by Alex Archer
He coughed once, spewing blood down the front of his shirt, and died. Annja guessed he probably never even knew what hit him.
She didn’t know if she had enough room to pull the sword back out of the driver’s body without getting the hilt jammed up on the seat behind her, so she just left it where it was for the time being and brought her hands up instead, using the exposed edge of the blade to slash through the zip ties holding them together.
She turned her attention to Dr. Crane, intending to help him subdue his own guard, when the SUV bounced over a particular large bump in the road. Without the driver’s grip on the wheel to keep it steady, the vehicle immediately yawed to the right, careering off the road into the scrublands around them. Even worse, the dead weight of the driver’s foot pushed the accelerator down and the vehicle began to speed in an arc away from the rest of the convoy.
“No, you don’t!” Annja yelped, and threw herself partially over the front seat to grab the steering wheel. At the same time she let go of the sword, returning it to the otherwhere. No longer pinned in place by the blade, the dead man’s body slumped to the side.
A quick glance to her right showed her Crane was still fighting with the man in the passenger seat, both of them oblivious to the course the car was taking. Crane had slipped down into the well between the seats, still pulling. Porter’s man, on the other hand, was turning blue in the face as he fought the pressure of Crane’s hands against his throat, his hands alternately pulling against Crane’s arms and flailing in search of the gun he’d dropped.
A sharp clang reverberated through the car as it careered off a boulder on its now runaway course, and Annja knew they couldn’t stay lucky for long.
Time to settle the odds.
While fighting the steering wheel with her left hand, she brought her right arm up as high as it would go and then savagely drove it back down so that her elbow connected squarely with the guy’s temple, knocking him unconscious with one powerful blow.
Which was good, because she didn’t have time for another one. She had to gain control of the vehicle.
Beside her, she heard Crane ask, “What happened to the other—?”
That was as far as he got.
The sound of retching that filled the car told her he’d finally gotten a look at her handiwork in subduing the other guard.
What had happened to her? Why didn’t she feel anything?
Crane was having a harder time dealing with the fact that she’d just violently ended a life than she was. In all likelihood the man had had it coming, but that didn’t change that she’d just become judge, jury and executioner. It wasn’t the first time, either. Her life had certainly changed since she’d taken up the sword and she’d been deluding herself if she thought it was all for the good.
But she didn’t have time to examine that too deeply right now, as the vehicle continued to accelerate and she had to keep them from driving into a tree.
A horn blared behind them and Annja knew pursuit wouldn’t be far behind.
28
Porter was in the front seat, flipping through the pages of his father’s journal, when he heard one of the men in the back mutter, “Where’s he going?”
Porter turned to see who had said it, only to look beyond the man and out the rear window where one of the vehicles behind them had suddenly veered off the road. It hadn’t slowed down, either. If anything, it had sped up and was now bouncing and jumping over the dips and cuts in front of them like a motocross racer determined to take a spill.
Porter’s orders had been quite clear. The vehicles behind him were to follow him to their next destination. They were not to stop for any reason and were not to deviate from the route Porter set for them.
Clearly, someone had decided to change the rules. Given that his men were well acquainted with the price they would pay for disobedience, there could be only one explanation.
Annja Creed was at it again.
“Damn that woman!” he exploded, startling Bryant, who sat next to him behind the wheel. “Turn around! Turn around!”
Bryant did as he was told without question, tapping the brakes and slewing the big SUV into a wide turn, nearly clobbering a startled pair of zebras in the process as they broke from cover behind nearby trees.
“There!” Porter shouted, pointing at the SUV headed away from them toward a large outcropping of rocks in the distance. “Stop them!”
Bryant altered course and stepped on the accelerator in an effort to close the distance between them. Dust and dirt filled the air as the other vehicles followed suit, making it hard to see. Porter cursed and pounded the dashboard in frustration as Bryant was forced to swerve sharply to avoid one of the other SUVs as it emerged suddenly from out of the mess, their front bumper passing scant inches from the rear of the other. Only Bryant’s swift reflexes kept them from slamming into each other dead-on.
The getaway vehicle had a good lead on them but Bryant’s efforts were helping them close the gap.
* * *
ANNJA WAS FINDING IT increasingly difficult to control the vehicle from the backseat. Her arms and lower back were starting to ache from the strain and she knew her chances of making a fatal error increased with every passing second. She had to get into the front seat and gain better control of the vehicle or this ride was going to be over sooner rather than later.
“Henry!” she called. “I need you to cut my feet loose.”
Her companion didn’t say anything, but after a moment she felt him sawing at the zip ties around her ankles with a knife. She didn’t have time to wonder where he’d got it from because a few seconds later the ties parted with a snap.
As soon as her feet were free she braced herself and then grabbed the shirt of the dead man behind the wheel and tried to drag him to the right, without much success. Crane saw what she was doing and added his strength to the task. Between them they were able to drag the body out of the driver’s seat and dump it onto the unconscious man in the passenger seat.
