Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (25 page)

Normally that would be enough to hyperextend the knee joint, causing the leg to collapse under its own weight.

This time it had about as much success as kicking a tree trunk. Maybe less.

Annja spun, intending to follow through by coming back in and attacking the other leg, but her opponent was much quicker for his size than she had expected. He was already lashing out with a backhand
that caught her square in the chest, lifting her off her feet and dumping her in the sand a few yards away.

Wow, that hurt!
Annja thought, as she struggled to her feet.

She heard the whistling sound of the club coming her way, and she threw herself to the side, narrowly avoiding getting knocked into next week.

She rolled when she hit, putting some distance between herself and her opponent. When she got back to her feet, she had a handful of the sand lining the floor clutched in her left hand.

The islander was already moving in, bringing the club whistling downward again, and this time Annja timed the blow, noting how long it took for him to recover and lash out again. When he was still in the middle of recovering from that second blow, Annja darted in and threw the sand in his face.

He pulled his head back, but the damage was already done. Momentarily blinded, he swung the club he was holding around him in a circle, trying to trip her up. She jumped lightly over it and twisted her body into a spinning crescent kick that she brought slamming toward his collarbone.

The blow never landed.

The islander dropped the club, grabbed her foot in midair and yanked her toward him, intending to smother her in his grasp.

Anticipating that very move, Annja let him draw her closer and then lashed out, trying to smash the side of her hand into the soft, unprotected flesh of
his throat, only to have him drop his chin at the last moment, deflecting the blow.

They went around and around like that with neither of them gaining the upper hand but causing a number of minor injuries along the way.

Annja knew she could draw her sword at any time, but doing so would reveal her secret not only to all of the islanders sitting in the stands but also to Krugmann and Schnell. That was something she wanted to avoid at all costs, for there would be little doubt that they would use all of the resources at their disposal to try to take the sword from her at that point and use it for their own nefarious ends.

So instead of simply skewering the big guy where he stood, Annja was going to have to whittle away at him piece by piece until she could deliver the final blow that sent him to the ground.

She was moving away from another of his strikes when she remembered what her captor had said at the entrance to the arena.

Watch his left foot
.

She did so and what she saw was so obvious that she was surprised she needed anyone to point it out to her.

Every time the islander prepared himself for a strike, he pivoted on his left foot, anchoring it in place to give him as much torque as possible.

Annja knew she could use that to her advantage.

Thank you, whatever your name is
, she thought.

They circled each other warily again, Annja biding her time and the island warrior doing the same.

Krugmann shouted something from the stands, and the islander used the temporary distraction to rush at Annja again.

Rather than skipping backward out of reach, which had been her modus operandi for the entire fight, Annja did the exact opposite, rushing forward and kicking that unsupported leg with everything she had.

It folded like a house of cards.

The warrior dropped to one knee, leaving his face and head unprotected.

Annja chose that moment to leap into the air, spinning at the apex of her leap, and lashing out with a perfectly executed heel kick that struck the warrior in the side of the temple.

“Timber!” she wanted to shout as the mountain of a man crashed forward to lie unmoving on the arena floor.

The crowd shouted and cried out.

Panting, she turned and saw the surprised expression on both Krugmann’s face and Schnell’s.

“Guess I’m telling the truth,” Annja called up to Schnell. “Maybe it’s time you put Krugmann to the same test.”

Whatever Schnell was going to say in return was interrupted as the door to his observation platform burst open and four men with submachine guns in their hands crowded into the narrow space and held their guns on everyone in there, including Schnell.

To the gunmen’s surprise, but not Annja’s, the old Nazi let his displeasure be known. “What is the meaning of this?” he shouted at the newcomers.

Krugmann answered for them with a very smug smile on his face. “This, dear Colonel, is a military coup. If you do as you are told, no one has to get hurt, least of all you.”

“What do you want?”

“The gold, of course,” Krugmann said.

“I’m not giving you anything,” Schnell replied.

Krugmann drew the gun at his hip and shot the old man in the foot.

Schnell screamed.

“Oh, shut up,!” Krugmann said. “Get over here before I put the next bullet in your head.”

Schnell snapped his mouth shut and hobbled over to Krugmann, who passed him over to one of his men.

As Schnell was being led out of the observation booth at gunpoint, Krugmann nodded at one of the men who stood behind him with a submachine gun. That man withdrew a walkie-talkie from his pocket and radioed someone else. Seconds later the door her first opponent had entered through swung open and three of Krugmann’s men entered the arena.

All of them were armed with a club or some form of bladed weapon, and they used them to laconically salute Annja.

Krugmann laughed at the sight. “I’m surprised at you, Annja. I thought for sure you would figure it out long before this. Every time I thought you had, you ended up surprising me with your blind ignorance. Which is really too bad, as I assumed you’d be a better opponent than that.”

“Come on down here and I’ll show you just how
good I am,” Annja shouted, without taking her eyes off the three men standing on the other side of the arena.

“Sorry, dear, but I don’t have time to waste on such petty problems. While you lie dying there in the sand, I want you to think about the fact that not one, but two of your friends are now in my custody. I’m going to enjoy using them in new and interesting ways.”

With that parting remark, Krugmann left the observation deck.

Down below, on the arena sand, Annja watched her opponents move in.

With Krugmann and Schnell no longer around, Annja decided it was time to even the odds somewhat.

Reaching into the otherwhere, she drew her sword, watching in satisfaction as it appeared whole and fully formed in her hand just a second later.

Whatever was left of the once boisterous audience went deathly quiet.

Feeling far more confident, Annja moved in to face her attackers.

