by James Becker
Bronson studied the rock-covered ground and nodded. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘Though I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to take it off the road. I guess we’ll be walking for the last part, up to that cleft.’
He reversed the jeep about twenty yards then swung it over to the right and inched his way off the rutted surface of the road and into the entrance to the gully, weaving his way between the fallen rocks. Beyond the fairly narrow opening, the rocks opened up slightly, and there were fewer fallen boulders to negotiate. He was able to drive about a hundred yards towards the split in the rock, which was further than he thought they’d be able to manage.
But eventually the ground became too steep and the surface too broken up for him to drive any further. He reversed the jeep into a gap between two large boulders and switched off the engine.
‘That should be invisible from the road,’ he said. ‘Now we walk.’
57
In a level area just off the road about a mile outside Arann, Masters ended the call on his sat-phone and grabbed a topographical map of Kashmir. Spreading it out across the bonnet of the Land Cruiser, he studied it for a few minutes, Donovan right beside him. Then he gestured to the other men, who clustered around him.
‘OK,’ he began. ‘Bronson and Lewis have just stopped their vehicle and pulled off the road right here. According to the surveillance team, the jeep drove up this narrow gully about ten minutes ago and it hasn’t reappeared.
‘So what we can’t do is drive up the gully after them. That would be real stupid. We need to sneak up on them.’
The heavy-set man at the edge of the group shook his head. Right then John Cross’s surname fitted his mood pretty much like a glove. ‘This makes no sense, Nick. These two Brits don’t have anything more than maybe a penknife between them. We’ve got assault rifles and pistols. I don’t see why we don’t just drive straight up to them, stick a pistol down the woman’s throat and tell the guy we’ll pull the trigger unless he tells us what he knows.’
A couple of the other men nodded their agreement.
‘Oh, and by the way, Nick, we still have no clue what the hell we are supposed to be looking for in this god-forsaken hole.’ Cross added, ‘because, so far you’ve told us diddly-squat.’
Masters nodded. ‘I’m still not going to tell you why we’re here,’ he snapped, ‘because that guy over there’ – he gestured at Donovan, who had walked a short distance away from the group of merceneries – ‘is the man who’s paying your wages, and he wants it that way. The reason we’re not going to give Angela Lewis a nine-millimetre tonsillectomy is because she’s the person most likely to find what we’re looking for. If you’re not happy with this, unload your weapons, put them back in the truck and start walking.’
He looked round at the men. Not one of them had moved. ‘No takers? OK, get ready. We leave in two minutes.’
Bronson shrugged a haversack on to his back. Inside it were bottles of water and half a dozen chocolate bars, plus a couple of sweaters and a handful of tools he’d bought in Leh that he thought might be useful. They left the rest of their survival equipment in the Nissan – if they had to spend the night in the open, they’d have to return to the vehicle.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready and eager to get going,’ Angela said with a smile.
Bronson led the way up a gentle slope, clambering around boulders and over fallen rocks, and paused to help Angela over the last section. As he stretched out his hand to her, he saw her eyes widen as she stared at something behind him, something he obviously hadn’t noticed.
Bronson spun round. ‘What is it?’
‘There,’ Angela said, pointing directly behind him. ‘Just beyond those rocks. There’s a straight line. It looks like the corner of a building – something man-made, at any rate.’
Bronson stared at the feature she’d spotted. The rocks closer to them curved slightly outwards, and so only the very bottom of whatever lay around the corner was visible from where they were standing. But from what he could see, it did look like the base of a vertical stone wall.
‘Let’s check it out,’ he said.
‘Just over there,’ Masters gestured to an area of ground on the left-hand side of the track they’d followed for perhaps a quarter of a mile from the road.
The driver swung the wheel and braked to a halt.
Masters waved the driver of the second four-by-four to park beside it. His four men piled out and stood waiting for orders.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Break out the assault rifles. Make sure all your magazines are fully charged right now, but do not – I say again – do not chamber a round in either the AKs or your pistols. We can’t afford a negligent discharge now. Leave two of the Kalashnikovs and a couple of pistols, plus ammo, between the jeeps for the recce team to collect.’
‘Suppose somebody else comes along here?’ Cross asked.
Masters just stared at him. ‘Out here?’ he snapped. ‘Get real. The worst that could happen to the weapons is that a goat could come along and crap on them. And gimme that sat-phone.’
Five minutes later they’d locked their vehicles and were heading towards the gully where Bronson and Angela had parked their vehicle.
On the side of the Saser mountain, the grey Land Rover was again mobile, following the same route Bronson had taken. Their plan was to collect the weapons Masters had left for them, drive past the gully, and stop half a mile or so away. They would then position themselves in the hills to the west, too far away to intervene in what was going to happen in the valley, but they’d make sure nobody could get out in that direction.
Caught between two groups of armed men, Bronson and Angela were walking into a trap.
