by Alex Archer
A terrible agonized scream pealed from right beside Annja’s right elbow. It was loud enough not just to be audible but painful even above the ear-punishing racket of assault rifles cracking off close on either side.
Annja threw the empty launcher away from her as if it were hot and spun.
Tony squatted at her side. He had his hands cupped around his mouth, which was wide open. He rolled his eyes at her.
“How’d I do?” he asked.
“Great,” Annja said, a little unsteadily. A beat late she realized his unearthly shriek was intended to convince the enemy their ridiculously poorly aimed fusillade was having lethal effects. The kid was a natural, no question. “Now yell what I told you to,” she said.
His inhalation seemed to swell his skinny body to twice its normal size. “Run away!” he screamed.
Laughing, the Protectors threw away their emptied weapons. They refused to fight with them, both for the cogent reasons they expressed and also, Annja suspected, because they thought them unmanly.
But the Protectors loved a good ruse. The sneakier and more underhanded the better. They were only too happy to fire the captured firearms once Easy persuaded them they were only noisemakers, to bait the trap. There was something seemingly universal in the human animal that absolutely loved making loud noises, especially when accompanied by big flashes of fire. She wondered what Phil Kennedy would make of that.
Wish I could ask him, she thought with a twinge.
She joined her companions racing into the jungle. Behind them the Shans, shouting in triumph, began to advance in cautious pursuit.
“ALL RIGHT, EASY,” the young woman said softly to herself. “Piece of cake.”
In each strong hand she held the pistol grip of an American-made M-16, recovered from Wa Army men unexpectedly recalled to their Lord. Each had a full 30-round magazine in the well. She carried no reloads. If all went well, she wouldn’t need them.
And if things went poorly…she wouldn’t need them, either.
The plans were all laid out for a faux ambush similar to the one she knew Annja Creed should be stage-managing scarcely half a mile away that same moment. Even as she thought that, firing broke out furiously from not very far behind her. She smiled.
Easy had tossed the plans promptly in the dustbin when her Protector scouts, slipping from the jungle as effortlessly and undetectably as wraiths, announced that the Wa patrol they were shadowing was just about to pass within thirty yards of a dead bold—or dismally lost—Shan patrol on a roughly reciprocal heading.
It was too good an opportunity to pass up.
She had shucked off her pack, all her gear except the lightweight tropical-pattern shoulder holsters that held her custom-made Sphinxes, sent them off with her escorts scampering for what should be relative safety a quarter mile deeper into the ruined temple complex.
Now she crouched clad only in black sports bra, cargo shorts and hiking boots, taking deep abdominal breaths to calm herself. To either side she heard the sounds of the mutually hostile patrols—boots crunching leaf litter, branches crashing, voices laughing or cursing, depending on whether the speaker was the man who got hit in the face by a branch or an amused bystander. The only thing that kept each column of twenty or so men from hearing the other was their own noise.
She drew in one last breath. Then, crossing her arms beneath her breasts to point the two black rifles to right and left, she launched herself in a dead run right between the passing enemy patrols.
27
As she ran flat out Easy Ngwenya ripped short bursts from both rifles. To her left ran a low course of ruined wall, with one full window arch, thoroughly entwined in vines, intact. To her right nothing but a thin screen of vegetation stood between her and a score of hostile heavily armed intruders.
She didn’t aim. That wasn’t possible. Nonetheless, from the corner of her eye she saw the dark-uniformed Shan point man on her left crumple like an empty sack without so much as twitching his Kalashnikov. She felt the old hunter’s exultation at drawing blood.
Just run! she ordered herself, and did.
Gunfire rattled in her wake as if she were a running fuse lighting off strings of firecrackers in passing. These were not troops disciplined enough to aim under the best of circumstances. They fired not at her but at the flash of motion and flickering fire that tore at the edges of their peripheral vision. By that time they were too late—except for hosing their equally astonished opposite numbers thirty yards away through the bush. Easy was in no danger from the men she passed beyond the usual stray-round risk.
