The Vanishing Tribe

by Alex Archer

  Humphrey’s eyes went wide as he slowly looked down to see the blood pumping out of him from the bullet wound in his gut, then he toppled over backward to lie jerking on the dais.

  “Hello, Dad.”

  The gunshots that followed were almost perfectly timed with the twang of the bowstrings as both sides fired on the other. Unfortunately for the Sho, they had to reload after the first shot; Porter’s men didn’t.

  It was over quickly, with the tribal warriors and their chief sprawled dead or dying across the dais and only two of the men with Porter sharing in their fate.

  As far as Porter was concerned, that was a fair trade.

  He stalked across the room and stepped up on the dais. His father, bleeding to death on the floor, grabbed his boot as he passed. Porter jerked his foot away without looking down. He ignored the body of the tribal chief, as well.

  He stopped in front of the diamond.

  It was enormous. Probably the biggest one ever found. Not only was he going to be rich, but he was going to go down in history, too.

  Hawser whistled appreciatively and stepped forward, a thick-bladed combat knife in his hand. “I think I’ll take my share of the booty now,” he said, referring to the deal he’d cut with Porter for twenty percent of the spoils from the raid.

  Porter’s gun came up, barked once, and Hawser went down with a bullet through the skull.

  Behind him, Porter heard Bryant’s gun go off twice, followed in rapid succession by the sound of bodies hitting the floor. He turned to find his second-in-command standing on the first step of the dais, his gun trained on the men in front of him. Most of them were Porter’s men, but a few had been part of Hawser’s squad.

  “Anyone else going to tell the boss how this job is supposed to go down?” Bryant asked, his gun steady.

  A chorus of “No, sir” came back to him and he nodded.

  He glanced at Porter and said under his breath, “Might want to secure that big shiny rock while we still can, sir.”

  Trusting Bryant and the rest of his men to cover his back, Porter stepped forward and began prying the stone from its resting place with the edge of his knife. It didn’t take long; after just a few minutes the stone began to rattle in its setting. He called two soldiers up to help him hold it as he worked it over for a few more minutes before the stone popped out.

  The three men lowered it carefully to the floor.

  Bryant tossed Porter a thin nylon pack. He put the inside, zipped it closed and then hefted it up onto his shoulder.

  It was heavy, but he’d make it.

  As he turned toward the rest of the men, he heard the sound of an elephant trumpeting from somewhere outside. The elephant’s cry was immediately followed by a thunderous crash.

  The helicopters! Porter ran for the door. The rest of his men followed at his heels.

  Outside it was chaos. Guns were going off, metal was shrieking and tearing like a living thing and over it all was the trumpet of an elephant gone mad. Porter stared in disbelief at the lurching, crumpled ruin that had been his helicopter. The rotors were snapped off, the cockpit glass shattered and the cargo bay containing the seats they’d ridden in nothing but a crushed hulk.

  The helicopter behind that one wasn’t much better. While the cockpit was still intact, the entire tail of the aircraft had been bent to one side at a perpendicular angle to the rest of the craft. Like the lead bird, this was another one that wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

  Men were shouting, guns were firing, and Porter looked up in time to see a bull elephant come charging out of the nearby vegetation, lower its head and slam into the tail of the third helicopter just ahead of the rotor. Blood was pouring from half a dozen wounds on the elephant’s hide but that didn’t seem to slow it down any. It barreled its way forward and reared up next to the fourth and final helicopter. As it did, Porter could see that the elephant wasn’t alone. There was a warrior riding on its back.

  “Kill them!” he screamed, and began firing shot after shot. Behind him, the rest of the men followed suit, adding a punishing hail of gunfire to the efforts of the men who’d already been trying to kill the pair.

  Bullets slammed into the hulls of the aircraft, ricocheting, the cacophony drowning out Porter’s repeated demands that his men kill the elephant and its rider. Miraculously, however, the elephant managed to get through the fusillade without taking a mortal injury and, at its rider’s urging, turned and rushed back into the dense foliage nearby, having accomplished its goal of destroying the craft that had rained down such pain and misery on the inhabitants of the Lost City.

  Slowly the firing stopped, leaving Porter shouting furiously in the wake of his enemies and dry-firing a now-empty weapon. Eventually he realized what he was doing and stopped.

  Behind him, Bryant began shouting orders for the team to grab what ammo they could from the wreckage of the helicopters and to form up around him.

  Porter waited until Bryant had stopped shouting and the men were carrying out their orders before catching the other man’s attention. “What are you doing?” he gritted, his fury still smoldering.

  Bryant’s reply was both calm and practical. “If the birds won’t fly, our only chance to get out of here is that tunnel we came through yesterday. If we can get over there quickly enough, we can keep them from sealing off the route and trapping us here.”

  Porter frowned. “You think they would do that?”

  “If a bunch of cowboys just shot up your hometown and were still within range, wouldn’t you?”

  Porter decided Bryant had a point.

