by James Becker
‘I agree. It was probably built here precisely because this particular spot is inside this sort of cone of silence, so the constant noise of the wind also wouldn’t disturb the meditation of the monks. But you’ve got exactly the same problem with the dates, Chris – they just don’t work. We can take a look inside it, by all means, but it was definitely constructed far too late to be what we’re looking for.’
They walked across to the small building and peered into it, but it was empty, just four bare stone walls. There was a tiny cubicle in one corner that had possibly functioned as an earth closet, and a flat stone bench that was presumably intended to be a bed. But apart from that, there was nothing else.
‘So what now?’ Bronson asked, sitting down beside Angela on the bench.
Angela sighed. ‘I still don’t think we should be looking for a building, because it just wouldn’t be still standing now, not after all this time. I was hoping we’d find a cave, something like that.’
Bronson stiffened. ‘I passed one a few minutes ago,’ he said.
‘Where? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You’d just waved me over,’ Bronson said mildly, getting up and pulling her to her feet, ‘and I thought you’d found something right here.’ He pointed out to the east, back the way he’d come. ‘Let’s go and see what I found, shall we?’
Two minutes later Bronson led the way in through what actually appeared to be little more than a crack in the rock. But inside, the cave widened out considerably.
‘It’s a lot bigger than it looks,’ Angela said, staring around her in the light from Bronson’s torch.
‘But no sign of anything that you could interpret as “the darkness formed of man”,’ Bronson pointed out, shining his torch around the interior of the empty space.
Facing them was a flat rock wall, boulders and lumps of wood resting against it in a tumbled heap. To the right of the rock wall a short tunnel the height of the cave opened up, but terminated in another solid wall of stone after perhaps ten or twelve feet. To the left, there was an even shorter tunnel, just three or four feet deep.
‘No,’ Angela said sadly. ‘To me, this just looks like a cave.’
She turned to leave, but Bronson reached out and grabbed her arm to stop her.
‘Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about this place?’
Angela shook her head. ‘No. It’s just a cave, a hole in the rock.’
‘But we know that somebody’s been in here.’
‘How can you tell?’
Bronson pointed at the wall opposite. ‘What do you see over there?’ he asked.
‘Rocks and bits of wood. Why?’
‘Exactly. The only way wood can get into a cave is if some person or animal carries it in. Which means that somebody else has been in here too. The question is, when were they here? And what could they have been doing?’
Bronson strode over to the wall and looked down at the debris. ‘Some of these look to me like worked timbers,’ he said.
He knelt down and started rooting about. Then he picked up a lump of wood, but it crumbled away almost to nothing in his hands.
‘These bits of timber must have been in here a long time,’ he said slowly, shaking the dust and slivers of wood off his hands. He bent forward and examined the remaining lumps of timber more closely. ‘I think this could be a part of a wheel,’ he muttered. ‘It looks like the rim of a solid wooden wheel. The edge of it is definitely rounded.’ He stepped back and looked down again. ‘You know, this could possibly be the remains of a cart, something like that.’
‘Makes sense,’ Angela said dejectedly. ‘When the monks from the Namdis Gompa monastery built that house of meditation we’ve just been in, they’d have had to haul worked stone up here to do it, and they would have needed some sort of cart. When they’d finished it, they probably just stored it here rather than dragging it back down the mountain again.
‘They could have worked the stone up here,’ Bronson suggested. ‘It would have been easier than shaping it down in the valley and then hauling it all the way up here from the monastery.’
‘Maybe . . .’ Angela said, clearly still unconvinced.
Bronson took another look at the lumps of wood lying on the floor, then turned back towards the entrance. Then he stopped suddenly.
‘Just come over here, will you?’ he said quietly.
Angela stepped across to where he was standing. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
Bronson didn’t reply, just pointed upwards.
‘What?’ Angela asked again.
‘There, in the roof. See those two parallel lines? There’s no way those are natural. Somebody cut those out of the stone with a hammer and chisel.’
On the right-hand side of the rock wall, the cave extended a short distance back into the mountainside, into a short, blind-ended tunnel. What Bronson was pointing at were two straight lines that extended from the side of the vertical rock wall over to their right, a distance of about five or six feet.
‘What are they?’ Angela asked.
‘I know what they look like,’ Bronson said, ‘though that’s almost unbelievable. But there’s one way to check.’
‘How?’
‘Let me show you.’
From his vantage point on the cliffs above, Nick Masters watched the two figures vanish from sight into what he presumed was a cave.
He looked away from his binoculars for a few seconds and stared at his watch. Then he glanced behind him to where Donovan stood, leaning against a boulder, looking uncomfortable.
He slid back from the cliff edge and waved to Donovan to join him. Donovan crouched down and weaved towards him in a clumsy parody of a soldier’s advance that would have been funny in any other context. When he got closer, Masters waved him to a stop and knelt beside him.
‘Right,’ he snapped, his voice low and urgent. ‘Keep down, and keep quiet. I know the wind’s blowing real hard, but you’d be amazed how far sound can travel at times like this.’
