Restless Soul - Alex Archer [39]
She held her breath and listened intently. Rain still pattered onto the leaves, and distant thunder rumbled. The slapping of the men’s boots on the ground and another burst of gunfire told her they were close.
She sucked in a deep breath and centered herself.
She could tell the men had split up and were coming at her from two directions. So they were smart and organized, possibly military, definitely with some training.
Annja took off on a straight course, tucking and rolling into a smaller target as bullets struck the ground at her feet and splashed her face with mud.
With a last prayer that Luartaro and Zakkarat were all right, she focused her attention on her fight.
She sprinted for a clump of willowy trees and darted between the trunks. Bullets followed her, but not as many as before.
She risked a quick peek and saw that two of the men had stopped to reload their pistols. She leaped toward them, feet churning over the mud-slick ground.
The other two were a little farther back and to the south.
Even as she homed in on the men, she felt reluctance. She didn’t want to kill. All life was sacred to her, even that of villainous souls. And while a man breathed, there remained a chance for redemption.
But she couldn’t dare take the chance that these men might redeem themselves at some point in the future. There were too many men, too many guns. She needed to cut their numbers.
She raised the sword above her head. Rain pinged against the blade.
One of the men saw her. He rammed the clip into his pistol and brought it up.
He fired just as she rushed in and swept her sword down, slicing into his collarbone and then through it. He screamed as she pulled the blade free and brought it down again. The scream stopped.
She dropped to her knees, grabbed his gun, brought it up and fired at his companion. It was one smooth, automatic motion, and though she hadn’t taken the time to aim, she shot him in the chest.
He didn’t even have time to scream. He collapsed.
She dropped the gun. She hated guns.
A phrase flitted through her mind, one she’d heard somewhere before. “It is trying to kill a man that you do not even know well enough to hate…”
Annja allowed herself a few quick breaths before she rose and barreled toward the two men with machine guns. She spotted them through a break in the foliage.
They were both running toward their fallen companions.
She planted herself against a tree, her shoulders against the trunk, her backpack pressing against the small of her back.
She spared a thought for the skull bowl, hoping it hadn’t been damaged by the carnival ride in the mud and all the jumping and running. No time to check now.
She glanced around the tree and yanked her head back.
No sign of the men.
She held her breath. There were no sounds of them, either.
Another few beats passed. She peeked the other way.
One man was easing through a tangle of vines, leading with his machine gun. The second man was behind him.
“Two down, two to go,” she whispered. And that was given that no more men from the Jeeps had come down the mountainside after her. They’d probably gone back to the cavern to check on their treasure. In Annja’s experience, greed almost always trumped common sense.
The southern third of Thailand was open to the Andaman Sea on the west and the South China Sea on the east. But the northern part was sandwiched between Myanmar, once called Burma, to the west, and Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam was not far away, particularly considering the narrow section of Laos. So the men might have come from Vietnam, through Laos and to these mountains.
But why? Normally Annja reveled in puzzles, but only when she had time to contemplate all the components.
She heard the slide on one of the machine guns snap back. Bullets suddenly whizzed past her.
She dropped down tight against the roots of the tree, hoping to be a smaller target. They weren’t giving her time for solving puzzles.
The two men shouted, obviously trying to be heard up the