The three men split up as they got closer, moving to surround her and make it so she couldn’t keep her eyes on all three of them at once. They were playing a cautious game, and that made her think they’d heard a bit about her prowess with a blade.

Annja, of course, had no intention of doing anything of the sort. Rather than wait for them to surround her, Annja picked one of her attackers and charged directly at him, hoping to put him down before the other attackers had a chance to move in on her unprotected back.

As she leaped forward, her attacker tried to backpedal
and give time for his allies to close in on Annja from behind.

Unfortunately for him, he’d never trained on sand and didn’t know how to move in it gracefully. The heel of his shoe caught in the sand behind him, tripping him up. As he flailed his arms for balance, Annja rushed forward and skewered him through the chest.

When she pulled the blade out, he gave a shuddering little sigh and collapsed to the ground to move no more.

The ferocity of her attack gave the other two men pause, but only for a moment. Clearly they thought they were better than the man who had been killed, so they moved in with confidence, weapons at the ready, determined to complete their assignment.

That confidence, and the way it made them view Annja as an opponent not worthy of their attention, would prove to be their undoing.

Annja waited for one of the men to move in close, trying to draw her into an attack and thereby give the other man a chance to strike at her unprotected rear.

It was a simple plan and might even have worked if Annja didn’t have a plan of her own.

She played along with what they were doing, pretending not to know that they were playing a game of cat and mouse with her. When the man in front of her began backpedaling to get away from her, just as her previous attacker had done, Annja abruptly spun and charged the man behind her.

He had been expecting to rush forward and attack her from behind and therefore actually took several
more steps in her direction before he realized that she wasn’t moving away from him as expected. That she was, in fact, rushing directly at him screaming at the top of her lungs.

The killer tried to stop his forward momentum but it was already too late. Annja rushed him, they had a short but decisive exchange of blows, and then she was turning away to face her third and final opponent while his buddy lay bleeding to death in the warm sand behind her.

This time Annja moved to the center of the arena and stood there, waiting.

If you want a piece of me, you’re going to have to come get it
, she thought.

Her opponent hesitated, but only for a moment. Apparently his fear of punishment at Krugmann’s hands was more daunting than the idea of dying right then and there, for he advanced on her slowly and carefully, exchanging blow after blow but taking no chances.

Annja bided her time, waiting for an opening, until she realized that the thug in front of her was deliberately stalling, no doubt to let Krugmann get away.

The thought of that man escaping the hand of justice was almost too much to bear.

Enough of this!
Annja thought.

They struck and parried, struck and parried, then Annja pretended to lose her balance and stumbled backward.

When the man overreached in an effort to pin her down, Annja trapped his sword with her own and
then flung it away, disarming him and leaving him defenseless.

“Look, I’m just following…”

Annja lunged forward, driving her sword through the man’s shoulder. He screamed and fell backward, with Annja tearing the blade out as he fell.

She quickly straddled him and pressed the edge of the blade against his throat. “I want some answers and I want them now!”

Five minutes later, Annja moved cautiously through the tunnels, trying to find her way back to where she and Garin had been kept prisoner. She did her best to avoid running into any islanders, and the one time she couldn’t she left the young man in a darkened corner after a swift blow to his head with the flat of her sword.

After several minutes of stumbling around in the tunnels, she found the room she was looking for.

Garin, however, was no longer there.

“They took him away,” a voice said from behind her in German. Annja whirled to find the colonel’s right-hand man standing there, the one who had taken them prisoner at the submarine.

“What do you mean they took him away?”

“Just what I said. Shortly after you entered the arena, the dark one’s men came and took him away. One of them said something about returning to the boat, but that was all that I overheard.”

Annja was confused. “Why are you helping me?”

The islander shrugged. “Is it not said that the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

Annja answered that with a folk saying of her own. “Yes, but it is also said that you should keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

The islander smiled. “It would seem that you are going to have to decide to trust me on nothing more than the wisdom of our elders.”

Fat chance of that, buddy
, she thought.

Annja tried to push past him, but he reached out and stopped her.

“Listen to me a moment. I believe that I can help you.”

“Help me? I’m not even sure I can trust you.”

“My people have been controlled by others for far too long. Now we may finally act. You have given us that chance, we will give something to you.”

Ah. So the islanders weren’t willing participants in all of this after all. At least they hadn’t started out that way
.

“And you think that if you help me, I will help you free your people from the yoke of this man and those who support him?”

“Yes,” he answered simply.

She would, too; that’s just the kind of person she was.

But first Garin, and then Doug.

“You’ve got a deal.”

She showed him how to shake on it, then asked him to take her to the elevator back to the top of the caldera. She was convinced that Krugmann would return to the boat he had talked about to get reinforcements and to begin loading the gold as his men
removed it from its mountain hideaway. If she could get aboard that boat, she could rescue Garin and possibly discover where Krugmann was keeping Doug.

After that, who knew? First things first.

As she headed through the underground tunnels with her co-conspirator in the lead, Annja asked, “What do I call you?”

He glanced back at her and grinned. “My name is Matahi.”

“Okay. And you can call me Annja.”

His grin widened.

Several times along the journey they passed other islanders, and each time Matahi had a quick conversation with them, no doubt to invent some reason the colonel’s prisoner was roaming around free.

At last, when she thought she couldn’t take any more of this underground passage, they emerged onto the ledge where the elevator hung.

Neither basket was there, more proof that Krugmann had not remained within the facility but had, in fact, returned to the top of the caldera. Since he was most familiar with how the elevator worked, Annja let Matahi call one of the cars down while she tried to work out a plan for what to do when they caught up with Krugmann.