29

The battle itself exploded.

In an instant, it seemed, Annja found herself surrounded by ships churning the seas with ghostly wakes; raking up lines of spouts with heavy automatic weapons and geysers from misses by rockets, bombs or cannon shells. She had no idea exactly what sort of ordnance was going off. But there was surely a lot of it.

Ships blazed up with light. She saw huge muzzle flashes light the sky like sheet lightning. Explosions flashed, dazzling white. Flames rushed skyward like demons escaping hell.

There had been about twenty vessels in the Red Hand pirate fleet when last Annja saw the overhead imaging in Wira’s study. The Rimba Perak navy had brought ten to twelve surface craft to the party. There was a mix of coastal-patrol vessels ranging in size from mere armed speedboats to Singapore-made bruisers, over fifty meters long and packing 76 mm guns, 30 mm machine cannons, and ship-killing missiles, along with the land-based Harrier attack jets. Though the Red Hand probably outnumbered the Rimba Perak forces in terms of manpower as well as hulls, the superior firepower and discipline of Wira’s men would tip the balance in their favor.

The explosions made the air seem solid. Sometimes it quivered all around her, as if she were trapped in clear gelatin. Other times it just banged on her like big sheets of boiler plate. She felt fear that the sheer high-energy, high-intensity sound produced by the vast quantities of explosives going off all around could permanently damage her brain, destroy her physical coordination or even her ability to focus her thoughts.

Yet she had no thought of going back. Once focused on her goal, she moved toward it inexorably. She would only alter course if a better one suggested itself. Anyway, she was well and truly in the middle of things here. The way back was as at least as hazardous as the way ahead.

She steered around a piece of flaming wreckage that appeared to be the remains of a lifeboat. A small boat with Rimba Perak’s green, gold and red pennants fluttering from its stern sped within a hundred yards to starboard, its twin guns raking a junk on the other side of it. An RPG flashed in its stern, setting off its fuel in a yellow fireball that flew straight up in the sky as the boat lost way. A burst of heavy automatic-cannon fire ripped the air above Annja, making her duck her head reflexively between her shoulders.

From the moment she had started to form the whole deranged scheme in her mind, listening to Wira and Purnoma and the sinister, lovely Lestari in the Sultan’s study the night before, Annja had wondered how she was going to be sure which ship was her target. She had operated on the assumption that it would be pointed out to her in one or more of a number of ways.

So it proved. Just as she started to fear she could never escape the hell boiling over on all sides of her—that if a stray bomb or bullet didn’t wipe her off the planet, a ship churning along at top speed would blindly run her down—she saw a big junk ahead, just starboard of her bow, steaming full speed away from the dogfight. It showed no lights. Nor, more significantly, did it show any sign of gunfire.

It didn’t stay dark for long. Enormous spotlights pinned the junk like horizontal pillars of blue-white light. One of the big corvettes and a patrol craft half its size pursued to port and starboard, converging like sharks.

The junk dwarfed both. It was huge for a wooden ship. It must have been two hundred feet long, its sharply raked stern and bow rising improbably high against the black sky. Annja thought it must have immense engines to thrust it over the waves so rapidly, raising a big green self-luminous wake. Fast as it was, though, it was no match for the two sleek, modern Sultanate craft.

The junk’s deck sparkled with muzzle flashes like a Chinese New Year parade. RPGs buzzed from it to flash against its pursuers’ sloped armor, or hiss harmlessly into the swell. The Rimba Perak ships only returned fire with machine guns and Mauser machine cannon, instead of their missile racks or 76-mm deck guns. That in itself told Annja the fleeing ship must be the Sea Scorpion. And it must be carrying the coffin.

Unless all it’s carrying is the transmitter, she remembered with a jolt of dismay. She turned her inflatable boat’s prow toward it and pushed on at top speed.

