by Rogue Angel
Annja grabbed it and twisted as hard as she could.
Hauptstark threw back her head and howled in agony.
With the force of desperation Annja heaved her shoulders off the deck. Her right hand scrabbled like a terrified animal at the coiled rope. As the supermodel raised her free hand to chamber a hammer-fist blow that would smash Annja’s skull a strand of rope came loose in Annja’s hand. She hauled on it for all she was worth.
She didn’t know exactly what the anchor lying atop the rope coil was for. Despite having been raised within spitting distance of Lake Pontchartrain, in a town that spent a certain amount of time underwater even before Katrina brought much of the Gulf of Mexico to town for a protracted visit, Annja knew almost nothing about boats. The anchor seemed too light to make a vessel this size stay put. She figured other anchors must have been deployed.
It was still a good-sized hunk of iron. It felt as if it must have weighed eighty pounds. Under most circumstances Annja knew she would have strained to lift it one-handed.
But these weren’t most circumstances. The rope snapped taut as she yanked. The anchor flew through the air, the point of its wedge blade descending like a pickax between Eliete von Hauptstark’s shoulder blades.
Annja was already moving. Her right hand whipped a coil of the rope, still rippling the air, around her opponent’s neck. The weight of the anchor had pushed back Hauptstark’s center of mass. With a heave of the muscles of her lower back and abdomen that sent pain shooting through her belly, Annja thrust her pelvis into the air.
The supermodel was thrown bodily off her. Bleeding and weakened, Hauptstark was momentarily stunned.
Annja jackknifed. She came forward onto her own feet facing her foe. With a scream of pent-up frustration and rage of her own she skipped forward and fired a side-thrust kick into the front of Hauptstark’s pelvis with all her strength.
The supermodel was long and lean, but no one could have accused her of being gaunt. Annja knew the woman was incredibly strong and still very dangerous. She also knew something more than simple jealousy was fueling her killer rage.
A voice deep inside her head was telling her what had driven the insane, and insanely powerful, attack. But she wasn’t ready to listen to the voice. For all the miracles she had witnessed—had taken part in, had performed herself—there were some vestiges of her rational worldview she wasn’t willing to surrender just yet.
And there were some things she didn’t want to believe.
Annja turned to lean on the rail and look off across the water while she recovered her breath. She knew she had to take some decisive actions immediately. But her mind and spirit had taken as brutal a battering as her body.
The water was a lovely deep blue between the sailing vessel and the shore, with its buildings marching up Jaffa Hill. Gulls and terns wheeled and called out to each other overhead. Below them, a variety of watercraft, mostly smallish vessels, rocked gently at anchor or swooped to the impetus of sails or small engines. She gave herself over to a deliberately thought-free contemplation of the postcard prettiness of the scene.
Then, before Hauptstark could attack again, Annja climbed over the rail and jumped into the sea. She swam as hard as her tired muscles would allow. Her instincts told her to get as far from Mark Peter Stern as possible.
A sudden flash caught the corner of her eye. She turned her head to see a puff like a cotton ball, pure white, roll away from one of those pretty little watercraft, perhaps a quarter mile away across the crowded water. In the midst of it blazed a spark like a miniature blue sun. It moved. It seemed to be circling slightly, and drew behind it a corkscrew trail.
Annja dived deep.
17
Above her head a yellow glow spread like a blanket. It had a benign, almost comforting appearance.
Annja wasn’t fooled by that for a nanosecond. Apparently Stern’s yacht had an engine with fairly substantial fuel tanks. They had just exploded. If Annja surfaced through that deceptively gentle glow she knew she’d functionally be necklaced like a South African informer.
Having some warning about what was about to happen, she’d drawn a good deep breath. She set out swimming underwater with strong strokes of arms and legs. She may not have grown up with boats, but she’d swum like an otter since she was four years old.
She swam until the yellow glow from the surface lay well behind her. Then, lungs burning, she swam some more.
