Asura

by R P L Johnson

  ASURA

  by

  R.P.L. Johnson

  ASURA

  Copyright 2020 by R.P.L. Johnson

  Cover art by Matthew Dobrich

  www.matthewdobrich.com

  For Irene,

  “Shoot, Bang, Fire...!”

  Extract from A Prehistory of India

  by Prof. Duncan Embleton

  ©Williamstown University Press 1967

  Five thousand years before the birth of Christ, civilisation blossomed along the banks of the Indus River in what is now modern-day Pakistan.

  After a hundred thousand years of nomadic existence—barely above the level of the animals they hunted for food and clothing—the human race had come of age.

  Towns were established, animals domesticated and crops planted and tended. The basis of modern life was developed at a pace that would make the Renaissance and the industrial and information revolutions seem pedestrian. The spoken word was captured for the first time on tablets of soft clay. The ox first felt the weight of the yoke on its back. Alphabets were codified, dams built and irrigation channels dug. It was a time of firsts: the first brick was fired, the first skins tanned to make leather. The first law was passed, recorded, observed and transgressed.

  Where once there had been only a collection of humans, barely differentiable from each other except by the loosest manifestations of tribal dominance hierarchy, now there were farmers and masons, soldiers, merchants, sculptors and priests. Homo Sapiens had become human beings, animals had become people and they thrived.

  Other than the artefacts left behind, relatively little is known about these early civilisations. The writing of the period, the so-called Indus Script, has so far resisted all attempts at translation. Although over four hundred individual symbols have been identified, their meaning remains enigmatic. No substrate or sister language has ever been found.

  Most of what has been learned about these early civilisations comes from anthropological study of their descendants. The movement of people can be traced by untangling the genetic tapestry of the current inhabitants of the Indian sub-continent.

  Other clues lie in the ancient stories that would in time become the epic poems of the Indian sub-continent. Early myths of the region display many linguistic and cultural similarities. Tales of divine beings known as Asuras, are common to many cultures. Tales spread eastwards to pre-Vedic India and westwards to Persia where they were called the Ahuras and spawned the religions of Zoroastrianism and Mithraism which persisted through to Roman times.

  Still further West the tales travelled and in Norse Mythology they are known as the Æsir.

  Although it is tempting to brush off the similarities in the names of these deities, other correlations point to a shared heritage and are too subtle to be mere coincidence. In all cultures from the Asuras to the Æsir, the gods were closely connected with the concepts of civilisation and society. Where previous pagan cults had drawn on animalistic or physical inspiration worshipping the Earth, the Sun, or fertility or animal totems, the Asuras were associated with the newly developed concepts of fate, contracts, morality, order and war.

  In another telling similarity the Asuras and their analogues in other cultures, were always figures of conflict—constantly at war.

  Some scholars conclude that this pan-cultural record of conflict between a class of warrior or ruler gods and an older class of pagan fertility gods reflects the pre-historic growing pains of the earliest civilisations, or possibly some forgotten crusade fought between the followers of the new and old orders.

  In any case it seems clear that the cult of the Asuras developed hand-in-hand with the emergence of civilisation in the Indus Valley. It is interesting to note that the alignment of the Asuras has been confused over time. In the Indian Vedas the Asuras are seen as demons, where as in the Norse and Zoroastrian pantheons they are revered as Gods. Whether the original common myths saw the Asuras as the authors of civilisation or its would-be destroyers is unknown.

  Those early tales have been lost over time. The Asuras live on only as linguistic coincidences in long-dead religions and as bit-players in the tales of later gods. The first religion worshipped in the cradle of humanity has disappeared: its followers dead, its temples weathered to sand, its rituals forgotten and its dogmas superseded.

  And of the Old Gods themselves, the Asuras, tales of which spread from India to Scandinavia, the ancient texts are silent.

