Annja crouched over him.
Another rock overhang ten feet above shielded them both momentarily from
gunfire from above. It was a tiny blessing. "Levi?"
He smiled weakly. "Are you going to ask me if I'm all right?"
Though a good six feet wide—which felt broad as an aircraft carrier's flight
deck after some of the hair-thin purchases they'd used—the ledge slanted
perilously outward. Feeling herself begin to slide down the surface, slippery
with a thin film of meltwater from the sunshine despite the fact the air
remained below freezing, Annja yanked her ice ax from her belt and drove its
pointy end through the ice to anchor her.
"Of course you're not all right. Your ankle's broken. Here, let me—"
Boots thumped on the ice behind her.
She heard the man grunt as he landed, then the beginnings of a triumphant
intake of breath. He had obviously jumped down from the overhang directly above
them.
Annja was already in motion, rising and turning in a single fluid motion. The
ice ax made a soft squealing sound as she yanked it free of the ice.
She didn't know exactly who it was behind her. It didn't matter anymore. There
were no friends above them on this mountain of death. Nor neutrals. Only
enemies, thirsting for innocent blood.
"All, right, Annja," she heard Josh Fairlie's voice say as she spun.
"I have you—"
She aimed the pointy end of her ax at his temple. Despite his own grinding exertions
he was young and wired, with reflexes like steel springs. He swerved away from
her stroke.
Unfortunately for him, if he jumped back far enough to completely avoid the
vicious backhand blow he'd have hopped right off the edge. Annja saw he wasn't
tied to a safety line, so eager had he been to score the kill.
Annja spun clockwise and blasted a spinning back-kick into his gut.
Air blasted from his lungs. Doubling over the kick he flew backward into
emptiness. Then he dropped, trailing a scream that still seemed more of fury
than despair.
On the treacherous slick slope Annja's planted foot shot right out from under
her. She didn't quite smash her own face on the ice but the ensuing belly flop
knocked the breath from her as surely as her pistonlike boot heel had from the
doomed Josh Fairlie. With the last of her strength she drove the her ax's spike
down through the ice to keep her from slip-sliding away.
Then, completely drained, she rested and breathed.
For a whole minute.
Then she started to move. "Up," she growled to herself.
"Up…you…go." With the last word she summoned whatever strength she
had and forced herself up off the ice and onto her feet.
Levi lay huddled against the cliff holding his ankle with one hand.
"Annja?" he called to her.
"I'm fine, fine." She waved him off. "We need to move again. If
we can get a little breathing room I'll bind the ankle. But we can't afford the
time right now."
"You need to rest," Levi said with concern.
"I'll rest later," she wheezed. "Plenty of time. Alive or
dead."
* * *
SHE USED HER LAST ICE PICKET to
secure them for a final rappel down the ice face. She went first, descending
among lava rocks and big black boulders onto a steep but manageable slope. Then
she held the end of the line as Levi came down.
She didn't look at Josh Fairlie, sprawled faceup on a slab of black rock
nearby.
Levi had no trouble bouncing himself away from the mountain face with his one
good leg. When he hit bottom, though, his leg buckled.
Annja was there, catching him with an arm around him, keeping him from going
all the way to the ground, strewn with sharp black pebbles. She eased him to a
seated position. Then and only then she turned and gazed down at the broken
corpse.
Josh's face was bone-white. The hazel eyes stared sightlessly back the way he'd
come to this sorry state. His head was about half the normal depth; glistening
red surrounded his dead face like a halo and ran down the side of the rock like
wild long hair. She shook her head.
"You don't go easy on yourself, do you?" Levi asked. "You don't
want it to become too easy."
"No. That's the fast track to becoming a monster worse than the ones I
fight against. I don't lose sleep over the men I kill—they're always trying to
kill either me or somebody I've chosen to protect. But I don't ever let myself
take it lightly," she said.
She knelt by the body and gingerly opened the thick yellow-and-blue jacket.
Fortunately it wasn't soaked. She reached inside.
"He was somebody's beautiful baby boy once. Some mother will probably cry
her heart out when she finds out he died broken on this godforsaken mountain.
