by Alex Archer
At last, both pushed and pulled, the gangly rabbi reached the top. Feeling thoroughly wrung out by the last spasm of effort Annja hauled herself over the black rock lip.
She quickly found a scene turned to nightmare.
Levi had gotten to his feet and stood blinking in confusion through his glasses and the goggles strapped over them. He held his gloved hands up before the shoulders of his puffy jacket.
"Come on, vessel of unrighteousness," a harsh and thickly accented voice commanded. "Clear the way. You will be dealt with later."
Hamid the Kurd guide gestured with the muzzle brake of the short rifle he held in his hands. His own heavy jacket lay open to the wind that was kicking up powdered snow all around the ledge, which was about the size of a theatrical stage. The wind was also sweeping some fresh snow down from the dark, thick clouds that had gathered like vultures around the peak. Did he have that thing under there the whole time? Annja wondered, gingerly obeying his command. It must have gouged and battered his ribs unmercifully.
She recognized the gun as a Russian-made AKSU. It was the submachine gun–sized version of the AKS-74, although it shot the same powerful 5.45 mm cartridge as the full-sized assault rifle. As a result it produced a fearsome noise and muzzle blast. This wasn't the first one Annja had encountered.
Although by the wild look in Hamid's dark eyes, it could well be the last.
Bostitch and Baron stood together with the sheer dark wall of the next cliff at their backs, their own gloved hands upraised. Bostitch blinked incessantly and his features were slack with befuddlement, as if he couldn't wrap his mind around this turn of events at all. Baron, though, seemed to be nearing dangerous pressures; Annja half expected at any instant to see white steam vent suddenly not just from his tightly compressed mouth, but from nose and ears as well.
"I don't understand," Bostitch was saying, shaking his head. "Why are you doing this, Hamid?"
"How can you not know? It is because your people have betrayed ours. They have denied us the promised prize for helping them seize Iraq—the north. And they have allowed their lapdogs the Turks to assail us there, to destroy our dreams of a free and united Kurdistan once and for all!"
Her mind racing, one question crowded its way out of Annja's chapped lips. "Why did you wait until now?" she asked.
"Silence, unclean thing!" Hamid jabbed the AKSU at her like a dagger. "Stay out of the way."
"That's twice," she muttered under her breath.
She saw about half the party stood on the ledge with gloved hands upraised or clasped behind hooded or colorfully capped heads. Bostitch, Baron, Taitt and Levi were with her. Also the darkly muscular Fred Mallory, whose black eyes smoldered beneath charcoal-smudge brows and his army-like haircut. Next on the rope came Wilfork, and then Zack Thompson. Josh Fairlie belayed from the bottom of the hundred-foot face.
To one side Jason stood, his café-au-lait features wooden and gray as driftwood, shooting the whole evil scene with the video camera that squatted on his shoulder.
The gunman stood just to the left of where Annja had emerged onto the narrow ledge. Obedient to his command, or at least his gun, she had moved both away from the edge and counterclockwise. She kept moving, gently, gently. The movement took her to what she judged was the edge of Hamid's peripheral vision.
The Kurd promptly turned his back on her to jab his AKSU down at Wilfork's startled porkpie face, for once drained of its florid color. He screamed at him to stay where he was. As I thought, she told herself. He doesn't think I'm worth paying attention to.
Male-chauvinist contempt had never been so welcome. She was a little far away from him to make a move. The last thing she wanted was to startle him into triggering a burst into poor Wilfork's face—and rain bullets down onto those climbing below him.
"What do you think you're going to accomplish, Hamid?" Leif Baron said in a voice reminiscent of a metal rasp over wood.
"This faithless one here records the vengeance of the Kurdish people upon you double-dealing capitalist infidels."
"Capitalist?" Larry said, sounding far more perplexed than scared.
"The Kurds are devout socialists," Baron said tersely. "Put a sock in, boy."
"For daring to speak," Hamid said, "you shall have the honor of cutting the rope that holds your friends. Then I shall shoot you all, except the kafir with the camera, and roll your bodies down on the rest. Then I shall drop rocks on any who still cling to the cliff. Then this worthless dog and I shall descend the mountain together to show his footage to the world."
"Can you make it down this route alone?" Bostitch asked.
Hamid laughed wildly. "If I cannot, I die a martyr. And this one dies a dog. And in the fullness of time, Allah willing, his camera will be found, and the world will see our vengeance. We Kurds are patient, as is Allah."
He pointed the stubby little Kalashnikov from the waist at Larry Taitt and gestured imperatively. "Now! Cut the rope. Quickly, quickly, or I shall shoot your master, the decadent plutocrat Charles Bostitch, in the belly. Move!"
The color dropped from Larry's face like a curtain falling. Snow began to blow in thick swirls around them. The clouds pressed close to the merciless mountain, enclosing them in a microcosm of fear. Larry flicked his eyes toward his boss. His right boot trembled on the verge of taking a step.
Without a sound Fred Mallory charged at Hamid.
