by Alex Archer
Feeling far more confident, Annja moved in to face her attackers.
The three men split up as they got closer, moving to surround her and make it so she couldn’t keep her eyes on all three of them at once. They were playing a cautious game, and that made her think they’d heard a bit about her prowess with a blade.
Annja, of course, had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Rather than wait for them to surround her, Annja picked one of her attackers and charged directly at him, hoping to put him down before the other attackers had a chance to move in on her unprotected back.
As she leaped forward, her attacker tried to backpedal and give time for his allies to close in on Annja from behind.
Unfortunately for him, he’d never trained on sand and didn’t know how to move in it gracefully. The heel of his shoe caught in the sand behind him, tripping him up. As he flailed his arms for balance, Annja rushed forward and skewered him through the chest.
When she pulled the blade out, he gave a shuddering little sigh and collapsed to the ground to move no more.
The ferocity of her attack gave the other two men pause, but only for a moment. Clearly they thought they were better than the man who had been killed, so they moved in with confidence, weapons at the ready, determined to complete their assignment.
That confidence, and the way it made them view Annja as an opponent not worthy of their attention, would prove to be their undoing.
Annja waited for one of the men to move in close, trying to draw her into an attack and thereby give the other man a chance to strike at her unprotected rear.
It was a simple plan and might even have worked if Annja didn’t have a plan of her own.
She played along with what they were doing, pretending not to know that they were playing a game of cat and mouse with her. When the man in front of her began backpedaling to get away from her, just as her previous attacker had done, Annja abruptly spun and charged the man behind her.
He had been expecting to rush forward and attack her from behind and therefore actually took several more steps in her direction before he realized that she wasn’t moving away from him as expected. That she was, in fact, rushing directly at him screaming at the top of her lungs.
The killer tried to stop his forward momentum but it was already too late. Annja rushed him, they had a short but decisive exchange of blows, and then she was turning away to face her third and final opponent while his buddy lay bleeding to death in the warm sand behind her.
This time Annja moved to the center of the arena and stood there, waiting.
If you want a piece of me, you’re going to have to come get it, she thought.
Her opponent hesitated, but only for a moment. Apparently his fear of punishment at Krugmann’s hands was more daunting than the idea of dying right then and there, for he advanced on her slowly and carefully, exchanging blow after blow but taking no chances.
Annja bided her time, waiting for an opening, until she realized that the thug in front of her was deliberately stalling, no doubt to let Krugmann get away.
The thought of that man escaping the hand of justice was almost too much to bear.
Enough of this! Annja thought.
They struck and parried, struck and parried, then Annja pretended to lose her balance and stumbled backward.
When the man overreached in an effort to pin her down, Annja trapped his sword with her own and then flung it away, disarming him and leaving him defenseless.
“Look, I’m just following…”
Annja lunged forward, driving her sword through the man’s shoulder. He screamed and fell backward, with Annja tearing the blade out as he fell.
She quickly straddled him and pressed the edge of the blade against his throat. “I want some answers and I want them now!”
Five minutes later, Annja moved cautiously through the tunnels, trying to find her way back to where she and Garin had been kept prisoner. She did her best to avoid running into any islanders, and the one time she couldn’t she left the young man in a darkened corner after a swift blow to his head with the flat of her sword.
After several minutes of stumbling around in the tunnels, she found the room she was looking for.
Garin, however, was no longer there.
“They took him away,” a voice said from behind her in German. Annja whirled to find the colonel’s right-hand man standing there, the one who had taken them prisoner at the submarine.
“What do you mean they took him away?”
“Just what I said. Shortly after you entered the arena, the dark one’s men came and took him away. One of them said something about returning to the boat, but that was all that I overheard.”
Annja was confused. “Why are you helping me?”
The islander shrugged. “Is it not said that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”
Annja answered that with a folk saying of her own. “Yes, but it is also said that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”
The islander smiled. “It would seem that you are going to have to decide to trust me on nothing more than the wisdom of our elders.”
Fat chance of that, buddy, she thought.
Annja tried to push past him, but he reached out and stopped her.
“Listen to me a moment. I believe that I can help you.”
“Help me? I’m not even sure I can trust you.”
“My people have been controlled by others for far too long. Now we may finally act. You have given us that chance, we will give something to you.”
Ah. So the islanders weren’t willing participants in all of this after all. At least they hadn’t started out that way.
“And you think that if you help me, I will help you free your people from the yoke of this man and those who support him?”
“Yes,” he answered simply.
She would, too; that’s just the kind of person she was.
But first Garin, and then Doug.
“You’ve got a deal.”