In the general battle the grief was not all going one way. The pirates fought back with everything they had, big thudding .50-calibers and buzzing, sparking swarms of RPGs, as well as a constant hailstorm rattle of small arms. Off her starboard quarter Annja saw the long low shape of a Rimba Perak cutter ablaze from knife prow to stern. Even as she watched its magazine erupted in a colossal blast shot through with pulsating flame and flickering flashes as minor munitions cooked off. It broke in two and began sinking, with a hissing audible even above the cosmic racket of the battle, below the waves.

Ahead, the two Sultanate ships closed with the big junk. Annja saw what she thought were grapnel lines arcing toward the fleeing vessel. The pursuing ships came in right under the junk’s looming counters. Men began to swarm up the lines and scale the sheer wooden sides of the hull. Grenades flash-cracked on deck. Assault rifles flared. Annja bit her lip as commandos dropped to the waves like dark fruit.

Wira! she thought. He would certainly be among the first to board.

She broke clear of the battle. It actually seemed strange not to be surrounded by volcanic upheavals of fire and noise. The big junk had lost way; she was gaining on it. Her heart sped up.

Sirens hooted from the Rimba Perak ships. They cast off or cut the lines holding them fast to the junk, which now lay dead in the water and was beginning to drift counterclockwise. The big corvette, which Annja felt certain was Wira’s flagship, swung the huge blinding white eye of its searchlight around.

Directly toward Annja.

But no, the beam did not strike her. It shone almost directly back over her head. At the same time the corvette’s machine-cannon opened fire. Red tracers lanced above her with sky-ripping noise.

She turned her head. A hundred-foot-long junk was bearing down on her. The Rimba Perak searchlight lit its crimson forecastle and the staring eyes painted on either side of the bow like a stage.

Annja’s Zodiac moved faster. She was in no danger of being run down. But she saw faces, bleached pallid in the multimillion-candlepower beam, staring at her. Arms pointed right at her.

Kalashnikovs began to wink orange fire at her from the rail. Bullets kicked up little spurts of water all around her small craft. A heavy machine gun raked the water toward her, its thumb-sized bullets sending up water spouts as high as a house.

Annja watched in helpless fascination. Absently she tried to keep steering straight for the Sea Scorpion. The risk of being run down by the Rimba Perak warships, or plowing into the junk’s squared-off stern, seemed the least of Annja’s worries.

Above and to the right of the onrushing junk, a star caught Annja’s eye. With everything else going on—all of it with a whole lot more immediate significance for her personal survival than astronomical phenomena—she wasn’t sure why.

Then she realized it was getting larger and brighter. Rapidly.

The junk’s whole stern blew up in a flash that lit the sky white from horizon to horizon. Annja saw debris, shattered planks and what she thought were twisting human bodies flying skyward in a pillar of yellow flame. With a whistling roar the Harrier jet that had launched the guided missile flashed over Annja’s boat. The doomed junk, engine shattered, its tall stern enveloped in a fireball, began to fall away to its own portside.

Annja looked forward. The Rimba Perak naval craft had sheered off on diverging courses. She guessed they were intent on preventing pirate craft from coming to their leader’s aid. Not that any seemed eager to do so, especially after the abrupt fate of the one ship that tried. A quick glance back showed the battle spreading out, as if the pirate fleet’s survivors were scattering like a covey of frightened quail.

The Sea Scorpion’s stern loomed above her like a dark wooden cliff. She throttled back. The Zodiac’s hard nose nuzzled the big ship to the starboard of its huge wooden rudder like an amorous dolphin.

She reached into her seabag for her grapnel gun. I’m getting to be an old pro at this, she thought, and brought it to her shoulder.

ANNJA WASN’T SURPRISED to find no one guarding the stern. Several still bodies lay about the deck, which was slick with blood and hazardous from bushels of empty shell casings, tinkling like tiny brass chimes as they rolled in shoals to and fro as the ship moved with the waves. Since both sides favored dark clothing for nocturnal operations, she had no idea who the dead were. Shouts and shots came from up ahead, seemingly up out of the hold.