  PROLOGUE

  The storm tossed the old airliner around like a stunt kite. Each new, stomach-churning swoop made the plane’s two Rolls-Royce Dart turboprops whine in protest like a pair of dive bombers from an old war movie. But little by little the Fairchild F27 hauled its forty-year-old bulk through the thin air over the Karakorum mountain range.

  Rebecca McCarthy stared out through the rain-smeared windshield at an early evening sky turned charcoal grey by the storm. Forks of lightning marbled the darkness: brilliant veins sparking off the mountain peaks below. In the instant that followed each firecracker strobe of electricity, McCarthy’s face stared back at her from the cold glass. Her wavy brown hair was pulled back in a businesslike ponytail and in the pale light from the instrument panel she looked drawn and anxious. The ghostly visage was eclipsed by another brilliant line of white fire that leaped upwards from the sharp edges of the mountains. The harsh radiance of the snow caps and corniced ridges jumped out of the gloom making the Karakorums look every bit as jagged and forbidding as their big brothers, the Himalayas that marched off to the east.

  ‘Christ! Have you ever seen it this bad before?’ she asked.

  Captain Vijay Hayat just shrugged. He kept his eyes fixed on the Fairchild’s instrument panel, particularly their fuel reserves and the needle on the oil pressure gauge that wobbled dangerously near the red line. The old bird was doing it tough.

  ‘It will settle down once we get over the mountains,’ he said. ‘It always does.’

  The Pakistani flashed her a quick, conspiratorial smile. With the grey of his thick moustache just starting to show flashes of the silver that dominated his hair, Hayat was one of those men who suited middle age. With his square, pugnacious jaw set in profile against the crashing storm he exuded an air of calm competence: solid, dependable, unflappable Hayat. McCarthy looked at him for a couple of seconds and felt some of the tension that had built up over the last hour slipping away. Just then the plane dropped, howling, thirty feet through an air pocket and in an instant the tension was back.

  ‘I hate this bloody weather.’

  Hayat inclined his silver mane back towards the passenger compartment.

  ‘Just think how they feel.’

  He was right, of course. McCarthy took a deep breath before picking up the heavy, bakelite phone handset that hooked up to the intercom in the passenger cabin.

  ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ she announced. ‘As you can tell, we’re experiencing a little rough weather. It’s very normal for this time of year and nothing to be alarmed about.’ She paused to let her words sink in. ‘Although it may feel a little uncomfortable, Captain Hayat and I have been through this kind of thing many times before, so please just try to relax and we’ll smooth out the bumps as best we can.’

  As the plane lurched again, McCarthy became acutely conscious of the heavy meal she and Hayat had shared before the flight. She replaced the handset.

  ‘I’ll flip you to see who cleans the bathroom after the flight.’

  ‘Bathroom?’ Hayat laughed. ‘What makes you think they’ll get as far as the bathroom?’

  Unpleasant visions swam through McCarthy’s head. Owning her own charter business ferrying passengers around the Hindu Kush had once seemed like such a romantic way of earning a living.

  Unstrapping herself from the co-pilot's seat she gra
bbed a sheaf of spare sick-bags from a locker at the back of the flight deck and headed aft.

  ‘I bet Richard Branson doesn’t have to do this,’ she muttered.

  The Fairchild F27 had seating for forty passengers in its slender fuselage, although in the four years since Rebecca McCarthy had founded Diamir Travel she had only seen it full a handful of times. Now, only about half the seats were filled.

  Her passengers were the usual mix of climbers and adventure tourists, with a sprinkling of expatriate Chinese, Pakistanis and nouveau-cosmopolitan Afghans. They were predominantly male—either young and rowdy or old and lecherous. She fixed one Chinese businessman with a hard stare, daring him to smack her rump as he had done the last time she had toured the cabin. She needn’t have worried. His hands were too busy digging new furrows in the old Fairchild’s vinyl armrests to wander too far.

  She made her way down the central aisle dispensing the spare bags and reassuring words in English and Urdu. Despite their racial mix, the passengers’ questions were all the same.

