With no choice Annja let go of
Levi. He went down like a sack of grain. But she managed to turn to face their
attacker.
He had sprung out of a fissure between two large rocks, reaching with both
hands for her throat. She grabbed his forearms and hung on. They felt like
blocks of wood.
No trick could have enabled Annja to keep her feet against the impact of the
mass of such a large and muscular young male body. Without conscious intent she
allowed herself to be thrown over backward. In combat it was always better to
go down under your own terms than get knocked down. She knew—she thought—no
rock waited immediately behind her to snap her spine or implode her rib cage.
As she fell Annja got the cleated sole of her right snow boot into her
assailant's midriff. Pain shot through her back as she landed hard on lumpy but
mostly level rock. She ignored it, concentrating on her technique, such as it
was. Pulling her opponent's arms over her head, urging his flying mass past,
she thrust hard with her right leg.
It wasn't pretty, but it was effective. The Young Wolf flew right over her to
smack against a big rock.
It was a crude circle throw. Ideally you finished the technique by pulling your
opponent's head in toward you, helping him tuck it so as to land safely on his
shoulder and roll out unharmed. Annja would've been fine if Zach Thompson had
come down face-first and busted his neck. He didn't, but her move got him away
from her.
Not bad, given that she'd only done the throw a few times.
As she sprang to her feet the careful, ever-meticulous part of her mind filed a
quick note to herself—not the first such—to practice grappling combat more. She
pirouetted to face the man who'd jumped her.
He was already up and starting toward her again. She'd recognized the sturdy,
blond ex-marine immediately. His clean-cut face was white with adrenal rage and
twisted like a rag. His out-of-control landing against hard stone must have at
least painfully jolted him, if not cracked some ribs or worse. But in his
current state he felt no pain.
He also moved much too quickly for Annja to summon the sword. She launched a
front kick for his groin or lower belly, hoping to jolt him enough to increase
engagement distance. Closing fast, he batted her leg away with his left hand
and punched her in the face with his right.
The blow missed breaking her nose but filled her vision with a yellow-white
flash of pain anyway. Still, it had been clumsily delivered. Had he gotten a
full running-start strike in it could have broken her neck. Ears ringing, she
staggered back, bringing up her hands to push-block a follow-up blow.
She deflected a straight left from her face. It was a feint. His right fist
caught her in the belly. She bent over, the air smashed out of her lungs. He
tried to follow it with an elbow smash to the face, stunning her or breaking
her neck. Either would've been fatal; the first would simply have taken more
time. Far too much time, if he let his friends catch up and got creative….
But Annja still had her presence of mind, battered and half-blinded as she was.
And she had the reflexes of a cat. She just managed to turn her body in so the
rising elbow caught her in the left shoulder.
The blow straightened her up and knocked her back. She slammed against a rock
wall. Her head snapped back and cracked into the rock. Lightning shot through
her brain and her stomach lurched.
She didn't lose consciousness. But for a moment she lost control over her limbs
and mind. Her body sagged against the cold, merciless rock as her thoughts
spun, fraying like tissue paper in a washing machine.
I'm going to die, she knew. He's going to beat me to death. Her wits were too
scattered to focus her will enough to summon the sword before he was all over
her.
But somehow he wasn't.
Annja forced herself to concentrate. Forced her vision to narrow to a field
where her eyes could make sense of what they saw. She forced her brain to
process the inputs of her eyes.
She saw Zach Thompson looking away from her, down and back at Levi. The skinny
rabbi was clinging to Thompson's leg with both arms. His lips had peeled back
into his beard, which had grown out over the last few days into a curly brown
tangle. His teeth were clenched. His legs trailed back after him over the dark
rock.
Thompson cursed and backhanded Levi in the face. Levi grimaced. His goggles
came off, his glasses went askew on his nose. He screwed his eyes shut tight
and still hung on.
Growling inarticulately the Young Wolf knotted his hand into a fist and drew it
up to his ear to smash the rabbi in the face.
Sheer outrage did for Annja what all the power of her own will couldn't.
