Rogue Angel - The Golden Elephant Part 13

Annja sighed. It wasn't as if she had anything better to do except fret about everything that could go wrong before the truck arrived. Which was everything. But then, wasn't that always true?

I knew this was coming, she told herself.

"Let's go in the woods a ways," she said. "Get some shade. For what it's worth." Actually, anything that kept the stinging sunlight off exposed skin helped. Even if the shade did little to diminish the humid heat. It was noticeably less wet and hot at this alt.i.tude. But not enough to come near comfort.

They walked along an animal trail through thick green brush to a tiny clearing twenty yards uphill from the road cut. It was far enough to keep voices from carrying unless voices were raised. Which she didn't intend to have happen. Despite what she was sure was on the verge of being said.

"As you know," Kennedy said, "I am the most experienced person in our group, both as an academic and a field researcher. I have more experience in this region than even Eddie Chen does. And of course, ah, there's the matter of my doctoral degree...."

Annja turned and faced him, smiling. Little birds, yellow and gray and black and crimson, trilled in the trees and hopped and jittered in the brush around them. "Let's cut to the chase, Doctor," she said. "I run this show. It was my idea. It's my quest, you might say. And of course, I'm paying."

His face had frozen. Now it mobilized to the extent his bearded, slightly full lips gave an even greater impression he detected a bad smell than usual. "So you're telling me that on this expedition-"

"We follow the golden rule," Annja said, still smiling, but with nothing in her voice to suggest the least degree of give. "Who has the gold, makes the rules. If you find the arrangement unsatisfactory we'll reluctantly part ways right here. You should be able to catch the elephant guys in time to hitch a lift back across the Salween."

Phil glared at her. She held his gaze. She kept smiling.

Trained anthropologists as they both were, both knew a smile is often a form of submission in a primate.

Kennedy dropped his eyes and shook his head. "Very well," he said. "I find myself in no position to argue. But-"

None of that, she thought. "Great, Dr. Kennedy," she said, chipper as an undergraduate who thinks she might be able to flirt her way out of arduous digging on a field trip. "I'm glad we could get that cleared up."

She started to walk back toward the road. From somewhere along it came the sounds of a driver grinding through the gears of a heavy vehicle. Their ride was on its way. If it makes it this far, she thought.

"Ms. Creed," Kennedy called after her.

She stopped and turned. She continued to maintain her centered, cheerful expression. To the extent it was false, it was plastered over her fears and anxieties about the risks that awaited them and the terrible possibility that the rapacious and utterly ruthless Easy Ngwenya would reach and ravage the Temple of the Elephant before Annja could stop her.

As for Kennedy-she had faced down men berserk with rage, men armed with knives and swords and automatic weapons. She had on occasion killed foes. Even before all that she had been hard to intimidate.

There was nothing Phil Kennedy could do to intimidate her. Not if he weighed twice as much and had black belts in five kinds of sudden death.

But his manner was troubled. Almost contrite, she thought. Whoa! I didn't look for that out of such an arrogant kind of guy.

"I need this a.s.signment," he said, his voice quieter than she had heard him use before. "I need the success bonus."

She stopped and looked back at him with brow raised questioningly. The sensation of desire, of the need to be moving forward toward her goal was pressing.

But since Kennedy had opted to remain a member of her team, she needed to be responsive to his morale. If he feels a need to talk, I need to listen. So long as she didn't have to do it too long.

"I have a daughter," he said slowly, as if it cost great effort to speak. "Back in the United States. Her mother was a Shan tribeswoman. She-my wife, by tribal ceremony-died in childbirth. I smuggled the child out of the country and got her to Hawaii."

He paused. He breathed heavily, as if he'd just run a mile. Annja didn't press.

"I set my daughter up with foster parents," the anthropologist went on. "It costs money to maintain her. Also I ran up debts to some rough characters getting her out from under the noses of the State Peace and Development Council. Not to mention into the United States. So I need need this job." this job."

Annja stood a moment, almost fidgeting with her need to go. Yet his admission was so naked, had left him so vulnerable, she knew she owed him something. Especially after backing him down on the issue of heading the expedition. Her innate decency as much as practicality forbade her crus.h.i.+ng the spirit of someone upon whom her life and the lives of the other two might soon depend.

"I understand," she said truthfully. "I'll tell you what. If you think I show myself unfit to lead in any way, tell me. Now or at any time in the future. If you really, honestly can say that I have, I'll reconsider."

He nodded. A faint smile crept through his gray-dusted beard. "I'll do that. But I have to admit you've done a perfectly adequate job so far."