  42

  Annja moved down the outside of the tower as fast as she dared, clinging to the wall like a spider and seeking out each new foothold with her toes, making sure it would hold her weight before releasing her hands. The biggest threat to her descent was her own haste. She had to keep reminding herself to slow down and move carefully. An inadvertent mistake would send her the short route to the bottom.

  She was one third of the way down when an outburst of gunfire from the palace startled her. She missed the foothold she’d been reaching for in the same moment that her opposite hand slipped from the crack she’d jammed her fingertips into. Before she knew it she found herself hanging precariously by one hand as her feet scrambled for traction.

  One of her flailing feet caught on the edge of a brick and she steadied herself, breathing a sigh of relief.

  There has got to be a better way.

  She glanced down, trying to gauge whether she was still too high to jump, and finally decided that she was. A two-story fall was likely to break an ankle or leg if she didn’t land just right, and that was something she couldn’t afford right now.

  In the process, however, she spied another window, much like the one she’d climbed out of on the floor above, a few yards to her left. Thinking that it might prove a quicker route to the ground, Annja hustled over to it and peered inside.

  It was a room like the one she’d been held in, except this one was empty.

  Opposite the window, the door stood open.

  Yes!

  There were wooden bars over the window, but that didn’t stop Annja. Getting a good grip on the wall nearby, she called her sword and used it to hack her way through the barrier. Once the bars were out of the way, and the sword returned to its resting place in the otherwhere, Annja shinnied through the window and dropped inside the room.

  Creeping across the room, she peered out the open door.

  No one was there.

  Sword in hand, she stepped into the hall, descended the stairs and ran outside.

  The gunfire had stopped. Annja didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. It might mean there were no longer any targets worth shooting at. She hadn’t seen the helicopters take off again from the other side of the palace, so that was where she decided to go.

  She followed the path the guards had taken her on earlier, until she came to the rear of the palace. Spotting an open door, she slipped inside.
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br />   Her breathing was loud in her ears and her heart beat wildly as she crept down the hall. A short passage opened up on her right and she followed that until she came to a door.

  She put her ear against it and listened, but didn’t hear anything. Annja had no choice but to push it slowly open.

  The door led into the audience hall and one glance was all it took to tell her that things had gone horribly wrong. Bodies littered the steps before the dais. Most were Sho warriors. It looked as though the Sho had been cut down where they stood, victims of firepower far superior to theirs.

  Along with the bodies of the guards, Annja could see the forms of Robert Humphrey and Lato the Elder lying in pools of blood.

  Behind the throne, the empty socket where the Heartstone had been kept glared at her accusingly.

  She was too late.

  It was a crushing blow, one that derailed her train of thought and left her wondering what to do next. Annja was standing there, staring at the destruction around her, when the elder twitched and groaned.

  She rushed to his side. Kneeling beside him, she gave him a once-over.

  It didn’t look good. He’d taken at least three bullets to the chest and stomach. By the blood spreading out beneath him, Annja wondered just how much blood he still had in him. That he was still alive was a minor miracle.

  Annja looked for something to stem the flow of blood from his wounds, before realizing there was no way she could put pressure on all of them simultaneously.

  “Help!” she cried, not caring at this point if it was Porter’s men who found her. “Somebody help me!”

  No one came.

  Annja did what she could, knowing it was futile, but she refused to give up. She tore several pieces of cloth from the elder’s sarong and stuffed them into the wounds; infection was the least of her worries.

  As she applied pressure to one of the makeshift bandages, his eyes opened. He stared at her, then grabbed her wrist in his aged hand.

  “Return...the Heartstone...to the People,” he gasped, blood dripping from his mouth. “Or we will all surely die.”

  He seemed to relax once he’d said it, and in the next moment his body went still.

  Annja frantically tried to resuscitate him. It was only after she stopped giving him CPR that it dawned on her he’d spoken in English again.

  A noise startled her and she whirled around, calling her sword into being.

  Across the room, a bloody and battered Nagamush stood staring at the scene. His gaze drifted from the elder’s corpse to the hole in the wall where the Heartstone had rested for generations and then back to Annja.

  She didn’t think she’d ever seen an expression so bleak.

  Humphrey’s words came back to her.

  The Heartstone is a sacred, religious object for these people.

  Maybe she could still stop them. She could still make this right. Wasn’t that what she carried the sword for? To protect the innocent from the predators among them?

  She hustled across the room, grabbed Nagamush’s arm as she went past and headed out the front door.

  Only to stop short at the destruction in front of her.

  The bodies of more than a dozen Sho warriors lay scattered on the lawn, along with the mashed remains of the helicopters. Now she knew why they hadn’t taken off. It looked as if a giant had used them as his playthings. Annja remembered the sound of the elephant she’d heard earlier and put two and two together.

  So where was Porter?

  The sound of gunfire drifted to her from somewhere in the distance.

  The lift.

  It had to be. He couldn’t fly out, so he was trying to escape with the Heartstone through the only other entrance to the valley. The same tunnel Nagamush had brought her through the day before.

  There might still be time to stop him.

  43

  Annja was about to rush off in the direction of the lift when Nagamush grabbed her arm. He shook his head and held out both hands. Then he put his fingers to his mouth and whistled.

