by Alex Archer
“Yeah, and what if these guys’ enemies are the Myanmar army?” Annja said. “They’re not our friends, for sure.”
Phil spread his hands and smiled knowingly. “You’re all making my case for me,” he said. “We need to find a village and find out what we can.”
“OKAY, NOW WHAT?”
It was Patty who asked the question. The four crouched in the brush behind a fallen tree trunk. Beyond it a small cultivated vegetable patch was visible. Annja could make out the sharply peaked roof of a small wooden temple above the trees a couple of hundred yards away. A village lay nearby.
“I guess we might as well talk to them,” Annja said. She had to admit she found Phil Kennedy’s logic compelling—they vitally needed information.
“That would be me,” Phil said smugly. He gave a covert side glance to Eddie Chen that Annja caught.
“Why you?” Eddie demanded a bit sullenly.
“I know this area,” the anthropologist said. “These people are De’ang. They speak a Mon-Khmer dialect related to Cambodian. I speak it, as well. Do you?”
Eddie scowled. He didn’t, Annja already knew.
For the past couple of days a mostly friendly rivalry had developed between Phil and Eddie. Phil, Annja suspected, felt challenged by Eddie’s superior knowledge of the Tibeto-Burman languages used in some places they’d passed through. Under other circumstances the irony might have amused her. He had been behind Eddie’s hiring, after all.
Annja didn’t care; she mainly wanted Kennedy for the cultural work necessary to document and start in motion proper preservation measures for the Temple of the Elephant. His relationships with certain groups whose territory they had to pass through on the way were a potential plus, not the reason for hiring him. Eddie was their guide and main liaison.
Flies swarmed around them like biplanes buzzing King Kong. The smell of the human excrement that was the main fertilizer for the little garden overwhelmed the usual jungle odors. It was no improvement.
They all looked to her. Even Patty’s face was paler than normal and taut beneath her sunscreen and the brim of her floppy hat. Her mouth was set in a line. No wisecracks for the moment.
The joys of being in charge, Annja thought. She drew a breath down into her belly, which did little to calm either pulse or misgivings and said, “Okay, Phil. But for God’s sake be careful.”
He frowned. “What’s there to be afraid of? These people are peaceful. You Westerners regard all preindustrial people as savages.”
He straightened and stepped over the log. The brush crackled as he swept through it. Annja winced. He called out across the little garden space in a warbling tonal tongue.
Fire stabbed from the brush on the far side. Even as a terrible crack assailed Annja’s eardrums she heard the moist chunk of projectiles hitting flesh and bone.
Phil staggered and sat down. His head started to loll. Blood ran from the side of his mouth.
With unspoken accord Eddie and Annja grabbed him under the arms and dashed back into the brush with him. He was deadweight. His long legs dangled behind, boot heels plowing up musk and catching on things. Eddie was sturdy as a pack mule and Annja pro-athlete strong; their blood now sang the adrenal song of fear. Annja had spent much of her life successfully learning how to master the fight-or-flight reflex. Now she gave herself to it and did her best to really fly.
Annja knew what they faced. Around the world, the firearm of choice of the poor villager and farmer wasn’t the notorious Kalashnikov. They were too heavy, and despite the world being flooded with them, too expensive. Also they ate up ammo too quickly. Even when the weapons themselves weren’t dear, the ammunition was.
Instead the universal weapon was what Annja thought of as the monkey gun—the single-shot, break-action shotgun, simple, sturdy and cheap. Their rudimentary mechanisms could survive more abuse than even the famously durable AK. They could work without cleaning or other maintenance; their useful service life could be extended almost indefinitely by jury rigs, from binding split stocks with cord to wrapping a weakened barrel with wire. Inevitably they’d burst, if abused long enough, possibly doing crippling or fatal damage to the shooter.
The guns were even prevalent, so Annja’s farm-belt college acquaintances assured her, among farmers in the American hinterland, if usually better maintained. It meant they were functionally immortal.
