Rogue Angel - The Golden Elephant Part 15

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, pus.h.i.+ng 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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, smas.h.i.+ng 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 enough 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 doc.u.ments 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 l.u.s.t for adventure conspired to make him a Chinese Indiana Jones. Lost temples and fabulous treasure h.o.a.rds 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.

Annja realized she was unprepared to doc.u.ment their find. She had one of Patty's cameras in her pack and went to dig it out.

"This is just the beginning," she said.

"You mean there's more?" Eddie asked.

"That's what von Hoiningen claimed. I think we kind of have to believe him now, don't we?"

"I have got to see this!"

The relief here was relatively flat. The obvious choice for a quick vantage point was to scale the ruined wall. Eddie quickly shed his pack and clambered up with his usual agility.

Annja frowned. "That might not be a good idea," she said, concerned from a preservation standpoint.

It was a bad idea. For a reason Annja never antic.i.p.ated.

Ignoring her, Eddie reached a high point on the wall, where the stone outer sheathing was still intact. He stood upright. "My G.o.d, Annja!" he exclaimed. "You're right! It's like it goes for miles-"

A burst of gunfire spun him around and down to the ground.

23.

Choking back an exclamation that could only risk drawing the eyes of the unseen shooter, Annja darted around the wall stub. Eddie lay on his back with his knees and forearms up. His eyes were wide behind askew gla.s.ses.

Probably more from his bad luck than the shooter's good marksmans.h.i.+p the burst had taken him right across the chest. Kneeling over him, Annja could see at least four entry holes in his blue polo s.h.i.+rt with the thin horizontal white stripes, surrounded by spreading patches of darker fabric.

He caught her hand. "Annja," he croaked, and the blood gurgled up from the back of his throat and ran out his mouth and down his cheeks. "Tell my father I'm-sorry-"

There seemed to be more. But it would have to wait. Eddie jackknifed in a terrible coughing spasm. His gla.s.ses flew from his face. He emitted a rasping croak and fell back dead.

Squeezing his hand in both of hers, she dropped her forehead to it. The tears streamed hot down her cheeks. She had not yet had time to grieve for Patty, or even Phil- And now she had three times the grieving to do, and no time to do it. She dragged Eddie's body under some brush; it was the best she could do for him. Then she ran hunched over around the rock, brought his pack and shoved it next to the body. A feeble gesture at concealment, it would work or it wouldn't.

Behind her a flight of crows burst raucously skyward. Someone was approaching from the cliffs.

She had to move. Now. Now.

Her choice of direction was obvious. She fled deeper into the mesa, into the overgrown temple complex and toward the red peak on which the Temple of the Elephant stood. Eddie had been turning when he got hit; Annja didn't know which direction the shots came from. Parties unknown closing in were the immediate threat.

Moving as quickly as she could with some degree of quiet, she became aware of more ruins around her. Some were wall stubs like the one Eddie had incautiously climbed. Others were segments of walls of larger blocks, fallen into jumbles. She saw apparently intact small buildings or perhaps surviving rooms, some mounded with overgrown earth, inviting with blank black windows or low doors.

Annja pa.s.sed these by, recognizing them for what they were-not bolt-holes but traps. She had no way of knowing which, if any, had other exits. Giving in to the siren song of a hiding place might get her caught, to be finished by gunfire, a grenade or literally smoked out.

She darted through a gap between walls. On her left a second stump of wall joined the other, a corner turned b.u.t.tress when the rest of the chamber fell away. She stepped into the niche thus created. It gave her not just concealment, meaning she couldn't be seen, but cover, meaning it s.h.i.+elded her from gunfire, from two directions, including the way she had come. It was neither a safe nor a satisfactory position. Just the best available chance to breathe deeply, calm her wild-running emotions and try to grasp some sense of her tactical situation.

Cautiously she peered back through the gap. She could see nothing but forest with occasional glimpses of stonework. She heard nothing but the normal jungle sounds. She could almost believe she had the mesa to herself.

But someone had shot Eddie Chen. Someone close by. Very few shooters were skilled enough to keep full-auto bursts on target at any range at all. Muzzle jump and parallax usually meant so many shots from one brief burst couldn't hit a target even from a hundred yards or less. They would have dispersed too widely.

If Annja were very, very lucky, whoever killed Eddie had no idea of her presence. "Yeah," she said softly. "As if I'm ever that lucky."

"Annja!" a voice whispered from behind her. "Annja Creed."

The phrase "almost jumped out of her skin" took on a whole new meaning for her. Her heart felt as if it hit the front of her rib cage as if shot from a cannon, and she jumped a foot straight up, twisting in midair like a cat. She landed trembling violently and gasping for air.

A dark, s.h.i.+ny face peered at her from a stand of green bamboo ten yards behind her.

"Annja, thank G.o.d you're here," Easy Ngwenya said. "I've been hoping against hope-"

Fury filled Annja with a force to equal the fright that had picked her up and whipped her around a few jackhammer heartbeats before. "You murdering little witch!" she shouted.