What I did was right and necessary. He probably deserved it—as punishment, I
mean, not just as an act of self-defense. But it's a terrible responsibility.
And it has to be."
Levi was staring at her wide-eyed. "What on Earth are you doing?"
"Looking for this." She held up his Josh's black pistol. It was a SIG
Sauer P226, very popular among government types, Annja knew from too much
experience. Especially the U.S. Navy SEALs, one of whom Baron had been. She
gripped the top rear of the slide with her left palm, pushed forward with her
right enough to crack the chamber and glimpse the yellow gleam of a shell
casing. Then she locked it up again, stuffed the pistol in her harness and
quickly searched the body for extra magazines. She came up with two. She would
have liked to count cartridges in the magazine in the well but there wasn't
time.
"Right," she said, rising and turning back to her companion.
"Let me help you up. Time to go."
The rabbi looked at her with pain in his eyes. "Annja, you've got to leave
me," he said.
"No." She knelt, slung one of his arms over her shoulder. His usual
schoolboy gallantry forced him to get to his feet—foot—as best he could.
"Come on, now," she said, "we need to keep moving." She
started walking him downslope at an angle, both to make their three-legged
descent easier and to head for the cover of a huge outcrop fifty feet away.
"You're the rationalist, Annja. Be rational now. One of us has a chance to
get away—you, alone. The two of us—one and a half…" He shook his head.
"We have no chance. It's simple mathematics."
"That's not how I do things," she said. "Now keep that foot away
from the rocks or you'll regret it."
"What will we do, then?" Levi asked.
"You hop as long as you can. Then I carry you," she said.
"But—"
"Shut it and hop, please."
He stared at her a moment. Then he did as she said. He was helped by the fact
that she continued to move at an angle downslope. He had to hop or get dragged.
Shots blasted after them. Annja set her jaw. Levi looked back once, then turned
his face forward.
A bullet cracked off stone and tumbled whining past them. The sound set Annja's
nerves on edge. She kept moving. Levi hopped with redoubled vigor.
They reached the outcrop, its black lava covered in razor-edged pockmarks.
Annja dragged Levi hastily behind it. She heard the remaining Young Wolves
baying to each other in angry frustration.
"Wait one," she said, easing Levi down and propping his back against
the boulder. She drew the gun and leaned out around the rock. She lined up the
sights on the first face she saw, which she guessed from the dark goggles was
Baron's, so that it seemed perched like an apple atop the white-dotted front
sight. Then she squeezed off a shot. Followed quickly by another.
She missed both times. On the second shot she actually saw black chips fly from
the ledge three feet below where Baron's head had so abruptly vanished. She
ducked back no less quickly.
Missing didn't bother her…much. One of the trickier feats in marksmanship is
shooting at somebody at a significantly different level than you are. And after
all the difficulty in hitting a target down a sheer slope, with the added
challenge of keeping one's own perch, was probably all that had kept them alive
so far.
Annja's main intent in opening fire was to show their pursuers that the prey
could now reach out and touch them back. Chasing somebody armed with a gun is
always a tough move because it's so easy for them to hole up somewhere and
shoot you from cover or at least concealment, and a nice, stable firing
platform. No matter how fanatical they were—and these boys did seem to be
extreme in their devotion—they had to face the cold truth that if they all got
picked off they'd fail their angry deity, rob Him of His chance to come back
and scour the Earth in fire to show His love. They wouldn't be martyrs, they'd
be failures. So like it or not they had to move more cautiously.
It still sucks I didn't take out Baron, though, she thought. The security man
really did seem to be that good. Given his battle savvy and his command skills
she judged he made up half the effective strength of their opponents. Or more,
given that it was down to him, Charlie, Eli Holden and ex-marine Zack Thompson.
The ex-SEAL was equal to the rest easy, even if you didn't count Charlie
Bostitch as a liability rather than an asset.
"That should keep their heads down," she said, turning back to Levi
and tucking the handgun away. "All right, up you come."
His face was pale with the pain of his broken ankle. To her great relief he
didn't give her any brave go-on-without-me guff this time. "Maybe I can
hop along okay if I hang on to the back of your harness."
