The Vanishing Tribe Read online

  A former SAS commando turned mercenary, Bryant had few scruples and would do whatever was asked provided he was paid. Porter had hired him several years before and considered it one of his better business decisions. Where Porter was reluctant to get his hands dirty, Bryant positively relished the possibility. It was an arrangement they both appreciated.

  Right now, Bryant was stationed in the lobby of

  Annja’s hotel.

  “Talk to me,” Porter said, on answering the phone.

  As usual, his subordinate’s report was short and to the point. “She’s in Isooda’s buying enough gear for a couple of weeks in the bush.”

  Michael Isooda was the equivalent of the local quartermaster. If you were headed into the reserve on a safari or just exploring the more arid regions of the Kalahari, he was your man. He carried everything from firearms to dried goods, and if he didn’t have it, he could usually get it for you quickly.

  “Any indications where she is going?”

  “No.”

  After a moment’s thought, Porter said, “Wait until she leaves and then have a chat with our friend inside. Pay him the usual fee if the information is good. I want to know where she is going and when.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Porter tried to return to his meal but he couldn’t seem to enjoy it in the wake of Bryant’s phone call. He wanted to move, to do something, to take back control of the situation, but he couldn’t until he had the information he needed from Isooda. He wound up pacing back and forth across the room, imagining all the ways he was going to make Annja Creed suffer for daring to lay her hands upon his father’s—no, his—map. She’d had the temerity to threaten him with a sword, for heaven’s sake, and if she thought she was going to get away with that she had—

  The phone rang.

  Porter snatched up the receiver. “What have you got?”

  “Isooda says Creed and her cameraman are headed into the reserve. He didn’t know anything more than that.”

  “You’re positive?”

  Bryant grunted. “He would have told me if he knew something else.”

  Satisfied his subordinate had applied the right amount of pressure, Porter considered what he’d learned. The Central Kalahari Game Reserve was a popular destination; there were half a dozen safari camps within its borders at any given time. Creed might simply be after a few pictures of the elephants, killing time between assignments for that television show of hers. That was what had brought her down here in the first place, wasn’t it?

  Still, something about the explanation didn’t feel right to him. There was a deeper reason for her presence here. Her tenacity over the drawing indicated she knew more about it and the secret it contained than she’d let on and he was convinced that anything else was just a cover story for her real mission. She was after the Lost City and the treasure it contained, just as he was.

  That was why he didn’t find it surprising that she was setting out in the same direction his father had taken on his last, fateful expedition.

  Clearly she had found the map; the one his father had left behind.

  Porter intended to claim it as his own.

  There wasn’t much he could do against Creed here in the city. The aborted break-in and the subsequent fiasco in the square had raised her profile too high. But once she left the city behind, she was fair game.

  “All right, listen to me,” he told his subordinate. “We don’t have time to waste. We need to get out on the road ahead of them. Grab a couple of the men and get back here on the double.”

  “Okay. I don’t think there’s any need to hurry, though.”

  Gritting his teeth, Porter asked, “Why’s that?”

  “When you told me to keep an eye on them, I figured it would be easier to do if they couldn’t go very far, so I flattened the back tires on their truck.”

  10

  It was nearly 1:00 p.m. by the time Lenny finally showed up with the truck. It had taken almost two hours for the tires to be delivered and another forty-five minutes to swap them. Lenny had even tried to buy new tires but the rental car agency doubled not only as the local mechanic, but the only auto parts store within two hundred kilometers.

  With nothing to do but make the most of it, the two set to loading the Nissan. Isooda sent a couple of teenage boys out to help and the four of them made short work of the stacked supplies. Since Lenny’s camera equipment filled about half of the rear cargo area, some of the supplies had to be tied down on the roof inside the iron cargo rack welded to the frame for just that purpose. Finally finished, they said their goodbyes and started out on the road, with Annja behind the wheel.

  They left Maun going south on the A3, toward Lake Ngami. The road was paved for the first twenty miles, but after that it abruptly turned to dirt. Their tires threw up a cloud of red dust that billowed behind them like the long tail of a comet. The road had them bouncing about in their seats with every dip and rut, but Annja didn’t mind. She was back in the wild, chasing down another legendary locale and loving every minute of it.

  Two hours after leaving Maun they turned south on a smaller dirt road that, if Lenny was reading the map correctly, should bring them to one of the few gates into the chain link protecting the park.

  At thirty-three thousand square miles, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve was the second largest reserve in the world, covering an area roughly twice the size of Massachusetts. It had been established in 1961 and, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Botswanan government and wildlife preservation groups the world over, had become a popular destination spot for safari tourism over the past two decades.

  Like the majority of the Kalahari region, the land was mostly flat, though they occasionally encountered long undulating hills. The desert dunes were covered with bush and grasses, dotted here and there with short stretches of trees.

  When they reached the entrance, Lenny hopped out and opened the gate, then waited for Annja to drive through before closing it again behind them. They continued on.