She picked her way carefully forward to avoid slipping on the spent casings. Then she froze and ducked down in the shelter of a yard-tall coil of cable as thick as her arm.

Men were clambering over the starboard rail. Dark-clad men with dark masks hiding their faces. They carried suppressed machine pistols. Sword hilts with cross-shaped guards jutted above each man’s shoulder.

“Oh, dear,” Annja said softly. Somehow, the Knights of the Risen Savior had joined the party.

The sloping deck offered plenty of cover for Annja to sneak forward. The Knights seemed focused single-mindedly on the noisy battle raging belowdecks. They showed no interest in securing the top deck.

Moving from hiding point to hiding point Annja found a hatch. It opened into darkness. She reached down, felt until she found a ladder. Then she climbed down, closing the hatch after her.

Black enfolded her. Her eyes adjusted slowly after the flash and flare of the naval battle. She reached tentative hands out to explore as her surroundings came dimly into view. She found herself in a world of closely fitted planking, a narrow gangway with a low overhead.

It smelled better than Annja had expected the inside of a notorious pirate vessel to smell. Apparently Eddie Cao Cao insisted on certain standards aboard his flagship. Assuming that was really where she was, of course.

That didn’t mean it smelled good. She could detect stale sweat, bilge water, diesel oil, burned lubricants, various forms of mildew and mold. She also smelled disinfectant and layer upon ancient layer of varnish.

Yellow light spilling beneath a doorway ahead faintly lit the gangway. The noise of combat came from beyond it. Sword in hand Annja crept cautiously forward.

It was like being inside a living thing. Ships move. Not just in terms of rolling and pitching and yawing in response to the vast irresistible motions of the sea. But internally, flexing, shifting.

A big wooden ship did so much more than a metal one. It was Annja’s first time on board such a ship, of such a size, on the open sea. All around her the junk shifted and creaked and groaned.

There was one thing she did not feel or hear—the throb of big nautical engines. Apparently either the pirates had shut them down, or the invaders had shut them off for them.

Listening at the door did little more than confirm that fighting was going on close by. Possibly right on the door’s other side. She reached for the rope latch, pulled the door open enough to peek through.

A number of stacked crates and objects swathed in gray or blue plastic tarps stood stacked left and right. The space beyond them opened up into a large hold with a kind of gallery or walkway running around it. Lamps hanging from the overhead lit it badly.

There was no mistaking the crate containing the coffin in the hold’s center. All around it men fought.

Dark-clad fighters pressed in from both sides, the Rimba Perak commandos from Annja’s left, the Knights from the right. A knot of pirates was being forced back upon the crate. Only a handful remained. But they were fighting hard. Annja saw Knights and commandos die as well as pirates.

For whatever reason the shooting and grenades had been dropped in favor of hand-to-hand combat. Most likely everyone, pirates included, feared damaging the precious artifact they battled over.

Annja smiled slightly. Maybe Wira wasn’t so eager to send it to the bottom, after all, she thought.

She could make out little more. A pair of pirates crouched before her, backs to her, in the passageway between the crates.

She saw him then—Wira. At first she didn’t recognize him. Like his men he wore indigo battle dress, although his long hair was confined by a midnight head-rag like one of the pirates. Her heart jumped in her chest. He waded into the enemy ahead of his men, laying about with his sword. A huge pirate with an even bigger bare belly swung an outsize battle-ax at him. He ducked the blow, slashed the man across the shins. The pirate screamed, bent to clutch at himself. Wira split his shaven skull.

A tall figure dressed in a scarlet tunic stepped forward. He carried a pair of butterfly swords, single-edged weapons with metal knuckle-bows and short, heavy blades almost like cleavers. He had a square, handsome face and neatly trimmed black hair and beard. He called something in a commanding voice.

The pirates disengaged and drew back against the crate. The fighting stopped. Apparently both Knights and commandos were willing to wait and see how events proceeded.

