Serpent's Kiss

3

Annja clung to the bark and hoped it didn’t give way beneath her fingers. All she saw was swirling water. The floodwaters muted her hearing, but she heard her heart beating frantically. Stay calm, she told herself. You’re going to be all right.

She knew from experience that she was prone to tell herself that lie every time things turned out badly.

She tilted her head back and looked up the tree. She couldn’t tell how high the water went. She felt the tree quiver under the onslaught of the flood.

Staying underwater wasn’t an option. Grimly, Annja slid her arms and legs up the trunk and felt the bark bite deeply into her bare flesh. She crept up slowly, only inches at a time.

Just as her lungs felt near to burst, her head broke the surface. She managed a quick breath and turned seaward. Another wave slapped her in the face and almost knocked her from her precarious hold. She caught a branch above her head and hauled herself out of the water.

Almost full dark had rolled in with the tsunami. Annja surveyed the trees for the survivors. The roar of the water made conversation almost impossible. But she heard her name.

“Annja!” A flashlight beam lanced through the darkness.

“Here!” Annja shouted.

The bright beam stung her eyes. She turned her head away. She sat on a branch eight feet above the water. The level didn’t appear to be rising.

“They said you were underwater,” Lochata shouted from the nearby tree.

“Not anymore.” Judging herself to be at a safe height, Annja shrugged out of her backpack and checked it. It was constructed so the main cargo area, where she carried her notebook computer, her camera and her other electronic equipment, was waterproof. She’d carefully packed it when the storm approached. The only worry was that debris might have smashed it.

Everything felt all right. She didn’t want to open the backpack in the rain to find out. After selecting a sturdy branch above her, she used the straps to secure the backpack. She took a flashlight from one of the outside pockets.

For the moment, no sign remained of the cliff as the water continued to surge through the jungle and inland.

That’s got to be at least fifteen feet deep, Annja thought. She tried to remember how high the lowest tree branches had been from the ground. Then she realized she didn’t know where the lowest branches were anymore.

“How long is this going to last?” someone above her asked.

Annja looked and saw Jason Kim sitting a few branches up. He clung to the tree bole. A young German woman had her arms wrapped around his waist. Both of them looked terrified.

“I don’t know,” Annja said. “Could be only a few minutes. Might possibly be hours.”

“Is it over?” the young woman asked.

Annja was hesitant to answer. “I think so.” Given the amount of water that had flooded the land, she knew that whatever had happened at sea to cause it had to have been powerful.

The massive tree swayed under the constant bombardment of the waves. They were lessening, but still dangerous.

Lightning burned through the night and revealed the dark clouds swirling and twisting overhead. The harsh peal of thunder came immediately.

Another crack, this one different from the thunder, issued from the left. A chorus of yells and cries for help followed.

Turning in the direction of the voices, Annja spotted a teak tree as it fell into the water. Three dig members clung to the branches as it went down. Annja guessed that the tree had been poorly rooted or had rotted and weakened. Either way, the surging sea started to carry the tree away.

“They’re going to get killed,” Jason Kim said.

Other people voiced the same concerns.

Annja knew that death was a possibility. If they stayed with the tree, if they didn’t get smashed by the branches, they might survive. But the water might carry them a mile or more into the interior, just far enough for them to get lost and possibly die from some other cause.

She grabbed her rope and shimmied along the thick branch she was on. Just as the branch started to sag beneath her weight, she jumped forward for the next tree. The teaks overcrowded the area and the branches grew close together.

By the time she caught a thick branch in front of her, she’d already chosen her next landing point. Like an aerial gymnast working uneven bars, she made her way through the trees faster than the floodwaters could carry away the huge tree. She also got closer to the water level. Her hands burned from friction against the bark.

After her fifth jump, when she knew she was out of trees, Annja shrugged the rope from her shoulder. Setting herself on a limb as wide as her body, she shook out the rope, swung the grappling hook and cast.