  At first there was no response. He tried again and this time a loud, trumpeting cry answered him. Annja spun around to see one of the elephants that had been bathing in the pool earlier stomp out of the vegetation on the other side of the wrecked helicopters. It moved toward them.

  The majestic creature was in rough shape. Annja could see where it had been hit by several bullets, blood oozing slowly out of the holes in its hide, but the injuries seemed to have done little to slow it down. It walked up to Nagamush and trumpeted again, then bent down on one knee.

  The Sho warrior scrambled up onto the elephant, seated himself behind its head, then leaned down, extending a hand to Annja.

  This is a first, she thought to herself as she climbed up behind him. Going into battle on an elephant.

  She let her sword vanish back into the otherwhere, then wrapped her arms around Nagamush’s stomach. He said something, then tapped the elephant twice on the head.

  The great mammal responded without hesitation, lumbering down the street in the direction Porter must have taken his men.

  They reached the base of the lift and the two of them dismounted. They raced over to the elevator mechanism, only to find their worst fears confirmed. The great wheel that powered the lift had been smashed and the ropes that normally controlled the movement had been pulled up to the ledge high above. The basket stood up there, as well, effectively marooning Annja and everyone else at the bottom of the cliff.

  Or so they thought.

  Annja took one look at the shattered mechanism and then turned her attention to the cliff instead. She estimated it to be maybe three pitches to the top, which would put it somewhere in the neighborhood of three hundred feet. It was a long way to go without adequate protection, but there looked to be a fair number of hand- and footholds. If she was careful, she wouldn’t have trouble.

  Except she didn’t have time to be careful.

  If she wanted to get the diamond back, she needed to catch up with Porter. Once back in Maun, he could hide behind the walls of his estate outside of town and she would have a much harder time gaining access to him and the gemstone.

  She caught Nagamush’s attention and then pointed to the cliff. Annja did what she could to make him understand her plan by pantomiming climbing the wall and then throwing down a rope so he could follow.

  He nodded.

  “Here goes nothing,” she said beneath her breath, and started climbing.

  To her surprise, the climb went quickly. She’d been correct; there were plenty of holds and with the exception of one ten-foot stretch of glassy smooth rock where she was scrambling for the next move, she didn’t feel she was pushing the margins of safety far.

  Then again, her margins of safety would make the average person quake with fear, so maybe that wasn’t saying much.

  She was about halfway up when she glanced down. Nagamush had sent the elephant away and was now climbing steadily behind her. He was doing all he could to help save his people from a catastrophe. In his position, would she have done any less?

  Buoyed by his fearless determination, Annja climbed on.

  Her arms were shaking from the lactic acid buildup in her muscles when her fingers finally slipped over the top. She’d made it. With a final pull, she heaved herself up over the edge and rolled onto her back, closing her eyes in silent thanks.

  The sound of footsteps was so unexpected that it took a moment for her to recognize what they were. By the time she did, she opened her eyes and found herself staring into the barrel of a pistol.

  “Well, well, well. Look what the cat dragged in.”

  Annja had never seen the man before, but the paramilitary fatigues and combat boots made it clear that he had to be one of Porter’s men. His finger was on the trigger of his weapon.

  Not good.

  Annja heard the clatter of small rocks falling down the cliff face and then Nagamush’s hand came up and gripped the edge.

  The movement shifted t
he soldier’s attention away from Annja. “What the...?” He swung the gun toward the ledge.

  Annja lunged forward, grabbed his ankle and pulled with all her might.

  The gun went off with a deafening bang, the bullet missing Nagamush by inches as the man’s leg was yanked out from beneath him and he found himself headed for the cliff’s edge with considerable speed.

  Recognizing the danger, he dropped the gun and flailed his arms, trying unsuccessfully to grab Annja to stop his fall. With a final bloodcurdling scream, he slid over the edge and out of sight.

  If he hadn’t fallen to his death, she would have run him through with her sword.

  The two of them took a moment to catch their breath and then set out once more. Nagamush led the way this time, unselfconsciously taking her by the hand and leading her through the tunnels without the benefit of a light, not wanting to give them away if Porter was up ahead.

  As they neared the end of the tunnel Annja made him slow down and advance more cautiously. Porter had already left one guard to watch the trail behind him and she expected he’d do the same at this end. Annja didn’t want to go blundering into anyone in the dark. But as they moved through the rooms of the temple, it became increasingly clear that they were the only ones there.

  When she stepped out into the canyon, Annja knew they were too late. Porter and his men had already disappeared.

  She turned to her companion. The look on his face told her he already knew.

  They had lost Porter and, in doing so, had lost the Heartstone, dooming the Sho people to what they believed was certain death. The ones who were still alive, that is.

  Nagamush sank to the ground. He stared at nothing, his eyes full of tears.

  It was heartbreaking, and for the first time in a long time Annja didn’t know what to do or say. How do you comfort someone who thinks he’s witnessing the death of his entire race?

  The words of Lato the Elder echoed in her head.

  Return the Heartstone to the People or we will all surely perish.

  There was no way she was going to let it end like this.