Rogue Angel 55: Beneath Still Waters (26 page)

Unfortunately she was pretty much out of ideas—at least productive ones—in that regard.

It took nearly twenty minutes for the car to reach them. When it did, Annja and Matahi climbed in and then shut the gate behind them. Matahi took control
of the crank and began to wind it, starting the elevator car on its long ride up to the top of the caldera.

Annja spent the time worrying about Garin and wondering if Doug was still alive.

They heard the bullet ricochet off the side of the basket before they heard the report of the shot, but the latter was only a second or two behind.

They looked around frantically, trying to spot who was shooting at them.

“Look! There!” Matahi shouted.

About a hundred yards above them, the second car was on its way down. In the basket were two men, both of whom were leaning over the side and pointing rifles toward Annja and her companion.

“What do we do?” Matahi asked.

“Duck!”

He did as he was told just as a pair of shots whizzed by.

They were in trouble and Annja knew it. As long as the other basket was allowed to descend or ascend, then the men in it could fire at them at will until they killed them.

If they wanted to survive, they had to take out those riflemen.

There was only one problem.

Neither Matahi nor Annja had any kind of weapon with which to return fire.

They were going to have to do it the hard way.

“How quickly can you get us level with them?” Annja asked.

Matahi looked at her like she’d just lost her mind.

“Level? Won’t that make it easier for them to shoot us?”

“Not if I can dissuade them.”

“And how are you going to manage that?” he asked her.

“Let me worry about that. For now, just get us up there!”

Shaking his head at the craziness of the idea but doing it anyway, Matahi crouched lower in the basket and focused on turning the crank, resuming their upward motion.

While he did that, Annja tried to figure out what it was going to take to get the basket rocking back and forth far enough that she could get close to the other one.

Thankfully, the men in the second basket were terrible shots. The bullets missed, sailing off into the distance or bouncing off the nearby rock and showering them with stone fragments.

As the firing continued, Annja walked back and forth from one side of the basket to the other, using her weight to get it to start swinging like a pendulum.

“What are you doing?” Matahi asked in a shaky voice, letting go of the crank to grab tightly to the sides of the basket. There were no safety belts, and it was a long way down to the bottom.

A long way—yes, but a relatively short trip should a person fall.

Annja glanced at him, but didn’t stop her motion. “I’m making us a more difficult target for them to hit.”

“They won’t have to hit us if you make us fall out. Stop that.”

Annja shook her head and kept up her steady motion. “We have to take out that other basket or they can just sit there and fire at us until we’re finally hit.”

Matahi’s eyes grew wide. “You are insane.”

“No, I just want to live.”

“You’ve got a crazy way of showing it,” the islander replied, but he kept cranking the handle and moving them slowly up the inside of the volcano.

As they got higher and the other basket came lower, the gunshots were starting to come closer. Matahi suffered a cut to his cheek when a bullet caused some fragments of rock to explode from the cliff face beside him. If the basket hadn’t been moving side to side, the shooter probably would have taken them both out by now.

Annja ducked lower but kept moving back and forth.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Finally the baskets were at the point where they were almost parallel to each other. Their fate would be decided in the next few minutes, Annja knew, and she prepared herself for what was to come.

She was only going to get one chance at this.

Annja waited until they were swinging away from the second basket to quickly explain her plan to Matahi. “When the basket swings the other way, there will be a moment at the farthest edge of our swing when we will be perfectly lined up with the other basket.
That will be our moment to act. No matter what happens, keep the basket swinging. Got it?”

The islander nodded, clearly scared out of his wits by the swaying of the cage but determined to handle it and be of use to her. Annja admired his bravery; a person had to be a little insane to attempt what she was about to do, but frankly she didn’t see any way around it. They’d been lucky so far, but this close the gunmen really couldn’t miss unless they were complete incompetents. That still might be the case, but she wasn’t betting on it.

The cage completed its swing to the outside and started heading back in the other direction. Annja crouched behind the side wall and watched the other cage as they rapidly swung toward it.

Wait for it
, she told herself,
steady…

Bullets were bouncing off the side of the cage now, the shooter in the other basket firing straight at them at this point. Annja gritted her teeth and ordered herself to resist the urge to duck for she needed to be ready to move.

Steady…

Annja’s cage was headed toward the other at full speed, and the shooter finally decided that discretion was the better part of valor and ducked behind the walls of his own cage. If the two collided, he didn’t want to be knocked over the side.

It was exactly the move Annja had been counting on.

The cage reached the farthest point of its swing. For a moment it hung there, directly opposite the
other. Annja jumped to her feet, snatched her sword from the otherwhere and slashed at the cables holding the other cage up.

She felt the shock of connection before she heard the loud crack of the cables giving way.

For just an instant she was poised there, sword outstretched, staring into the eyes of the shooter as he crouched next to his partner near the crank, the rifle in his hands pointed directly at her.

His finger twitched on the trigger.

The cage started its swing back in the other direction, pulling her a fraction of an inch to the side as the bullet whipped through her hair without striking anything solid, fortunately not blowing her head to smithereens.

Then they were headed back in the other direction, and Annja released the sword. She watched as the other basket began to tilt downward, the cable holding it in place no longer in one piece. Annja could see the shooter and his partner grabbing for the side of the cage, not quite understanding yet that they weren’t falling out of it but that it was falling along with them.

Annja stared as they dropped out of sight.

She turned and found Matahi peering at her in horror.

“What did you do?” he gasped.

“Taught them that shooting at us is a very bad idea.”

She glanced over the side of the cage in the direction the other had fallen and then amended her statement. “Make that
was
a very bad idea.”

