13

Annja was arguing in French with the pilot of the small airplane.

It concerned the firefight quite unmistakably taking place on the airstrip of the tiny island they were descending toward.

“I am a charter pilot, not a mercenary,” the pilot shouted excitedly over the roar of his two engines. He was a wiry man whom she guessed to be middle-aged, although some of what she took for aging may simply have been the result of years of overexposure to the sun. His blue eyes contrasted madly with skin like old leather. He had a thatch of stiff, straw-colored hair and dark glasses perched on a beaky nose. He wore blue denim shorts, a blue denim shirt, and white deck shoes without socks. He had a gold chain around his right wrist and a big multifunction watch on his left.

The curiously shaped plane, with its twin tail booms and propellers in front of and behind the cabin, wallowed from side to side. Annja wondered whether that was due to winds close to the waves and nearing land, or whether he was that jittery. “I am not paid to land in a war zone!”

“But I’ve got to get down there,” Annja said. She sat in the right-hand seat. She was dressed in a cream-yellow short-sleeved shirt and khaki cargo shorts. Her ponytail was passed out the back of a tan baseball cap. Wraparound amber sunglasses that were unobtrusively also shooting glasses covered her eyes. She had come dressed for trouble.

Evidently she had found it. Earlier than she could possibly have anticipated.

The engines whined as the pilot pulled back on the yoke. He ignored Annja’s plea. The island and its black X of landing strip swept by beneath.

“See?” she said. “Nobody’s shooting at us.”

“That’s how I like to keep it!” he shouted.

Of all things a C-130 Hercules sat toward the middle of the strip, which occupied much of the low western end of the island of Le Rêve. The island resembled a kidney bean with its smoothly curved side facing south and a concavity that looked too gradual and shallow to provide much of a harbor on the north. Eastward from the strip the island rose in a series of densely forested hills. On one of them stood the astronomical observatory her contact had mentioned.

The four propellers of the Hercules were spinning but clearly feathered. The fat cargo plane wasn’t moving. Men fought around the aircraft and the nearby cluster of buildings, mostly Quonset-style huts and manufactured-looking wooden structures with pitched roofs. They fired at one another from the ground, around the buildings, over stacks of colorful plastic drums. From the air there was no telling them apart—they all wore sand-colored battle dress. She didn’t even have a clue how many factions there were. It might be massively multiplayer war down there.

I wonder if some of them were my late-night visitors? Annja thought. Naturally they wouldn’t be obtuse enough to wear black uniforms in broad daylight.

“I feel your pain,” the pilot said, banking right, to the north. “But if I get shot I’ll feel my pain more.”

She wanted to tell him no one would shoot at them. That stuck on her tongue. She wasn’t at all sure it was true. It was just as likely both sides, or however many, would assume the light plane was reinforcements for the opposition. Then everybody would shoot at them.

“But I came all this way from America!” She had chartered the aircraft on the French-owned island of Nuku Hiva, sixty miles of open water to the northwest. Her informants told her that the Solomon Kane had made landfall shortly before dawn that morning.

So challenging had it been to make the proper connections to get there, the slow surface-going vessel had beaten her.

Her pilot shook his head. He continued his bank, turning back toward Nuku Hiva. “You must learn to accept disappointment,” he said, leveling the wings. “It is part of life.”

She grubbed in her pocket and brought out her wallet. “A thousand dollars if you get me onto the island.”

He turned to blink at her through his aviator glasses.

THE WIND BLEW from the west. The airplane came in low over green water from the east, heading into it, so it could slow to the lowest possible ground speed before falling out of the air. Fortunately, the larger of the two runways ran east-west. If the plane had been forced to land in a crosswind the pilot probably wouldn’t have done it for any amount of money.

Then again, landing wasn’t exactly on the agenda. There was a limit to what Annja would get even for a thousand dollars.

The Frenchman cranked down the landing gear as the island approached. The plane rocked and tried to rise as they swept across the foam-flecked beach and hot air flowed upward from the land. Annja swiveled her head left and right. She was looking for combatants.

There were none to be seen. She was pretty sure they were still shooting at one another as energetically as before. But they were doing it from behind cover. Approaching ground level she and the pilot no longer had the height advantage to spot them.

The tires kissed the runway with nervous squeals and a quick kick to the tailbone. Annja unfastened her safety harness. It seemed a pretty foolhardy thing to be doing, under the circumstances.

The airplane vibrated. It was already shaking pretty comprehensively—this felt different.

A hole rimmed in white, as if with frost, appeared in the front windscreen just to the left of the driver’s head. A crack filled the cockpit. Annja felt something buffet her lips, like a light tap from someone’s fingers.

A hole appeared in the window beside her head. She had felt a bullet’s wind of passage.

“That’s it!” the pilot screamed in a shrill voice. “I am out of here!”

She reached out and seized the yoke with her left hand. “If you don’t do what you promised,” she yelled, “I’ll crash us.”

He glanced at her. What he saw in her expression evidently convinced him she wasn’t kidding.

She wasn’t. We’re on the ground, she thought fiercely. We’d survive. Probably.

He kept the aircraft on the ground. He continued to slow. They passed the stationary Hercules on their left. Then they were past the cluster of structures.