She showed him how to shake on it, then asked him to take her to the elevator back to the top of the caldera. She was convinced that Krugmann would return to the boat he had talked about to get reinforcements and to begin loading the gold as his men removed it from its mountain hideaway. If she could get aboard that boat, she could rescue Garin and possibly discover where Krugmann was keeping Doug.
After that, who knew? First things first.
As she headed through the underground tunnels with her co-conspirator in the lead, Annja asked, “What do I call you?”
He glanced back at her and grinned. “My name is Matahi.”
“Okay. And you can call me Annja.”
His grin widened.
Several times along the journey they passed other islanders, and each time Matahi had a quick conversation with them, no doubt to invent some reason the colonel’s prisoner was roaming around free.
At last, when she thought she couldn’t take any more of this underground passage, they emerged onto the ledge where the elevator hung.
Neither basket was there, more proof that Krugmann had not remained within the facility but had, in fact, returned to the top of the caldera. Since he was most familiar with how the elevator worked, Annja let Matahi call one of the cars down while she tried to work out a plan for what to do when they caught up with Krugmann.
Unfortunately she was pretty much out of ideas—at least productive ones—in that regard.
It took nearly twenty minutes for the car to reach them. When it did, Annja and Matahi climbed in and then shut the gate behind them. Matahi took control of the crank and began to wind it, starting the elevator car on its long ride up to the top of the caldera.
Annja spent the time worrying about Garin and wondering if Doug was still alive.
They heard the bullet ricochet off the side of the basket before they heard the report of the shot, but the latter was only a second or two behind.
They looked around frantically, trying to spot who was s
hooting at them.
“Look! There!” Matahi shouted.
About a hundred yards above them, the second car was on its way down. In the basket were two men, both of whom were leaning over the side and pointing rifles toward Annja and her companion.
“What do we do?” Matahi asked.
“Duck!”
He did as he was told just as a pair of shots whizzed by.
They were in trouble and Annja knew it. As long as the other basket was allowed to descend or ascend, then the men in it could fire at them at will until they killed them.
If they wanted to survive, they had to take out those riflemen.
There was only one problem.
Neither Matahi nor Annja had any kind of weapon with which to return fire.
They were going to have to do it the hard way.
“How quickly can you get us level with them?” Annja asked.
Matahi looked at her like she’d just lost her mind.
“Level? Won’t that make it easier for them to shoot us?”
“Not if I can dissuade them.”
“And how are you going to manage that?” he asked her.
“Let me worry about that. For now, just get us up there!”
Shaking his head at the craziness of the idea but doing it anyway, Matahi crouched lower in the basket and focused on turning the crank, resuming their upward motion.
While he did that, Annja tried to figure out what it was going to take to get the basket rocking back and forth far enough that she could get close to the other one.
Thankfully, the men in the second basket were terrible shots. The bullets missed, sailing off into the distance or bouncing off the nearby rock and showering them with stone fragments.
As the firing continued, Annja walked back and forth from one side of the basket to the other, using her weight to get it to start swinging like a pendulum.
“What are you doing?” Matahi asked in a shaky voice, letting go of the crank to grab tightly to the sides of the basket. There were no safety belts, and it was a long way down to the bottom.
A long way—yes, but a relatively short trip should a person fall.
Annja glanced at him, but didn’t stop her motion. “I’m making us a more difficult target for them to hit.”
“They won’t have to hit us if you make us fall out. Stop that.”
Annja shook her head and kept up her steady motion. “We have to take out that other basket or they can just sit there and fire at us until we’re finally hit.”
Matahi’s eyes grew wide. “You are insane.”
“No, I just want to live.”
“You’ve got a crazy way of showing it,” the islander replied, but he kept cranking the handle and moving them slowly up the inside of the volcano.
As they got higher and the other basket came lower, the gunshots were starting to come closer. Matahi suffered a cut to his cheek when a bullet caused some fragments of rock to explode from the cliff face beside him. If the basket hadn’t been moving side to side, the shooter probably would have taken them both out by now.
Annja ducked lower but kept moving back and forth.
It wouldn’t be long now.
Finally the baskets were at the point where they were almost parallel to each other. Their fate would be decided in the next few minutes, Annja knew, and she prepared herself for what was to come.
She was only going to get one chance at this.
Annja waited until they were swinging away from the second basket to quickly explain her plan to Matahi. “When the basket swings the other way, there will be a moment at the farthest edge of our swing when we will be perfectly lined up with the other basket. That will be our moment to act. No matter what happens, keep the basket swinging. Got it?”
The islander nodded, clearly scared out of his wits by the swaying of the cage but determined to handle it and be of use to her. Annja admired his bravery; a person had to be a little insane to attempt what she was about to do, but frankly she didn’t see any way around it. They’d been lucky so far, but this close the gunmen really couldn’t miss unless they were complete incompetents. That still might be the case, but she wasn’t betting on it.