When she could no longer stand the pain, she surfaced. Behind her the Zohar II wallowed in the soft swell with its deck just above water. Everything from there up was a great compound billow of yellow fire, with dense, greasy black smoke roiling out of the midst of it and fouling up the sky.
She let out the deep breath she’d gasped down without volition and shook water from her nose and eyes. “Wow,” she said.
For some reason the only thing she could think about for a moment was that her spike heels were still aboard the blazing yacht. “Good riddance,” she said aloud.
She looked around. She was all alone in the water. If any survivors had leaped from the boat they were bobbing around on the far side of it. She turned to look toward shore. It lay perhaps half a mile off. A somewhat tedious swim, but well within her capabilities.
She heard the whine of an outboard motor. She immediately thought someone had seen her bail and had come out to finish the job. Her head and shoulders rose from the sea as she sucked down a deep breath, increasing her buoyancy, ready to dive fast and deep. She reckoned her best and probably only shot was to remain submerged until her persecutors decided she must’ve drowned….
“Wait! Don’t be a bloody fool!” a voice called over the snarl of the approaching boat. It was a familiar voice, with a distinct educated-middle-class English accent.
She looked around. A small white powerboat slid toward her, riding a rolling crest. The driver was waving vigorously to her from behind the wheel.
“Aidan? What on earth are you doing out here?”
The engine’s sound diminished as the boat approached broadside to her and stopped just a few feet away. She bobbed in the surge that rolled from it.
“I believe you Yanks have some less polite terms for it,” the young man called, half standing to lean over and extend a hand to her, “but I’d call it a rescue.”
He helped haul her aboard. She lay dripping puddles into what she thought might be called the scuppers. Or was it a bilge?
“The shoe is on the other foot,” he said. “Or some such rubbish.”
“That’s fair,” she said.
Annja’s dress was plastered to her body revealing more skin than she would have liked. Pascoe chivalrously looked away as she tried to wrestle it back into place. He revved the engine and turned the boat around, heading into the crowd of watercraft clustered closer to shore.
“Where are we going?” she asked, sitting on the seat behind Pascoe.
“Somewhere fast,” he said, “in the faint hope that we can lose ourselves. In a pinch—if the authorities nip us, say—I can claim with perfect honesty to be taking a survivor of the explosion to shore for emergency medical examination.”
As he spoke she heard the warbling of electronic sirens from shore.
“You don’t really need medical attention, do you?” he asked, looking concerned.
“No,” she said. “You’re not worried about the authorities?”
“Not half so much as I am about the lot that did in Stern and his floating pleasure palace.”
Luxurious as its appointments had been, the Zohar II struck Annja as having been on the small side to be a “palace” of any stripe. She didn’t say so. Now that survival did not require immediate action and reaction, she felt mostly stunned.
“Good point. What are you doing here, anyway?” she asked, realizing her rescuer could hardly have been nearby in any kind of coincidence.
“Keeping an eye on our friend Mark Peter Stern,” Pascoe said, with a nod of his head to a big camera case that lay by Annja
’s feet. It sat half open, a camera with a long lens visible inside.
“Subtle,” she said, watching a white-and-yellow helicopter with a shrouded tail rotor that had begun to prowl toward the blazing wreck from the shore. Her interest was abstract. Weariness descended on her like lead fog.
“But not too easy to pick up among all the other boats around unless someone was keeping a lookout specifically for such surveillance—which in Stern’s case would mostly consist of paparazzi. Nobody noticed the crew on another boat setting up to fire that antitank missile, for instance.”
Annja sat dripping and stared at nothing in particular. She felt numb. She knew that she needed desperately to sort out any number of things that had just happened. But somehow she couldn’t muster the urgency.
Something, though, pierced her lassitude. She raised her head and looked in the direction of the smoking wreck. Other boats had begun to swarm around it in vain hopes of rescuing somebody.
“Right now! Turn hard!” she shouted.