58
‘You need to get ready,’ Tembla instructed as he walked into the briefing room. He was wearing a set of flying overalls, a survival belt including a holstered pistol around his waist. ‘Bronson and Lewis are proceeding on foot up into the valley.’
Killian stepped across to the table and looked down at the map.
‘They’re here, near these ruins,’ Tembla said, ‘not far off this road that runs east from Arann. It looks as if they’re heading towards the centre of the valley.’
Outside the building, Killian could hear the sound of a jet engine spooling up, and there was a faint whiff of burnt kerosene in the air.
‘When do we leave?’ he said.
‘Not yet. The moment we fly into the valley, everyone will know we are there. Until we’re sure they’ve found something, it’s better if we watch what happens through the camera on the Searcher. But I’ve ordered the helicopters to be manned and their engines started, so we can take off at any moment.’
Killian nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Can I see the images?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Follow me.’
A couple of minutes later, Killian was sitting in an adjacent room staring at a small video screen. On it was an image that moved slightly as the Searcher manoeuvred in the sky, though the area displayed remained reasonably stable.
‘This is the jeep,’ Tembla said, pointing to an oblong shape in the bottom right of the screen, more or less in the middle of which was a small circle of colour – the mark Tembla’s man had painted on the roof of the vehicle. ‘Bronson and Lewis are here, standing beside these ruins. But I’m afraid that if they think what they’re looking for is inside that building, they’re going to be disappointed.’
Bronson stepped around the corner and past the overhanging rock, turned to his right and then stopped.
‘What the hell is this place?’
The structure in front of them was very obviously ancient, but at the same time had a strangely modern look, with straight grey-brown stone walls unadorned with decoration. It rose from a level area of ground perhaps fifty yards square, and had two storeys topped by a flat roof, most of which appeared to have fallen down inside the building. All the windows and the two doorways they could see were simply openings in the walls,
nothing more. They could see into the building through one of the doorways, where rubble and unidentified rubbish lay scattered across the stone floor.
‘I know what it looks like,’ Angela said, pulling out her map.
‘A deserted monastery?’ Bronson suggested. ‘A small one?’
‘Spot on. Yes, it is – or rather it was – a monastery. In fact, it’s even marked on this map.’
She folded the map so that Bronson could see where she was pointing.
‘Just there. That symbol and the note right beside it.’
Bronson read the words aloud. ‘There’s a sort of castle symbol with the words “Namdis Gompa” beside it,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit surprised it’s deserted. You’d have thought some wandering goatherd might have appropriated a place like this for his own use.’
‘The locals are very superstitious. This was once a monastery, a holy place, and they’d respect that. They’d never dream of squatting here.’
‘Could this be it, do you think?’ Bronson said, looking up at the old building. ‘The text said something about man-made darkness, which could mean there’s a hidden room inside.’
‘I wish it was that easy, Chris,’ Angela said. ‘But we haven’t passed through that cleft in the rock up there, the one the text described as the “pillars”.’
‘Maybe the writer was referring to the rocks on either side of the gully, down by the road.’
‘But the dates don’t work. I don’t know exactly when this monastery was built, but most of them seem to have been constructed anything from three to five hundred years ago. Even if we’re generous with the dating, and assume this was built half a millennium ago, what we’re searching for was hidden here fifteen hundred years earlier than that. There’s no point in even looking in here.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said, staring back up the slope, ‘onwards and upwards.’
The gully that Bronson and Angela were exploring began as little more than a break in the rock wall. Just to the north of this was an area of sloping ground, at one side of which, and behind a rocky outcropping, the monastery of Namdis Gompa had been built. Beyond that was the cleft in the rocks which Angela had spotted. On the north and north-east side of the valley was a steeper and wider area, dotted with small plateaus where stunted bushes and other scrubby vegetation had gained a precarious foothold.
All this was obvious to Nick Masters as he lay on his belly near the crest of one of the hills that bordered it. He was looking through a pair of binoculars at the scene below him, while about fifty yards back the rest of the men who’d accompanied him sat or lay on the ground, weapons cradled in their hands, bored and waiting for his orders. The exception was Donovan, who was pacing up and down, clearly excited – and irritated.
Masters was careful to keep in the shadow of a rock, because the last thing he wanted was a ray of the afternoon sun to reflect off the glass of his binoculars and alert Bronson to his presence. He kept as low and as motionless as he could, just the way he’d been trained.
He’d already identified the position of their jeep, and now he focused on the two targets themselves. Judging by their gestures, they appeared to be talking about the ruined building in front of them, and for a fleeting moment Masters wondered if this could be the end of the operation, if this old ruin was the resting place of the relic Donovan was so desperate to recover. But then he saw the woman shake her head firmly and point further up the hill. A few moments later they’d both turned and started walking up the slope.
‘I didn’t expect this,’ Bronson muttered as they passed through the cleft in the rocks. In front lay an expanse of rocks and tufty grass. ‘It could take us days to search this area properly. Is there any other information that could help narrow down the position?’