The grappling hook landed in the branches of the fallen tree. It jerked and bounced as it slid along the length of the tree without securing a hold.

C’mon, Annja thought. Take hold somewhere.

The grappling hook snugged up against a thick branch. Annja yanked on it like fishing line to set it. Satisfied it was securely in place and knowing that she’d never be able to hold the tree on her own, she dropped over the back of the branch she was on and paid out rope as she plunged into the water.

For a moment as she entered the water, she was afraid. The drop was little more than six feet, but she knew anything could be under the water. If she was knocked unconscious or seriously injured, no one would be able to help her.

The flashlight beams of the other dig site members played over the water as they tracked the tree caught in the surge. The glowing light continued moving away from Annja.

When the rope bit into her hand, Annja paid out more line and fought the current to get to the base of the tree she’d dropped from. Once she had hold of the tree, she pulled herself around it and looped the rope. Then it, too, became a deadly threat.

If she got caught in the rope, if the weight didn’t amputate her fingers or a hand or break them, it might trap her below the water and leave her to drown. The coarse fiber burned along her palm.

The rope pulled taut. The tree she’d attached it to shivered under the assault. But it held.

Working quickly, Annja tied the rope off and made it secure. She had to work one-handed while she held on to the tree with the other. Then, as black spots danced in her vision from lack of oxygen, she kicked and swam up next to the tree.

The flashlight beams from the other dig site members barely reached the fallen tree. In the dim light, Annja saw that all three people still held on to the branches less than thirty feet away from her.

Annja abandoned her hold and let the current take her. The current wasn’t as strong as it had been earlier. Swimming in it was difficult but it was only a short distance.

When she reached the tree, she hung on for a moment to gather her strength. Instead, the constant battle with the current only leeched energy from her. She forced her body out of the water and onto the tree.

“Is everyone all right?” Annja shouted above the noise of the storm and the rushing water.

All three college students, two female and one male, nodded. All of them looked pale and frightened in the flashlight beams and the lightning.

Tethered at the end of the rope, the tree danced and jerked like a fish on a line. Annja spotted the white scars left in the bark by the grappling hook’s prongs. She could see the branch the hook had caught had started to tear away.

Annja made her way across the slippery tree trunk and grabbed the branches from another nearby tree. She held tight and saw blood from the cuts on her hands. She ignored the pain and kept gripping.

“Get into the tree,” Annja ordered the others.

At first none of the three college students wanted to move. All of them were from Lochata’s university, and they all spoke English.

“Now!” Annja commanded in a more forceful tone. “That branch is going to tear free. I don’t have another rope and I don’t think we’ll get this lucky twice.”

One of the women spoke to the others in her native language. She got them up and moving. Awkwardly and fearfully, they made their way into the other tree.

Annja helped them, then pulled herself into the branches. She felt the cold from the storm splintering through her body.

Postadrenal surge, she told herself as she hunkered down and rubbed her arms. You’ll sleep well tonight. If you find a place to sleep.

The storm continued unabated. A few minutes later, the broken tree tore free from the rope and floated away. It collided with several other trees before disappearing into the darkness.

Annja settled in and got as comfortable as she could. It promised to be a long night.

A NNJA WOKE with the dawn. The sun painted the eastern horizon pink and purple with hints of gold and ruby. Blinking against the brightness, Annja relished the increasing warmth. When she pushed herself up from the crook of the tree’s branches where she’d slept, the pain in her hands reminded her of the damage she’d done.

She looked down at them and found several tears and scrapes across her palms. They weren’t as bad as they’d felt last night, but they were still painful when she flexed them.

“Professor Creed, I can’t believe you slept like that.”

Annja glanced up and shaded her eyes against the sun. One of the Indian college students sat on a limb above her. She was young and thin with long black hair. Annja tried to remember her name and finally got it.

“Indira, right?” Annja asked.

The young woman nodded. “I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

“I probably shouldn’t have.” Annja looked down. The water level had dropped considerably, but it still looked several feet deep. There was no sign of the campsite or the vehicles.