Snapping herself together she launched herself from the rock. Her right hand
formed a half fist. The sword filled it.
"Ahhhh!" Annja screamed, partly to distract him from beating down the
helpless Levi, partly to vent the white-hot rage that filled her and drove out
all traces of pain and fatigue. She held the sword back over her shoulder
two-handed, as if it were a baseball bat.
The cry snapped Thompson's face around. The beginning of a triumphant leer died
on his face as the muscles of his mouth went slack with total overpowering
surprise. His eyes went round. The pupils expanded to crowd the pale blue
irises to tiny halos.
With all the force of her righteous wrath Annja swung the sword. It took Zach
Thompson at an angle across his face.
Feeling no impact she thought she'd missed. He still stared at her. She managed
to stop herself short of piling into him. She drew back the sword for another
strike.
The color red began to bloom on Zach Thompson's white-and-blue stocking cap. A
line of red appeared, running from his left brow, right beneath the knit cap,
across his nose to the edge of his right jaw. His eyes, still wide and staring
into Annja's, dulled. She had the quick impression of Zach's face turned into a
horrible caricature of a Picasso portrait. His body slumped to the black rock
beneath his boots.
She lowered the sword to the rock and leaned on it, panting. She felt sick and
utterly spent.
"Thanks, Levi," she said.
"Least I could do." He had settled his glasses back on his nose. One
arm had snapped off. He started casting about for his goggles. "You're,
ah—you're sinking!" he exclaimed.
"What? Oh, holy—" The tip of the sword's blade had already sunk four
inches into the hard volcanic rock. She had just kept leaning on it, leaning
farther forward without being aware of the fact as her weight drove it in. She
pushed herself back upright, letting go of the hilt. The sword vanished.
"Once again, thanks," she said. "I probably would have fallen
over if it had continued to sink like that."
Levi found his goggles and pulled them on over his knit cap, pulled them well
away from his face so as not to dislodge the one-winged glasses perched
precariously on the bridge of his nose. Then he let them settle onto his face.
It was rapidly puffing up and going pink from the effects of Zach's backhand.
"There," he said. "I hope that holds them in place."
He turned to look at her with a silly smile.
"Zach!" Leif Baron's voice ricocheted down to them from above. He was
obviously not close; but he wasn't high enough or far enough away for any kind
of comfort. "Zach, you idiot, where are you?" they heard him calling
out.
"Can you keep going?" Annja asked the rabbi urgently.
"As well as I could before. I don't walk on my face. Although it sure
feels as if I have."
She reached a hand to him. They gripped each other, forearm to forearm. She
hauled him to his one good foot. He swayed against her, then, pushing off with
an apologetic smile, straightened himself.
"Let's get going," Annja said. "Only a few thousand feet
left."
"Piece of cake," Levi said, without much conviction. She had to give
him an A for effort, though.
They were getting near enough the bottom that they could get a good detailed
look at the terrain awaiting them below. A fairly substantial stream seemed to
wind around the base of the mountain, sporadically visible as they picked their
way from cover to cover. Beyond it stretched a mile or so of flats, tan with
dry bunch grass and dotted with dark scrub. Shiny patches of white showed where
snow remained. It seemed the recent fall had concentrated on the peak. Annja
frowned slightly, remembering Levi's half-joking assertions that gods were
battling each other over their destinies. West of the flats the land rumpled up
into sinuous black ridges separated by narrow gullies.
Annja kept getting bad vibes from the landscape below. She couldn't see
anything that looked more dangerous than a thorn bush. Not consciously, anyway.
But she couldn't shake a nagging sensation she was missing something
potentially major. And possibly deadly.
She said nothing about any of that to Levi. They had too many clear and present
dangers to worry about possibly phantom misgivings.
As she looked down to pick their dubious way through the scree and obstructions
Annja felt a cool touch on her face. Her vision seemed to dim slightly. Raising
her head to look out she saw shadows swiftly coming over the panoramic
landscape of Ağri Province.
She looked up. Between the two struggling human specks and the sun the clouds
were gathering. Though the light from above turned their edges to incandescent
silver, their bellies were an ominous slate-gray. They seemed to be moving with
unnatural speed. Where they came together they visibly churned.
