by Alex Archer
The artifacts had been Vietnamese—a bronze drum, dozens of earrings, statues and ceramic jars. She rubbed her forehead, smearing dirt and the gnats that had stuck there. She was feeling so many things at the same time—anger that people would steal from history and deprive the public of an opportunity to see these relics and deny archaeologists the opportunity to study them; elation that she’d uncovered what obviously had been a massive smuggling operation; fear that some of the parties involved were still out there and could resume the nefarious practice; worry that the authorities might not properly handle all these priceless things.
She pulled in a deep breath, taking the dusty air into her lungs and relishing the oldness. Her breathing was loud in the stillness of the building. That and the shush-shushing of her shoes against the plank wood floor were the only sounds. The tavern was too distant, and the walls and shelves of this place kept its music and laughter at bay. There was no traffic on the street at this hour in this part of the city.
Annja wouldn’t be returning to Chiang Mai right away, as she’d told Pete. She would stay in Hue a day or two, call the American consulate and embassy, contact Doug and beg him to send a second film crew here and call the various experts she knew in the field of ancient Vietnamese relics. She wouldn’t be able to see everything through, but she could put things in motion, and that would give her a better sense of accomplishment and closure. She’d done nothing illegal, save drive a Jeep from Chiang Mai that didn’t belong to her…and temporarily force Nang to accompany her. She would talk her way out of trouble—she was good at that.
Annja glided down the next aisle, seeing bronze jewelry dully gleam in her flashlight beam. She wanted pictures! She reached to her fanny pack as she heard an engine roar and gravel crunch. Someone had arrived out back. The pictures would have to wait.
She summoned the sword and hurried to the back of the shop, leaving her flashlight on a shelf. She’d meet them outside, refusing to risk even one relic being ruined in the fight that was to come.
And Annja knew there would be a fight. It wasn’t the police she slipped through the office to meet. Either Nang had summoned Lanh’s thugs or the alarm she’d tripped upstairs had called them. She stepped out the back door and clung to the shadows up against the wall.
Two men got out of a dark SUV, and a van pulled up behind it, turning off its headlights and disgorging four more men. Neither driver door had opened, so there were at least two more people that she couldn’t see.
The only light in the alley filtered down from a lamppost at the far end. It was nearly as dark as a cave. She couldn’t make out any details regarding the men, though her instincts told her they were well armed. They looked like moving splotches of black against the gray of the walls and the vehicles—shadows upon shadows. She stared at the man heading to the door she’d just exited. All she could tell was that he was bigger than her.
The man behind him started up the steps to Lanh’s dwelling.
Common sense told her she should creep along the wall and get out of there. The odds were too great and the visibility too poor. Alive and away, she could report what she’d seen and retell what had happened in the past few days.
But common sense was rarely Annja’s friend, and so she angled the blade so the flat of it was out, pivoting slightly. Her feet made a sound against the gravel that alerted the closest man. He stopped and stared at the wall, and she wondered if his eyes were more acute than hers and he could actually see her. But then the moment passed and he reached for the doorknob, and she swung the blade up with all her strength behind it.
Annja drove the flat of the blade against his neck, and he collapsed on the stoop, dropping something that made a metallic sound. He grabbed at his throat, hacking. She hit him again just as the man who’d started up the stairs retreated and called to the others.
Annja had managed to take one out without spilling blood, but she’d alerted the rest to her presence. The odds were five-to-one now, plus the two drivers and hopefully no more. Seven-to-one, she decided. She’d faced worse.
They shouted to one another in Vietnamese, one word in English ringing out and making her heart jump. Sandman. The van’s lights snapped back on and caught Annja in a midleap kick at the man who’d just come off the stairs. The heel of her right foot landed solidly against the small of his back and sent him forward into another of his fellows.
Though the light wasn’t bright, it momentarily blinded Annja, and she slammed her eyes shut as she planted her right foot and spun with a roundhouse kick that connected with the same man. She kicked him one more time and heard him drop, and then she opened her eyes to see two men pointing guns at her.
Her eyes better adjusted, she could tell that the men were a mix of young and middle-aged Asians, all with some bulk to them, and all wearing jackets despite the summer heat. They shimmered in the headlights like ghosts fazing in and out.
The one closest to her shouted that she should drop the sword, and she considered sending it away to find a peaceful resolution. But she noticed that the guns were sleek, recent models—all with silencers—and she was confident they would kill her quietly. She dropped to a crouch as bullets whispered above her head, and then she somersaulted forward, the gravel from the alley biting at the top of her head and the back of her neck. Rising right in front of the men, she swept the sword in hard, cutting through the jacket of the man on her right and into his rib cage. He howled as she dragged the blade in deeper, killing him.
Bullets whizzed by her ear as she stepped in close to the falling corpse and wrenched the sword free, driving the pommel up into the chin of the man who’d been standing shoulder to shoulder with him, cracking his jaw and breaking teeth. A slug slammed into her left arm, feeling like a piece of fire imbedded in her flesh.