The problem was the tumult inevitably alerted the men in front of her, as well.
Well, the Easy way wasn’t always the easy way. Not for E.C.
The air before her was suddenly ripped by muzzle-flames and blasts so terribly loud and powerful that the air itself seemed to shake. She unwound her arms. Her lightweight assault rifles were almost empty.
Her head snapped right. She caught a flash picture across the right-hand weapon’s open sights on the mass of a man’s chest. She held down the trigger, knowing the well was nearly dry.
Two shots snapped out before the bolt locked back. One must’ve hit. He started down.
She was already whipping her head the other way, lining up a second quick sight picture on a Shan fighter, trying to will her vision past the huge yellow flame billowing from his Kalashnikov’s muzzle brake. She fired high.
The last round in her left-hand magazine snapped his head back. He toppled backward, dropping his heavy Russian-made gun.
She dived forward, letting the empty rifles fall. She landed in a forward roll but instead of snapping upright into the crossfire of the last elements of both patrols she came up on all fours and scuttled through the grass like a lithe lizard.
The near-panicked militiamen shot high. She made it to the comforting green embrace of the undergrowth unscathed. Ignoring thorns that raked her cheeks, arms and thighs, she slipped inside and was gone before the patrols even knew what had hit them.
“I FAILED,” EASY SAID.
“We didn’t fail,” Annja said, hunkering down beside her in the plaza among the great stone ruins. Evening gloom gathered particle by mauve particle. It suited the mood. “You didn’t fail.”
“Tell that to them,” Easy said, gesturing.
Five dead tribesmen lay under woven reed mats. Half a dozen wounded men moaned in the huts. The Protector women had gently but firmly chased Annja away when she tried to help care for them. Belatedly it struck her the Protectors probably had experience dealing with battle trauma. In fact, given the way their world was changing, she realized they probably knew quite a bit about bullet and high-speed fragment injuries, as well.
They had accepted with smiles of gratitude when Annja turned over her meager stock of medical supplies to them. These weren’t as meager as they might have been—the Protectors had recovered Eddie Chen’s body and backpack after sunset the first night here.
“Look,” Annja said. “Your tactic worked—we got the two armies to fight.”
“But it isn’t stopping them,” Easy said. She hunkered down with her arms draped over her bare thighs and her head hanging. “They just keep pushing toward the center of the mesa trying to get around one another’s flanks.”
Annja sat back on her own heels. It was true enough. That was where their plan, admittedly, had gone awry. Rather than simply going for each other, the two sets of invaders kept driving inward, dogfighting as they went. In the process they brought more force to bear than the sparse Protector warriors could handle, even with booby traps for force multipliers.
“We couldn’t foresee that,” Annja said. “It is delaying them. The Protectors are delaying them some, too.”
Easy looked at her. “Do you really think that’s going to be enough?”
No, Annja thought. No, I don’t. She refused to say it. But she couldn’t deny it.
The Protectors only maintained live booby traps in a zone around the p
erimeter of the mesa itself. With a millennium to work on their techniques they clearly had means of keeping track of where the traps were laid, but it was simply too hazardous leaving them all over the place where the drunk or merely inattentive might stumble into them. Or children at play. Also it took work; the Shan Plateau was dry by the standards of lowland Southeast Asia, but that still made it pretty wet by the standards of most other places. Things rotted quickly in the jungle.
The Protectors had displayed remarkable speed and efficiency setting traps to guide the rival ethnic armies into colliding. But that was in a very limited area. They didn’t have time to set enough to halt the progress of the rolling gunfight that threatened the heart of their tiny nation.
Ironically, once caught up in a running gunfight, the invaders were less inclined to be slowed by threat of booby traps or ambush, rather than more. Walking cold-bloodedly into a mysterious, unfamiliar jungle, knowing some awful fate might take you at any minute, would grind down anybody’s nerves. And when somebody did trip a deadfall—or vanished from the rear of a marching file, never to be seen again—what was bad enough in fact was magnified tenfold in emotional impact.