Without hesitation Pascoe cranked the wheel hard right. A line of water spouts six feet high marched across their curving wake. Bullets would have raked the boat stem to stern had he turned a half second later.
“Bloody hell!” he shouted as the whine of the helicopter’s engines and rotor chop became audible above the roar of the boat’s motor. “What is it now?”
“Somebody in that helicopter flying toward the wreck is shooting at us,” she called, looking back at the chopper. It hovered broadside to them now, a sleek Aerospatiale Dolphin SA-366, not twenty yards up. A man was visible in the open doorway, aiming what looked like an AK at them. “Swerve,” she shouted another order.
Pascoe obligingly cranked the wheel left. Again bullets ripped the water where they would have been but for the rapid course change.
“Sod this for a game of soldiers,” Pascoe shouted, barely audible above the roar of their motor. Annja didn’t have the slightest notion what it meant. Their latest turn aimed them toward a variety of anchored boats. Pascoe rolled the throttle full out to put theirs among them.
“Will you check my eyes?” Annja asked suddenly.
“What? What?”
Boats flashed by to either side, rocking gently in the powerboat’s wake. “My eyes. I’m afraid I’ve got a concussion.”
“You may just be mad. They’re shooting at us, woman!”
Pascoe glanced back. The chopper was approaching them slowly from behind. The gunner in the doorway seemed reluctant to fire with all the other vessels so close, just as the Briton had hoped.
Annja stood behind him, bracing herself with one hand holding the back of the seat. She flexed her legs as Pascoe turned the wheel over hard again, this time to port. They passed between a schooner-rigged catamaran and a big white power cruiser. A topless woman who had been sunbathing on the cruiser’s afterdeck rose up and shook her fist after the boat whose wake had carelessly drenched her.
“Please,” Annja said. “I need to know.”
Pascoe’s handsome face scowled ferociously. He looked intently into Annja’s eyes. “Both pupils the same size. Now will you let me drive?”
“Sorry,” she said. “It was important. Break left!”
Pascoe had turned them back into open water. The helicopter now prowled alongside them to their port side. The gunner raised his rifle.
The powerboat veered hard as Pascoe complied. For a moment Annja feared he turned too tightly, that inertia would have its way and break them over the berm of swell that had built up along the hull outside the turn. She feared they’d be scattered across the waves like rag dolls. If that happened they’d either be killed outright, or too hurt to do anything when the helicopter dived in close and the gunman pumped bullets into their floating bodies….
But Pascoe kept the boat on her keel. Annja was impressed at his skill. The boat passed beneath the helicopter, which turned on its axis to pursue.
“Head us straight out to sea,” Annja suggested.
“What? Maybe you took too hard a crack on the head after all. That chopper’s faster than we are!” Pascoe said.
But the cobwebs had cleared from Annja’s brain. Perhaps it was a brand-new adrenaline dump on top of the old one. She felt much better, almost exhilarated.
“I’ve got it,” she said.
The helicopter had spun round. A line of bullet holes appeared in the prow of the powerboat. Pascoe turned the small craft back to starboard and lit out for open water.
Annja heard the gunner’s bellow of rage even above all the rotor chop and surf hiss and engine noise. Pascoe had the throttle wide open. The small boat banged across the tops of the waves, each impact like a sledgehammer to the bare soles of Annja’s feet.
Suppressing a thrill of alarm that the small craft might break apart from the violence of its own passage, she crouched down in the stern. The helicopter was overtaking them rapidly. Its pilot, she guessed, was as sick of his quarry’s disobliging antics as his gunner. If they did what she anticipated, the chopper would zip past them and then flare into hover mode broadside to them, so that whether they broke left, right or came straight on, they couldn’t escape getting hosed down by copper-jacketed bullets.
As the Dolphin closed in, nose down to drive with its main rotor’s maximum thrust, Annja stood abruptly. In her hand she held a loop of a nylon rope that lay coiled in the stern. Dangling from the end was another grapnel-style anchor. It was a much more modest anchor than the one she’d struggled with on Stern’s yacht.