Angela shook her head helplessly, then pulled out her notebook and read the lines of the text again. ‘It says “between the pillars and beyond their shadows / into the silence and the darkness formed of man”. We’ve passed between the pillars.’ She pointed at the jagged-edged gap in the rocks a few yards behind them. ‘The next phrase means either that they walked north, so their shadows were in front of them, or maybe that they had to go some distance beyond the shadows cast by the rocks that form those pillars. Either meaning would work, I suppose.’
‘Yeah,’ Bronson agreed, ‘but neither really helps us. It’s needle-in-a-haystack time.’
‘Don’t be so negative, Chris.’
‘I’m being realistic.’ He waved his arm at the widening valley in front of them. ‘This must cover two or three square miles, and over the last two millennia hundreds, maybe thousands, of people must have walked all over it. If there was still anything here to find, surely somebody else would have found it by now?’
Angela nodded. ‘But nobody has. When this relic was hidden, the people involved obviously concealed it really well.’
‘OK.’ Bronson straightened up. ‘Let’s look at this logically. We’re standing on a sloping rocky hillside. The only two possibilities, as far as I can see, are that the treasure is either in some kind of building or hidden inside a cave.’ He turned to Angela. ‘Let’s split up. That way we can cover more ground.’
* * *
Masters watched the two people in the valley below him separate and start to move in different directions. He watched them for a few moments longer, then eased back away from the cliff edge and walked across to where his men were waiting.
‘They’re moving further up the valley, so you can move parallel to them.’ He pointed at an outcropping of rocks about a quarter of a mile north-east of where they were standing. ‘Go there, quietly, and make sure you keep out of sight. Keep the sat-phone switched on, but on silent, and wait till I give the word. You stay with me, JJ.’
As his men picked up their weapons and moved off, Masters crawled back to his vantage point and resumed his scrutiny of the valley below.
‘Chris!’ Angela called out, waving her arm. ‘Come here.’
With the constant howling of the wind, Bronson was too far away to hear her distant yell, but he saw her wave and ran across the valley floor towards her.
‘Remember the text?’ she asked, as he stopped beside her.
‘Most of it, yes,’ he replied.
‘Notice anything?’
Bronson glanced around. ‘No.’
‘Actually, it’s not something I saw – it’s something I heard. Listen.’
For a few seconds Bronson listened intently. Then he shook his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Angela said. ‘In this area there’s no wind noise, and I don’t know why. I guess it must be something to do with the shape of the valley.’
Bronson realized she was right. He’d got so used to the constant moaning of the wind that his subconscious mind had tuned it out. But here his brain wasn’t having to do any filtering – they were standing there in virtual silence.
‘The text says, “between the pillars and beyond their shadows / into the silence.” We’ve come through the pillars and headed north, walking beyond their shadows, and I think we’ve just stepped “into the silence”.’
Bronson stepped towards her and hugged her. ‘Did I ever tell you how amazing you are?’ he said.
Angela grinned. ‘We’re not there yet,’ she said, pushing him back. ‘And this “silent” area is pretty large. It could cover quite a big part of this side of the valley.’ She pointed towards the valley wall to the west. ‘It’s most likely that cliff which diverts the wind. It’s probably just blowing right over our heads.’
‘But we must be close,’ Bronson said. ‘Come on – let’s keep searching.’
They moved on, further up the valley floor, checking all around them as they went, looking for anything that could possibly match the last half of the penultimate line of the text that had brought them halfway around the world – “the darkness formed of man” – anything, in short, fabricated by human beings rather
than a product of nature.
Bronson saw it first. In a small plateau just off to their left he caught a glimpse of a small square structure. He stopped dead.
59
‘That can’t be it,’ Angela said firmly. To their left was a small, cubical building. The stones that made up its structure were the same texture and colour as the surrounding rocks, which was why neither of them had noticed it before. But now they could see it, they also saw the single oblong opening in its front wall – a doorway without a door.
‘What?’
‘I need to explain something about Lamaist monasteries,’ she said, sitting down in front of it. ‘Most of them, and certainly all the larger ones, actually consist of two buildings or groups of buildings, in two different places. There’s the main structure, like Diskit Gompa that we saw down below, where the two rivers meet, and a second, much smaller building. This is usually quite some distance – maybe three or four miles – from the monastery proper, and usually at a higher altitude. It’s like a simple cell, with almost no facilities, and it just provides shelter and a place to sleep.
‘Before a monk can become a lama, he is required to spend quite a long period of time in a building like this. He’s supposed to meditate in the solitude, completely undisturbed. The monastery provides him with basic food and drink, which is delivered once a day, so that the monk doesn’t have to disturb his meditations by preparing meals. It’s a bit like the forty days and nights of solitude Christ is supposed to have spent in the desert in Judea after being baptized. And I’m pretty certain that what we’re looking at here is the separate house of meditation that belonged to the Namdis Gompa monastery.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Bronson muttered. ‘But it fits the text so well. It’s in this weird area of silence, and it’s clearly man-made, not to mention dark inside.’
