Rogue Angel - The Golden Elephant Part 14

He took off his Dodgers cap and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of a hand. His normal ebullience had definitely flattened.

"Are you a tracker?" Phil asked superciliously. But Annja sensed it was pro forma.

Eddie shook his crew-cut head. "No way. But I do know what a path made by a bunch of guys on foot who don't much care what kind of a mark they leave on the environment looks like."

"Wouldn't elephants leave signs like knocked-over trees?" Patty asked.

Eddie nodded. "And their feet'd mush up the ground more."

"So who were they?" Annja asked, taking off her sungla.s.ses and putting them up on the front of her boonie hat.

Eddie shrugged. "Like I say, I'm not a tracker."

"Tribal people move carefully," Phil said. "They leave few marks."

Eddie nodded. "I'd say it's an army. Or a militia. Whatever."

"Militia?" Annja asked.

He shrugged. "Ethnic army, drug army, bandit gang. Any of the above, all of the above. Take your pick."

"To the extent there's a difference," Patty said.

Eddie nodded crisply. "Exactly."

Annja felt her cheeks draw up and turn her eyes to unhappy slits. "Great. I'm guessing these are people we don't want to cross paths with."

"Whether they're worse than the government forces is kind of an open question," Eddie said. He seemed to be sweating more than before, even though he wasn't exerting himself. "The important thing is we don't want to find out."

"Well." Annja stood a moment with hands on her hips. She noticed some trash trodden into the pathway, little plastic wrappers from snacks or cigarettes. "At least they're going a different way."

"They were when they pa.s.sed by here, anyway," Patty said. "Do we know where they were going?"

Everybody looked to Eddie, even Phil. He was, after all, the man with the best line on Myanmar's famously large and cantankerous ethnic armies. His eyes were big.

"You got me," he said. "Wouldn't I have to be, like, psychic to know?"

"This could've been just part of a larger group, too," Patty said, "headed out on patrol, or maybe coming back."

"How do you reckon that?" Phil asked. His tone held no challenge-he seemed just to want to know. As did Annja.

Patty jerked her head at the trail. "No tire tracks," she said. "Any self-respecting gang of thugs is at least going to have a pickup or a Land Cruiser or something for their big boss to ride around in."

"Maybe," Annja said.

"We need information," Phil Kennedy said decisively.

"We need out of this area," Annja said. "We can move faster than a big mob of men on foot, can't we?"

"If they're not real elite or moving with real purpose, like as not," Patty said.

"But we don't know for sure," Phil said, nodding as if he had it all worked out. "Do we really want to risk blundering into them? Or their main force, if Patty's right and this was just a patrol?"

"Or their enemies, for that matter," Eddie said.

"Maybe we should find out who's who, then," Phil said. "Don't the Arabs say, 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend'?"

"Maybe that works for Arabs," Eddie said slowly. "Around here-not so much."

"Not so much in the Muslim world, either," Patty said. "I think the proverb was meant to apply to temporary alliances."

"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 pa.s.sed through. Under other circ.u.mstances 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 doc.u.ment and start in motion proper preservation measures for the Temple of the Elephant. His relations.h.i.+ps with certain groups whose territory they had to pa.s.s 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 G.o.d'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 s.p.a.ce in a warbling tonal tongue.

Fire stabbed from the brush on the far side. Even as a terrible crack a.s.sailed Annja's eardrums she heard the moist chunk of projectiles. .h.i.tting 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 st.u.r.dy 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, st.u.r.dy 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 a.s.sured 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 grat.i.tude 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," "Voices," she hissed. "They're chasing us!" 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 cras.h.i.+ng 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s 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 gra.s.s. 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 shotguns 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 bra.s.s 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 bra.s.s bases.

"The guns are loaded," she said. "I've got these sh.e.l.ls. 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 rea.s.sure 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. .h.i.t 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 sh.e.l.ls 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.

"s.h.i.+t," 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 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. 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 ma.s.s 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.