  Kitna vaqt?

  How much longer?

  McCarthy gritted her teeth behind her professional smile and assured them that they would be through the worst of the weather soon. Her fingers began to ache from the death-grip she kept on the seat backs as she made her way down the pitching aisle.

  Apart from the high-pitched, swooping whine of the engines, the cabin was unusually quiet. Even the nervous laughter that usually accompanied a bout of turbulence had been worn away by the constant ferocity of the storm. With lightning flashing in through the ports on both sides, the cabin looked like Hell’s waiting room.

  Only one person seemed to be enjoying the flight. He sat in a window seat on the starboard side and gazed with rapt fascination down towards the mountains below. Every now and then, he turned to the statuesque blonde at his side, speaking quickly in French and pointing out some new attraction. She checked each overture with a brusque wave and kept her eyes fixed on the back of the seat in front of her. Each time the plane dropped through an air pocket the Frenchman actually laughed, slapping the armrest and whooping as if he was on a rollercoaster.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss.’

  McCarthy turned to see one of the few Pakistanis on the flight waving at her from a third row seat. He was a handsome man in early middle age, well-dressed, with a neatly trimmed full beard and no moustache. She remembered him from when he had checked in; his name was Khamas, Muhammad Khamas. He had been courteous, conservatively dressed in a western business suit with a copy of Newsweek under his arm, bilingual at least—a poster boy for the emerging Muslim nations.

  ‘My daughter,’ he continued, ‘—the turbulence upsets her. Would it be alright if she sat on my lap?’

  McCarthy looked at the daughter. She was a slight little thing, probably about ten years old, although McCarthy’s experience with kids was limited to the bi-annual visits to her sister’s brood in Fremantle so she could have been a couple of years out either way. The girl flinched as the plane shuddered through another stomach-lifting swoop, her fear making appear younger than her gangly height suggested.

  ‘I’m sorry, Sir, but she really has to stay in her seat.’

  ‘I could hold onto her; she would be just as safe.’

  Rebecca didn’t try to reason with him. The last thing the little girl needed to hear right now was that there was no way in hell her father could hold onto her if her worst fears came true. Holding a sixty pound girl through a four hundred knot crash would be like trying to hold onto a stampeding rhino; it just wasn’t humanly possible.

  ‘We’ll be over the mountains in a few more minutes; the weather always settles down after that.’

  The father opened his mouth to speak again, but McCarthy managed to pre-empt him.

  ‘I really must get back to the flight deck,’ she said. She knelt at the little girl’s seat and gave her hand a reassuring squeeze. ‘Try to think of it as an adventure,’ she said, hoping the girl understood English.

  Something was wrong.

  It started as a vague sense of unease. McCarthy felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle with anticipation. She looked down at the girl’s hand, still clenched in her own, and saw the sparse hairs on her forearms standing straight up like goose bumps. When she released her clasp, a tiny blue spark jumped between their fingers. The girl snatched back her hand with a pained yelp.

  A distant hum quickly rose above the engine noise until some passengers clamped their hands over their ears. Then, as suddenly as it had arisen, it dropped back to a subsonic rumble that made McCarthy’s guts squirm and shook the plane with a dozen different harmonic vibrations until McCarthy expected the rivets to pop from its aluminium skin.

  Light blossomed in through the ports again, but this was not the usual strobe flash of the storm. It poured in from both sides, brutal in its brilliance, as if they were stuck motionless at the centre of a lightning strike.

  The plane dropped from the sky like a stone.

  McCarthy clung on to the back of the little girl’s chair and looked down the aisle towards the flight deck. It was like looking down a twenty foot deep hole, although the diving plane was screwing up her sense of direction. The acceleration of the Fairchild along its fatal flight path told her middle ear that the flight deck was above her. She had no hope of reaching it in time. She could only hope that Hayat could pull out of the dive.