"Try that," she said. "If you can't keep up I'll damned well
carry you."
"You wouldn't?" After a moment he shook his head. "What am I
saying? Of course you would."
"In a New York minute," she said as he latched on and she began to
make her way down the rock-strewn slope.
"You're insane, Annja Creed," she heard him say. "But I think
now I know what they mean by divine madness. Truly, you are touched by the
Creator's hand."
"Whatever," she said. "Right now it's the Angels of Death up
there I'm more worried about."
* * *
IT WASN'T EASY CLIMBING DOWN
ARARAT. Especially with Levi left with only one working leg. Apparently Annja's
new ability to shoot back was making the pursuers more cautious. She spotted
them following a good five hundred yards back. Clearly they were waiting for
better terrain to close in and finish their prey.
She took advantage of their wariness to tend to Levi's left ankle. It was
swelling ferociously. They had nothing that would serve adequately as a
bandage; there wasn't any time to go pulling off harnesses and jackets to try
cutting up a shirt to wrap the ankle. She knew none of those things would work
very well anyway. Annja had Levi clamp his teeth on the nylon web tether of a
quickdraw while she untied his boot and relaced it around his injured ankle as
tightly as she could. He thrashed like a gaffed fish but managed not to pull
away.
Going down Ararat was still lots easier than going up the mountain. The
fugitives weren't following anything close to the path they'd taken on the
ascent. As far as the expedition was concerned they were in unknown territory.
Because they couldn't reconnoiter, but had to take pretty much whatever route
they could find on the fly, they couldn't avoid technical climbing.
Oddly, that was easier on Levi than trying to pick his way down on his good
leg. When they had to resort to pitons to keep descending she roped him close
to her, and in daylight mostly unobscured by the clouds that began to
reassemble in late morning they managed to find routes that offered pretty good
handholds. The mountain's igneous rock was good for that, although it quickly
sliced the socks Levi was using as improvised mittens to useless tatters. Then
again, it was getting warmer as they continued their descent. The wind was only
an occasional gust instead of a constant warmth-draining river of cold. And
while they still had to navigate plenty of packed snow and ice they weren't on
ice all the time.
The day ground past in a haze of black rock and panting breath; of cloud
shadows alternating with bright sun. Annja's body and limbs turned to lead
somehow shot through with dull red pain. She ignored it and pushed on.
As Annja expected the pursuit remained circumspect. The Rehoboam Academy types closed the distance again, but never that she could see to less than about fifty
yards. Cover was abundant here, with big jagged boulders and black rock
outcroppings. She didn't have too much trouble keeping something between them
and their pursuers, although with avalanche damage steadily diminishing more
than a few bullets came their way.
For her part, any time Annja glimpsed a face above them she shot at it. It
didn't bother her that she never tagged anyone. She didn't worry about
conserving ammunition; three-high cap magazines were enough for lots of
cautionary shots, and she didn't expect to win a firefight against four trained
men. Anyway, busting caps at them periodically helped keep their minds right.
"Good thing we're in a restricted military zone," she muttered as
they made their way and she got ready to lower Levi down a narrow chute. She
could chimney down like a monkey; but there was no way he was going to, with a
busted or even sprained ankle.
"Why so, Annja?" Levi asked.
"Anybody on the mountain who isn't you or me," she said, "is the
enemy. Down you go."
Though she secured herself well to the top, and used figure eights to brake the
rope as she played it out and let him down by degrees, she still had to let him
down fast. It was rough. His wounded foot banged at least twice against the
unforgiving black stone walls, eliciting choked-off yips of pain. The sheltered
scholar was not strong, quick, or tough. But he was showing incredible
fortitude.
At last she got him to the bottom, if in a little more limp a heap than she
would have liked. Feeling a rising sense of urgency she unroped, recovered her
protection and, putting her back to one wall of the crevice and her boot soles
to the other, free-chimneyed rapidly down to join Levi.
"Let's move," she said, hoisting him up and slinging his arm around
her neck. "I've got a bad feeling—"
With a scream of rage a large male body flew at her from the rocks to her left.