The cage completed its swing to the outside and started heading back in the other direction. Annja crouched behind the side wall and watched the other cage as they rapidly swung toward it.
Wait for it, she told herself, steady…
Bullets were bouncing off the side of the cage now, the shooter in the other basket firing straight at them at this point. Annja gritted her teeth and ordered herself to resist the urge to duck for she needed to be ready to move.
Steady…
Annja’s cage was headed toward the other at full speed, and the shooter finally decided that discretion was the better part of valor and ducked behind the walls of his own cage. If the two collided, he didn’t want to be knocked over the side.
It was exactly the move Annja had been counting on.
The cage reached the farthest point of its swing. For a moment it hung there, directly opposite the other. Annja jumped to her feet, snatched her sword from the otherwhere and slashed at the cables holding the other cage up.
She felt the shock of connection before she heard the loud crack of the cables giving way.
For just an instant she was poised there, sword outstretched, staring into the eyes of the shooter as he crouched next to his partner near the crank, the rifle in his hands pointed directly at her.
His finger twitched on the trigger.
The cage started its swing back in the other direction, pulling her a fraction of an inch to the side as the bullet whipped through her hair without striking anything solid, fortunately not blowing her head to smithereens.
Then they were headed back in the other direction, and Annja released the sword. She watched as the other basket began to tilt downward, the cable holding it in place no longer in one piece. Annja could see the shooter and his partner grabbing for the side of the cage, not quite understanding yet that they weren’t falling out of it but that it was falling along with them.
Annja stared as they dropped out of sight.
She turned and found Matahi peering at her in horror.
“What did you do?” he gasped.
“Taught them that shooting at us is a very bad idea.”
She glanced over the side of the cage in the direction the other had fallen and then amended her statement. “Make that was a very bad idea.”
Matahi grunted.
She was about to say something in her defense when there was a loud bang from above her head and one side of the cage suddenly dipped downward.
Annja instinctively grabbed the main cable over their heads with one hand and Matahi’s arm with the other just as the basket dropped out from beneath under their feet!
Chapter 33
Annja hung there, hundreds of feet above the ground, holding on to Matahi with one hand and to the cable above her head with the other.
Below her, her new friend screamed in fear and kicked his legs as if looking for support where none existed. If he kept it up, she was going to drop him.
“Hey, knock it off!” she said.
He kept screaming and moving about.
“Matahi! Knock it off, Matahi, or you’re going to make me drop you!”
That seemed to get through to him for he suddenly started repeating something in his native language, over and over again. Annja couldn’t understand him, but she figured it was something along the lines of “Don’t drop me!”
If he held still, she probably wouldn’t.
Probably.
“Stop kicking and squirming around!”
At last he stopped moving.
They were still swaying from side to side just as they’d been before the cage had come apart around them, which was just making matters worse, but there wasn’t anything they could do about that now.
Annja knew there was no way she was going to be able to support Matahi’s weig
ht for long. Not like this, at any rate. They needed to get off this cable.
But how?
She glanced above her head and could see that they were still about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet from the top. That was a long way to go, but it was doable at least. She’d climbed higher before.
Yeah, but not right after fighting four big men in hand-to-hand combat and holding a large man’s weight with only one hand.
She told her inner voice to shut up and, surprisingly, it did.
This was not the time for negative thoughts.
She could feel her shoulders already burning from the pull being exerted on them in both directions. She didn’t have much time; she needed to figure this out and figure it out fast.
She let herself drift in a slow circle and looked at the nearby wall of the caldera. It was pitted with fissures and cracks, just the kind of things that could serve as hand- and footholds for an experienced climber. She’d climbed harder faces than that.
Yeah, but not without a rope, her inner voice piped up.
Quiet, you! she told it. It’s not like I’ve got a choice here. I’ve free climbed a steep slope or two before. I can do this one.
But could Matahi?
That she didn’t know.
“Matahi, can you hear me?”
“Yes,” came the shaky reply.
“We need to get off this rope and onto the rock wall beside us.”
His fingers tightened around her wrist. “What? What are you talking about?”
“I can’t hold you much longer, and I doubt I can hold on long enough for you to climb up and over me to shimmy up the rope. So we need to climb up the inside of the wall.”
“That’s crazy!”
“Crazy or not, it’s the only chance we’ve got.”
“But…”
She’d had enough. “Shut up and listen to me or we’re both going to die!”
Matahi shut his mouth with a snap.
“You need to kick your legs toward the wall so we start swinging toward it. That way you can grab hold of it when we get closer.”
“Kick my legs?”
“Yes, but gently.”
He made a couple of tentative motions that got them moving slightly, but not enough.
“Harder, Matahi. A little harder.”