All this time Annja had been edging into position. Hamid couldn't have paid less attention to her if she were ten thousand miles away hearing about all this over her cell phone. She had gotten well away from the others and behind the man with the gun.
Fred charged along the cliff from Hamid's other side. The Kurd, who had taken a step back from the edge once he froze Wilfork floundering five feet down from the top, wheeled, thrust out his AKSU and sprayed his attacker with thunderous yammering gunfire.
Annja watched in horror as the muzzle blast hit Fred in the chest. Fred gasped aloud as the bullets lanced through him. He went over the edge and fell away without another sound.
Annja watched in horror. But not helpless horror. Even as Hamid fired she launched into furious motion, sinuous with long practice. It was a classic fencing advance lunge—a quick step flowing into a long driving step off the left leg. As she began the accompanying thrust she formed her right hand into an open fist.
The sword's hilt filled it. The mystic tip crunched into Hamid's back just below his left shoulder blade, just outward of his spine.
For many hours she had drilled the move, in relentless and unsparing practice of modern and Renaissance swordplay techniques alike. She had calculated her thrust to give him about six inches of steel—enough to do maximum damage to his internal organs without poking betrayingly out the other side.
He stiffened. He screamed. Praying the tip hadn't protruded from his chest far enough for her companions to see, Annja opened her hand. At once the sword vanished back to the otherwhere, where it was no more than a reach away.
Keeping her forward momentum she spun a back-kick into the small of Hamid's back. He was pitched over the ledge, narrowly missing Wilfork, who let go the rope and cried out in alarm as he spun.
The Kurd screamed and fired wildly as he fell. Annja leaned out perilously far to watch him. Now coming in hard, the snow swallowed him inside of thirty feet; the muzzle flashes continued to illuminate the whiteness from below and the slamming reports continued until his weapon jammed or ran dry.
The screams continued considerably longer. It went on and on, until even Annja felt a mad desire to press her gloved hands to her ears to blot them out.
"Jesus," Jason whispered. No one took him to task for his blasphemy.
Chapter 19
For a moment, no one moved or said anything. Annja wasn't sure anybody even dared to breathe. She had to remind herself to do so, and that only happened when the already razor-thin membrane keeping hypoxia at bay began to fray, and the blackness crowded forward threatening to crush her vision to a pinpoi
nt, and then extinguish it completely. She swayed then went to one knee. She focused on taking in deep breaths. Otherwise she risked following Hamid and his victim Fred into white oblivion.
It was Larry Taitt who came to her side and helped her to her feet. His thickly gloved hand trembled on her arm. The face behind his goggles was the same color as the snow.
"Ms. Creed," he stammered. "A-Annja. Are you all right?"
"Yeah," she said. "I guess so."
She was shaken. She had just stabbed a man in the back and watched another brave man fall to his death. She'd seen many people die since the sword had come into her possession but she was sure she'd never get used to it. At least she hoped it would never become unremarkable.
"You took your bloody time booting the traitorous bastard over the edge," Wilfork bellowed as he scrambled up over the ledge as lithely as a skinny adolescent. Baron grabbed his arm and hauled him away from the drop. "Were you taking time to admire his rhetoric, or what?"
"Waiting for my chance," Annja said.
But the question did bother her. Did I wait too long? she asked herself mentally again and again. Did I buy my secret's continued security with the life of that poor boy? Even if the "boy" was likely the same age she was.
While Hamid had obviously dismissed her from his consciousness, it didn't mean he didn't keep cranking his head left and right like a feral Brooklyn tomcat navigating an unknown alley. Once he caught the flash of purposeful movement in his peripheral vision it wouldn't matter whether it was caused by man or mere woman—he'd instantly wheel and shoot.
But was I too concerned about trying to hide the sword from the others? she wondered. She feared she would see the grimace of pain on Fred's face as he fell for a long time in her dreams.
The rest of the climbers reached the top quickly and safely despite the full-on blizzard that had descended around them. Tommy and Josh came up last. The survivors basically clumped into two shocked groups huddled against the now-howling storm. The Young Wolves moved to one side, the Chasing History's Monsters trio to another.
Jason was babbling excitedly to his companions. His voice was lost to Annja in the greater voice of the wind. They cast the occasional wide-eyed look at Annja but sent no recriminating words her way. She dared to hope they'd finally grasped that her act of violence, shocking though it was to their tender sensibilities, had been to save them. Had been the only thing that saved them.
More likely, she thought, they're too scared of me to speak to me now.
Levi stood close to her, making soothing noises he seemed to hope were helpful. She appreciated his solicitude but tried to tune him out. She was sitting with her back to the granite wall, trying to sort out her own chaotic seethe of thoughts and emotions. The thin air didn't help.
Wilfork also loomed nearby, his ski cap off, his white-yellow hair ruffled by the wind and rimed with snow. He kept looking at her strangely.
"You actually kicked him off the cliff," he said, several times. To Annja it sounded as if he was trying to talk himself out of something. Did he think he saw something?