Annja bit down hard on her lower lip in a failed effort to keep from crying out, tasting her own blood in her mouth and feeling a surge of adrenaline. This was a fight she shouldn’t have picked, should have listened instead to her common sense. But since she’d started it, she knew she’d have to finish it quickly if she wanted to keep breathing.
The man whose jaw she’d broken swung his gun on her, firing just as she sidestepped it and she felt a bullet graze her right arm. She drew her sword down to her side and thrust it up at an angle, essentially skewering him. More whisper-hisses sounded, none of the bullets striking her, but hitting the man she’d skewered and the side of the van.
What were the odds now?
Her mind raced as she twirled away from the two she’d just dropped and rushed to the back of the van, buying her cover.
Four-to-one?
Had she counted right and cut the number in half? Was this a war she could possibly win?
Her arms burned from the bullets, and her chest felt on fire from the exertion. She stepped around to the other side of the van, nearly running into a man who’d just emerged from an open side door.
How many were there? An army?
Without hesitation, she drove the tip of the blade into his stomach, her charging momentum sending it in deeper and out his back. When he fell, she dropped with him, planting her knee on his chest and pulling hard to free the sword. She jumped to her feet and ran to the front of the van, darting around it just as someone hugging the shadows by the SUV opened fire.
31
This is madness, Annja thought. It was madness thinking she could fight all these men, madness that anyone would smuggle artifacts precious to all of humanity, madness that Zakkarat died.
“Madness!” Annja screamed the word as she charged a man coming around the other side of the van. She held her sword as if it was a lance and ran him through. “Madness!”
She fell on him, using the momentum to spring up, turn and tug the sword out of his gut.
What were the odds now? Better, but by how much? How many men had she dropped? Had more come out of the van or SUV?
She was close to two more men, so close that another two she spotted didn’t fire,
not wanting to risk their fellows. The closest two flanked her, and she used it to her advantage, ramming her elbow back into the shorter one, catching him squarely in the chest. She stepped back with him when he doubled over, striking him the same way a second time, hearing his gun drop. The move had bought her just enough space to bring her sword up on the man in front of her. One slice finished him.
Annja was spattered with blood and the insects had become a second skin, stuck to her sweat. The wound in her left arm continued to feel like fire, her right arm stinging where she’d been grazed. Sweat poured off her, from the heat of the summer night and all the fighting. She saw only two men left standing, and they yelled at each other, again. “Sandman” was repeated several times.
She heard a siren, but it was distant and receding, attending to another matter and leaving this private war to her and the remaining thugs. Both of them fired, missing because she was moving so fast and the shadows from the van helped cloak her, darting and weaving and never staying still for even a heartbeat. The slugs hit the side of the van, one of them breaking a headlight and making everything murkier.
Annja preferred that, not wanting to see too closely the faces of the men she was going to have to kill. She was haloed by the sole headlight, backlit like a movie monster as her feet churned to eat up the distance, feeling another bullet graze her left arm, and changing her grip so she held the sword only in her right hand.
Blood flowed down her left arm, that hand practically useless now, and mingled with the sweat as she hollered, “Madness!” once more and swung her weapon with all of her waning strength. She’d aimed high, and with one blow killed one of the men. Spinning from the energy of the swing, she followed through and struck the second, felling him, too.
She slouched forward, panting, holding her left arm in close to her body, the fire of it fading and turning to numbness. She needed a hospital. But more than that she needed to end this war and finish the puzzle. Gulping in the humid, bug-filled air she turned and staggered toward the SUV. A man climbed out, taller than the others, thinner, and with hair so pale it looked like mist. In the light from the SUV’s dome she saw that he wasn’t Vietnamese, and that his deeply lined face was so pale it branded him a Caucasian.
“Sandman,” she guessed.
“And you are a madwoman.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “Hands out to your sides.” She raised the sword for emphasis, and he complied. She listened for any movement, either from the few men she’d knocked out rather than killed or from the vehicles, hinting that there were still more inside.
“You are impressive,” he said after a few moments had passed. “An army unto yourself. I should have not dismissed Nang’s ramblings so easily. He called you a pretty demon. I should have brought twice this many men.”
“Who are you?”
“Sandman, as you know,” he said. His face was an emotionless mask, cold and empty. “It is the only name I’ve used in, well, quite a long while.”
Annja put him in his sixties.
“Tell me about this, about all of this.” She pointed the sword behind her to the back of the antiques store. She had plenty of other questions, but she’d start there.
He gave a great shrug of his shoulders, and she realized that beneath the long coat he wore, he was frail and rail-thin. “What about it?” he said after another few minutes had passed.
In the silence she’d heard nothing but her own labored breathing and the buzzing of the damnable insects. Then somewhere out on the street a car horn honked.
“The smuggling,” she started. “The cave in Northern Thailand.” She paused. “All the guns. Vietnam and all of this!”
He leaned against the side of the SUV and dropped his hands to his sides. “Did you kill Lanh?”
Annja pointed the sword at his chest. “No. But he is dead. I don’t think anyone killed him.”
“He hadn’t been well,” he said. “It was only a matter of time. It’s only a matter of time for all of us, actually.”