“This is it!” he shouted. “You must go now.”

She looked out her window, the one with the hole. The airspeed indicator had them going about twenty miles an hour. It still seemed pretty fast.

“This is probably a bad idea,” Annja said. She yanked open her door. Clutching her day-pack to her chest she rolled out.

She hit the hot blacktop, bounced, rolled. Her teeth clacked together. Immediately the airplane’s engines howled as the pilot jammed the throttle to the stops so hard he must have bent the handle. The little red-and-white plane scooted away, rapidly picking up speed.

Annja stopped rolling after fifty feet. One of the benefits of her martial arts practice, along with gymnastics training and yoga, was enhanced body awareness. She already knew two things—nothing was broken, and she’d ache for days.

The plane seemed not so much to lift off as run out of island. It just skimmed the waves for a moment, then began to climb. Annja rolled into the ditch beside the runway. She was thankful the pilot had gotten away okay. He really hadn’t signed on for a hot landing zone.

And he had done what she paid him for—delivered her intact. Mostly, she thought, feeling bruises develop on her hips, buttocks and shoulder.

She let her pack slide to the bottom of the ditch. It was lined with weeds and litter that, she hoped, didn’t house anything too venomous that bit. Or anything that bit too hard. She looked back along the runway toward the airfield buildings and the C-130.

The big cargo plane was lumbering into motion, turning onto the runway as if to taxi for a takeoff. She guessed it would have to go all the way to the east end to get a long enough takeoff roll. She knew the Hercules could take off on a fairly short runway—surprising what you learned, when you knocked around the world as much as she did, not to mention got knocked around by it—but it was still a great wallowing beast, and short was relative.

Then she saw men running toward her on her side of the runway. Her lips skinned back from her teeth. They were white guys, beefy, not fat like some private military contractors, or overly ripped like ’roid rats. They looked as if their skins were stuffed with muscle like sausages, the way U.S. Army troops in peak training form did. Are they the guys who broke into my loft? she wondered. The odds seemed good they were from Millstone’s bunch. Especially when she spotted sword hilts stuck up incongruously from behind their shoulders.

They carried submachine guns or carbines. That put her in a bind. She doubted they intended to kill her. She figured Americans would be conditioned against shooting a white woman without extreme provocation. If they did want her dead, the sensible way to do it was from a distance, by shooting her, that being what guns did and all. But if they wanted to take her prisoner, they could neutralize the advantage of her sword and the surprise factor it gave her just by acting professionally.

Bullets kicked up sand around the men. Two fell. The others dove into the ditch on Annja’s side and began returning fire. Someone across the way had ripped them with a light machine gun.

The five survivors forgot totally about Annja for the moment. Taking advantage of the distraction she jumped up out of the ditch and darted for a stand of palms thirty yards or so behind her.

With every step she expected to feel bullets lancing like needles through her back. But the opposition forces, whoever they were, didn’t seem interested in her, either. People shooting at them were much more interesting than someone running away from them. She reached the shade of the palms and threw herself down in the pale sand between two of them.

She looked back in time to see the Hercules lumbering down the strip, following the path the smaller aircraft had taken with its touch-and-go. It struck her as dead-brave or at least desperate, to run the gauntlet of fire like that. The machine gun sounded. The burly cargo plane could probably absorb vast numbers of the fast but little bullets. She wasn’t so sure about the aircrew.

It was academic. Just before the plane drew even with her she heard a nasty crack, its ultra high-frequency and energy harmonics paining her eardrums from fifty yards away. A white flash and a cloud of debris flew away from the outboard engine on the plane’s far side.

A big plume of black smoke immediately streamed back from the stricken engine. The propeller slowed to visibility. The C-130 trundled onwards. Can it take off on three engines? Annja wondered. The pilot seemed determined to try.

The coffin must be aboard, she realized with a shock. They’re trying to get it away at any cost.

This time she saw a white comet, blindingly bright, streak from among the buildings on the strip’s far side. Someone was firing missiles at the huge airplane. This one hit the undercarriage, blasting half of it to wreckage. The airplane pivoted like a hippo ballerina and went in to the ditch.

Annja scrunched up her face and flattened herself, expecting an orange fireball and a rolling blast-wave. In fact, lots of nothing happened. The aircraft just lay there with its huge tailplane upraised. The propellers of the three surviving engines began to slow to join that of the disabled one, which had completely stopped spinning. The pilot had evidently switched them off.

From Annja’s right came the crack of grenades and a fresh outburst of shooting. The men who had started toward Annja gestured that way in evident agitation. Looking, Annja could see explosions on her side of the strip. A wooden outbuilding went up in orange flames and greasy black smoke.

Farther along, the American-looking fighters were laying down their weapons and standing up with their hands behind their heads. Their opponents, their identities still mysterious to Annja, had apparently turned their far flank and gotten in behind them, starting to roll up their line. With their tactical position untenable and the airplane carrying their priceless relic nose-down in the ditch, the Americans had no choice but to surrender.

Dense undergrowth grew down to within forty yards of the palm trees where Annja had taken shelter. Hoping the trees would screen her—and the victors wouldn’t look too hard her way—Annja began to speed-crawl on elbows and belly toward the cover of the brush.