‘What’s happening?’
Masters explained what he’d seen. ‘If they stay in that cave for another ten minutes, I’m giving the go signal.’
Donovan nodded agreement. His instructions to Masters had been very specific – let Bronson and Lewis find the relic, but on no account let them touch it.
‘Do you think they’ve got it?’ he asked, his heart pounding with anxiety.
‘I don’t know,’ Masters said. ‘But we’re sure as hell going to stop them if they have.’
60
Back in Karu, Killian and Tembla stared intently at the video screen. Through the data-link from the Searcher UAV they’d watched two tiny figures look at the ruined monastery building, walk deeper into the valley, and enter another small structure, from which they’d reappeared almost immediately. But now they’d vanished completely.
‘They’ve found a cave,’ Killian muttered.
‘There are lots of caves in that valley,’ Tembla pointed out. ‘Let’s see if they come out again.’
Five minutes later there was still no sign of the two figures.
‘They’ve found something,’ Killian said, standing up. ‘We must leave.’
Tembla leaned over to the serviceman who was piloting the UAV and issued a series of orders. Immediately, the image widened as the man switched from the telephoto lens to a wide-angle view that covered the valley walls as well as the floor. Then he began to zoom in on one particular area.
‘What are you doing?’ Killian asked.
‘Checking on the opposition.’ As the picture tightened, Tembla pointed at a number of slow-moving dots that were just coming into focus. ‘There are the men Donovan recruited. Including Donovan, there are six of them in the valley, the four you can see there and two others who are still watching from the valley wall. There are a couple of others we spotted driving a four-by-four, but they’re some distance away, and we don’t yet know if they’re also a part of the group. And you’re right – from the way they move, they
are mercenaries. They’re also carrying assault rifles, which is good for us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it gives us the perfect excuse to eliminate them. You know what we’re looking at here, but I’ll make sure that all the pictures from the Searcher will just show a group of heavily armed men who’ve almost certainly entered India illegally. We are entirely within our rights to engage them. Using the Hind might be considered to be overkill, but I’ll argue about that later.’
Tembla issued a further instruction and the image changed again, to the view of the rocks where Bronson and Lewis had vanished.
‘They’re inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘Mark that spot and pass the coordinates to the chopper pilots. Right, Father. It’s time we got airborne.’
* * *
Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.
‘Look at this,’ he said to Angela. He took a knife from his belt – one of the various items of camping equipment he’d bought back in Leh – and pressed the blade into the soil. The tip penetrated no more than a quarter of an inch. Then he moved the blade a few inches away and repeated the operation. This time, the blade slid into the dirt for about six inches. He withdrew the knife blade, moved it even further, and again the tip hit solid rock within less than half an inch.
‘You see,’ he said. ‘There’s a groove that runs from the edge of the rock wall across towards the right-hand side of the cave. It’s directly below those two lines on the roof.’ He paused and looked at Angela. ‘In fact, what you’re looking at up there isn’t a pair of parallel lines at all – it’s actually a groove cut into the stone itself, and it’s mirrored by an identical groove cut in the floor of the cave.’
‘You don’t mean . . .’ Angela’s voice trailed away as she looked from the floor to the roof of the cave, then to the rock wall itself. She stepped forward and carefully felt the stone, running her hand up and down the edge of the wall.
Bronson nodded. ‘That isn’t a wall of rock. That’s a sliding door made of solid stone that somebody went to a lot of trouble to conceal. What we have to do now is find a way to open it.’
Nick Masters checked his watch once more – it was ten minutes and eighteen seconds since Bronson and Lewis had disappeared. He considered his options for a few more seconds then made a decision. Beckoning to Donovan, he moved back from the cliff-edge and made a call on the sat-phone to the small group of mercenaries who were waiting a short distance up the slope.
‘The targets have gone into a cave. There’s a small stone building on the valley floor – you’ll see it when you get down there. The cave entrance is maybe seventy yards east of that. Move forward now, slowly and quietly. Then hold position about thirty yards clear of the cave entrance.’
Next he made a call to the two men who’d been in the Land Rover – and issued orders to them as well.
Finally he checked his Kalashnikov was fully loaded, shouldered the sniper rifle and began a careful descent down into the valley, Donovan following cautiously behind him.
‘A stone door, Chris? In your dreams! How would they do it?’
‘You’re the one who’s always banging on about how technologically advanced the ancient races were,’ Bronson said, continuing to dig around in the earth with the sheath knife. ‘The pyramids have been standing for what – about five thousand years – and you’ve told me that even today nobody actually knows for sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to build them.’
Angela nodded, almost reluctantly. ‘True enough. And some of the passages in them were deliberately blocked by massive stone blocks to foil tomb-robbers, so the technology obviously existed – or at least it did in Egypt. It’s just that up here in these mountains, in this country – it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find.’
Bronson pointed at the floor, where he’d exposed a long straight-sided groove. ‘Once they’d slid the door closed, they jammed rocks under the base of it to stop it moving, filled the channel in the floor with earth and covered it, and the front of the stone door, with rocks and wood. But they couldn’t do anything to conceal the channel they’d had to cut in the ceiling.’