  It wasn’t long before living proof that they’d entered the park walked right in front of them. A massive herd of wildebeest decided that they wanted to graze on the other side of the road, which forced Annja to pull over and wait while several hundred of them passed. She sat watching with delight at the sight of so many wild animals together in one place. Lenny took more than a few shots with his cameras. By the time the herd had thinned out enough to let their vehicle pass, Annja was almost sorry to go.

  They’d been driving for another fifteen minutes when Lenny suddenly shouted, “Look! Over there!”

  Annja followed the line of Lenny’s finger to where it pointed to a large flock of carrion birds wheeling in the sky about a hundred yards to the left of the road. The black harbingers of death sent chills down

  Annja’s spine.

  Had to be something big to draw a crowd like that.

  Without thinking, Annja turned the wheel in that direction. The truck bounced and clattered as they left the dirt road behind and made their way across the open plain.

  “What are you doing?” Lenny asked.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” Annja replied. She kept her gaze locked on the knee-high grass she was driving through, not wanting to discover a boulder or fallen tree the hard way. “I’m going to take a look. Isn’t that why you pointed it out?”

  Lenny snorted in disgust but didn’t say anything.

  They got within twenty feet before the carrion birds took to the air en masse, squawking in indignation at having their meal interrupted. Their departure revealed the large, gray mound they had been feeding on and it didn’t take long for either Annja or Lenny to recognize it for what it was.

  A dead elephant.

  Annja brought the truck to a stop and turned off the engine. She and Lenny got out and stopped a few feet away from the carcass. Lenny stayed standing while Annja squatted down to take a closer look.

  The African bush elephant is the largest living terrestrial anim
al. The average male stands between ten and thirteen feet at the shoulder and can weigh between ten thousand and thirteen thousand pounds, while the female typically weighs half that. Unlike their Asian cousins, both the male and female of the species have tusks, from five to eight feet long. Annja knew elephants lost their teeth six times during their lives and that the most common cause of death for an older elephant is starvation due to the loss of those teeth.

  It was immediately clear that this particular elephant hadn’t died from natural causes, however. The missing tusks and bullet holes in its sides were testimony to that.

  Poachers.

  Anger swept through her at the thought. Elephants were highly intelligent creatures, possibly more intelligent than apes and even dolphins, and it hurt Annja to see one treated so brutally.

  It also made her wonder where the other elephants were.

  Elephants gathered in family units, led by a matriarch, and it was rare to see one of them alone. Even adult males tended to gather together and form alliances with other males.

  This particular elephant hadn’t been dead for long; aside from the coppery scent in the air from the tacky pool of blood that had formed around the body, there wasn’t the stench one would associate with a carcass that had been lying in the sun for any length of time.

  Which meant the poachers couldn’t be far away.

  Lenny must have come to the same realization as she did, turning in a slow circle, looking around them with the kind of intensity that suggested he thought they might not be alone.

  Annja stood and did the same at the sensation of being watched. The plain stretched uninterrupted back to the road they’d left behind and she hadn’t seen anything on their way in to indicate someone had been here before them. The grass to either side seemed undisturbed, though she’d be the first to admit that didn’t mean much. If the poachers had been on foot, they could have moved through the area without leaving any obvious sign at all.

  She took a few steps to the left, which gave her a better view of the area on the other side of the carcass.

  The sun at her back brought the twin sets of tire tracks into sharp relief. They began about a dozen feet from the carcass and ran in a straight line toward a large copse of trees a few hundred yards away.

  Annja was staring at the trees, wondering if the poachers were watching them even now, when she saw a flash of light.

  It was only visible for a second, but that was all the time she needed to recognize it for what it was—sunlight reflecting off glass.

  “Get down!” she yelled, and dove at Lenny.

  The rifle shot echoed across the plain a split second later.

  11

  Annja felt the bullet whip past the spot where she’d just been standing as she flung herself forward. Poor Lenny had no idea what was going on. He was just turning toward her in response to her yell when she barreled into him. They slammed to the ground in the middle of the congealing pool of elephant’s blood, splattering it everywhere.

  “What the hell was that?” Lenny asked, unthinkingly starting to get up.

  Annja yanked him back again. “Keep your head down,” she said sharply. “Do you want to get it blown off?”

  “Hell, no! But how are we supposed to see if they’re coming when we’ve got our heads down in the dirt?”

  He had a point. They couldn’t stay here indefinitely. Whoever was out there had been willing to take a shot at them; they probably wouldn’t have any moral dilemma about sending another gunman around to flank them and shoot them where they lay. If they were going to live through this, they had to take control of the situation, which meant getting out of here as quickly as possible.

  Annja glanced behind them, gauging the distance to the truck. Twelve to fifteen feet at most. She hadn’t wanted to park too close to the corpse when they’d arrived, afraid of obscuring evidence for the park rangers to identify the killers. Now she was regretting that decision.

  Even five feet felt like a mile when there was a gun pointed at your back.