Monkey guns lacked glamour. But they did the job—killing pests that threatened the crops, putting meat on the table. And a good blast of buck would kill you every bit as dead as a burst from an AK-47—or a multimillion-dollar laser-guided missile, for that matter.
As Phil Kennedy had just learned.
They stumbled and bulled through brush for fifty yards, a hundred. Patty ran before them. She could easily have outdistanced her burdened comrades, left them far behind. Instead she’d dart ahead a few yards, then stop and wait, panting and quivering visibly like a frightened fawn. Annja wasn’t sure whether to feel gratitude at her not abandoning them or shout for the red-haired photographer to do just that—save herself.
Patty had stopped with hands on thighs and was staring back past Annja. “Voices,” she hissed. “They’re chasing us!”
“Put him down,” Annja told Eddie. Phil continued to breathe, raggedly, with an unpleasant bubbling gurgle that made it audible above the crash of brush and the drum of their feet and above all the jackhammer solo of her pulse in her ears. They eased the stricken anthropologist down beneath a bush. She didn’t hold much hope for his survival if he’d sucked a whole charge of shot to the chest. But she didn’t want to finish him off herself. She started back at an angle to the direction they had come.
“Annja, wait!” Patty called in a tight voice, trying to be heard only by her companion but not their pursuers. They way they came crashing it might have been. “You’re not a trained commando.”
If she had anything more to say, the green brush closing behind Annja, and her pounding pulse, swallowed it.
She had simply taken for granted that if the SPDC caught up with them, its agents would either shoot them out of hand or scoop them up and interrogate them. The only real difference was that the latter would be a longer, less comfortable route to the same fate—decomposing in deep woods somewhere.
She had often heard and read that when severely outnumbered, fighting back was no option anyway, so there was no point going armed into enemy country. She had never really believed that. Her experience had certainly not borne that out. The main reason she’d brought no guns was concern they’d make her companions uncomfortable. And yet here it came again—lacking firearms, they could only flee from those who had them. Only the dense brush kept them from facing the impossible task of trying to outrun shotgun pellets.
But Annja had an edge. The last thing her pursuers would ever expect was that their fleeing quarry might double back to ambush them.
With a deliberately held coldness of heart intended to keep her from flashing over into an inferno of rage and grief, Annja was determined it would indeed be the last thing.
PATTY LOOKED UP FROM where she knelt over Phil Kennedy as Annja emerged from the brush. The anthropologist lay stretched out full length with his head propped on his own backpack. The pallor of his face, the gleam of his eyeballs beneath half-lowered lids, the stillness with which he lay told Annja all there was to know before the photographer spoke.
“He’s gone,” Patty said.
Annja knelt and placed two monkey guns on the grass. Patty’s eyes went wide when she saw the two long, slender black objects.
“What about—?” Eddie began.
“They won’t chase us anymore,” Annja said flatly, grateful they’d been pursued by only two men. She bent close to feel Phil’s neck. The skin was clammy, no more elastic than putty, cool despite the late-afternoon heat. There was no pulse.
“We’ll divide up what we can of his load,” Annja said, rising.
“What about those?” Patty said, nodding to the two shotgun
s Annja had laid down. One had a swirly pattern, incorporating something like a mandala, picked out in its shoulder stock with hammered-in brads or tacks. As a piece of folk art it was rather pretty. The other was wound with brass wire, holding together a broken stock and attaching the barrel to it.
Annja shrugged. She reached in a pocket of her khaki cargo pants and held four cylinders, finger length and half again as thick, out in her palm. They were brown greased paper, smudged and stained, with faded black printing on the sides and tarnished brass bases.
“The guns are loaded,” she said. “I’ve got these shells. They’re French. They’re old—you can tell from the wax-paper hulls. I won’t swear they’re not black powder. I won’t swear the guns won’t blow up in your face the next time they go off, either. But the charges and the guns work.”
“What good’ll they do us against Tatmadaw rockets?” Eddie asked. “Or even ethnic-army AKs, for that matter?”
“How much good did bare hands do us?” Annja asked. Her voice was harsh and Eddie jerked back as if she had slapped him. She didn’t care.
