by Alex Archer
The second attack helicopter came around suddenly. A missile shot from the pod underneath and came straight at Fleet. He cursed and dived from the deck gun. He was still in midair when the explosion tore the weapon from its moorings.
Heat blistered Fleet’s back as he crashed to the deck and struck his head. The air left his lungs. He rolled over and unlimbered the HK 53 assault rifle. He tracked the craft and fired while on his back.
Pieces of the Plexiglas nose fell away. The pilot broke off the attack. In the next instant one of the coast guard cutter’s other deck guns opened fire and tore away the tail rotor.
Out of control, the helicopter spun around and around before it fell into the sea. The rotor blades shattered on contact and turned into flying shrapnel.
Fleet stayed down until the carnage was over and the helicopter pulled away and quickly disappeared.
When he glanced back at the Black Swan, he saw that the helicopters were just then swinging away with the rescue baskets full.
Fleet pushed himself up and went to see what he could do for the wounded. Captain Mahendra was already there and performing CPR on a man.
“Help me,” the captain said when he saw Fleet.
Fleet joined the captain and took over the compression rhythm. “Did you get a chance to call your base and let them know we’d been attacked?”
Mahendra shook his head. “Their first salvo took out all communications.”
Fleet glanced over at the comm area. Where the gleaming array of satellite receivers and antennae had been, only tortured metal remained. He kept focused on the compressions and willed the man to live.
But Rajiv Shivaji was getting away.
ANNJA SAT in the bottom of the airlift rescue basket. Constructed with wide spaces between the steel bars that made it up so it could be set down into water to rescue people, the basket looked more like an iron cage with the top missing.
Rajiv kept his pistol pressed against her head. “I apologize, Miss Creed. It seems we’re going to need you as a hostage a little while longer.”
Annja didn’t say anything, but she thought about throwing herself over the side. But now that they were a couple of hundred feet in the air, hitting the ocean surface would be like hitting concrete.
One of the men bound her hands behind her back with disposable cuffs. She settled back against the basket as the helicopter reeled them into its belly.
THE HELICOPTERS MADE one stop for refueling at a merchant ship carrying hidden reservoirs before they reached their final destination.
When they put down again, it was at a private field. Cars waited there for them and within minutes they were whisked away to Thanjavur.
Annja didn’t know that until they released her from the trunk she’d been placed in for the trip. Holes had been drilled into the floor to allow air circulation, which led Annja to determine the car had been used for transporting prisoners before. Before she’d been put in, the young man named Goraksh had gagged her. With her hands tied behind her and limited by the trunk, she had no opportunity to pull her sword.
Her arrival and extraction from the trunk was a welcome blessing. She hadn’t recognized the city, but plenty of local businesses had the city’s name listed on them. From her studies of Indian maps, Annja knew the city was part of the Tamil Nadu district and was into the interior.
Annja had no clue why they were there. She sat quietly and remained watchful, but her thoughts were on Lochata, Shafiq and the crews of the Casablanca Moon and the coast guard cutter. She knew there’d been casualties.
She tried not to think of that. She had to concentrate on her own survival at the moment. She ate what she was given and drank water every time she had an opportunity.
And she waited for a chance to escape.
“YOU’RE A LUCKY MAN, Special Agent Fleet.”
While standing outside the emergency room of the Kanyakumari hospital where he’d been treated for superficial scrapes, bruises and burns, Fleet didn’t feel lucky. He ached all over.
He looked over at Captain Mahendra, who had also escaped the worst of the attack. “Shivaji got away.”
“What is it you Europeans say?” Mahendra asked. “He can run, but he can’t hide?”
“That’s it.” Fleet shook out one of the ibuprofen tablets the doctor had given him in the examination room. He stepped to the watercooler long enough to get a small cup of water and take the tablet. “But this is a big part of the world for him to hide in.”
Mahendra sighed. “We’re not going to walk away from this.”
“I know.” Fleet took a breath and let it out.
“Five of my men are dead,” the captain said in a quiet voice. “All of them have families that I’m going to have to talk to.”
Fleet didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He still remembered what it had been like visiting the families of the men he’d lost when he’d been ambushed. That had been the hardest thing he’d ever done. Even harder than the months of painful rehab that had followed as he dealt with the operations and the rehab on his foot.
“Losing men,” Fleet said in a quiet voice, “is hard. Trying to make it right to their families is even harder.”
“There’s no way to make it right,” Mahendra said. “Rohan’s mother—” His voice broke.
Fleet glanced away and gave the man his space. He hadn’t known the young lieutenant had been a casualty until after they’d gotten the fires aboard the Bengal Tiger under control.
“His mother asked me to look out for him,” Mahendra said.
“You did,” Fleet said quietly. “The best that you were able.” You keep telling yourself that every day, too, he reminded himself. You don’t believe it any more now than you did then.
“I will talk to her. I will let her know that he was brave until the end.”
Fleet leaned against the wall. He was almost too tired to stand. The phantom pains in his missing foot were sharper than they’d ever been.
“What are you going to do?” Mahendra asked.
“Do you mean, am I going to leave?”