  She hauled herself into an empty double-seat behind the father and his terrified little girl and scrabbled desperately with the safety belt.

  ‘Come on, Vijay. Pull up!’ she hissed above the sound of her pounding heart.

  Through the port at her side she could see the white peaks of the Karakorum mountain range. Although they cruised at well over twenty thousand feet above sea level, the average relief on this route was nearly ten thousand. Not much time to correct mistakes. As she watched, they dropped below the level of the highest peaks.

  Too close, too close, she thought. Not enough time.

  The last thing she saw through the window before bending double into the brace position was a huge mountain a couple of kilometres away. Its triangular silhouette loomed over them, back-lit by the ferocity of the thunderstorm, and from somewhere halfway up its flank a brilliant beam of white light shot vertically up like a laser from the top of a Las Vegas hotel.

  She hugged her knees as hard as she could, and shouted, ‘Brace! Brace! Brace!’ until she ran out of breath, hoping that the rest of the passengers could hear her over the noise of their own screams.

  When they hit, they hit hard.

  But Vijay had managed to get the nose up and keep the wings level through the first impact. It felt like they had bounced right back up into the air, and Rebecca started to think that they might have a chance. If Vijay could just keep her level, and had found a decent place to ditch, then the snow might be just what they needed to bleed off speed quickly and slide to a halt.

  Then something dug in. Either a wing tip or the nose itself ploughed into the snow, and the plane was pitched into a rolling spin at well over two hundred knots. The cabin spun crazily and metal screamed, drowning out even the terrified passengers. The slender aluminium tube of the fuselage buckled, folding almost in half, crushing some passengers and pressing its port flank against its own propeller. The two-metre long blades ripped into the cabin like a buzz saw. The last thing Rebecca was aware of was the icy cold wind that came howling in as the cabin tore itself apart around her.

  ◆◆◆

  Only the man’s head was visible above the snow as he scanned the sky with a pair of high-powered binoculars. He lowered the glasses to reveal a brown oval of skin with two deep-set eyes over a sharp nose—sunburned and peeling—and a thick blond moustache hanging over a white woollen balaclava that covered the rest of his face. He passed the binoculars down into the snow hole where they were taken from him and replaced by the bulky handset of a Fischer Systems satellite phone.

  ‘Nothing yet,’ he said in
to the phone and paused, listening for a couple of seconds. ‘Understood.’

  With a curse he flicked off the phone’s power switch and slumped back into the snow hole. The other three men in the cramped makeshift shelter looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Two hours late,’ the man said. ‘There's no way they’re still in the air.’

  ‘So?’ asked one of his companions.

  ‘Exfiltrate as planned. Maybe pick up the trail in Gilgit, how the fuck should I know?’

  The second man looked at the long metal cylinder by his side. The green steel tube was stencilled with white Cyrillic letters and had a pistol grip assembly about a quarter of the way along its length. It was a Strela 3, known to NATO as the Gremlin: an old Russian surface-to-air missile system popular with the rebels on both sides of the Kashmiri border. A thirty year old missile to bring down a forty year old plane.

  ‘So I lugged this fuckin’ thing up here for nothing?’ the second man said in exasperation.

  The spotter ignored him and stood up in the snow hole’s entrance to scan the horizon once more. There was still no sign of flight PA-403. Their contact had confirmed that it had left taken off on time, and it didn’t have the range to take the eastern route over the mountains. It had to have come this way.

  Turning, the spotter looked east towards the harsh contours of Nanga Parbat— the ninth highest mountain in the world. Its name meant naked mountain, referring to the way it was set apart from the end of the Himalayas. A storm had gathered at its northern face; the black clouds spilled over its shoulders like a cape before evaporating in swirling vortices as they tumbled down the steep southern face.

  For a second he thought he saw something else. A flash of lightning maybe, but unlike any he had seen before. It was arrow-straight, stabbing into the sky like a rapier of thin white light. Then it was gone, lost in the rolling clouds.