?” Easy said in a breathless schoolgirl gasp.
“Giancarlo?” Annja said in shock.
The archaeologist smiled a smile as radiant as the idol itself—still out of his view beyond the high temple steps.
He stood limned against electric morning dazzle. He was flanked by pairs of burly men in expensive expedition wear. They pointed handguns at Easy and Annja.
“You son of a bitch,” both women said at once.
He spread his hands innocently. “Ah. Harsh language does nothing to help us here.”
Annja’s throat was suddenly so dry she had to work her mouth to summon saliva and swallow before she could force words out. “So you’re behind this,” she said angrily.
“Not exactly,” he said, still smiling benignly. He wore no pack, but his normally svelte figure looked oddly bulky beneath the lightweight tan jacket he wore. Despite a bit of a breeze it was hot as hell out there in the morning; Annja and Easy alike were sheened with sweat from their own exertion scaling the seventy-foot sheer precipice. Gia
ncarlo looked as cool as if he lounged in an air-conditioned private club in Buenos Aires. “Let’s say I accepted a commission similar to the one that propelled you both here.”
“So you set us up,” Annja said as mental tumblers fell into place with clicks she thought Easy ought to be able to hear beside her. “You…got the red ants and the black to fight.”
“Competition, the current wisdom avers, works wonders. And in any event, by the time I was offered the commission you both had attained a substantial lead. So I thought—” he shrugged “—why wastefully duplicate effort myself, when not just one but two brilliant and ingenious young women were already on the trail? Simpler to let you do what you did so well, and follow in your tracks.”
“But I slept with you!” Easy wailed.
Annja shifted her weight uncomfortably. “You, too?” Easy asked her.
“No,” Annja stated emphatically, relieved it was the truth.
Giancarlo cleared his throat. “Ladies,” he said, raising his voice only slightly. It echoed within the high arched foyer of the Temple.
The professional-archaeologist part of her mind, still working below surging tidal layers of despair, outrage and fury, told Annja that must be a mark of sophisticated acoustic design.
“I fear we’ve no time for recriminations. Or rather, you’ve no time for recriminations.”
“Not so fast, pal,” Annja said. “You killed Sir Sidney. And poor Isabelle!”
“And set those dogs on me in Montmartre,” Easy added.
“Whom you dispatched with admirable ruthlessness, my dear,” Scarlatti said. “As for Professor Hazelton, do these look like hands that could beat a gentle old man to death? No, it was Luigi, here, who did in the ridiculous old blatherer.” His head flip indicated a goon on his right, who had a slab jaw and a black-browed scowl.
“And a fearful mess he made, although I scarcely blame him. An unavoidable by-product of such work. As for Professor Gendron, though, I admit I pulled the trigger on her. An occupation at least marginally more suited for a gentleman.”