Mahendra hesitated, then nodded. “I guess I do.”
“I’m not going to leave,” Fleet said. “Shivaji broke his cover for a reason. He gave up everything here. According to those people working the shipwreck, he gambled everything on that book that he grabbed from them.”
“Do we know what’s in that book?”
“No. Professor Lochata believes it’s some sort of history,” Fleet said.
“Not a journal?”
“No. She said too much care was taken with it. The illustrations were too good.”
“What was it a history of?” Mahendra asked.
“The island that sank out in the Indian Ocean.” Fleet felt foolish saying that, but he tried to understand what it was all about. Rajiv Shivaji had gambled his life away, and had exposed himself to unrelenting law-enforcement pursuit. He was going to be a wanted man the rest of his days. What could be worth that?
“Kumari Kandam?” Mahendra said.
Fleet thought about the name and thought that it sounded right. He nodded. “You’ve heard of it?”
“The land of the snake worshipers,” Mahendra said.
“Doesn’t sound good already,” Fleet commented.
“The kingdoms there were supposed to be fabulously wealthy.”
“That’s not going to do Shivaji much good if it’s sitting at the bottom of the ocean. And if it was easy to find, it seems like someone would have found it before now,” Fleet said.
“There was also the rumor that not all of those people went down on that island.”
“This place is like Atlantis, right?”
“It was also called Mu and Lemuria. It was supposed to be a large continent that bridged India with Africa.”
“Nothing like that existed. The continents just broke apart and moved into the positions where they are now.” Fleet had caught television shows about that while he was rehabbing and trapped at home. He’d flippe
d back and forth between the history programs and televised sporting events.
“Perhaps,” Mahendra said. “But the Indian Ocean is filled with hundreds of islands. Who is to say that at one time there wasn’t one more?”
Fleet had to admit that was true. He scratched his stubbled chin and let out a tense breath. “Do you have a family, Captain?”
“My daughters are grown. Sadly, I lost my wife a few years ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
Mahendra smiled thinly. “Oh, it wasn’t like that. She decided I was too dedicated to my mistress—the sea. Western ways, including divorce, have been on the rise in this country.”
“Sometimes it’s mutually satisfying,” Fleet said.
“In this case, it was.”
“Then let me buy you dinner tonight,” Fleet said. “You shouldn’t be alone.” He paused, then admitted something that he wouldn’t have been able to a few years earlier. “Neither of us should be alone.”
“I’ll take you up on that, Special Agent Fleet. Shall I call you?”
Fleet handed his card over. “My cell is on that.”
Mahendra took the card and slipped it into his pocket. “You’re not going to be at your hotel?”
Fleet shook his head. “Not when there’s work to be done. I’ll find Inspector Ranga. We can get a court order to get into Shivaji’s warehouse and home. Maybe he left a clue behind.”
“You’ll let me know?”
“It’ll be the first call I make,” Fleet assured him.
“Miss Creed hasn’t turned up yet,” Mahendra said. “By all accounts, she’s a very smart woman. Capable, too.”
“She’s a hostage,” Fleet reminded him. “I don’t think that’s a capable position.”
“Still, you have to wonder why Shivaji has continued to hang on to her.”
“I’ve thought about that. Either he’s killed her and we just haven’t turned up the body, or he’s still in-country and in need of a hostage. I’m hoping it’s the latter. If she is capable, maybe she can trip Shivaji up somewhere,” Fleet said.
32
The basement measured fifteen feet by ten feet and smelled like rotting vegetables. Other than the dirt floor, there was nothing in the room.
Annja has been over every inch of it.
A naked bulb provided illumination behind a security mesh screen mounted in the center of the ceiling. The light barely reached the corners of the room and only weakly dispelled the darkness. The air felt moist. It was easy to imagine that she was breathing in mold with every breath.
Rajiv and his men had taken Annja’s backpack and everything from her pockets. They’d even claimed her change. Two of the guards had stayed with her while she’d eaten her meal, then they’d taken her dishes and plastic utensils.
But they didn’t know about her sword. It gave her an edge. However, she didn’t think she’d be able to escape through the house. Rajiv had too many men there. The only concession was that the room wasn’t wired for security monitors.
Stubbornly, Annja pulled the sword into the room with her and rapped the hilt against the walls. The room’s dimensions just felt off. She worked her way along the stone wall, tapping again and again until she heard a hollow behind one of the walls.
She focused on the sound and allowed herself to think that maybe a tunnel to the surface might exist. The house was old. There was a chance that a tunnel into the basement had originally come from outside. Firewood or coal could have been brought in through a chute.
She used the sword to chip away the mortar between the stones. The length made it unwieldy, but she quickly had a pile of mortar at her feet. The mortar was old and crumbled more easily than she would have thought. Within minutes, she had the first stone free.
She eased the stone out with her fingertips and dropped it to the floor. Even though she peered through the opening, she couldn’t see anything. A foul stench came from the void. She continued working.
Only a few minutes later, when she had the opening large enough to stick her head and shoulders inside, she found out why the stench was there. She willed the sword away.