"Wow," Levi said. "Looks like a movie."
"Do me a favor, rabbi," Annja said. "No editorial comments on the
meteorological phenomena. Please."
"Anything you say, Annja." But his eyes twinkled behind his
one-winged glasses.
In breathtakingly short order Annja and her companion found themselves hobbling
through premature twilight. They descended by steep slopes covered with black
gravel that had a dangerous tendency to slip out from under foot. Their
progress was a halting three-legged dance, with Levi right behind Annja
clutching onto the back of her harness for dear life.
At least here if they slipped on loose gravel and fell, there was much less
risk of shooting off over a precipice to certain death. But an uncontrolled
tumble down a rocky slope wasn't fun, nor safe, either. Especially when you
were being hunted by religious fanatics fanatically intent on letting out your
blood.
They entered a fantastic-looking landscape of violent juts and frowning looms
of rock, rough granite, smooth-textured basalt and sharp-edged lava, pitted and
matte-black. Annja picked her way between the great outcrops, using her hands
to support her on the surrounding rock when she could to counteract the chancy
footing.
"It's like being in some kind of old black-and-white movie," Levi
said.
"It is, isn't it?" The rock looming around them was predominantly
black to begin with, as was the gravel and soil underfoot. The granite did
muster shades of dark gray; the crisp bunch grass that sprouted from the
gravelly slope and niches among the outcrops was leached of color and moisture
by premature winter. In better light it might've been at least a wan tan.
But the oddly sudden overcast's half-light leached even the much brighter
colors of Annja's and Levi's jackets to the point they only suggested hues. The
grass came out looking a vaguely silvery-gray.
The land leveled. It was temporary; they were still several hundred feet at
least above the base of the cinder cone. It was a relief all the same.
Annja was becoming acutely aware of how loud the black gravel was crunching
under their boots, when Levi said, "I wonder why they haven't attacked us
for so long?"
She almost laughed. She'd started wondering the same thing.
"I think they probably decided there was no point either in wasting
bullets or attacking us where there was a real lively chance they'd wind up
splattered on some rock without us even having to do anything. We still have a
long way to go. Maybe they even thought we'd figure we were about out of the
woods and get careless," she said.
"What do you think they'll do now?" Levi asked.
She shrugged. They mounted a low rise to get between rounded house-sized
protrusions. Annja winced as the dry branches and gray leaves of a bush rattled
at their passage. Hearing her own words had led her to decide to take a route
offering better cover in preference to following the path of least resistance.
"Baron's the professional tactical guy. Which sucks from our standpoint.
I'm not a professional. But if it were me running the circus I'd split the
group up."
"Divide your forces? I thought that was a major nono," Levi said.
"Okay, I'm not a big military historian, either, and there's a limit to
how much my knowledge of, like, the Battle of Pavia in 1525 is going to be
applicable to this happy twenty-first century of ours. But I've, uh, I've been
in some fights.
Battles
, you might even call some of them. Small ones.
Mostly," Annja said.
"Somehow, I rather figured that."
"So anyway, if you're going to try a pincers movement, a very basic tactic
to catch your enemies on the flanks, what you have to do split up."
As she spoke she began to swivel her head more constantly left and right. They
came out into a shallow bowl covered with dead grass, that stretched maybe
twenty-five yards between big outcrops.
"Hitting flanks are important for all kinds of reasons. One is if you get
your enemies looking left, your pals coming from the right get free shots at
their backs. See?" she explained.
"All too clearly, I'm afraid."
"Yeah. Well, stay alert. Also, the better trained your troops are, the
more leeway you have to do things like split them up."
She sighed through briefly gritted teeth. "And I'm afraid Baron and Eli
Holden are both really good at this sort of thing. I bet they run the students
through all kinds of tactical field exercises at the academy. If they didn't
before Baron signed on, they sure do—"
She actually
felt
the bullet pass her face to strike the basalt boulder
ten feet to her right.