But when blood was hot, and spilling freely, and caps were being busted all around—it was war and men would face ridiculous threats without a second thought.
If nothing else, by dint of Easy hopping and expostulating in energetic Chinese, the Protectors had allowed themselves to be talked out of their taboo against using modern weapons pretty quickly, once it became lethally obvious that blow darts and bows were decisively overmatched in the situation. The Zulu woman struck Annja as remarkably persuasive.
For her part Annja felt vaguely like the serpent in the Garden of Eden for helping introduce them to firearms.
Some village men came in with AK-47s. Their famed ease of use had come in handy, and there were fairly abundant numbers available to be scavenged by people adept at sneaking through the woods.
Easy roused herself to go listen to their report. Exhausted by her own part in the day’s strenuous events, Annja sat below a crumbling edifice and rested. In a couple minutes Easy returned.
“They say both sides have stopped for the night,” she reported. “They don’t like doing anything in the dark. Especially with all the danger from traps and ambushes. But they’re already a quarter of the way here.”
Annja grimaced. There were, as she appreciated even more keenly now than she had this morning, infinite ways a battle could shape up. The way this one had the only issue was whether the Protectors, and the timeless treasure they guarded with their lives, got overrun tomorrow or in a week. In either case the outcome looked inevitable.
“Quite,” Easy said. Annja looked up at her. “Unless the Tatmadaw notices all the noise up here and decides to join in. Won’t that be fun?”
“You have ESP, too,” Annja said.
“I do,” Easy said, with a tired little laugh, “but it’s hardly necessary. Your thoughts show as clearly as if your forehead was an LCD screen. Under the circumstances, they’re pretty inevitable thoughts, really.”
“Maybe.” Annja stood up. “But we aren’t dead yet. And while there’s life, there’s—well, not hope, maybe. But there’s always something we can do!”
“Like what?” Easy said.
Annja sucked in a deep breath and let it out. Her head sagged; it felt like lead. But she would not let herself slump.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But there’s one rule I live by.”
“And that is?”
“When in doubt, bust stuff up.”
ANNJA HEARD THE SOBBING from several feet away.
The woman sat just inside the brush that surrounded the central plaza. She had her knees drawn up and her arms clasped tightly about them. A huge, nearly intact structure rose to her right. The moon came up over the forest to the east.
Annja sat down by her side. She said nothing. Only waited.
“I’m afraid,” Easy said in a broken voice.
Annja looked at her. Her normal impudent—arrogant—poise had deserted her. Its departure deflated her, left her looking like a small adolescent girl.
“Why?” Annja asked. “You don’t seem to be afraid of death.”
“Oh, I am,” Easy said. Strangely, saying that seemed to calm her. If only slightly. “But that’s not what really scares me.”
Annja herself felt terrified. In action she settled into a sort of mindful trance—maintaining the invaluable presence of mind that was life in combat or any kind of blood crisis. Some of her combat instructors, like ex-SAS operator Angus, had remarked upon her gift. It was rare, naturally possessed by one in a thousand, or ten thousand, or even a million. All of special-operations training was designed to impart that ability. And even then it succeeded only part of the time.
But nothing made danger’s imminence any easier to take.
Easy uttered a bitter laugh. “Death seems the easy way out right now.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but I get the feeling that where you’re concerned, the Easy way is really the hard way,” Annja said.
“Found out for the fraud I am!” This time her laugh sounded more genuine. Annja felt a quick rush of relief. Maybe I’m getting through.
It was strange. We started as rivals, she thought. Adversaries on opposite sides of law—and right, she still believed, although she had long recognized those as two very different things. Then I hated her, as much as I’ve ever hated anyone.
Now I feel like her big sister.
She reached out an arm and hugged the woman to her. Easy almost melted into her. Annja held her for several minutes while she clung and sobbed as if her heart were broken.