Skeletons, three or possibly four, lay in disarray on the floor inside the void. One of the grinning skulls had a bullet hole through its head. There was no chute or abandoned doorway to the outside. Only a makeshift crypt.
“Ah, I see you found some of my former business associates.”
Annja jerked her head from the opening and turned to see Rajiv descending the wooden steps that led up to the main floor. Four armed guards flanked him.
Rajiv looked into the void himself. He pointed to the mortar. “How did you dig that out?”
“It was old. It crumbled easily,” Annja said.
Rajiv glared at her. “I come to offer you a proposition, Miss Creed. You’re the curious sort. That’s what your job is all about. I daresay that’s what your life is about.”
“You were curious enough to come after that book,” Annja said. “You were willing to kill people to get it. And bring the coast guard and law enforcement after you.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know why?” Rajiv asked.
Annja remained silent, but she was certain that Rajiv knew he had her.
“Come upstairs,” Shivaji said, “and I’ll tell you how I came to know that book was there and what secrets it contains.”
“Anywhere is better than this basement.” Annja glanced at the void where the skeletons lay swathed in darkness. “Although I think the company here may be better.”
UPSTAIRS, once more in disposable cuffs, Annja sat on an overstuffed couch in a modestly appointed den. Rajiv sat across from her and drank a glass of goat’s milk. He’d offered her a choice of drinks and she’d taken water.
“You know about Kumari Kandam?” he asked.
“It was a mythical kingdom out in the Indian Ocean,” Annja replied.
“Not mythical,” Rajiv said. “Once it was very real. A proud and fierce people lived there for a long time, and they amassed a vast fortune.”
“Have you ever noticed how these stories make vast get larger with every generation that tells them?” Annja coolly sipped her water.
Rajiv scowled at her.
Since he was still talking to her, Annja guessed there was more at stake than he was willing to admit. He needed something from her.
“As the island began to sink,” Rajiv went on, “the people abandoned their city and fled to the mainland.” He took the book she’d found in the sunken ship and laid it on the table between them. He opened the book to an illustration of a ship in a harbor repelling boarders.
When she’d first seen the pictures, Annja had thought the ship had been under attack by a hostile force, or that they had been attacking the people on the shore. Looking at the drawing now, she noticed the children. They were on the ship and the shore.
“Most of the people drowned when the sea reclaimed the island,” Rajiv said. “But the others—the king and his court—managed to get away.”
Of course, Annja thought. The king had all the warriors.
“They took the contents of the treasure room with them,” Rajiv continued. He turned more pages.
“Can you read this book?” Annja asked.
“No,” he said.
“Then how do you know this story?”
Rajiv hesitated for a moment. “It was given to me by my father-in-law. It’s his lineage that carries the blood of the people of Kumari Kandam. He only had a daughter and no son to pass his heritage on to.”
“What heritage?”
“Twenty-five hundred years ago, a young man named Sahadeva and his friends found the people of Kumari Kandam, where they built a new city deep within the jungles on the mainland. As you may know, a lot of India’s interior is relatively unexplored. There’s not enough in the center of the continent to draw settlers there.”
The idea of a lost city appealed to Annja. Her interest grew enough that she could almost overlook the fact that she was
a prisoner.
“The Kumari Kandam people are fierce warriors,” Rajiv said. He flipped to a page showing the picture of a warrior displaying the head of a slain enemy. “They were headhunters. They killed everyone who managed to find their city. Except for Sahadeva.”
“What about his friends?” Annja said.
“They killed them, eventually. But not before the king’s daughter, Jyotsna, freed him and his friends. She had fallen in love with him.”
Annja’s immediate reaction was to reject that idea. Then she thought about how attractive an outsider might be to an enclosed society.
“Why were Sahadeva and his friends not killed outright?” she asked.
“The king wanted them to strengthen the bloodline. The community was living too close together.”
“They were having genetic defects,” Annja said.
Rajiv nodded. “The community was inbred. The children were dying. There was talk of curses and vengeance of the gods.”
“They lived on an island community,” Annja said. “Capturing or trading for other men and women would have been part of their culture long before the move to the mainland.”
“Perhaps. But they were more reclusive. The population along the mainland was strong. And they had much to protect.”
“The treasure,” Annja said.
“Not just their treasure. Their way of life.”
“They believed in human sacrifices.” Annja leaned forward and used both hands to turn pages in the book until she reached a graphic depiction of a victim being slain by a man wearing a giant snake’s head.
“Yes.”
Annja looked at Rajiv. “This man, Sahadeva, escaped.”
Shivaji nodded. “He arrived in Kaveripattinam with Jyotsna. There he attempted to sell some of the treasure he’d stolen.” He brought out the naga figurines. “These were among them. That’s how I knew you had found the ship Sahadeva was on when it sank.”
Annja looked at the gold figurines as the pieces of Rajiv’s story clicked together.
“Sahadeva was betrayed by the merchant he tried to sell the treasure to,” Shivaji said. “He was overcome by drugs and sold into slavery aboard a Roman ship. The merchant went aboard the ship, as well, in hopes of finding a better market for the figurines in Rome. While they were at sea, a tsunami struck and took the ship down.”