Part 18 (1/2)

Annja didn't see the hidden trigger. Then again, neither did the point man. He was walking along, his long black rifle held in patrol position in front of him, when with no warning, a four-inch-thick sapling that had been bent until its top touched the ground snapped upright into his face and body.

The trunk had eighteen-inch wood spikes jutting from it.

The point man, ma.s.sively and multiply impaled, didn't even have time to scream. He emitted a brief squealing grunt, then hung limply from the blood-tipped spikes. His comrades dived off to both sides of the narrow game trail they'd been following.

Some of them screamed, though, and very loudly, as hands and feet plunged into small concealed pits, themselves dug no more than a foot or two into the jungle clay, to be pierced by needle-sharp slivers of bamboo.

The patrol's undamaged members opened fire. The poorly trained, panicked men shot high. As Annja and her escort of four grinning Protectors slipped away through the brush, a burst clipped branches ten feet over their heads.

No one else came close.

THE LAST MAN IN the line stopped and slapped a tattooed hand to his neck. He looked annoyed by the forest insect that had just bitten him. The rest of the eight-man GSSA patrol moved out of sight, hardly more noisily than a herd of water buffalo, around a curve in the trail through tall gra.s.s.

The last man blinked. A curious expression crossed his mustached face.

He then pitched over in the gra.s.s and lay still.

”Neat,” Easy Ngwenya said softly to her companion.

Although it wasn't common on the Shan Plateau, the Protectors had somehow acquired the art of the blow-pipe. For its ever-necessary complement-fast-acting poison-they used some manner of secret decoction whose effects, on the visual evidence, bore a striking resemblance to curare.

Dr. Philip Kennedy, whose work Easy rather admired, would've been quite fascinated at the intersection of sociology and biochemistry. It was a pity Annja Creed had gone and mislaid him, she thought. Although from her own account, despite her best efforts to claim all responsibility, it was clear to Easy that the silly self-important sod had gone and mislaid himself. Self-importance seemed an occupational hazard among cultural anthropologists, she had noted, and ethn.o.botany wonks in particular.

”Come on,” said her companion in piping, urgent English.

Easy looked down. Short as she was she saw eye to eye with most of the Protectors. The adults, that is. Her guide was a young man who had spent two years in America. He insisted on being called Tony.

The rest of the party, the actual blow-pipe men and their guards, were armed with spears and singe-edged bladed weapons like swords with hilts at ninety degrees to the blades, which they held along their forearms. They had already moved out toward the preselected position from which they'd pick off the next Grand Shan State Army man to be last in line. They'd keep up the game until they were discovered. Or until they ran out of intruders.

Either outcome was satisfactory. The survivors would bear back to Marshal Qiangsha with tales of silent death from the bush; or the lot would vanish. In either case, the marshal would find his men unwilling to come this way again, no matter how he might threaten and bl.u.s.ter.

And if they did, of course, the Protectors would ring in more fiendish surprises on them. They had a wonderful selection, really, Easy thought. They had been collecting them for centuries, it seemed, like avid little hobbyists.

Impatient, her guide started off through the bush. Like his older fellows, he glided through the thick undergrowth as noiselessly as a shadow. Easy's bush craft was good and she knew it. But she envied these people their skills.

She concentrated keenly on what the boy was doing as she made to follow him. A true professional was always learning.

”HOW GOES THE WAR?”

Despite herself Annja smiled. They had rendezvoused amid especially high walls of stone, where monkeys capered and screeched as they leaped among the lianas in the velvet lengthening shadows of late afternoon. Like their Protector allies Easy was bright eyed and practically vibrating with excitement.

Annja was, too.

”Goes pretty well so far,” she told her ally who had so recently been her enemy. ”We didn't inflict too many casualties. But we've definitely got them moving in the right direction.”

”Ah, but that's the whole point of the exercise, isn't it?” Easy said.

”Best of all,” Annja said, nodding, ”is that we didn't take any ourselves.”

”We, neither,” Easy said with an answering grin. It quickly faded.

”But that can't last,” she said.

”I know,” Annja said, frowning.

ANNJA CROUCHED BEHIND a waist-high rampart of crumbling red brick. Some freshly cut brush, arranged on top of the wall, hid her neatly from observation by the Shan patrol noisily crunching its way through the woods toward them. Thermal imaging, she knew, would show the cut foliage. But the Shans didn't have any.

Tony crouched at her side, ready for anything. He said nothing.

A dozen adult warriors crouched behind the varying-height wall to either side of her, and behind stumps or in depressions in the uneven ground. They were very careful not to walk or hunker down behind Annja.

The first members of the GSSA patrol came into view across a clearing fifty yards wide. The blue-turbaned men in their dark-green battledress, some solid colored, some jungle camouflage, were smoking and joking. Loose and easy.

They thought they'd found a route delightfully free of b.o.o.by traps, or ambushers who struck silently and fled, often before the survivors knew they had been attacked.

Annja raised an RPG to her shoulder and peered through the low-power optical sight.

The RPG was part of the booty scavenged by Protector scouts from their victims of the actions the day before. As were the AKMs and ancient AK-47s Annja's companions held.

As she sighted, instinct took over. Slipping her finger inside the trigger guard, she drew in a deep breath. The weapon felt lightweight and cheap, in contrast to the chunky solidity of a Kalashnikov rifle. But then, the launcher only had to shoot once.

She snugged the weapon in, let out half the intaken breath and squeezed.

With a great whoosh the rocket-propelled grenade streaked from the launcher, surrounding Annja with nasty, acrid, dirty-white propellant smoke. It also sent a long jet of flame out the rear end of the tube.

The rocket motors made a loud, furious buzzing as they sent the missile spiraling toward the target. It struck with a silver-white flash and the hideous high-frequency crack of its shaped-charge warhead that was so hatefully familiar to her.

She still didn't care for it much. Even from the other side.

The grenade blew a great yellow wound in the tree's hard wood a dozen feet above the turbaned heads of the patrol. Long splinters flew in all directions. To either side of her the Protectors held their Kalashnikovs over their heads and, whooping enthusiastically, blasted away with them.

Lowering the spent launcher, Annja took her eye from the scope. She had to fight to control the trembling of her hands and even remember to breathe.

Three of the Shan militiamen had fallen to the ground right below the grenade's impact point. Two of them flopped around vigorously and screamed shrilly. That pleased Annja in a grim way. The point was to sting the Shans enough to anger them, without hurting them badly enough to rout them or even send them to ground.

At once the Shans did what most other troops in the world, trained or not, did when unexpectedly taken under fire-they dumped their whole magazines as fast as their full-auto actions would cycle in what they hoped was their enemy's direction. As far as Annja could tell they came no closer to hitting her hidden comrades than the Protectors did to them. And the Protectors were trying to miss.