The two pirates crouched in front of Annja weren’t, though. Unseen by the combatants, back there in deep shadow, they raised Kalashnikovs to aim at the young Sultan.

Annja glided forward. She struck twice. Her blade bit deep. Both pirates fell without a sound.

No one looked their way. Wira and the man with the two swords and the commanding presence came together in a clash of steel.

Eddie Cao Cao caught Wira’s downstroke with his swords in an upward X. Before he could riposte the Sultan side-kicked him in the flat belly. The pirate leader slammed back against the crate. His powerful upper body swayed alarmingly over it.

Wira darted forward, slashing backhand for his opponent’s chest. Cao Cao had feigned some of his loss of balance. He blocked across his body with his left-hand sword held upward. His edge skirled off Wira’s. The pirate spun around, crouching, slashing for Wira’s right knee with the blade in his right hand.

Wira jumped astonishingly high in the air. The broad blade swiped harmlessly beneath his boot.

As he came down he slashed a whirring blow at Cao Cao’s head. The pirate lord blocked with his left sword. Then he slashed the young Sultan across the stomach with his other weapon.

Wira jumped back. A line of skin appeared, pale against the midnight blue of his blouse. The middle of it was a shocking scarlet line.

Annja’s shout was lost in the general roar of dismay from the commandos and—she thought—the Knights, and approval from the surviving pirates.

Wira seemed to freeze, staring down at himself as if paralyzed with horror, at the pain, at the sight of his own blood, at the shock of having his sacred person so violated. Annja felt sick. He should never have come there. She glanced frantically around for the rifles dropped by the men she had silently dispatched. Both corpses lay atop their weapons.

Grinning like a shark, Cao Cao advanced for the kill.

Cocking his right butterfly sword back over his shoulder the pirate thrust his left one for the Sultan’s wide-open chest.

The young Sultan moved with shocking speed. His sword flashed across his body, right to left. It struck the stabbing blade and knocked it across his opponent’s broad chest. Turning his wrist sidearm Wira slashed backhand right over the top of the pirate’s sword arm.

His curved blade sliced Cao Cao’s throat. Blood spurting, the pirate leader took several steps back. His head lolled to one side. He fell.

The hold was silent.

For a moment Wira stood gazing down at his fallen foe, chest heaving. Blood streamed from the gash across his belly, wetly glistening black against the dark fabric of his uniform. With a flick of his wrist he cleared blood from his curved blade.

Then he raised his head to look at the surviving pirates. Only five remained standing. The ragged men instantly threw down their weapons. Turning inward toward the crate they went to their knees and laced hands behind their heads.

Evidently they knew the drill. As well they ought. They’d inflicted it on others often enough.

For a moment Annja feared one or the other group would simply massacre the surrendered men where they knelt. She had no objection to cutting them down in the heat of battle. But killing in cold blood went against her grain.

Perhaps they merited death these men—they served with the most bloody-handed and merciless pirate gang in the South China Sea, which probably meant the world. But what if all wasn’t as it appeared? What if they were recent recruits, maybe even conscripts whose obedience was secured by threats against their families? They had fought fiercely at Eddie Cao Cao’s side. But had they any choice? When not one but two packs of highly trained, highly motivated and thoroughly ruthless killers swarmed aboard the great junk, the only available options were fight or die.

It was pure speculation, of course. Annja had no way of knowing.

As if noticing them for the first time, Wira stared past the crate, its yellow-pine sides defiled with shocking bright spatters of blood, at the Knights. The two groups, who had relaxed subconsciously at the fall of the pirate king, went tense. They glared at each other from blacked-out faces—dog packs contesting an alley.

Annja thought one of the Rimba Perak commandos swung up his submachine gun first. The Knights did likewise. Suddenly the rival forces were aiming at each other with automatic weapons, separated by no more than a dozen feet of deck slick with blood.

My turn, Annja thought. She straightened and strode forward from between the piled crates, right between the barrels of the too-ready guns.