She was questioning, now—oh, blessed hindsight—whether she'd even needed to use the sword. But as tightly wound and wary as Hamid had been, could she realistically have been sure of getting close enough to land a solid kick before he turned and shot her? The three-foot steel length of the sword's blade had been her margin of success.
She knew she'd got a clean heart shot, even if she'd slightly misjudged the range. Trying to reach a man's heart through a man's stomach was taking the long way around, she knew from anatomy classes. And also experience. But the additional kick that sent him over the edge hadn't just been to hide the fact he'd been run through. She'd also seen firsthand how even a clean heart shot wasn't always instantly lethal. Especially on someone totally stoked on adrenaline. She couldn't afford him the chance to pull the trigger and wave goodbye to her companions with his automatic weapon.
Blood spills, burned deeply into fresh snow and already cooled to the point they no longer steamed, spattered the edge of the sheer drop. Nobody, Annja figured, was going to be in position to analyze them and find out they belonged to Hamid as well as his victim. It was relief, but a small one.
Bostitch and his acolytes had formed an inward-facing circle linked with arms on shoulders and heads together. They seemed to be going through some kind of ritual for their lost friend.
"Have they done this often before?" Levi asked. He'd shoved his goggles up onto his forehead so he could scratch the bridge of his nose beneath his thick glasses.
"Good question," Annja said, feeling suddenly colder than even weather and circumstances called for.
"We have to push on," Bostitch announced as the circle broke up with some kind of joint exhalation of prayer.
"What?" Annja and Wilfork asked at the same time. The television crew echoed them a moment later. Jason had recovered his presence of mind enough to take up his big video camera and start filming again.
"Didn't you hear the man?" Baron snapped. "He said we have to move. Get bodies in motion, people. Daylight's wasting."
"It's still daylight?" Trish asked.
"You can't be serious," Jason said. His voice shook but he held the camera steady as stone. Annja had to admire his professionalism. "Somebody just died here," he said.
"We have to go back," Trish said. "The expedition's over. I mean…isn't it? Surely it is." She looked pleadingly at Annja.
"And let Fred's sacrifice go in vain?" Josh snarled. His own face was so white that for a heartbeat Annja feared he was on the verge of massive frostbite.
"This is crazy, man," Tommy said. He also looked to Annja for support. "You tell 'em."
But she shook her head slowly. "I'm not going back," she said. "We're within a day of our goal. We didn't quit when Mr. Atabeg got killed. I don't see why we should quit now."
Trish and Tommy stared at her, white-faced beneath the goggles they'd pushed up on their heads. Jason shook his head.
"We're just used to covering imaginary horrors," he said. "Not real ones."
"We're moving on," Bostitch announced. His own voice wobbled like a relapsing alcoholic after a couple of stiff ones. "Move on. Up. We have to get away from here."
"What, man, are you afraid it's haunted?" Wilfork demanded.
"Does this look like a debating society?" Baron shouted. "The man says move, people. Now, do it!"
Even the Rehoboam Academy grads seemed to move slowly in response, although that could well have been residual shock from the sudden horrible death of a friend. But move everyone did.
Annja realized with a little shock that she hadn't even raised a peep of protest herself. Did I just realize it was futile to argue with the boss, she asked herself, or am I as eager to get away from this place as Bostitch is?
The day, such as it was, grew dark around them. Annja thought it reckless to the point of craziness to continue to climb. But Josh took point and they struggled upward over a hundred feet higher through the snow and twilight. Annja moved in an internal fog almost as chill and blinding as the hell of half-lit and darkening snow whirling around her, compounded by physical fatigue and emotional overload. A good dose of adrenaline-buzz letdown had been thrown in, too.
Perhaps in desperation, both to escape the scene of horror below and to find some kind of relatively safe harbor before darkness and the storm trapped them dangling on the sheer gray face like flies on a single spider-strand, they took more risks than they should have. Perhaps mental numbness and physical fatigue took its toll on the others as well as Annja.
Jason, though not the most skilled climber in the television crew, insisted on accompanying the lead climber, now Josh Fairlie, as he blazed a trail while the others rested as best they could suspended in midair, roped closely to pitons and spring-loaded camming devices jammed in cracks in the rock. He also insisted on making his own way, paralleling the Rehoboam graduate from the right and slightly below.
Annja thought that was
a foolhardy risk to take for the sake of some grainy snow-filled video in a gloom even the camera's built-in light did little to dispel. But the crew from Chasing History's Monsters didn't seem to be listening to her right now. Possibly they thought she'd gone over to the "other" side, as they apparently saw it. Or maybe they were so creeped out by what she'd done they couldn't bring themselves to deal with her.
During the desperate storm-whipped scramble tempers had frayed. Below her Annja could hear Trish and Tommy snarling at each other with voices held low to prevent dropping some shelf of snow and ice hanging over them unseen down in their faces. The odd acoustics of storm and stone both muffled their voices and oddly amplified them.