She narrowed her eyes and her voice dripped with ire. “Tell…me…about…all…of…this.”
“That could take a bit.”
“I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.”
“Apparently not.” He let out a long sigh. “I suppose ‘all of this’ started shortly after the Vietnam War. A police action, they called it. I’m sure the war was long over before you were born.”
Annja listened, concentrating to stay on her feet and refusing to give in to the pain and blood loss.
“I survived the war, and I didn’t go home. The gold was too tempting, you see. And I found things in Vietnam to my liking.”
He explained that he’d been a soldier with a rifle company that had come across a stash of relics on a tour during 1966. A collection of golden Buddhas had been hidden by monks who feared that Americans would overrun their temple and take the holy objects. He took what he could carry with him and deserted, finding a few other soldiers who’d also fled their units, living from village to village and learning the language and customs.
“It was a small operation at first. We’d carry a few bits of holy treasure into China and make a tidy profit, reinvest it. Eventually, we set up a corporation of sorts in Saigon. We spread enough money around to get some police to look the other way, appeared to support the communist government, stuck to the shadows. Never sent too much across the border at any one time.”
He shook his head sadly, the gesture making his mist-like hair appear to float around his face. “Times have changed. The government is cracking down on smuggling. It seems some people want to keep the relics here. But we never sent too much at any one time, tried not to be noticed.”
Annja remembered the article about the men arrested in China transporting Vietnamese artifacts.
“It looked like a significant haul stashed in the mountains,” she said. “I’d say that was ‘too much.’ And I noticed.”
He gave another shrug. “Things have been complicated recently. More Western influence, more people concerned about the national relics and history, more guards watching the borders. If they only knew how much is gone, scattered across the globe. Most of it’s gone when you think about it—beyond the considerable inventory in that warehouse and the pittance in a few…antiques stores.”
Annja shuddered at the loss of history.
“Yes, Lanh and I saw to it that there’s really not all that much left. Pity, I suppose. But it couldn’t be helped—it was the best way to earn a fortune that I could think of.”
One of the men she’d knocked out groaned and tried to rise, but he fell flat again and stopped moving.
“How did you get involved with him? Lanh Vuong?”
He smiled fondly, the first trace of emotion he’d shown. “During the war, actually. That was the first time I met him. We ran afoul of a dink base he was in charge of, and he had the audacity to capture us. I expected to spend the rest of the war in some slimy slope-head prison. But I made friends with some of them. I’d learned enough of the language at that point to get by. I bargained my freedom with Lanh for the location of a temple stash. He always did like gold.”
Annja felt the bile rise in her stomach. This man was making her physically sick recounting what he’d done.
“The short version is that Lanh released me and two of my friends. There were four others, but he wanted some souls to take back with him. As we were running away, his camp was taken by American Marines—we managed to avoid the Marines, not wanting to end up in some U.S. prison for desertion. Neither did we want to end up dead. There were a lot of bullets flying that day. I learned later that Lanh had been grabbed by the Marines and tossed into a cell in the south. Many, many years, he was stuck there. Later our paths crossed again.”
Annja felt dizzy, from lack of sleep, loss of blood and from listening to the sordid doings of a former U.S. soldier. The Sandman had successfully turned her stomach.
“It was an accident, really, our meeting again.
Lanh had found my smuggling network, and he had far more contacts than I did. He was running a few operations of his own from behind bars. When he finally got back up north, we combined our resources. Became friends, I suppose, or as close to friends as our kind can be.”
She hissed and stepped close, dismissing the sword as she brought her right hand up and grabbed his throat, feeling a few gold chains hanging there and dangling down beneath his shirt. There was another chain, with a familiar feel to it, and this she yanked free.
“And you come clean to me,” she said, feeling his dog tags in her fingers. “Why? Why spill your guts about this?”
He looked surprised. “Why? Because you asked. Because you’ve won this war.” He swallowed hard and she eased up and gave him a little breathing room. “And because I’ll be joining Lanh soon. Something’s rotten inside.”
She remembered those exact words from one of his answering-machine messages to Lanh.
“Something horribly rotten. Cancer of the pancreas, the doctor told me. He gives me a month at the most. Hurts like hell. War is old men dying in the fullness of their promise while there is still madness in this world. War is hell.”
“Which is where you’ll end up,” Annja said. She swung him around and pushed him toward the back of the shop. He was easy to push, frail and weak, and his hands were twisted from arthritis. “Go in.” She intended to make sure he spent whatever days he had left rotting in a cell somewhere.
Annja flipped on the lights, wanting to better see the inside.
“Records?” she asked.
He gave a clipped laugh. “Never bothered with them. Lanh, neither. Not records on our…real dealings, anyway.”
She pointed to the skull bowl she’d left on the desk and fought a crashing wave of dizziness. “What do you know about that?”
“Oh, the skulls? Only that Lanh liked them. Said he put souvenirs from the war in them. Said he picked them up in the States before the war. Must have had a dozen of them. Talked to them like they were childhood imaginary friends. Rubbed them like a magic genie’s lamp and called them Papa Ghede.”