  Thankfully she hadn’t parked straight on but at a forty-five-degree angle relative to the elephant. If she could reach the truck and get to the other side, she’d be shielded by several tons of Detroit steel and would have a better than average chance of survival.

  If she could get to the truck.

  She needed a diversion.

  “Take off your shirt,” she told Lenny.

  He looked at her like she’d just lost her mind. “What?”

  “You heard me. Take off your shirt,” she repeated. When he still didn’t move she gave up on him in exasperation and rolled over onto her back and began unbuttoning her own shirt.

  She pulled first one arm and then the other out of her sleeves, leaving her wearing just her form-fitting tank top.

  When she was finished she flipped back over on her stomach, the shirt bunched in her right hand. She kept her left hand flat against the ground. With her body as a shield to keep Lenny from seeing what she was doing, she called her sword to hand.

  “We can’t stay here forever,” she said quietly, passing him her shirt, “so you’re going to create a diversion while I make a run for the truck.”

  He stared at her and then down at her shirt in his hand. “I’m going to create a diversion...with this?”

  “And this,” she replied, passing him her sword.

  Lenny’s eyes nearly bulged from their sockets as she passed the English broadsword across the grass to him.

  “Annja, that’s a freakin’ sword!”

  “Yes, it is. Now here’s what I want you to do.”

  She quickly explained what she intended. Lenny wasn’t happy about it, but a sudden spurt of gunfire, designed no doubt to panic them into action, helped him understand they couldn’t lie here all day. He wrapped the shirt around the tip of the sword and got ready to do his part.

  “On the count of three,” Annja told him. “One... Two... Three!”

  As Lenny used the sword to lift her shirt over the far edge of the elephant carcass, two things happened almost simultaneously. Gunfire rang out from the copse of trees and Annja leaped to her feet and rushed for the truck.

  She knew she had only a few seconds before the gunman’s eye would be drawn by her movement, and so she didn’t waste any time trying to zig and zag but just put her head down and ran full out. Her breath sounded overly loud in her ears; her heart was pounding in her chest and any minute she expected to take a bullet in the back.

  She reached the truck and went sliding over the hood just as a fusillade of shots rang out, the bullets hammering into the side of the truck in her wake.

  Damn, that was close.

  She scrambled on hands and knees over to the

  driver’s door, yanked it open and pulled herself across the two front seats on her back, being sure to keep her head below the dashboard.

  More shots rang out, but Annja focused on digging the keys out of her pocket and jamming them into the ignition. A quick flick of her wrist and the engine roared to life. They were only going to get one chance at this.

  Annja took a couple of deep breaths and then she sat up, jammed her foot on the gas and dropped the truck into Drive all in one long, fluid motion. As the Nissan lunged forward she cut the wheel hard to the right, sending the vehicle slewing sideways until she brought it to a stop right next to the dead elephant.

  “Now!” she screamed.

  Lenny didn’t waste any time, just yanked open the rear door, threw the sword into the truck and leaped in after it as Annja rammed her foot on the gas. She hoped he wouldn’t notice that the sword had disappeared.

  The window next to her shattered and suddenly she was aware of just how much gunfire was coming their way. Either the gunman was equipped with an automatic rifle or there was more than one gunman out there. Bullets were hammering the outside of the truck with staccato regularity.

  She spun the wheel and raced across the uneven surface of the plain. The gunfire followed them for a mo
ment, a final stray bullet smashing in the rear window, and then they were swerving back onto the dirt road and roaring south as fast as the truck would take them.

  “You okay back there?” Annja shouted over her shoulder.

  Lenny didn’t say anything.

  “Lenny?”

  She chanced a glance behind her and gasped. Lenny was sitting in a pool of blood, his hands clamped tightly against the gunshot wound in his left thigh.

  “Not as light on my feet as I used to be,” Lenny grunted, and then promptly passed out.

  12

  A glance in the rearview mirror told her they weren’t being followed—for now—so Annja pulled to the side of the road. Immediately she was out of her seat and climbing into the back to deal with Lenny.

  She’d seen enough bullet wounds to know what she was looking at and it didn’t take her more than a few seconds to determine that the bullet had entered the back of Lenny’s leg and exited out the front about halfway up his thigh. There was a lot of blood, but it was seeping out of the wound rather than spurting in a stream. The artery hadn’t been cut. That was good; it meant he might live long enough for her to get him help.

  First thing she had to do was stop the bleeding.

  She dug in the back of the truck until she located the medical kit. She pulled several thick pressure bandages out and put them over the entrance and exit wounds. She used an Ace bandage to hold them in place and then pulled the whole thing tight with the help of the leather belt Lenny was wearing. It wasn’t the best field dressing, but it would do for the time being.

  Annja hauled Lenny fully upright in the seat and then used the seat belt to secure him in place. After that she hauled herself back in front behind the wheel.

  In the rearview mirror she could see they still had the road to themselves.

  “Hang on,” she told Lenny’s unconscious form and then threw the truck in gear and slammed the accelerator. The SUV responded as if it understood the urgency of the moment, surging ahead.