The SUV began to slow as soon as the dead man’s foot was pulled off the accelerator, but Annja quickly changed that as she slipped between the seats and into the driver’s position, ramming her foot on the gas.
The SUV leaped forward.
Their slowdown had given Porter and the rest of them time to turn themselves around and now Annja counted at least three vehicles, maybe more, in hot pursuit.
They needed a distraction.
She glanced at the men in the seat next to her, then said to Henry, “Get rid of them.”
“What?”
She jerked her thumb. “One of them is nothing more than dead weight and the other might wake up at any moment. If he does, we’re in trouble. We caught him by surprise the first time. The second time around he won’t be so easy to subdue.”
“Okay,” Henry said. “As soon as you slow down—”
Annja didn’t let him get any further. “Slow down?” she asked incredulously. “Are you nuts? We’ve got Porter and his hired guns hot on our tail and you want me to slow down?”
“Um, well...”
“Just open the door and push them out.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can,” Annja said calmly. “You already tried to strangle him to death. I’d say the points for that on the ‘do no harm’ scale are much higher than simply pushing him out of a moving vehicle, wouldn’t you?”
Henry gaped at her.
“If it makes you feel any better we’ll try to dump them out on a nice grassy spot, all right?”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe you’re asking me to do this!”
The unconscious guard chose that moment to stir and Annja knew he wasn’t going to remain unconscious much longer.
“Henry!” she said sharply.
“Okay, okay. Try to keep us away from any big rocks,” he said as he leaned across the front seat, reaching for the door handle. Annja hit the switch on her door that opened all the locks.
�
��On the count of three,” Annja said, timing their release so the bodies would tumble out into a reasonably debris-free area and not end up splattered across a large boulder or slammed into the trunk of a tree.
“One... Two...”
On the final count Henry popped open the door and did what he could to manhandle the bodies out the opening. Annja helped by leaning to the right and pushing with that hand, while still doing her best to keep her eyes on the road.
The first body slid out easily enough, but as the second followed suit, their former captor regained consciousness. His eyes popped open, startling Henry, who let out a squawk and tumbled back into the rear seat, and then the man’s hands shot out to grab the nearest support as he realized that he was falling backward out the door. One hand latched on to the doorjamb while the other caught Annja’s right arm just above the wrist.
Annja tried to pull herself free, to no avail. He had a good grip and wasn’t letting go. In addition, every tug she made pulled him another inch back into the vehicle.
“Look out!” Henry shouted, and Annja looked at the terrain in front of her in time to see the massive baobab tree looming ahead of them. She jerked the wheel to the right, barely clearing the tree’s thick trunk and sheering off the driver’s side mirror in the process with a shriek of tearing metal and smashing glass.
And still their unwanted passenger held on.
With every bump, the door swung shut, slamming against the desperate thug’s back and then rebounding only to do it all over again. Still, he refused to let go, holding on to Annja’s arm for dear life, trying to use the one leg he had inside the vehicle to leverage himself back inside. If it hadn’t been for the bumpiness of the ride, Annja knew, he would have already used the leverage he had to push himself back across the front seat at her.
“Do something, Henry!” she shouted, swerving to avoid a group of boulders.
Henry grabbed the other man’s hand and began to try to pull him off Annja, but the guy’s grip was like a vise and Henry just didn’t have the strength. So he opened his mouth and bit the man’s thumb.
Their unwanted passenger let out a shriek of pain and involuntarily opened his hand.
That was all Annja needed. The minute the pressure on her wrist let up, she jerked the wheel first to the left and then immediately back again to the right, throwing their former captor off balance and sending him tumbling out the door.
Annja glanced in the rearview mirror, trying to get a glimpse of what happened to him, but her view was filled by the dark shape of one of the other SUVs. The driver had taken advantage of her inattention to close the distance between them and he announced his presence by slamming his SUV’s front quarter panel into their rear one. The wheel jerked in her hands, the movement threatening to send the SUV into a skid that would put the front compartment directly in the path of the pursuing vehicle. Annja doubted she’d survive having a five-hundred-pound vehicle dropped in her lap, so she fought the turn with everything she had and got them running straight again.
Henry shouted, “They’re going to shoot!” half a second before a bullet shattered the rear window and embedded itself in the back of the front passenger seat. Several more followed, the crack of each shot causing Annja to hunch over the wheel, but none of the other bullets found their mark and she continued charging hell-bent for leather toward the rocky ridgeline she’d picked out as their destination.
Just a few hundred yards left.
She heard the sound of a gunning engine and the other SUV moved in for a second strike, but Annja tapped the breaks and cut the wheel hard in that direction, slamming her own vehicle into theirs. The impact was enough to push theirs several feet to the side, where the termite mound Annja had spotted seconds before was suddenly lined up directly with the front of the SUV. As Annja raced safely past, the other driver was unable to avoid the obstacle and slammed into it. The mound acted as a kind of makeshift ramp, tipping one side of the vehicle higher than the other and launching it into the air, only to come crashing back down to earth several feet later with a thunderous crash and the long warbling cry of a horn that was stuck.
