No, Annja thought. No, I don't. She refused to say it. But she couldn't deny it.

The Protectors only maintained live b.o.o.by traps in a zone around the perimeter of the mesa itself. With a millennium to work on their techniques they clearly had means of keeping track of where the traps were laid, but it was simply too hazardous leaving them all over the place where the drunk or merely inattentive might stumble into them. Or children at play. Also it took work; the Shan Plateau was dry by the standards of lowland Southeast Asia, but that still made it pretty wet by the standards of most other places. Things rotted quickly in the jungle.

The Protectors had displayed remarkable speed and efficiency setting traps to guide the rival ethnic armies into colliding. But that was in a very limited area. They didn't have time to set enough to halt the progress of the rolling gunfight that threatened the heart of their tiny nation.

Ironically, once caught up in a running gunfight, the invaders were less inclined to be slowed by threat of b.o.o.by traps or ambush, rather than more. Walking cold-bloodedly into a mysterious, unfamiliar jungle, knowing some awful fate might take you at any minute, would grind down anybody's nerves. And when somebody did trip a deadfall-or vanished from the rear of a marching file, never to be seen again-what was bad enough in fact was magnified tenfold in emotional impact.

But when blood was hot, and spilling freely, and caps were being busted all around-it was war and men would face ridiculous threats without a second thought.

If nothing else, by dint of Easy hopping and expostulating in energetic Chinese, the Protectors had allowed themselves to be talked out of their taboo against using modern weapons pretty quickly, once it became lethally obvious that blow darts and bows were decisively overmatched in the situation. The Zulu woman struck Annja as remarkably persuasive.

For her part Annja felt vaguely like the serpent in the Garden of Eden for helping introduce them to firearms.

Some village men came in with AK-47s. Their famed ease of use had come in handy, and there were fairly abundant numbers available to be scavenged by people adept at sneaking through the woods.

Easy roused herself to go listen to their report. Exhausted by her own part in the day's strenuous events, Annja sat below a crumbling edifice and rested. In a couple minutes Easy returned.

"They say both sides have stopped for the night," she reported. "They don't like doing anything in the dark. Especially with all the danger from traps and ambushes. But they're already a quarter of the way here."

Annja grimaced. There were, as she appreciated even more keenly now than she had this morning, infinite ways a battle could shape up. The way this one had the only issue was whether the Protectors, and the timeless treasure they guarded with their lives, got overrun tomorrow or in a week. In either case the outcome looked inevitable.

"Quite," Easy said. Annja looked up at her. "Unless the Tatmadaw notices all the noise up here and decides to join in. Won't that be fun?"

"You have ESP, too," Annja said.

"I do," Easy said, with a tired little laugh, "but it's hardly necessary. Your thoughts show as clearly as if your forehead was an LCD screen. Under the circ.u.mstances, they're pretty inevitable thoughts, really."

"Maybe." Annja stood up. "But we aren't dead yet. And while there's life, there's-well, not hope, maybe. But there's always something we can do!"

"Like what?" Easy said.

Annja sucked in a deep breath and let it out. Her head sagged; it felt like lead. But she would not let herself slump.

"I don't know," she said. "But there's one rule I live by."

"And that is?"

"When in doubt, bust stuff up."

ANNJA HEARD THE SOBBING from several feet away.

The woman sat just inside the brush that surrounded the central plaza. She had her knees drawn up and her arms clasped tightly about them. A huge, nearly intact structure rose to her right. The moon came up over the forest to the east.

Annja sat down by her side. She said nothing. Only waited.

"I'm afraid," Easy said in a broken voice.

Annja looked at her. Her normal impudent-arrogant-poise had deserted her. Its departure deflated her, left her looking like a small adolescent girl.

"Why?" Annja asked. "You don't seem to be afraid of death."

"Oh, I am," Easy said. Strangely, saying that seemed to calm her. If only slightly. "But that's not what really scares me."

Annja herself felt terrified. In action she settled into a sort of mindful trance-maintaining the invaluable presence of mind that was life in combat or any kind of blood crisis. Some of her combat instructors, like ex-SAS operator Angus, had remarked upon her gift. It was rare, naturally possessed by one in a thousand, or ten thousand, or even a million. All of special-operations training was designed to impart that ability. And even then it succeeded only part of the time.

But nothing made danger's imminence any easier to take.

Easy uttered a bitter laugh. "Death seems the easy way out right now."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that where you're concerned, the Easy way is really the hard way," Annja said.

"Found out for the fraud I am!" This time her laugh sounded more genuine. Annja felt a quick rush of relief. Maybe I'm getting through.

It was strange. We started as rivals, she thought. Adversaries on opposite sides of law-and right, she still believed, although she had long recognized those as two very different things. Then I hated her, as much as I've ever hated anyone.