He looked up, then back down at the floor. ‘They must have used rollers of some kind,’ he said, almost talking to himself, ‘probably lubricated with animal fat or something like that. I just hope that they used stone instead of wood because of the weight of the door. No, in fact, they must have used stone. After two millennia wooden rollers would have simply disintegrated, and the door would have dropped, and maybe even fallen out of the top groove.’
‘Can we open it?’ Angela asked, her voice trembling with excitement.
‘We can have a bloody good try. First, we’ll have to shift all this stuff from in front of it, so there’s as little resistance as possible when we try to slide it.’
Together, they cleared all the rocks and bits of timber from the front of the rock wall. Once they’d done so, the edge of the groove the stone door sat in was clearly visible on the ground.
Bronson opened up his haversack and took out a hammer and chisel. Walking to the right-hand end of the stone door, he bent down and started bashing away at the rocks which had been jammed underneath it, and which were acting as wedges to stop the door being opened. In a couple of minutes, he’d chipped them all out and checked under the edge to make sure there was nothing else jamming it in position.
‘I can’t see anything else locking the door in place,’ he said. ‘Maybe they relied on those few stone wedges and its sheer weight.’
He stepped closer to the rock, looking for any sign of a hole or another wedge, but found nothing. It appeared that the stone door would slide to the right as long he could find some way of exerting enough leverage to start it moving – though that obviously wasn’t going to be easy.
He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a crowbar, fully aware that such a puny tool – and even his own strength – might prove inadequate. He looked at the left-hand side of the stone wall, trying to decide where he should try levering it. There were a few gaps that he could see that might be wide enough to let him drive the end of the crowbar into them, but he knew it all depended on how much the stone door weighed and the condition of the rollers that he was sure had to be underneath it, in the groove cut in the stone floor. Then he looked across at Angela, who, like him, was entirely absorbed in the task confronting them.
‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.
‘She might not be, but I sure as hell am,’ JJ Donovan snapped as he walked into the cave, two armed men crowding in behind him.
61
‘How long?’ Killian demanded. He was strapped into the back seat of the Dhruv and the rubber strap of the throat mike was uncomfortably tight around his neck. His voice vibrated as he spoke, but the other men in the helicopter – the two pilots in the front seats, one of them acting as the navigator, and Tembla sitting beside him – seemed to have no difficulty understanding each other.
‘Twelve minutes to the edge of the valley,’ the pilot replied. ‘And then thirty seconds to the target.’
The Dhruv was flying at about ninety knots – just over a hundred miles an hour – due north and had just reached the Shyok river valley. The pilot altered course very slightly to the west to follow the path of the tumbling river, rugged brown hills and mountains rising well above the helicopter on both sides.
Behind and slightly to the right of the Dhruv was the Hind, a menacing and unfamiliar shape, its stubby wings bristling with ordnance, the light reflecting off the individual windscreens of the tandem cockpits. Tembla had told him that the cockpits and the vital systems on the Hind were armour-plated, and the most that a round from an assault rifle could do was dent it.
Tembla had, of course, been correct. If all the opposition they’d face in the Nubra Valley was half a dozen men armed with Kal
ashnikovs, using the Hind was overkill. But these were the kind of odds Killian liked. He smiled in satisfaction as he imagined the terror that would follow the totally unexpected appearance of the helicopter gunship.
Tembla tapped the navigator on the shoulder. ‘Get me an update,’ he instructed.
There was a click as the man went off the intercom to use the radio. A few moments later he had the answer from the UAV operator at the base outside Karu.
‘Bronson and Lewis are still inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘And three of the other men we’ve been watching have just gone in after them.’
Bronson and Angela spun round, shocked by the unexpected sound of the nasal American voice and the sudden appearance of three men, two of them carrying automatic weapons.
‘So we meet again,’ Donovan said. ‘I’ve been following you ever since that night at the country house in England.’
Bronson looked from one man to the other. The man doing the talking was unarmed, but obviously the real power lay with him. The figure standing beside him looked like a soldier, tough, composed and sure of himself, the Kalashnikov assault rifle in his hands clearly a familiar tool, another heavy rifle slung over his shoulder.
‘You’re the guy who hit me,’ Bronson said to the American, a statement, not a question.
Donovan nodded.
‘But how on earth did you follow us?’
‘When I heard you tell Jonathan Carfax that your wife worked at the British Museum, I put a tracking chip in your mobile. I was right behind you all the time you two were wasting your time digging around in Egypt.’
‘You were in the cream Mercedes,’ Bronson hazarded, ‘on the road to el-Hiba?’
‘Well spotted. Just satisfy my curiosity – how did you make the connections to find this place?’
Bronson looked at Angela. Since the intruders had appeared, she’d not said a word, but one glance was enough to tell him she was both furious and frightened. Pretty much Rule One in Bronson’s book was never irritate a man carrying an assault rifle, and definitely not a man who employed people who carried assault rifles. So before she could say something they might both regret, he intervened.