Annja hit the gas again, trying to regain some of the lead they had lost. In the rearview mirror she saw two other SUVs trying to close the distance, intent on boxing her in, but she was determined not to let them get the chance.
She cut the wheel to the right to avoid a massive boulder, burst through a dense clump of acacia thorn bushes, and found herself driving along the knife edge of a long-dried-out riverbank. The earth along the edge of the bank was little more than dry, loose soil and she immediately felt the SUV lurch in that direction as the tires began to slip and spin.
She knew in that moment it was too late.
Still, she gave it her best, throwing the wheel in the opposite direction and physically leaning into it, trying to add as much weight as possible to that side of the vehicle to keep them from going over, but the slide was already in motion.
“Brace yourself!” she yelled as the ground beneath the passenger’s side of the SUV gave way entirely and the SUV tipped precariously in that direction.
Annja spared a glance toward Crane, saw him hunkered down in the well between the front and backseats, his head tucked between his knees, and hoped it would be enough to protect him from serious injury. In the next moment, the SUV careened sideways off the crumbling riverbank and rolled toward the bottom. Annja lost all sense of which way was up and which was down as she was thrown from side to side. The floor became the ceiling, became the wall, became the floor, became the wall again as the vehicle came to a crashing halt in a great, billowing cloud of dust.
Blood flowed down one side of Annja’s face from a cut across the edge of her forehead, but the rest of her seemed intact. A few bruises and what was sure to be an egg-size lump on one side of her head, but no twisted limbs or broken bones, thankfully.
Satisfied that she wasn’t going to injure herself just by moving, Annja took a second to make sense of her surroundings. The SUV had come to a stop on its roof, its wheels still spinning. Broken glass covered the “floor” around her, and the door closest to her was crumpled and bent into the driver’s seat. It wouldn’t budge when she tried to open it.
Annja crawled over to the other side on her hands and knees, doing her best to avoid jamming herself with any of the crumpled safety glass that littered her way, and then tried the other door. It, too, was stuck, though it didn’t look quite as bent or damaged. She turned around so that she was facing the door with her legs out in front of her, braced herself on her elbows and lashed out with both feet, driving them into the door near where it met the frame. On the third kick the door opened enough that she’d be able to twist her way through it.
She heard movement behind her and turned to see Henry crawling through the space between the seats. He looked dazed and weary, but physically uninjured.
“Come on! We’ve got to get out of here!” she said. Porter and his cronies couldn’t be far behind.
The two of them writhed and wriggled their way out of the narrow opening, then crawled a short distance from the truck just to be safe. Through the ringing in her ears from the crash, Annja thought she could hear the sound of racing engines.
She looked at Henry. “Can you run?”
He nodded. “I think so. Do you have a plan?”
Annja glanced back the way they had come, then turned in the other direction. “We’ve got to get out of here before Porter and his men catch up to us. Our best bet is to head up into those rocks,” she said, pointing toward the ridgeline twenty yards away, “and see if we can lose them in the canyons.”
“What are we waiting for, then?” he replied.
They had no water and no supplies, but that was secondary to getting as big a head start as they could get. Porter would come after them. If he caught them, it was unlikely he’d be as lenient as he’d been the first time around.
Their only hope was to put enough distance between themselves and Port
er that he eventually gave up the search. They took off for the safety of the ridge as fast as their legs could carry them.
29
The terrain reminded Annja of the American Southwest, a boulder-strewn series of hills and free-standing rock spires clung to a stretch of interconnected canyons. Plus plenty of dead-end trails. What little vegetation there had been along the banks of the ancient riverbed quickly fell behind them as they climbed the nearest slope, the loose rock and earth slipping beneath their feet with every step. Annja could hear Henry cursing beneath his breath every time his foot slipped out from under him. She moved closer without making it obvious what she was doing. She wanted to be there in case of a fall; the last thing they needed was a twisted ankle or, heaven forbid, a broken leg.
The terrain evened out once they got to the top of the hill, which was a relief. They paused a moment to catch their breath. It had been a difficult climb and they had both been worn-out before they’d started. A glance back down the trail showed the three others SUVS slamming to a halt on the bank of the river. Seconds later, Porter and his men poured out and began scrambling down the riverbank. One figure remained behind and it was a moment before a bullet ricocheted off a rock on the slope below them, the sound of the shot echoing through the canyons.
They needed a better plan.
Henry was already breathing heavily from the excitement and exertion of the past few minutes. He wouldn’t make it much farther. She was going to have to lead them away from him, give him time to regroup, perhaps even to double back to secure a vehicle to make an escape.
“How are you doing?” she asked as she pulled him behind a nearby rock just in case the rifleman grew more accurate.
“Didn’t think I was going to be running around the Kalahari when I left the house this morning. I’m all right, though.” He nodded. “Yep, I’ll be just fine.”