Now I feel like her big sister.

She reached out an arm and hugged the woman to her. Easy almost melted into her. Annja held her for several minutes while she clung and sobbed as if her heart were broken.

At last the pa.s.sion of grief and fear pa.s.sed. Easy pulled away and smiled feebly. "I'm acting quite the fearless action heroine, aren't I?"

"You're acting human," Annja said. "Unfortunately, what we all need-me, the Protectors, even you-is the action heroine back."

Easy shook her head. "If only that were really me. And not just a pose."

"You feel like a phony?" Annja asked.

Easy nodded. "Just a little girl trying to get her daddy's attention. Maybe, if I am very, very good, his approval. Yet when I well and truly caught the attention of the parental unit the resulting explosion launched me an entire continent away."

"Welcome to the world, Princess," Annja said, surprised her own tone sounded bitter, and slightly embarra.s.sed by it. "Everybody feels like a phony. Everybody lives in fear of being found out." She laughed, a little too sharply. "Heck, I thought you might be the exception."

"Not me," Easy said. "Overcompensation is my middle name."

"I thought it was Calf."

Easy goggled at her a moment. This time her laugh was free and clear.

But she clouded over again almost at once, huddled back over herself. "I thought I was so clever. Let's get the red ants and the black ants to fight. I thought it was the answer to all our problems."

"So did I," Annja said. "So did the Protectors. It wasn't just our best shot, Easy. It was a good idea."

"But it didn't work."

Annja shrugged. "Well, good ideas don't always. And sometimes bad ones do. The best we can do is the best we can do."

Easy sniffled loudly twice. Then she sighed. "You're not going to allow me to indulge in self-pity, are you?" she asked.

"Nope," Annja said. "Not now. Maybe later. If we, you know, live."

Easy lifted her head and smiled at her. "You give me so much to look forward to."

Annja shrugged.

They sat in silence. Fifty yards away the villagers sat and talked or played soft music on reed flutes, among the firelit faces of the ancient walls of stone they had protected for a millennium from all enemies except the one no human wit nor valor could overcome-time. Around it all the nocturnal noise of the jungle wrapped like a membrane of noise, rea.s.suring somehow.

"Did you really kill a lion with a spear?" Annja asked.

"Oh, yes. And somehow managed not to get disemboweled in the process. Frightfully silly thing to do. Daddy was fearfully angry with Old Tom. He was his chief conservation officer. Which really meant huntsman. huntsman. Only it's shocking bad publicity to call it that." Only it's shocking bad publicity to call it that."

Annja shook her head more in wonder than disbelief. "What on earth made you do a thing like that?"

"Bravado. I was raised to a warrior tradition. Also I had a need to prove I was the equal of any man, and then some. My father, you'll doubtless be shocked speechless to learn, was always disappointed his first-born, and as things turned out his only born, wasn't male. So I tried to show him I was good enough."

"But a spear?"

Easy shrugged. "Hunting lion with a rifle didn't seem much of a challenge. All you need to do is keep your wits about you to place your shot properly, and the poor beast rolls up at your feet dead as a stone. I never really understood how some people managed to panic and get themselves killed."

Easy c.o.c.ked her head. Then she grinned. "Ah, yes. The ability to keep one's head in danger. A gift we share, I take it. Given that we've both survived our respective follies."

Annja managed to bite down on the words so far. so far.

"I read about the Masai rite of pa.s.sage," Easy went on, "where young boys proved themselves by killing a lion with a spear. Or proved their unfitness, and got out of the gene pool at the same time. I must admit a certain adolescent ethnic pride came into play-a tribal princess was not going to be outdone by a bunch of primitive gawks who wear caps made of red clay and cow c.r.a.p on their heads."

Annja laughed.

"We're similar, Annja Creed," Easy said. "We're both rather too smart for our own good, with a tendency to overintellectualize. What saves us from the sterile ivory tower lives that most of our fellow intellectuals lead is a tendency to put our heads down and charge in straightaway, trusting to our improvisational skills to take us through. And a little bit of luck. Or am I mistaken?"

"No," Annja said, drawing it out, shaking her head. "I'd call it a pretty spot-on a.s.sessment. Even if a little uncomfortable."

"We can never be a great team," Easy went on earnestly, "precisely because we're so much alike. Our strengths and weaknesses overlap, rather than complement each other. In the present case, however, two women who are our precise kind of crazy may be exactly what's needed."

"And if it's not," Annja said, "we probably won't live long enough to worry about it much."

"Here, now!" Easy said sternly. "I thought you were in charge of positive thinking."

"Me? I thought it was your your job!" Annja exclaimed. job!" Annja exclaimed.

