Lord Tyger (Grandmaster Series)

  The pilot, a white man with a heavy brown beard, fell at the first few shots from Eeva. The machine gunner, a skinny white man with long orange hair, raced for the copter and his weapon, but he did not make it. The machine went up with a great bang and a sheet of flame and spiraling smoke. The fire sprayed outward and caught two men who were also running toward it. Yusufu's second attempt downed two men. The three survivors began to fire back. By then, Eeva and Yusufu had crawled off elsewhere. Yusufu was between the three and the hillside, and Eeva went on her hands and knees back to the forest. Ras called to her, and soon she was beside him on the branch. She was smiling and weeping at the same time, but her aim did not seem to be shaken too much. She could see the three men now, and with six shots she stretched all three in the grass. Then she and Ras got down from the tree and cautiously approached the bodies. Yusufu joined them. They found three men still living and one of the dogs alive. Yusufu killed all four with two bursts from his rifle.

  Eeva was crying because the copter was burning. "We could have flown out of here!" she said. "We could have gotten away! Now we're still stranded here!"

  Yusufu said, "The other copter is coming."

  Ras could just hear it. He told Eeva, who said that they must get out of this area at once. Ras had thought so, too, at first, but now he said that he had another plan. It would be very dangerous, especially for him in the first stages. But if the others would agree, they might capture this copter. Or, at least, get rid of another. But there was no time for careful and detailed planning; they would have to improvise now, and if they did not care to do what he suggested, they would not be blamed by him. They were in the forest by then. Yusufu was carrying the walkie-talkie taken from a corpse.

  Eeva and Yusufu listened, and then Yusufu said that it seemed like an excellent plan to him. Risky, but likely to succeed. After all, Boygur and his people must think that Ras was dead--Ras had told him about the river and the cave--and seeing him here would startle them. So far, they had made no effort to kill Ras; they had always made sure that he was not around when they had tried to kill Eeva, if what Ras said was true.

  Ras had no time to talk. He ran out into the clearing and lay down about twenty yards from the edge of the forest. He lay on his face, head toward the forest as if he had been running toward it when something had happened to him.

  He heard the copter overhead and felt the chill of its shadow for a moment. It went around and around him as its occupants apparently studied the situation. They must have been shocked by what had happened to their own men and shaken by discovering him. They would be talking to the man on top of the pillar--Boygur, Yusufu had called him--describing the situation and asking for orders.

  Yusufu had said he could listen in on them, so he must have some idea of what they intended to do.

  After a few minutes, the copter landed near enough so that the grasses by him bent away from the blast of air, and he could feel the air cooling off his sweating back. Its noise almost drowned out the sounds of rifles shooting. On hearing this, Ras rolled over. One of the men who had been in the copter was about ten feet away. He was lying on his back, a shiny object near his open hand. It was small and barrel-shaped and transparent and had a needle end.

  The pilot of the copter had remained at the controls. Now he took it up and away, but he suddenly slumped, and the machine turned over on its side and struck the earth. It did not catch on fire, but its blades were crumpled and its nose was shattered. The pilot made no effort to get out. Ras ran to him and found that he was dead. Eeva wept some more because the machine was wrecked. Yusufu did not seem to think things were so bad. He was alive and free, whereas ten minutes ago he had been a prisoner and expected torture and death. Also, his beloved Ras, whom he had thought he would never see again, was with him and well.

  Besides, all they had to do was stay alive long enough, and they would be able to get out of this valley forever. An Ethiopian military plane had buzzed this valley ten days before--when Ras and Eeva had been in the old river bed underground--and it had been caught by machine-gun fire when it approached too closely to the pillar. It had crashed into the lake, but Yusufu was sure that other planes would be looking for it. That explained why Boygur, who believed Ras to be dead anyway, was frantically getting ready to desert the valley and his project. But, first, he had to destroy Jib, so that his fingerprints could not be traced, and he had to find and kill Yusufu, so that his mouth would be forever shut.

  "There are so many things I don't understand," Ras said. He felt as if the world were a big trap door that had suddenly opened and he were falling through darkness.

  "There will be time to explain later," Yusufu said. "There is much I don't know, also. Let us go to my camp, which is far closer than yours, and we will weep for Mariyam and talk of how we will get revenge upon this Boygur."

  On the way, Ras asked what the man with the hypodermic syringe--Eeva had explained this to him--had intended to do.

  Yusufu said, "I listened in on them. They did not know what had happened, but they were frightened and also angry with the anger that fear brings. They saw you stretched out face down on the grass. Boygur could not believe that you were there; he thought you had died in the cave. Then he became joyous and said that you were indeed a true hero, that you could not be killed. Now, instead of leaving the valley, he would stay and carry out his plans. He was sure that the Ethiopian authorities could be satisfied if he spread a great deal of money where it would be most effective. And he may be right. Anyway, he told the copter to land, and the gunner was to see if you were alive. Boygur had some second thoughts then; it occurred to him that just because you were there did not mean that you were alive.