At last the passion of grief and fear passed. Easy pulled away and smiled feebly. “I’m acting quite the fearless action heroine, aren’t I?”
“You’re acting human,” Annja said. “Unfortunately, what we all need—me, the Protectors, even you—is the action heroine back.”
Easy shook her head. “If only that were really me. And not just a pose.”
“You feel like a phony?” Annja asked.
Easy nodded. “Just a little girl trying to get her daddy’s attention. Maybe, if I am very, very good, his approval. Yet when I well and truly caught the attention of the parental unit the resulting explosion launched me an entire continent away.”
“Welcome to the world, Princess,” Annja said, surprised her own tone sounded bitter, and slightly embarrassed by it. “Everybody feels like a phony. Everybody lives in fear of being found out.” She laughed, a little too sharply. “Heck, I thought you might be the exception.”
“Not me,” Easy said. “Overcompensation is my middle name.”
“I thought it was Calf.”
Easy goggled at her a moment. This time her laugh was free and clear.
But she clouded over again almost at once, huddled back over herself. “I thought I was so clever. Let’s get the red ants and the black ants to fight. I thought it was the answer to all our problems.”
“So did I,” Annja said. “So did the Protectors. It wasn’t just our best shot, Easy. It was a good idea.”
“But it didn’t work.”
Annja shrugged. “Well, good ideas don’t always. And sometimes bad ones do. The best we can do is the best we can do.”
Easy sniffled loudly twice. Then she sighed. “You’re not going to allow me to indulge in self-pity, are you?” she asked.
“Nope,” Annja said. “Not now. Maybe later. If we, you know, live.”
Easy lifted her head and smiled at her. “You give me so much to look forward to.”
Annja shrugged.
They sat in silence. Fifty yards away the villagers sat and talked or played soft music on reed flutes, among the firelit faces of the ancient walls of stone they had protected for a millennium from all enemies except the one no human wit nor valor could overcome—time. Around it all the nocturnal noise of the jungle wrapped like a membrane of noise, reassuring so
mehow.
“Did you really kill a lion with a spear?” Annja asked.
“Oh, yes. And somehow managed not to get disemboweled in the process. Frightfully silly thing to do. Daddy was fearfully angry with Old Tom. He was his chief conservation officer. Which really meant huntsman. Only it’s shocking bad publicity to call it that.”
Annja shook her head more in wonder than disbelief. “What on earth made you do a thing like that?”
“Bravado. I was raised to a warrior tradition. Also I had a need to prove I was the equal of any man, and then some. My father, you’ll doubtless be shocked speechless to learn, was always disappointed his first-born, and as things turned out his only born, wasn’t male. So I tried to show him I was good enough.”
“But a spear?”
Easy shrugged. “Hunting lion with a rifle didn’t seem much of a challenge. All you need to do is keep your wits about you to place your shot properly, and the poor beast rolls up at your feet dead as a stone. I never really understood how some people managed to panic and get themselves killed.”
Easy cocked her head. Then she grinned. “Ah, yes. The ability to keep one’s head in danger. A gift we share, I take it. Given that we’ve both survived our respective follies.”
Annja managed to bite down on the words so far.
“I read about the Masai rite of passage,” Easy went on, “where young boys proved themselves by killing a lion with a spear. Or proved their unfitness, and got out of the gene pool at the same time. I must admit a certain adolescent ethnic pride came into play—a tribal princess was not going to be outdone by a bunch of primitive gawks who wear caps made of red clay and cow crap on their heads.”
Annja laughed.
“We’re similar, Annja Creed,” Easy said. “We’re both rather too smart for our own good, with a tendency to overintellectualize. What saves us from the sterile ivory tower lives that most of our fellow intellectuals lead is a tendency to put our heads down and charge in straightaway, trusting to our improvisational skills to take us through. And a little bit of luck. Or am I mistaken?”