The wind of the projectile's
passage brushed the bridge of her nose and her cheeks with a dainty touch
creepily reminiscent of the television show's makeup people dusting her with a
powder puff to take the shine off freshly applied makeup. The hard flat rap of
the handgun shot overlapped the noise of the slug striking rock. The bullet
whined upward and away.
"Down!" she said in warning.
Figuring Levi would either have the presence of mind to follow her lead or,
failing that, simply lose his balance and fall on top of her, Annja threw
herself facedown on the gravel. The rabbi landed not on her, as expected, but
beside her, promptly enough that she figured he had gone down on his own
instead of toppling when his support went suddenly missing.
"Oww." Levi managed to keep his voice low. His face was pale behind
his grown-out beard, thin mobile features twisted in pain.
Annja bit down on her impulse to ask if he was all right. Clearly he wasn't. He
had a broken ankle. Falling down, even though not
on
it, must have hurt
like hell.
She looked around. Past the outcrop to their left a black promontory rose a
story or so higher. The shot had come from that direction, right enough. But
the higher projection was also one hundred and fifty or so yards away. For the
shooter to hit that close to her head with a handgun at that range, firing at a
downward angle, he had to be either way better or way luckier than he could
possibly deserve to be. She knew, or anyway suspected strongly, that among the
Christian leadership skills Rehoboam Academy taught its pupils was the gentle
art of combat handgunning. That type of training concentrated strongly on the short
ranges at which handgun fights almost inevitably took place, not long-range
shooting. She suspected the shot had actually come from a closer, lower height
now masked by the nearby black boulder.
A muzzle flash caught her eye from a pile of rusty-tinged black rock topped
with wind-gnarled brush just past the end of the boulder that screened them.
She grabbed Levi and rolled over with him, toward the loom of rock to their
left. She tried to ignore the groan of anguish he wasn't able to stifle.
Another bullet kicked up gravel a couple of feet away from where they'd lain.
Annja's move hadn't come quickly enough to save them if it had been going to
hit them anyway. The missile had come from about fifty yards away. It was still
an uncomfortably good shot with a handgun, even if the shooter were prone and
had the piece well braced.
They were out of sight of the spot where she'd seen the muzzle-flare bloom like
a lethal yellow-light flower. For the moment. "Get on my back, Levi,"
she ordered.
"What?"
"On my back. Quickly."
He hesitated a split second, which was long enough for her to fight and at
least temporarily win against an impulse to grab him and give him a good shake.
Then she felt his weight sprawl on top of her.
With a reverberating groan of effort she pushed herself up to all fours. I knew
someday I'd be grateful for doing all those push-ups in my daily routine, she
thought. She hated push-ups. She did her best speed crawl—more of a vigorous
slow-motion crawl with the doubled weight reminding the muscles in her
shoulders and forearms of the abuse they'd been through in the last day and a
half—right up to the side of the big basalt jut to their left. There she
collapsed, panting, her arms and shoulders feeling as if they were on fire.
Levi's breath was loud in her ear. That's why it's hard to catch your breath,
she told herself.
"You can get off now," she said in a strained voice.
"What—oh. Sorry, sorry. Ouch." The last came out as an involuntary
exclamation as he rolled off too fast and jarred his damaged ankle again.
"No need to apologize," she said. She looked around. Ten or twelve
feet behind them a smaller rock outcrop maybe three feet high stood near the
boulder. There was at least a shoulder-width distance between them. Some bunch
grass sprouting around it offered some additional concealment. Anything helped,
she thought.
"Levi, can you get yourself back in between those rocks there?"
He drew a deep, shaky breath. "Yeah, I think so," he said.
"Okay. Hide as well as you can and keep your head down."
"What's going on?" he asked.
She paused, sucking her lower lip. "I think the shooter is trying to drive
us. Like a beater for wild game. Chasing us toward the hunters to get
shot."
"What're we going to do?" he asked, finally sounding alarmed.
"You're going to make yourself scarce like I told you. I'm going to try to
even the odds."
It took a massive act of will to wrench herself out of the gravel's embrace,
sharp and cold and as comfortable as the finest bed she'd ever slept in. Her
every joint creaked and every muscle screamed protest. Leaving behind her
companion and any objections he might care to voice to her plan, she started
running bent over, back the way they had come.