Matahi grunted.

She was about to say something in her defense when there was a loud bang from above her head and one side of the cage suddenly dipped downward.

Annja instinctively grabbed the main cable over their heads with one hand and Matahi’s arm with the other just as the basket dropped out from beneath under their feet!

Annja hung there, hundreds of feet above the ground, holding on to Matahi with one hand and to the cable above her head with the other.

Below her, her new friend screamed in fear and kicked his legs as if looking for support where none existed. If he kept it up, she was going to drop him.

“Hey, knock it off!” she said.

He kept screaming and moving about.

“Matahi! Knock it off, Matahi, or you’re going to make me drop you!”

That seemed to get through to him for he suddenly started repeating something in his native language, over and over again. Annja couldn’t understand him, but she figured it was something along the lines of “Don’t drop me!”

If he held still, she probably wouldn’t.

Probably.

“Stop kicking and squirming around!”

At last he stopped moving.

They were still swaying from side to side just as they’d been before the cage had come apart around
them, which was just making matters worse, but there wasn’t anything they could do about that now.

Annja knew there was no way she was going to be able to support Matahi’s weight for long. Not like this, at any rate. They needed to get off this cable.

But how?

She glanced above her head and could see that they were still about a hundred, maybe a hundred and fifty feet from the top. That was a long way to go, but it was doable at least. She’d climbed higher before.

Yeah, but not right after fighting four big men in hand-to-hand combat and holding a large man’s weight with only one hand
.

She told her inner voice to shut up and, surprisingly, it did.

This was not the time for negative thoughts.

She could feel her shoulders already burning from the pull being exerted on them in both directions. She didn’t have much time; she needed to figure this out and figure it out fast.

She let herself drift in a slow circle and looked at the nearby wall of the caldera. It was pitted with fissures and cracks, just the kind of things that could serve as hand- and footholds for an experienced climber. She’d climbed harder faces than that.

Yeah, but not without a rope
, her inner voice piped up.

Quiet, you!
she told it.
It’s not like I’ve got a choice here. I’ve free climbed a steep slope or two before. I can do this one
.

But could Matahi?

That she didn’t know.

“Matahi, can you hear me?”

“Yes,” came the shaky reply.

“We need to get off this rope and onto the rock wall beside us.”

His fingers tightened around her wrist. “What? What are you talking about?”

“I can’t hold you much longer, and I doubt I can hold on long enough for you to climb up and over me to shimmy up the rope. So we need to climb up the inside of the wall.”

“That’s crazy!”

“Crazy or not, it’s the only chance we’ve got.”

“But…”

She’d had enough. “Shut up and listen to me or we’re both going to die!”

Matahi shut his mouth with a snap.

“You need to kick your legs toward the wall so we start swinging toward it. That way you can grab hold of it when we get closer.”

“Kick my legs?”

“Yes, but gently.”

He made a couple of tentative motions that got them moving slightly, but not enough.

“Harder, Matahi. A little harder.”

He did as he was told, and after a few minutes they were swinging almost all the way to the wall. Annja could see that the area they were facing had some bomber climbing holds that she could grab to get her off the rope.

But she couldn’t do anything until she let go of Matahi.

“When we get close to the wall, I want you to grab on to it and hang on.”

“I can’t do that!”

“Yes, you can. Just reach out and grab something with your free hand when we get close.”

To his credit, he tried. They swung close to the wall and he reached out and touched the rock, but couldn’t get his hand wrapped around anything and they swung back again with him flailing about.

Annja gritted her teeth and did everything she could to hold on to him, but she could feel his weight dragging her farther down the cable she was holding on to.

“We’re running out of time, Matahi. I can’t hold us much longer. You have to grab the wall and hold on to it this time.”

He didn’t reply, but when she looked down she could see that he was flexing the fingers of his free hand, getting ready to make another try.

They were still swinging to and fro, and it was a simple matter now to nudge them close enough for him to reach out a second time.

“Got it!” he called out at the same time she felt some resistance to her swing.

“Okay, find a foothold for your feet. When you’ve got something secure enough to hold you, let go of my arm.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Of course you can,” she told him.

If he didn’t let go soon, there was nothing she was going to be able to save him. It was as simple as that.

“On the count of three, okay?”

She didn’t wait for his reply.

“One…”

“Two…”

“Three!”

To her immense relief she felt the weight come off her left arm as the islander clung to the face of the cliff instead.

Now it was her turn.

She swung toward the rock face and quickly chose a handhold before she swung back out again. Keeping her gaze fixed firmly on that spot, she waited for the cable to send her back in that direction on the reverse side of the swing, mentally counting in her head.

One…two…three…

She threw herself against the wall, jamming her hand inside the crack she’d seen on the first swing and twisting it to one side, using the pressure of her fist against the interior of the space to hold her there for the few seconds it took for her feet to find a corresponding perch.

At last she was secure against the rock, using her legs to support her to give her aching arms a rest. She put her forehead against the stone and breathed a sigh of relief.

That had been a little too close for comfort.

It’s not over yet
, she reminded herself.
You still have to climb to the top
.

“You still with me, Matahi?”

All she got was a grunt from below her, but that told her he was still alive, at least, and that was good enough.

“We need to start climbing while we still have the strength. One hold at a time, okay? Find a spot for your right hand, then your left, then do the same for your feet. It’s not a race. Take your time and make sure each hold is secure, understand?”

Then another thought occurred to her.

“No matter what you do, don’t look down.”

Having exhausted all of her advice, she began to make her own ascent. There was nothing more she could do for her companion; he was going to make it or he wasn’t. It was as simple as that.