22

Two things hit them halfway up the hundred-foot cliff to the mesa where the lost temple complex awaited.

One was torrential rain, the drops exploding like little mortar shells on the red rocks around them.

The other was a patrol from the Grand Shan State Army, opening fire from the jungle floor a hundred yards away.

“Shit,” Patty said in a voice that sounded more annoyed than scared. She was the lead climber. Annja was poised ten yards beneath Patty. Eddie was a few feet below her, perched on relatively large and stable outcrops while the red-headed photographer hammered in pitons to belay their safety lines. Despite her years Patty Ruhle climbed like a monkey.

The burst hit somewhere too far to be visible. Patty shook her head wearily, glanced at the jungle, then looked down at the others.

“I am definitely getting too old for this,” she said. Then she turned her face resolutely from the danger on the ground and began to climb swiftly and purposefully. More cautiously Eddie and Annja, neither a seasoned climber, followed her.

Annja never knew what happened next. She had too little rock-climbing experience to know whether it was the torrential rains that caused the slippage, or the impact of Patty’s piton going into a fissure in the yellow rock, or the photographer’s weight. Or even just evil luck that caused several hundred pounds of boulder to suddenly split off the face with Patty clinging to it.

“Rock!” she bellowed as she fell. Annja felt an impulse to grab for her. She restrained it. The combined mass of Patty and the rock to which she was already bound by the rope was far too great for Annja to make any difference. In fact it ripped the pitons above Annja right out of the cliff face as it plummeted.

Annja flattened and threw herself to her right. As she did the corrugated rubber soles of her walking shoes lost their purchase. She dropped a foot to slam and then hang spinning helplessly from her own safety rope.

Patty fell past. She caught Annja’s eye. For a moment time seemed to slow. Annja’s frantic brain formed the impression the older woman winked at her. And she saw even in the overcast and the rain the wink of bare steel in the photographer’s left hand. Her son’s knife.

Time resumed. Patty and the fatal rock plunged away with sickening speed. Whipping above them like a festive stream was a cut end of the white-and-blue rope—severed by Patty in a final act of incredible sacrifice and presence of mind.

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, pushing 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, pushing 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, smashing 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 documents 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 lust for adventure conspired to make him a Chinese Indiana Jones. Lost temples and fabulous treasure hoards 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 document 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 anticipated.

Ignoring her, Eddie reached a high point on the wall, where the stone outer sheathing was still intact. He stood upright. “My God, 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.