Restless Soul - Alex Archer [48]
Zakkarat wagged a finger. “You have only to promise that you will bring it back when you can. He doesn’t care about baht beyond using it to buy gasoline.”
“I promise,” Annja said, facing Erawan. “I promise to bring it back as soon as possible—and give him baht for gas. Please thank him for me. And please remember to tell all of these people about the men and the guns and—”
The wind gusted, bringing a shower of rain inside the building. Thunder boomed and beyond the doorway fingers of lightning flickered. The dog yapped shrilly.
A single burst of gunfire sounded. A heartbeat later another followed. From somewhere outside a woman screamed and a child wailed.
Annja rushed past Erawan, reaching under her shirt and drawing the pistol, stopping just outside the doorway and taking everything in.
The children who had been playing streamed into the other large building across a mud-slick clearing, shooed by a gangly woman in a sleeveless pink shift. Others looked out from windows and doorways, eyes fixed on the body of the small white dog that one of the gunmen had shot.
Annja looked around the corner and saw four men, shoulder to shoulder, machine guns raised at waist height. They were some of the dark-clad men who had come from the Jeeps on the mountain. Annja recognized their hard faces. One stepped forward, fired another burst into the dog’s carcass and hollered something she couldn’t understand. A moment later he repeated it in English.
“The foreigners…the strangers. Surrender them now or everyone dies.”
With another burst of gunfire, they advanced into the village.
12
Annja whirled in the opposite direction from the gunmen, hugging the building and darting past a bench, then slipping around the far end of the school, leading with the pistol in the event more men had come in from another direction.
No one else had—at least that she could see. Apparently, there were just the four. And they hadn’t seen her yet. She heard the frightened voices of the villagers inside the school, the wails of children across the way, the continued shouts of the gunmen and the rain striking everything.
“Surrender the strangers,” one of the gunmen repeated, punctuating the demand with another burst of gunfire. “The white woman and two men. Surrender them now.”
The villagers don’t understand what you’re saying, she thought. They don’t understand English or Vietnamese, and only one of them seems to speak Thai. But they understand that you killed a little dog and could just as easily kill them. They understand that you’re dangerous. And I understand that you need to be dealt with now.
More children cried, and a woman leaning out a window shouted something Annja couldn’t make out.
“Surrender, or we will kill you one by one!”
“I give up!” This came from Luartaro. There was more wailing and chatter and he shouted to be heard over it. “Don’t shoot anyone. Leave these people alone. It’s me you want.”
“No,” Annja growled. She slipped around the next corner, intending to come up from the other side, where the men still would not be able to see her. “No. No. No, Luartaro.”
“The woman’s not here,” Luartaro continued. “I lost her in the jungle. Who knows what happened to her. It’s just me. Take me and leave this village alone.”
There was a quick exchange in which she could pick up only a few groups of words.
“Surrender to us.”
The phrase was repeated several times and made Annja furious. The villagers had done nothing to provoke this; she and Luartaro and Zakkarat had simply been at the proverbial wrong place at the wrong time, and seen piles of treasure that the smugglers wanted no one else to know about.
She peeked around the next corner, spotting the four men and immediately drawing her head back. They’d advanced a little farther into the village. Another look, and she couldn’t see them anymore; they’d passed out of her line of sight. But she heard Luartaro, again calling for the men to leave the villagers alone.
“On your knees!” shouted the man who could speak English.