At first she moved like a none-too-spry octogenarian who'd lost her walker. But
movement quickly made her feel better. Just as she knew it would. Even if it
was entirely in her mind, she felt no more than a rusty forty by the time she'd
passed the little clump of rock she'd told Levi to dig in behind and started
climbing up the steep bank that would lead her up and over the protective cover
of the boulder.
Possibilities flashed through her mind. Were there two shooters off to her
left, which was south? Was it just one, cunning enough to hurriedly shift
positions so he could fire on the fugitives where they'd dropped into what they
thought was cover after his first shot? Was that even their plan, what she had
suggested to Levi? What if instead of waiting the other half of the pincers was
closing in even now as she scrambled over the sliding, rustling black surface
upslope of the boulder, ducking from lesser rock to rock cluster? With Levi
left behind, unarmed, injured, helpless? Was she focused too much on Baron and
his youthful red-haired acolyte, and underestimating the threat of fat,
middle-aged Charlie Bostitch?
As quickly as she could she moved back down the far side of the boulder that
hid Levi from the shooter she was sure about. Ahead of her two squat pillars of
dark stone rose a couple of stories in the air. Slim as she was there was just
room to slip between them.
She clambered up six or eight feet to the crack. It was a tricky climb; she had
to stuff the handgun she'd taken off Josh Fairlie's body into her belt to make
it. Then, turning sideways, she forced herself between the columns. It was
tighter than she'd thought.
She emerged onto flat ground at just under the level of the cleft. Thirty feet
away Eli Holden stood on top of another basalt outcrop about four yards high.
He held his SIG Sauer muzzle up and shifted weight from the front of one booted
foot to the other, as he craned to try to spot the quarry he was trying to
creep up on and surprise in their hiding place. His jacket hung open and his
close-cropped red-haired head was bare.
He and Annja locked eyes. For what seemed a very long time they simply held
that tableau, staring at each other.
"It doesn't have to be this way, Eli," she at last managed to say in
a low voice jagged as an ancient lava tube.
His cheeks drew back, tightening his mouth into an almost sweet smile.
"Yeah," he said, so quietly the word was almost lost on a rising
breeze. "Yeah. It does. I wish it didn't, too."
He sounded entirely reasonable. It was odd; she had sized him up as a
stone-dumb fanatic who let others do the talking as well as the thinking.
Instead he sounded wistful, and his voice was that of a man who was thinking,
and was pained by his thoughts.
He moved first. For all Annja's lightning reflexes he would have had her cold
had she not expected it.
But all he had to do was lower his P226, get a flash sight impression, shoot
her. She had to draw from her belt. Which put her fatally behind the curve.
She threw her left hand straight up over her head, cupping the fingers as if
gripping something.
The sword appeared, glinting dully in the twilight.
She saw Eli's head jerk back in surprise at the impossible appearance of such
an utterly unlikely weapon out of thin air. Then her right hand was up, the
front sight of her weapon at the level of the center of his mass. She fired
twice, trying not to yank the trigger and jerk the weapon offline. Shooting
one-handed she had to fight hard against the bite of rifling grooves into the
fast-moving projectiles that tried to torque her sight off-target and pluck the
piece from her hand.
Her first shot missed. She saw or thought she saw the second pluck the inner
right hem of his jacket. He flinched. His arm, which had just come straight and
level, jerked upwards a fraction. His gun roared, firing over her head.
Releasing the sword Annja dropped her left hand to cover her right and the
front of the gun's trigger guard, locking her arms into the steady triangle of
a classic isosceles stance. She pulled the fore-sight back down to the center
of Eli's blue flannel-check shirt, which looked darker than it had a second
ago. She fired a quick double tap.
He staggered and fell. His body rolled back out of sight behind the rock jut he
was standing on. His gun clattered down into a tangle of sharp-toothed rocks
and thorny brush where Annja knew with sick certainty she'd never have time to
find it.