They laughed. Probably, more than it was worth. But it kept them from breaking...

28.

"The neighbors mocked him." Jerry Cromwell's voice rang through the camp of the Lord's Wa Army, pitched in the middle of an ancient plaza. He had sworn to eradicate it as an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. "Lord, how they mocked! But Noah worked on. He trusted in the Lord! The Lord of Israel, the Lord of Hosts!"

His voice, which sounded to Easy-lying on her belly in the underbrush-at once strained and over-enunciated, had electronic a.s.sistance. Dragging a generator up here made at least some sense. But who knew what possessed Cromwell to lug along speakers and microphones for a public-address system.

Apparently his followers felt reverence for his strident voice as it echoed among the crumbled ma.s.sive cliffs of stone. In any event his actual sermon had to be translated by Wa translators with their faces hard beneath their distinctive yellow head wraps.

Their painfully young faces. Easy guessed the fallen preacher's translators, like the dozen bodyguards who stood flanking him with M-16s leveled at their own fellows, ranged from twelve to fourteen. It didn't make them any less dangerous, she knew-her own continent's recent history bore ample witness to that.

Easy lay scarcely fifty yards from the nearest of them. Sixty from their gangly, pasty-white messiah.

It isn't the marksmanship that makes the hunter, you see, she thought. It's the stalk.

Elephant Calf Ngwenya had been born into a culture which, for all its pride in its modernity, was very different from the one in which Annja had been brought up. Although an upbringing in a Catholic orphanage in New Orleans, Easy reckoned, was likely to be considerably more Darwinian than girls of Annja's race and cla.s.s usually underwent. To Easy's mind that probably accounted much for the fact that Annja was a heroine, and not another ineffectual, overeducated wimp.

Warrior-princess though she was-she had always tried, not always successfully, not to be too smug about that-Easy harbored strong ethical standards when it came to killing people. It was not all right unless they were actively committing aggression. Then they became not only legitimate targets, but it was also an act of virtue to kill them.

Jerry Cromwell and his fanatics fell into that category as far as she was concerned. Easy still felt bad about the lion after all these years. He was mighty, a truly impressive beast, guilty of nothing more than doing what was natural for him.

She would dampen her pillow not at all over Jerry Cromwell. In the unlikely event she survived, of course.

She ignored the insects crawling over her exposed skin, and the long, gleaming, diamond-patterned serpent coiled on a branch above her, which she had quickly determined was a constrictor, unlikely to bite unless she grabbed it, and not in the least venomous.

Every day at noon, rain, shine or war, Cromwell gathered his followers about him to preach to them. He wasn't sufficiently crazy to pull fighters off the battle line to harangue them, though.

The Protectors were well aware of the Lord's Wa Army. The people of the temple routinely scouted potential foes wandering into their district. They had told Easy, laughingly, about Cromwell's preaching well before Annja arrived.

She understood his rationale-fanaticism was a flame that needed constant stoking. But any habit is a weapon to your enemies. One a huntress as skilled as Princess Easy planned to exploit.

She'd heard said of a.s.sa.s.sinations that anyone can be gotten at, no matter how well protected, as long as his or her would-be killer doesn't care about getting away alive.

Easy fully intended to escape. Of course, she reminded herself silently as she wriggled a few inches forward beneath the boughs of a bush, noiselessly as the snake who watched unblinkingly from above, between the thought and the action falls the shadow.

But the key thing was she would take her shot. She would make her shot. And then the chips would fall where they might.

"And so the rains came," Cromwell said. "And they fell and fell and fell-for forty days. And forty nights. Forty days!"

Easy could hear the way he used his tone of voice, his cadence, to stir the blood like a marching drumbeat.

The smell of the vegetation in which she hid was unfamiliar yet by no means strange. She felt a touch and froze. A lesser snake slithered across her left calf, then her right. She lay on her belly unmoving. She did not look back.

Best not to.

The serpent moved on. She couldn't hear its rustling for the preacher's declamations and the fervent responses of his congregation. Within a few heartbeats she forgot it. She focused her thought, her intent, her entire being on her stalk and its target.

She had penetrated well inside the Wa main camp. In itself that was small challenge, especially since she crossed the perimeter in the twilight half an hour before dawn, when human metabolism ebbed lowest and the guards were likely to be least attentive. The camp had been laid out without conspicuous regard to security. Apparently the great man believed his G.o.d would provide, or at least make up any shortfalls in his arrangements. Probably he couldn't take seriously that anyone might dare to threaten him here, in the midst of his bloodthirsty flock.

She was close as she cared to get now. She had a clear shot of under sixty yards-a simple shot, she considered, for a true marksman, even over open sights. She had the most accurate of the captured rifles, which she had tested and sighted in the previous afternoon.