Part 15 (1/2)
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.