“I left my computer down there,” Indira said. “All my stuff.” She bit her lower lip. “It’s probably ruined, isn’t it?”

Annja hated giving the young woman the bad news. “I’m afraid so.”

Tears filled Indira’s eyes.

A guilty feeling stole through Annja even though she’d had nothing to do with the tsunami. She looked back at the tree she’d originally climbed. Her backpack still hung safely from the limb. She sighed in relief. Replacing the equipment would have been a pain, but financially she could have done it. However, getting replacements could have been difficult.

She grabbed the limb over her head and pulled up. Her hand burned as the cuts pulled. A quick inspection revealed that none of them had broken open. Infection could be a problem, she told herself. And the first things you take care of when you’re out in the tropics are your hands and feet.

She discovered she was sore from sleeping in the tree. All the diving, jumping and swimming had probably contributed to it, she thought.

“Professor Creed?”

Still not used to the formality, Annja thought. She wasn’t actually a professor but Lochata Rai had told all of her charges they were to address Annja that way.

The speaker was the male college student. Annja felt bad that she couldn’t remember his name at all.

“Yes?”

“I just wanted to thank you for saving us,” he said. “That was the coolest thing I think I’ve ever seen done.”

“W E WERE VERY LUCKY ,” Lochata said. “Everyone survived the experience.”

“I know. But the flood destroyed the dig site.” Annja waded through the hip-deep water and felt the pull of the flood’s withdrawal. The sea continued to return to its proper boundaries.

Annja and the professor had organized the dig members into teams responsible for searching for supplies that might have survived the flooding. Prizes turned up with hopeful regularity, though many of them were farther inland. A lot of the food and water was in waterproof containers. Unfortunately, many of those containers were buoyant. The deluge had ripped the tents free of their stakes and allowed them to be carried inland or back out to sea.

“What was buried under the earth will still be there when we are ready to begin again,” Lochata said. She reached forward and plucked a snake from the water, examined it for a moment, then hung it on a tree limb.

“Think it’ll find its way home again?” Annja asked.

“Or make a new home, perhaps.” Lochata watched the snake slither along the branch until it found a place in the sun. It coiled up and sat there.

One of the male students sang out joyously fifteen yards away. He hoisted a bottled sports drink into the air as if he’d just won an Olympic event. He spoke in his own language.

“He says he’s found a whole box of the sports drink,” Lochata translated with a smile. “At least forty-eight bottles.”

The find drew the others to the area and they fanned out to search the underbrush for more food and drink.

Annja knew they weren’t going to starve. Her satellite phone had allowed Lochata to get in touch with rescue centers in Kanyakumari and request assistance.

According to the dispatch officer Lochata had conversed with, the city hadn’t been hit by the tsunami. The disaster seemed to be fairly localized, but several small villages had been hard-hit, as well.

“Are you going to continue the dig?” Annja asked.

“If I’m able. I still have to contact the university.”

“It seems a shame to walk away from it now. We’ve just gotten started,” Annja said.

“I agree.”

“And it’s not likely there’ll be another tsunami.”

“I don’t think so, either.”

Annja watched the university students splash around in the water. “Do you think many of your interns will stay on?”

“I can only ask.” Lochata raised her thin shoulders and dropped them. “For many of them, this will be a grand adventure by tomorrow. Something they’ll be able to brag about to their classmates when we return to university. However, they have to return in two weeks no matter what. That’s all I could arrange for them to be away from their studies. I was not able to schedule this for the summer due to the monsoon season.”

“You can always threaten them with their grades.” Annja smiled.

“Hey!” someone shouted. “I found gold!”

The unusual cry drew Annja’s attention at once. Across the water, brown and thick with dirt and debris, one of the male college students held up an object that held the dark yellow luster of gold. He had to use both hands to hold the object.

Lochata and Annja trudged through the water and joined him.

“Let me see that.” Lochata took glasses from her vest pocket, slipped them on, then reached for the object the young man held.