"Thanks," she said, through a smile that had set slightly. "Now let's go back and I'll tell you and the others exactly what we're doing in this h.e.l.lhole."

THEY DANCED IN THE pouring rain. Beer helped.

At the village they had pa.s.sed through before camping for the night in an abandoned hut, Eddie Chen bought them thirteen bottles with colorful labels printed in squirmy Burmese characters.

"Hope n.o.body here's superst.i.tious," he had said as he lugged them in the yellow plastic crate.

Phil frowned. "It isn't wise to dismiss folk wisdom out of hand," he said. "It's got a lot longer track record than Western materialism and rationalism."

"Ah, but is it a better one?" Patty Ruhle asked.

Phil smiled thinly. "How many people died through the use of modern technology in the twentieth century?"

"Well," Patty said, "you've got a point."

Eddie, if anything even more indefatigably cheerful than Patty, deflected the conversation by commencing to pop open bottles with a church key he carried on his belt. It had what seemed like dozens of pockets on it, more than Patty's, sealed by snaps, zippers or Velcro. He called it his utility belt. "Just like Batman's," he said.

The rain started shortly after Eddie returned. A thunderclap announced it as they sat on the edge of the elevated hut, dangling their legs and eating their MREs. The sudden noise made Annja and Patty duck their heads. Eddie did, too. Only Phil Kennedy failed to react, other than giving his comrades a look as if to say he'd expected no better of them than to fear natural phenomena.

What it suggested to Annja was that the anthropologist had never come under fire.

The rain came down in sheets in the gathering dark. They pulled their legs in under the thatch overhang and watched it out of the hut's open side. Annja didn't know how it came to be vacant. Phil dismissed risk of disease; if anybody had died in it, the hut would have been burned down. For that matter, had the occupants been arrested, the government forces would probably have burned it down, as well. Eddie had confirmed no one in the nearby village cared if they occupied it for the night. It offered a welcome change from sleeping in the open the past two nights, although this was the first night it had rained since they'd set out from Bangkok.

They all polished off their first beers during dinner. Afterward even Annja was amenable to opening a second. Eddie had gotten out an iPod and a slim set of portable speakers with a slot in the middle to accommodate the player. It wasn't anything Annja would have chosen to bring, given how little they could carry. But if Eddie was willing to carry the excess without complaint, she had no objection.

The rain slackened. They made torches from dry straw pulled from inside the roof. They sputtered but burned in the falling droplets. Eddie started playing pop songs that were bouncy, happy. You could dance to the music, and overall it made it seem natural to be out dancing in the warm rain. Which they soon were.

They had something to celebrate. They'd reached the top of the Shan Plateau. If the Red Monastery map was correct they had a two-day march left before reaching the smaller mesa where the lost temple complex stood.

So they danced and drank their third beer each. That left one beer remaining. Annja, already sensing she was fuzzed, pa.s.sed. She hated losing control; it was why she didn't drink more, or do recreational drugs. She didn't know who got the last beer. She thought it was Patty.

The rain stopped. The clouds seemed to snap apart overhead, leaving the sky above clear in minutes. The stars stood out through the fresh-cleansed air like tiny spotlights focused down on them.

Annja found herself thinking about Giancarlo Scarlatti.

Phil and Patty got into a sort of free-form limbo contest. Each would lean back and try to dance as low as possible. The round ended when one-or occasionally both-fell on his or her b.u.t.t in the mud. Then they got up and started over, cackling like lunatics.

Annja sat on the steps with Eddie. She felt mellow, notwithstanding a certain unease at the core of her being. Out there in the startlingly black night was Easy Ngwenya. And Annja was just sure she wasn't pa.s.sing the time yucking it up and dancing.

Eddie was enthusing again about California. "I'll go back one of these days," he said. "Finish up my E.E. at CalTech."

"You're an electrical engineer?"

"Well, not yet." He held up two fingers as if to pinch. "But I'm that close."

Annja nodded.

"I've got a girl back in Cali," he said, voice dropped low and confidential. "Woman, I guess I should say."

"Really," Annja said.

"Would you like to see a picture?"

"Sure."

He opened a flap on a belt pouch, drew out a stiff cardboard jacket. From it he slid a photo and handed it to Annja. It was a three-by-five, professionally posed shot of a woman with long, wavy blond hair and blue eyes, smiling over her shoulder at the camera. She was startlingly beautiful.

"Nice," Annja said. "Is she a model or something?"

Eddie laughed. "Aeronautical engineer," he said. "She's got a job with JPL now."