  "The gunner--Johann--was to examine you. If you were wounded, he was to fix up the wounds if they were slight. If they were serious, he was to bring you in for treatment on top of the pillar. If you were unharmed but unconscious, he was to knock you out with the hypodermic, and then they were to fly back to the pillar, pick up the girl--the girl who was supposed to be your jane--and bring her back here. They were to give her a chance to escape and then to pretend to look around for her, and then were to come back here. The girl would find you, and everything would go as expected. Boygur said it was none too soon. The girl was still on a hunger strike and would die soon if she didn't eat. He hoped that you would be what she needed.

  "Rudi said that the situation looked menacing to him; surely you didn't do all that killing and destroying by yourself. He didn't want to land, but Boygur said he'd kill him if he didn't carry out orders."

  Yusufu was silent for a while; then he said, "Boygur must have known a long time ago that things weren't working out the way he wanted them to and that they never would. But he wouldn't admit it to himself. The man is mad!"

  "And now," Ras said quietly, "will you tell me everything--from the beginning?"

  21

  GOD CAUGHT IN A NOOSE

  The following day they spent hidden in the forest near the shore, where they watched the stone pillar in the middle of the lake. The thousand-foot thrust of shiny, black rock had always seemed sinister to Ras after Mariyam's explanation of its origin--an explanation he now knew to be false and indeed had never really believed--but now that he knew the truth, it seemed twice as menacing. Its blackness had become even darker.

  Nothing happened. They could see no sign of life except for two fish-eagles soaring around it. Yusufu pointed out the place where Boygur often stood to look through the telescope at the scene below, most often at Ras himself. Ras strained, but he could see nothing.

  Yusufu said, "He will have radioed for help; you can be sure of that. Tomorrow, or the day after, another helicopter will come. Perhaps it will be the great copter that brings fuel and supplies. Then the hunt will begin again. Boygur will never quit. I know that demon."

  "Tell me more of that place," Ras said. "Tell me all about it, all that is needed for a man who would go there to kill."

  Yusufu was startled. He
said, "What? Surely you joke, son?" But he obeyed.

  Ras listened, and asked many questions, and then told what he had in mind. He had to listen to loud and powerful and even hysterical protests and arguments from Yusufu and Eeva. Finally, Yusufu said to Eeva, "Do not waste your breath and wear away your spirit any more. I know that look. He is determined to go. Nothing except Death will stop him."

  The rest of the day was used in getting ready. This involved a journey to the cave in the cliffs. Ras slept an hour in the evening, and then, at dusk, he entered the dugout with Eeva and Yusufu. They paddled in the moonless black until they were at the base of the dark pillar. Here Ras kissed both Eeva and Yusufu, quieted their tears and their final protests, and, armed with only his knife, leaped from the dugout.

  Blindly, he gripped the projections he had gripped many times before, found more handholds, and began his slow, blind climbing. For the first time, he did not slip, perhaps because he was on fire and burned into the rock and so made his own clinging, or so it seemed to him. Painful and creeping as his progress was, it took him away from sight of the shadowy dugout too quickly. It was below him, a few yards away from the base, while Eeva and Yusufu waited to make sure that he did not fall. They would be there until shortly before dawn, unless he fell in before then and they pulled him living into the boat or dragged his dead body in.

  Soon the moon rose, and he could now see the boat and the tiny figures in it. He waved at them, but they did not wave back because he was invisible to them. Or perhaps he was so high that he could not make out their hands.

  He could see the silvered lake, the dark walls of the forest, and the white feather of one cataract. The moon rose higher, and he with it, though much less swiftly and less certainly. After a while, his fingers got cold. He was dressed in buckskin moccasins, trousers, and shirt, but the wind, coming over the cliffs and then down, as if weighted by icy particles, was chilling.

  He continued to go up, handhold by handhold, foothold by foothold, grip by grip. At times, he had to angle across, and other times he had to go down before he was able to work his way back up again. Twice, he found himself a quarter of the way around the pillar and then had to find some holds to get back to the side that would take him to his goal.

  The time came when he felt that he could not haul himself upward for another second; yet he could not stop, and he refused to return. He had climbed without the aid of picks or pitons or ropes; he had used his fingers and toes, and often had had to cling with only his fingers supporting his weight while the knobs or heads of rock seemed to be giving way. Though his hands and fingers were callused, they were bleeding, and this made for slipperiness. He wiped his hands on his shirt until the sides of the shirt were a solid red. Finally, he decided that he had to put on the gloves that Yusufu and Eeva had made for him. They would dim the sensitivity of his fingertips in testing the strength of the rock projections, but he could not put up with more pain, more loss of blood, and the resulting lack of friction between hands and rocks.

  For a long while he felt very heavy. Then he began to feel light and airy, as if the wind had plunged into him and made a balloon of him. He realized that it was fatigue and hunger and cold that were causing this dangerous sensation, but he could do nothing about it. He continued to climb. Shortly before dawn, while the sky was paling in announcement of the sun's approach, his upstretched hand felt a hollow and a ledge of stone that was too regular and smooth to be natural. He had found the window that Yusufu had described. And just in time. He had to summon all the strength in him to pull himself up and over the sill, and when he had done so he sat bent over with knees against his chest for a long time in the window as if it were a womb and he a baby waiting to be born. He certainly felt as weak as an about-to-be-born.