Annja peered over the diminutive professor’s shoulder for a better look.

The object was hardly larger than Annja’s closed fist, but it was too heavy to be common metal. It looked like an egg, elliptical in shape. But at the top a fist poked through.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“It appears to be a mechanism of some sort,” Lochata answered.

“Is it gold?” someone else asked.

“I believe so, yes.” Lochata’s fingers glided around the figure.

“Where did you find it?” Annja asked the student who’d found it.

He pointed at the calf-deep water. “Here. I stubbed my toe against it. I figured it was just a rock, but when I looked down I saw that gold color. When I picked it up, that’s what I found.”

Several of the students took renewed interest in the surrounding area.

“Am I going to get to keep it?” the student asked.

“Dude,” Jason said, “if I can’t keep one lousy skull out of the dozens we found, there’s no way they’re going to let you keep a solid-gold paperweight.”

“It’s not a paperweight,” Annja said.

“Then what is it?”

“No one makes a paperweight out of solid gold,” one of the female students said. “Except maybe Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.”

Annja ignored the chatter. She watched as Lochata’s fingers found the hidden release. The mechanism inside the egg-shape whirred to life. The device split open like the sections of an orange to reveal the figurine inside.

It was a woman.

At least, part of it was a woman. From the waist up, the fantastic creature was a woman. She held one fist above her head. In the other she held a short whip.

But below the waist she was a snake. Her serpentine half sat in a tight coil and balanced her.

4

“A ship! I see a ship!”

Wearily, Goraksh Shivaji lifted his head and stared out at the bleak expanse of the Indian Ocean from the deck of his father’s ship, the Black Swan. He’d barely managed a handful of catnaps during the night.

He should have been home in Kanyakumari studying algorithmic design paradigms. The professor this semester was harsh. College life wasn’t easy for him. It didn’t help that his father expected him to work a fifty-hour week in the warehouse.

Over the past two years of his career at university, Goraksh had thought about telling his father that he was quitting the warehouse. But he needed the pittance his father paid him to pay his tuition.

Jobs were hard to come by, especially ones that worked around a college schedule. Also, working in the warehouse guaranteed that he could live in his father’s house. If he was on his own, he knew he wouldn’t be able to make ends meet.

As it was, when Goraksh finally graduated, he was going to owe a small fortune to the university. He would have his degree in computer science. Then he would be able to get a good job in the United States, maybe designing video games, and finally leave his father’s warehouse behind for good.

But that was the dream. Tonight was all about working for his father. If you could call piracy work, Goraksh grumbled sourly.

“Goraksh, do you see the ship?” His father’s voice was stern. Rajiv Shivaji was a hard, lean man in his early fifties. He wore the turban and steel bracelet—the kara —of the Sikh, and his beard was full. He also carried a .357 Magnum revolver in a shoulder holster.

“Not yet, Father,” Goraksh replied. He held the high-powered binoculars to his eyes and swept the surface of the sea. The light hurt his eyes. He swayed to the rise and fall of the waves as the cargo ship strained under full sail.

Rajiv stood at the prow of the ship and held on to the railing. Goraksh had never seen a man more able who had taken to sea. It was easy to imagine him sailing with the likes of Sinbad the Sailor and other heroes.

Except that Rajiv wasn’t a hero. He was a pirate and a thief, and he had set sail with his crew after learning the tsunami had struck. They’d expected to find several ships swamped at sea. So far they’d found none.

“Fyzee,” Rajiv yelled up to the old man standing in the wire crow’s nest twenty feet above the pitching deck.

“Yes, Captain.”

“Do you still see the ship?”

“I do. It’s only a short distance away.” Fyzee pointed. He was old and potbellied. His beard and hair had turned snow-white long ago.

Goraksh followed the direction the old man was pointing, then lifted the binoculars to his eyes again. This time he saw the ship. He knew then why he’d lost it—the ship was upside down.

