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.

A terrible agonized scream pealed from right beside Annja's right elbow. It was loud enough not just to be audible but painful even above the ear-punishing racket of a.s.sault rifles cracking off close on either side.

Annja threw the empty launcher away from her as if it were hot and spun.

Tony squatted at her side. He had his hands cupped around his mouth, which was wide open. He rolled his eyes at her.

"How'd I do?" he asked.

"Great," Annja said, a little unsteadily. A beat late she realized his unearthly shriek was intended to convince the enemy their ridiculously poorly aimed fusillade was having lethal effects. The kid was a natural, no question. "Now yell what I told you to," she said.

His inhalation seemed to swell his skinny body to twice its normal size. "Run away!" he screamed.

Laughing, the Protectors threw away their emptied weapons. They refused to fight with them, both for the cogent reasons they expressed and also, Annja suspected, because they thought them unmanly.

But the Protectors loved a good ruse. The sneakier and more underhanded the better. They were only too happy to fire the captured firearms once Easy persuaded them they were only noisemakers, to bait the trap. There was something seemingly universal in the human animal that absolutely loved making loud noises, especially when accompanied by big flashes of fire. She wondered what Phil Kennedy would make of that.

Wish I could ask him, she thought with a twinge.

She joined her companions racing into the jungle. Behind them the Shans, shouting in triumph, began to advance in cautious pursuit.

"ALL RIGHT, EASY," the young woman said softly to herself. "Piece of cake."

In each strong hand she held the pistol grip of an American-made M-16, recovered from Wa Army men unexpectedly recalled to their Lord. Each had a full 30-round magazine in the well. She carried no reloads. If all went well, she wouldn't need them.

And if things went poorly...she wouldn't need them, either.

The plans were all laid out for a faux ambush similar to the one she knew Annja Creed should be stage-managing scarcely half a mile away that same moment. Even as she thought that, firing broke out furiously from not very far behind her. She smiled.

Easy had tossed the plans promptly in the dustbin when her Protector scouts, slipping from the jungle as effortlessly and undetectably as wraiths, announced that the Wa patrol they were shadowing was just about to pa.s.s within thirty yards of a dead bold-or dismally lost-Shan patrol on a roughly reciprocal heading.

It was too good an opportunity to pa.s.s up.

She had shucked off her pack, all her gear except the lightweight tropical-pattern shoulder holsters that held her custom-made Sphinxes, sent them off with her escorts scampering for what should be relative safety a quarter mile deeper into the ruined temple complex.

Now she crouched clad only in black sports bra, cargo shorts and hiking boots, taking deep abdominal breaths to calm herself. To either side she heard the sounds of the mutually hostile patrols-boots crunching leaf litter, branches crashing, voices laughing or cursing, depending on whether the speaker was the man who got hit in the face by a branch or an amused bystander. The only thing that kept each column of twenty or so men from hearing the other was their own noise.

She drew in one last breath. Then, crossing her arms beneath her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to point the two black rifles to right and left, she launched herself in a dead run right between the pa.s.sing enemy patrols.

27.

As she ran flat out Easy Ngwenya ripped short bursts from both rifles. To her left ran a low course of ruined wall, with one full window arch, thoroughly entwined in vines, intact. To her right nothing but a thin screen of vegetation stood between her and a score of hostile heavily armed intruders.

She didn't aim. That wasn't possible. Nonetheless, from the corner of her eye she saw the dark-uniformed Shan point man on her left crumple like an empty sack without so much as twitching his Kalashnikov. She felt the old hunter's exultation at drawing blood.

Just run! she ordered herself, and did.

Gunfire rattled in her wake as if she were a running fuse lighting off strings of firecrackers in pa.s.sing. These were not troops disciplined enough to aim under the best of circ.u.mstances. They fired not at her but at the flash of motion and flickering fire that tore at the edges of their peripheral vision. By that time they were too late-except for hosing their equally astonished opposite numbers thirty yards away through the bush. Easy was in no danger from the men she pa.s.sed beyond the usual stray-round risk.

The problem was the tumult inevitably alerted the men in front of her, as well.

Well, the Easy way wasn't always the easy easy way. Not for E.C. way. Not for E.C.

The air before her was suddenly ripped by muzzle-flames and blasts so terribly loud and powerful that the air itself seemed to shake. She unwound her arms. Her lightweight a.s.sault rifles were almost empty.

Her head snapped right. She caught a flash picture across the right-hand weapon's open sights on the ma.s.s of a man's chest. She held down the trigger, knowing the well was nearly dry.

Two shots snapped out before the bolt locked back. One must've hit. He started down.

She was already whipping her head the other way, lining up a second quick sight picture on a Shan fighter, trying to will her vision past the huge yellow flame billowing from his Kalashnikov's muzzle brake. She fired high.

The last round in her left-hand magazine snapped his head back. He toppled backward, dropping his heavy Russian-made gun.

She dived forward, letting the empty rifles fall. She landed in a forward roll but instead of snapping upright into the crossfire of the last elements of both patrols she came up on all fours and scuttled through the gra.s.s like a lithe lizard.

The near-panicked militiamen shot high. She made it to the comforting green embrace of the undergrowth unscathed. Ignoring thorns that raked her cheeks, arms and thighs, she slipped inside and was gone before the patrols even knew what had hit them.

"I FAILED," EASY SAID.

"We didn't fail," Annja said, hunkering down beside her in the plaza among the great stone ruins. Evening gloom gathered particle by mauve particle. It suited the mood. "You didn't fail." didn't fail."

"Tell that to them," Easy said, gesturing.

Five dead tribesmen lay under woven reed mats. Half a dozen wounded men moaned in the huts. The Protector women had gently but firmly chased Annja away when she tried to help care for them. Belatedly it struck her the Protectors probably had experience dealing with battle trauma. In fact, given the way their world was changing, she realized they probably knew quite a bit about bullet and high-speed fragment injuries, as well.

They had accepted with smiles of grat.i.tude when Annja turned over her meager stock of medical supplies to them. These weren't as meager as they might have been-the Protectors had recovered Eddie Chen's body and backpack after sunset the first night here.

"Look," Annja said. "Your tactic worked-we got the two armies to fight."

"But it isn't stopping them," Easy said. She hunkered down with her arms draped over her bare thighs and her head hanging. "They just keep pushing toward the center of the mesa trying to get around one another's flanks."

Annja sat back on her own heels. It was true enough. That was where their plan, admittedly, had gone awry. Rather than simply going for each other, the two sets of invaders kept driving inward, dogfighting as they went. In the process they brought more force to bear than the spa.r.s.e Protector warriors could handle, even with b.o.o.by traps for force multipliers.

"We couldn't foresee that," Annja said. "It is delaying them. The Protectors are delaying them some, too."

Easy looked at her. "Do you really think that's going to be enough?"