Annja blinked. It all seemed pretty d.a.m.ned incongruous to her. "What are you doing doing here, Eddie?" she asked. "You seem to love it back in California. And if I had a girlfriend like that waiting for me back home I wouldn't stay here in Southeast Asia. And I'm straight." here, Eddie?" she asked. "You seem to love it back in California. And if I had a girlfriend like that waiting for me back home I wouldn't stay here in Southeast Asia. And I'm straight."

He smiled shyly. For once reserve overcame his usual ebullience.

"It's Dad, see," he said. "I'm eldest. So I kind of have to look out for him."

"He seems pretty able to look out for himself, from what I saw," Annja said.

"It's a Chinese thing. A family-obligation thing."

She tipped her head sideways and looked at him in the torchlight. "Is that everything? Really? I mean, you act totally homesick. And you seem pretty American to throw over your whole life-not to mention a cover-girl of a girlfriend who happens to be an aeros.p.a.ce engineer-for traditional Chinese familial piety."

"Well, Dad says if I hang on over the winter, he's planning to sell everything and retire next year. Then he'll go live with my sister in Singapore."

It seemed as if there was more so Annja said, "And...?"

Eddie shrugged. "Well-I guess I kind of like the excitement. You know. Making the run across the border. Up into China and back. I-well, let's just say, no matter how much I miss Cali, there's nothing back there that compares to the rush. Not surfing, not skydiving."

Annja wondered if he and his dad were running arms to Myanmar resistance groups. He seemed to know much about the Karen rebels. She didn't ask. It wasn't any of her business, and it was the sort of thing that, since she didn't need to know it, she reckoned she needed not not to know. That way if the authorities scooped them up, she could truthfully say she had no information whatever about such activities on Eddie's part. to know. That way if the authorities scooped them up, she could truthfully say she had no information whatever about such activities on Eddie's part.

If that would do any good. She suspected it would not. She had a cold suspicion that if the Myanmar army caught them skulking around out here the only way they'd make it to Yangon for trial was if the SPDC wanted the publicity.

"Hey," Phil Kennedy called from out in front of the hut. "What's that?"

He was pointing away to the south. In the guttering, failing light of their torches he and Patty looked like a pair of golems from the slick, pale mud smeared all up and down them.

The southern horizon flickered with dull yellow flashes like distant lightning. A mutter reached Annja's ears, like thunder from a distant storm.

Streaks of yellow light, thread thin, arced up and across and down. When they vanished light really flared up, white now.

"Fireworks?" Phil asked. He sounded puzzled.

"Rockets," Patty said. "Big ones. Government's pounding rebel positions down there."

She put hands on her hips and stood gazing at the display. "Multiple Launch Rocket Systems," she said. "MLRS. During World War II the Germans called theirs fog throwers. The Americans called them Screamin' Meemies. My boy says they raise a howl like all the d.a.m.ned souls in h.e.l.l."

"I didn't think you believed in h.e.l.l," Phil said.

"Sometimes," she said.

Annja felt cold all over. "That's some pretty heavyweight repression," she said.

"That's what makes Myanmar the garden spot it is," Patty said. "Its government's charming propensity to settle domestic disputes with barrage rockets."

Eddie squinted and scratched the front of his crown beneath his ball cap. "I got news for you," he said. "They could be 240 mm rockets. Made in North Korea."

"Two hundred forty millimeters? millimeters?" Annja asked in astonishment. It was almost nine and a half inches, if her math was up to the task.

"Uh-huh."

"North Korea," Patty said, for once without her usual humor. "Jesus Christ."

Phil said nothing. He just looked at the flicker of yellow in the sky. But Annja thought his manner, rather than disapproving, seemed sad.

For once she felt in complete agreement with him. And if he was disgusted with the whole modern world-for the moment, so was she.

21.

"Annja," Eddie Chen called. "Come take a look at this."

She pushed herself forward through the brush. Wait-a-bit thorns tugged at her sleeves. She wished she could summon up the Sword and chop them all back and be done with it. It didn't exactly seem appropriate. But, darn, it'd be gratifying.

They were getting close to their destination. Sporadic rain, last gasp of the monsoon, had made the forest footing mushy even though today was fair and hot. Annja's sense of urgency was a constant neural buzz.

They had come upon what looked like a road through the woods. The hardwood trees were widely s.p.a.ced. It looked almost as if a path had been bulldozed through brush and a stand of saplings, transversely to their own course. But even Annja, no tracker, could see no signs of the tearing and gouging a track-laying vehicle did to such soft ground.

"What's this?" she asked. "An elephant trail?"

"Too wide," Patty said. "It'd take a herd to do this."

The women looked at Eddie, the guide, and Phil Kennedy, who had lived and worked among the tribes in this region. They looked at each other.

"Men," Eddie said. "Men made this."