“Did you like the feeling of utter helplessness, getting chased through the woods like that?” Annja said. “Those were a couple of farmers. They probably thought they’d got lucky, bagging spies to sell to the chief of whatever bandit gang’s working the area. Or the SPDC. Will you feel better if we get ambushed again and all we get to do is throw rocks?”
“Guns don’t make us bulletproof,” Patty said. She didn’t seem to be denying Annja so much as talking. Possibly just to reassure herself that she could.
“Hold that thought. What they might do is give us a chance we wouldn’t have without them. But they are a burden, and could be as dangerous to you as anybody you’re shooting at. Your choice.”
“What about you, Annja?” Eddie asked.
She knelt and began teasing the pack slowly from beneath Phil’s head. If the apparent callousness shocked the others, again, she could care just now. A corpse was no novelty to her, sadly. And it wasn’t as if poor Phil was going to mind.
“I don’t need them,” she said. “I’ve got other options.”
22
Two things hit them halfway up the hundred-foot cliff to the mesa where the lost temple complex awaited.
One was torrential rain, the drops exploding like little mortar shells on the red rocks around them.
The other was a patrol from the Grand Shan State Army, opening fire from the jungle floor a hundred yards away.
“Shit,” Patty said in a voice that sounded more annoyed than scared. She was the lead climber. Annja was poised ten yards beneath Patty. Eddie was a few feet below her, perched on relatively large and stable outcrops while the red-headed photographer hammered in pitons to belay their safety lines. Despite her years Patty Ruhle climbed like a monkey.
The burst hit somewhere too far to be visible. Patty shook her head wearily, glanced at the jungle, then looked down at the others.
“I am definitely getting too old for this,” she said. Then she turned her face resolutely from the danger on the ground and began to climb swiftly and purposefully. More cautiously Eddie and Annja, neither a seasoned climber, followed her.
Annja never knew what happened next. She had too little rock-climbing experience to know whether it was the torrential rains that caused the slippage, or the impact of Patty’s piton going into a fissure in the yellow rock, or the photographer’s weight. Or even just evil luck that caused several hundred pounds of boulder to suddenly split off the face with Patty clinging to it.
“Rock!” she bellowed as she fell. Annja felt an impulse to grab for her. She restrained it. The combined mass of Patty and the rock to which she was already bound by the rope was far too great for Annja to make any difference. In fact it ripped the pitons above Annja right out of the cliff face as it plummeted.
Annja flattened and threw herself to her right. As she did the corrugated rubber soles of her walking shoes lost their purchase. She dropped a foot to slam and then hang spinning helplessly from her own safety rope.
Patty fell past. She caught Annja’s eye. For a moment time seemed to slow. Annja’s frantic brain formed the impression the older woman winked at her. And she saw even in the overcast and the rain the wink of bare steel in the photographer’s left hand. Her son’s knife.
Time resumed. Patty and the fatal rock plunged away with sickening speed. Whipping above them like a festive stream was a cut end of the white-and-blue rope—severed by Patty in a final act of incredible sacrifice and presence of mind.
Instead of being torn from the rock face to her own destruction, with Eddie Chen following an eye blink later, Annja hung, still turning, watching in helpless horror as Patty struck bottom. If the fall wasn’t enough to kill her—as it almost certainly was—the seven-hundred-pound boulder fragment landed on her.
Tears streamed from Annja’s eyes, mingling with the rain. She sought for and found a purchase for her shoes. When she no longer swung freely she secured the rope. As safety backups, both she and Eddie carried rock hammers and pitons.
There was no help for her friend. Already men in dark clothing and blue headbands had begun to filter out of the brush, cautiously approaching the crushed body of the photojournalist as if suspecting it was bait in an elaborate trap. Turning her face away from her fallen friend Annja blinked away the tears and rain. She began to climb.
“WE MADE IT,” Eddie said in a tone of frank amazement.