  It was while he was squinting against the sun that panic seized him for a second. The notch in the top of the cliff to the east seemed to be moving, and he felt that the world was sliding away from him. Then he realized that the notch was not moving back and forth. He was moving. Rather, as Yusufu had told him years before, the pillar of stone was moving, swaying, pushed by the wind as far as it could be pushed, perhaps a foot, and then springing slowly back to its original position, only to be pushed northward again. It was incredible that such an enormous and solid mass could respond to the weak and invisible air. But it was. It had been doing so since it first became a thousand-foot-high column, and would continue swaying until the movement cracked it somewhere and the upper part fell off.

  He let himself into the room, stretched, bent, and then began to explore. Yusufu had said that this room had been chiseled out of the rock a year before Ras had been born. It was a general storeroom. He tried the big door, which was made of thick wood, and found it locked. He would have to wait until someone unlocked it. According to Yusufu, a cook would open it shortly after dawn to get food for breakfast.

  There were many things piled here, all labeled. He wanted some ointment for his fingers and then some food. He found the ointment after a few minutes' search, opened a jar, and smeared it on. He had to pry open a box with a small crowbar to get a can of meat. After puzzling over the directions printed on the label, he pulled the little key from the bottom of the can, and inserted the tab in the slot of the key. The process was so novel and delightful that he had to restrain the impulse to open all the cans. The meat tasted cold, greasy, and too spicy, but he ate all of it, and he felt much better when his belly was on the way to being full.

  After eating a can of peaches, which he had to open with a can opener and therefore took more time to puzzle it out, he examined the armory. There were boxes of ammunition of all sorts, cases of revolvers and automatic pistols, several submachine guns, and a variety of rifles in racks. Ras took an M-15, which was the same type that Eeva had shown him how to handle after they had gone to Yusufu's hiding place. He inspected it for cleanliness, loaded it, and got a canister of clips to take with him. Then he sat down near the door and waited.

  The sun's rays entered the window at a steeper angle and brightened a machine that had been a dim, many-angled bulk. The machine was taller than he and three times as long as its height and had many toothed wheels and a huge cylinder on which white rope was wound and a long, metal neck on which were little wheels and more ropes. The entire machine was on a platform with wheels and could be pushed to the window, where the neck would stick out for about six feet. The rope around the spool was attached at one end to a big coil of rope on the floor, and this coil to another, and so on until twenty great coils formed a connected series.

  This was the machine Yusufu had described, the "donkey," which was run by petrol and which could let down a thousand feet of rope from the window to the surface of the lake. Boygur had prepared this for the day when he might be stranded on top of the pillar without helicopters. Near the donkey were several fish-gray metal boats attached to frames and hooks, which would support the boats while they were being lowered to the water.

  Without leaving his post, Ras looked at the machine to pass the time. Then he forgot about it to think of other things, past and present and future. A fish-eagle slashed the air outside the window with two screams. There was no sound after that until, so suddenly that his heart lurched, he heard a key in the lock. He ran to a large pile of wooden boxes and hid behind it. A short, fat Negro wearing a brown shirt and shorts and a clean, white apron entered. He locked the door behind him and put the key in his pocket and went on by the pile of boxes. He stopped before a waist-high stack of boxes and leaned over it and came up with a bottle half full of some dark liquid. It was tilted to his lips when Ras hooked an arm around his neck from behind. The bottle fell on the boxes and was still gushing out the stinking amber liquid when the man's neck cracked. Ras dragged the body behind the boxes and threw the bottle onto the body.

  He wiped the ointment from his fingers, because he would need friction if he had to handle his knife. After unlocking the door with the key from the man's pocket, he passed through it, lo
cked it again, and stuck the key in his shirt pocket. Before him were ten steps cut from the rock. He went up them and found himself in a hallway the ceiling of which was only a few inches above his head. The hallway ended abruptly a few feet on his right; he had to go to the left. A few steps down the hall and to his right was a doorway flush with the floor, and about twelve steps farther on was another door to his right. Both were locked, and his key fitted the locks of neither. At the end of the hallway was a stairway of stone to his right, and on his left, just opposite the stairway, was a thick, wooden door with a small window in it.

  Ras looked through it and saw a window with three bars of iron at the other end. Inside the small room was a stand with a metal washbowl, a pitcher, and a cup, and a white pot with a lid in one corner, and a wooden bed with some blankets and pillows. A woman lay on her side on the bed. She was dressed in brown clothes similar to those Eeva had worn when he had first seen her. The woman was thin, her yellow hair was tangled, and her face, as much as he could see, was gaunt. This woman would be his jane, the woman brought here against her will and now starving herself.

  While he was standing outside her door and wondering what--if anything--he should do about her, he heard the faint, far-off chuttering coming down the stairway to the outside. So many times, like the beats, of the wings of a demon, it had excited and frightened him. Now he knew it only heralded the approach of a dead thing, a machine, and some--but not all--of the mystery and terror was absent. Hearing this one, he felt eagerness more than anything. If it was the big copter that carried fuel and supplies, it could be used to bring consternation, panic, and death to his enemies.