Instead she turned around and scrambled quickly up the slope again, to pass
above the two basalt columns she'd pressed between.
Trying to move quickly from rock to rock she ran back to the north. She went
past where Levi lay thankfully hidden from her sight. She was sure the danger
now was advancing from that direction. Leif Baron either thought she was dead
or thought Eli was. In either case he'd be moving in, whether to finish off
just the rabbi or both of them.
She didn't know where Bostitch was. She hoped he had the sense to just stay out
of things and keep his head down. He'd hired an elite thug with a body like a
cartridge with his head for the bullet. The wise thing was to let Baron do a
bullet's job.
Freed from the necessity of propping up poor half-crippled Levi, and the
too-long present risk that a single misstep would plunge her a thousand feet to
take a long nap on a hard-rock mattress, Annja sprang across the rocks and
gravel with relative ease. She no longer felt stiff or sore. The turbocharge
the gunfight with Eli had given her didn't hurt, either.
She made no effort to stay quiet or unseen. She wanted Baron to home in on her,
and not the defenseless Levi. What she was trying to do was attract attention
while making herself a terrible target.
She succeeded. As she anticipated, Baron spotted her first. She was jumping
from one level to another four feet down when the first shot, snap-fired from
about thirty yards away, passed through the space she'd occupied a heartbeat
before. The second round of the double tap cracked somewhere high over her
head.
Loose chunks of rocks slid out from under her feet. Annja let herself sit down
hard and slid down another dozen feet to the bottom of a narrow dry streambed
in a crunching slide. She scrambled up a pile of granite rocks on the far side
and peeked over.
This time she saw Baron first. He was moving between boulders not twenty yards
from her. Either he was lucky or his peripheral vision caught the quick
purposeful motion as she thrust her captured handgun toward him. He vanished
from sight even as the weapon bellowed and bucked her hand.
She was down to her last half magazine. She thought she had about six shots
left. She'd never quite got the hang of counting shots fired in the stress of
combat. Nobody she'd ever talked to had, either.
They played hide-and-seek with guns among outcrops six and ten feet tall. Annja
ran a few paces, then bent between two rocks and fired two quick shots toward where
she guessed her enemy was. He popped up over a rock seven feet to the left of
that and fired two quick shots in return. She had ducked back already and was
on the move to another spot.
She heard Baron curse. She scrambled up an eight-foot chunk of granite and
snapped a quick shot over the top toward the sound.
He fired back. She had already turned and slid back down the rock.
Been fighting a desk a little too long, haven't you, Jocko? she thought. You
may keep your hand-eye skills sharp-shooting off your hundred rounds a day or
whatever. But you've forgotten that you can't miss fast enough to catch up.
Being well drilled in that philosophy herself, what Annja was doing—busting
caps while scarcely aiming—ran totally against her grain. But she had a plan.
If she hit him, bonus. But what she was mainly trying to do was get him to do
what he'd just done—waste cartridges. She was well aware there were limits to
how much ammunition the pursuers could have brought down the mountain with
them.
It wasn't that Annja was really counting on getting Baron to exhaust his
reloads. She was just doing whatever she could think of to tilt the odds her
way. She figured it was worth a try.
And in any event, she knew with certainty that if she actually traded deadly
shots with him, she'd die. She wasn't expecting to settle this with a firearm.
She spent the next two shots sparingly. She kept moving fast among the field of
big rocks and outcroppings. She doubted her opponent had any kind of hearing
protection, any more than she did; all she could hear was the ringing in her
ears, particularly loud crunches. And if Baron did have earplugs in he
definitely wouldn't hear her moving.
They kept closing the range between them, even if it was three steps closer and
two steps back. Sensing she was getting near the former SEAL Annja scrambled up
a big rounded granite boulder. She hoped to surprise him with a short-range
shot from above.
As she reached the top Baron's head popped up like a bald prairie dog, facing
her not eight feet away. He had shed his jacket and wore only a black T-shirt
despite the cold. Both off balance, they each snapped off a one-handed shot.
Hers sent rock dust clattering against the dark amber lense of his goggles. His
just missed the left side of her face.