Well, anchors have been lucky for me today, she thought, and cast.
In a long underarm lob the anchor rose toward the oncoming rotor disk. The pilot apparently saw something flash toward his face and responded by reflex. The helicopter banked hard left. The man in the door, seemingly oblivious to anything wrong, raised his rifle to his shoulder. The chopper was close enough that Annja could see him grin beneath his dark aviator glasses.
The anchor passed between rotor blades. The trailing blade caught the rope high up near the hub.
Instantly Annja heard a change in the rotor sound. The rotor, rather than severing the tough synthetic rope, wrapped it tightly around the shaft. The anchor, brought up short, bounced upward again. This time it struck a blade.
The thin composite sandwich sheared with a crack and a screech. The face staring at Annja over the Kalashnikov’s sights went pale as the helicopter rolled rapidly counterclockwise around its long axis. The pale yellow flames that leaped from the muzzle brake when the gunner’s finger tightened on the trigger stabbed impotently into the sky.
The Dolphin rolled onto its back and pancaked onto the Mediterranean. Annja heard a loud crack as its backbone broke. As it began to settle in the water a yellow glow of flame began to shine from within the cockpit.
The speedboat fell away to one side, engine idling. “Bloody hell,” Aidan Pascoe said. “That’s impossible.”
“Just dumb luck,” Annja said. He stared at her, blue eyes wild.
She grabbed him by arm and shoulder and pushed him back into the driver’s seat. “Drive,” she said. “Or do you want to try explaining this to the Israeli port police?”
The engine snarled back to full throttle. Annja rocked back as the little craft took off across the blue-green water.
18
“Either Israeli search and rescue has some pretty harsh ideas about how to go about their business,” Annja called out from the bathroom, “or we’ve got a new player in the game.”
She dashed cold water from the tap on her face. She wanted a shower. Her dress felt like papier-mâché molded to her body, and her skin itched from dried salts and less desirable substances from the Jaffa anchorage. But there were some things to be cleared up first.
“I don’t know.” Aidan Pascoe sat in a chair in a corner facing the twin beds. With the curtains drawn and the light off a twilight gloom pervaded the modest hotel room. Only a buttery glow at top and bottom of the reinforced drapes showed that the sun was setting over
Tel Aviv. “But I’d guess we’ve just had another run-in with our friends the Russian mafiya. It’s about the right approach for brutal completists, mopping up after the way they did with the helicopter.”
“You’re probably right.” Annja said.
The television was on with the sound muted. For about the tenth time since they’d turned it on, it showed a past-prime pop diva in London, peroxide curls awry, mascara tear-smeared, sobbing about the loss of her adored spiritual leader Mark Peter Stern as her Pakistani soccer-player husband hovered in the background looking vaguely scandalized by the proceedings.
“What does the news say?” Annja asked.
“Still blaming terrorists, of course,” Pascoe replied. The screen now showed burly yarmulke-clad settlers rioting at the Temple Mount. “If it was the Russians, I suspect that terrorists will remain the official explanation, and the story won’t have many legs.”
“Why do you say that?”
“The mafiya has its influence, after all. There’s been never a peep in the international media about that slight unpleasantness we were embroiled in over in Amsterdam, has there? ‘Terrorism’ is a useful catchword, always available to swallow inconvenient loose ends,” he said.
He took a sip of the whiskey he’d bought in the hotel lobby and shook his head. “Bah. Vile stuff. Not as bad as their gin, but there you have it.”
Annja splashed more tepid water on her face. It made her feel a little better. It cut the salt sting if nothing else. It didn’t improve what she saw in the slightly cloudy glass, however.
“Could it have been?” she asked.
“What?”
“Terrorists?”
“Not a chance. Who’d rent a helicopter like that to a Palestinian? An expensive bit of work, that Dolphin. And also if one was positively frantic to get put under a microscope by the Israeli security service, that would be just the ticket, wouldn’t it?”