Judging from the rough, unadorned exterior and the barnacle-covered hull, the craft was a cargo ship. It was one of the lunkers that local businesses used to cross the Indian Ocean on regular routes. They were operated for a song and only required a skeleton crew. Goraksh thought of the ship’s crew and wondered what had happened to them.

Sickness lurched through Goraksh’s stomach when he thought of how cruel the sea could be to those who were lost in it. He’d been with his father when they’d reclaimed bodies from the ocean. Sometimes, after the sharks had gotten at them, there were only parts of bodies. But they’d inspected them for anything worth stealing and quickly shoved the gruesome remains back into the sea.

“Well?” his father demanded.

“I see it,” Goraksh replied.

“Where is it?”

“South by southwest.”

Rajiv called orders back to the helmsmen. The crew came about sharply as the ship took on a new heading.

“Are there any survivors?” Rajiv asked.

“None that I can see.” Goraksh kept scanning the boat from prow to stern. He knew they weren’t looking for survivors. Anyone who had lived through the storm would only complicate things.

Rajiv gave orders to trim the sails. Goraksh put his binoculars back in their protective case. Tension knotted in his stomach when he thought of what might lie in the overturned ship’s hold.

G ORAKSH BRACED HIMSELF as the ship came alongside the cargo vessel expertly. Tires tied along the length of their port side muffled the impact.

“All right,” his father growled as he paced the ship’s deck, “get aboard and discover what the gods have favored us with on this trip.” He stopped in front of Goraksh. “Go with them, college boy. See how a man dirties his hands to put food on the table.”

Goraksh wanted to argue but he couldn’t meet his father’s gaze. His father had been angry with him ever since Professor Harbhajan stopped by the warehouse early in the week.

The warehouse had been full of stolen and illegally salvaged items. Fortunately the professor hadn’t recognized any of it. But Goraksh’s father hadn’t let him forget that the professor could just as easily have turned them in to the police.

Professor Harbhajan had graded the projects his class had turned in at the start of the semester. He’d stated that he’d been particularly impressed by Goraksh’s work. His father had been incensed when he’d heard about the visit and the topic.

Rajiv was one to hold grudges for years. Goraksh knew that no matter how long he lived he would never be forgiven the trespass he himself had not caused.

Without a word, Goraksh nodded. He kicked off his shoes and clambered over the ship’s side with the rest of the boarding crew.

U NDER THE HOT SUN , Goraksh held the battery-operated saw and worked quickly. He’d paired up with Karam, one of his father’s oldest crew. The man was emaciated by age and alcoholism. His gray beard showed stark against his dark skin. Old scars inscribed leathery worms against his features.

The saw jumped and jerked in Goraksh’s hands as he held it to the task. The blade chewed through the wooden hull and threw out a constant spray of splinters. He remained aware throughout of the ship’s erratic movement in the water.

Finally, when he had a square cut that measured a yard to a side, Goraksh pulled the saw back and stomped his foot on the square. The section dropped down into the hold. Goraksh heard it hit water only a short distance down.

“There’s water in the hold,” Karam called across to the other ship.

Rajiv leaned on the railing. “Find out what else is down there.”

Karam nodded.

“Goraksh,” Rajiv called. “You’ll go inside.”

For a moment Goraksh thought of disobeying his father’s order. His father knew he had a fear of enclosed, dark places.

“She’s the Bombay Goose, ” Rajiv said. “I checked her manifest.”

Goraksh knew his father paid someone off in the customs house for ships’ manifests.

“She’s carrying electronics,” his father continued. “Computers, DVD players. Those will sell nicely on the black market.”

They’re probably all destroyed, Goraksh thought. But he knew better than to point that out to his father. Rajiv Shivaji always believed good things would happen to him.

Rajiv looked over his shoulder and shouted for the scuba gear to be brought up from the hold.

Karam caught Goraksh’s eye and spoke in a low voice. “Go slowly, boy. Everything will be all right if you just go slowly.”