Annja could hardly believe it herself. They stood atop the mesa that rose from the Shan Plateau. As if by cosmic irony the rain had ceased. In front of them rose a green wall of jungle. Several miles farther on jutted a fang of bare red rock. On its top stood an unmistakable weathered structure, possibly carved from the peak itself.
She sucked in a deep breath. “The Temple of the Elephant,” she breathed.
“It’s real!” Eddie said. “I can’t believe it.”
She grinned at him. Despite the exhaustion she should have felt from the desperate climb—almost a vertical run—the rest of the way up the cliff, she was totally buzzed with triumph.
At their feet lay their backpacks, including Patty’s. They had hauled them up on ropes after reaching the top.
Voices floated up over the lip of the cliff. Men were shouting excitedly at each other. Annja frowned. Ignoring Eddie’s warning, she walked to the edge and looked down.
A knot of dark-clad men had gathered at the cliff base. They surrounded Patty’s body. One of them stepped cautiously forward and prodded an outflung hand with a boot. The hand flopped as if attached to a rubber hose.
The men closed in and began to tug at the body. Clearly they were grubbing for loot.
Rage filled Annja. They had not caused Patty’s death directly, unless a stray shot had somehow caused the boulder to split from the cliff, which she knew to be unlikely. But they had shot at them, without reason, and if that additional hurrying hadn’t caused misjudgment that led to Patty’s death, it had contributed.
Chunks of rock lay near the cliff edge, weather-split from an outcropping. Annja’s eye lit on one about the size of her torso. She bowed her back, pushing her stomach forward and sucking a breath deep to press her internal organs against her spine and stabilize it. Grasping the rock by the ends she deadlifted it, driving upward with her legs. It almost felt easy. Anger was engorging body and mind with a fresh blast of adrenaline.
She straightened her back and heaved, pushing with her thighs. The rock rolled outward from the cliff top and then dropped toward the knot of men swarming over Patty’s corpse.
From back in the brush a comrade called a warning. One man looked up and screamed.
The rock hit him in the head. It must have snapped his neck like a toothpick. Deflected slightly, it struck a second bandit in the lower back, smashing spine and pelvis. He fell screaming.
His comrades scattered like roaches from the light. Annja stood looking down upon them, flexing and unflexing her hands. She retained en
ough self-control not to make the gesture to summon her sword.
Her companion stared at her with jaw hanging so slack it might have come disjointed.
“You meant to do that?” Eddie asked.
Annja nodded.
His eyes were saucers. “You’re not just an archaeologist, are you?”
She stooped to the packs. Her mind had already returned to the urgency of the situation at hand. They’d take any supplies they’d really need from Patty’s pack, any documents or small personal effects. Then they’d cache the rest, as they had Phil’s—along with his body, lacking time or energy to bury him. Although he’d doubtless prefer returning his stuff to the jungle he loved, whatever the jungle left of him Annja had vowed to herself to see recovered and returned to his family. Silently she made the same promise to Patty.
If she survived, of course. Death canceled all debts, zeroed out every promise. An archaeologist, whose study was, after all, the dead, knew that better than most.
“NO WAY,” EDDIE BREATHED.
A partial wall of red stone and exposed brick filler a good fifteen feet high stood before them. It was so vine twined and overgrown, with full-blown bushes sprouting from hollows in its irregular upper surface where soil had accreted over centuries of ruin, that it looked not as if the brush had grown up around it, but as if it had itself sprung up from the earth, grown up as part of the living jungle itself.
For a moment Annja didn’t understand her companion’s exclamation. Then she realized he was still astonished to discover that the legendary giant temple complex, swallowed by the jungle centuries before, really existed.
Of course it does, she felt an urge to say, with a touch of irritation.
But she knew the modernist-skeptic reflex well. She shared it—or, now, clung with increasing desperation to the shreds and fragments real-world experience had left to her. Eddie was an engineer by training and inclination, although filial piety and a half-denied lust for adventure conspired to make him a Chinese Indiana Jones. Lost temples and fabulous treasure hoards were only myths in this modern world of satellites and cell phones. Confronted by one impossibility made undeniably real—the temple on its crag—he was still struggling to accept it.