Annja charged.

Easy's face creased in a frown. "Good Lord, please be quiet-" she began, obviously reacting more to the volume of Annja's exclamation than its content. Her dark eyes widened. She only just managed to duck and roll away as Annja swung for her head.

Easy rolled and snapped to her feet with the practiced grace of the gymnast she was. "What on Earth do you think you're-?"

"You killed them!" Annja screamed, berserk with anger, grief and the successive shocks of seeing three comrades die in such a short period of time.

She aimed a kick at the crouching woman. Easy flung herself to the right.

"Who?" Easy yelped as she sprang up.

"All of them!" Annja cried, running toward her. Easy darted behind a tree with a six-inch bole.

"All who?" she shouted, then ducked as Annja swung and missed again.

"Sir Sidney," Annja panted. "Isabelle Gendron. My friends. Who knows how many others?"

"I never did!" Easy said. "I never touched a hair on Professor Hazelton's dear old head. I've no idea who Isabelle Gendron is. And I-holy s.h.i.+t!"

The uncharacteristically vulgar exclamation burst from the young woman when the upper half of the tree she hid behind toppled abruptly to her right, cras.h.i.+ng into some brush as unhappy monkeys bailed in all directions.

"How did you do that? And will you kindly quit trying to chop me in two with that b.l.o.o.d.y cleaver?"

Annja had summoned her sword when Easy had ducked behind the tree.

Annja hacked at her again. Easy dodged around the tall stump. Annja was as astonished as Easy was by the fact she'd cut through the tree with a single stroke. Now that she was trying she couldn't do it again. The blade went in halfway and stuck fast.

"Maybe you'll listen to reason now," Easy said, still keeping the trunk between herself and Annja. "I've killed people, yes. I've killed some today, as it happens. But I sincerely doubt any of them were remotely friends of yours-hey!"

After two ferocious tugs Annja had dislodged the blade from the grip of the green wood.

Annja raised the sword above her head, preparing for a mighty stroke. As she did Easy rolled into view on Annja's right, lying on her back on the short clumpy gra.s.s.

The muzzles of her twin Sphinx .40-caliber autopistols were like unwinking black eyes staring into Annja's.

"Now we've arrived at the standoff phase of our program," Easy said conversationally in her upper-cla.s.s Brit accent. "You know no handgun bullet really has any such thing as stopping power-they won't prevent you splitting me like kindling with that b.l.o.o.d.y great pig sticker. But it will be a dead or dying hand that splits me, I a.s.sure you. So for the love of G.o.d, can we talk?"

Annja frowned as she considered. "That might be," she said deliberately, "a worthwhile idea."

Easy's right hand weapon flashed orange fire. Annja never heard the shot, nor the one that immediately followed. She did feel the heat of muzzle flares, and stings as bits of unburned propellant struck the exposed skin of her arm and cheek.

She did not launch a dying stroke. Because a pre-conscious part of her mind had registered how the young woman who held the purple-and-gold firearm with such unwavering steadiness had twitched a few degrees aside before the paling of the skin over a knuckle betrayed that Easy's body was preparing to fire.

Annja spun. As she did she heard a scream.

A small man dressed in dark green clothes and a blue turban was falling in the gap between wall fragments through which Annja had run in what now seemed another lifetime. His bare forearms were twined with tattoos. As he went down a dying reflex triggered a burst toward the slate-colored sky from his AK-47. The muzzle-flash was enormous. It lit the little clearing like a bonfire.

A storm of fire burst through the gap from the wall's far side. Annja couldn't see the shooters. Bullets clipped branches from trees and mowed down bamboo stalks thirty feet from the two women.

"That's torn it," Easy said. "Run!"

She took off on a course that led into deep brush, straight toward the mesa's center. Annja saw no choice but to follow. Unless she wanted to stand and fight at least one patrol of heavily-armed thugs. Or wander strange territory at random with night coming fast.

Even following a mortal enemy looked more attractive.

Easy seemed to slip between the branches and her boots landed lightly on the forest-floor mulch. Annja was acutely conscious of blundering like a rhino. Everything raked her face, legs and forearms. Everything made loud crackling and swis.h.i.+ng sounds. The earth crunched and drummed beneath her feet.

But it made little difference. Annja had fired Kalashnikovs full-auto. She knew a person doing that didn't hear much else short of an artillery barrage landing right nearby. Stealth was no issue; speed might well mean life.

Easy turned sideways as she ran between trunks flanking the faint game trail she followed. When she pa.s.sed through she almost casually extended her left arm to its full extent at an angle from her path.

As Annja squeezed after her, feeling the rough bark squeeze her b.o.o.bs, Easy's Sphinx cracked off twice.

A figure collapsed forward out of a scrim of brush, a rifle falling from limp brown hands. This one wore a ratty nondescript s.h.i.+rt that was stained and a faded blue-checked sarong. His head was wound with a yellow turban.

That surprised Annja. She was pretty sure all the goons she had seen so far wore dark green uniforms or pseudouniforms, and definitely blue headgear.