Asura

by R P L Johnson

  CHAPTER 1

  Captain Jonathan Rose of the Royal Engineers lay on his belly and stared at the mine through his fragmentation visor. Using a plastic trowel, he carefully scraped away the dusty soil. The mine was a Soviet PMN anti-personnel mine and Rose knew that it should take at least 10 pounds on its pressure sensitive casing to set it off. But this mine had lain undisturbed for almost twenty years and the old Soviet technology didn’t age well.

  The PMN was a blast mine. There were no ball bearings, or heavy casing to cause shrapnel injuries, just the force of its own high explosive charge. Technically it was classed as non-lethal; it was designed to tie up the medical resources of the enemy by maiming rather than killing its victim.

  However, Rose thought, the term ‘non-lethal’ doesn’t really apply when your face is only ten inches away from the little round bastard.

  Rose finished clearing away the soil and then stood up, carefully keeping his hands and feet inside the day-glow orange mine tape that defined the perimeter of the working lane.

  Their site high in the hills above Skardu in Northern Kashmir had been well mapped with GPS as well as more traditional surveying techniques. The dense mat of wormwood and juniper had been burnt back away from the jeep trail and the sandy soil was criss-crossed with stakes and flags that marked the safe route from the working lane back to the medical point, vehicle park and equipment storage areas.

  He slapped the dust from the front of his fatigues, and flipped up the visor that hung like a welder’s mask from a plastic band around his temples.

  He was just an inch shy of six feet tall and lean without being muscular. He had sharp, regular features that could, on occasion, be described as handsome. That particular moment—with his shirt collar basted with sweat, and his forehead smeared where he had rubbed the sweat from his brow with a dusty hand—was not one of them. He had picked up what his father would have called 'a builder's tan'. Three weeks of working with a United Nations mine-clearing team in the sticky heat of a Kashmiri spring had burned his face and forearms to a deep, chestnut brown. In a few weeks the heat would crack, and the first of the monsoons would douse the hills south of the Karakorum Mountains. Then, under that cover of thick, semi-permanent cloud, Rose would revert to the natural milk-bottle white that was just visible as a plain border around the brown vee of his exposed throat and upper chest.

  ‘Hey, Tej. Throw us a candle would you?’ Rose called.

  Tejbahadur Rai, a stout Nepali from the Corps of Ghurkha Engineers, sat on the bonnet of one of their two dun-coloured Land Rovers. Their standard operating procedure required two specialists to be present at all times. Because of the intense concentration required, they worked in thirty minute shifts with each man watching his partner for any signs of a lapse in judgement or deviation from the standard operating procedures.

  Tej watched Rose with deep brown eyes, so dark they were almost black, and his ubiquitous impish smile. The Ghurkha was a few years older than Rose’s twenty-eight years, but a combination of his smooth, Asian skin and naturally cheerful disposition made him appear more like a kid on a school outing than a staff sergeant in an elite military corps. Even the twelve inches of razor sharp steel sheathed at his hip—the infamous Ghurkha kukri—couldn’t quite shatter the illusion.

  Tej already had the ‘candle’ in his hands. He threw the slim cylinder to Rose who caught it deftly and retraced his steps to the uncovered mine. The candle was the latest tool in the humanitarian mine clearing effort; its real name was the FireAnt which was emblazoned in red letters down the side of its silver casing. It had been developed by DERA, the United Kingdom’s Defence Establishment Research Agency. It had a flexible, plastic spike protruding from one end and Rose thrust it into the dirt next to the mine, adjusting it so that the silver cylinder pointed directly at the top of the exposed weapon. Rose unpeeled a plastic tab from around the base of the cylinder and gave it a sharp tug. Instantly, the base of the cylinder started to smoke.

  ‘Light the blue touch-paper and stand well back,’ he said to himself.

  By the time Rose was back to the Land Rover the candle had lit, and was showering the mine with a sparkling, white-hot exhaust like the Roman candle that gave the tool its nickname.

  In thirty seconds, the exhaust burned itself out, and Rose returned to remove the candle and scoop up the mine on his trowel. It was little more than a featureless lump of plastic: its covering melted and the high explosive inside degraded by the intense heat of the candle to the point where any explosive reaction was impossible. The candle’s heat had driven the activation energy high enough to force the chemicals down a new reaction path. The resultant mix of by-products was about as likely to explode as a bowl of porridge.

  Rose moved the day-glow tape that marked the safe area half a metre up the hill and his gaze followed the contours of the land out of the tiny zone they had cleared and up the steep slope to the mountains beyond.

  Another one down: ten thousand to go.

  The hills north of Skardu, near the line of control between India and Pakistan, provided some of the most spectacular landscapes Rose had ever seen. The dense scrub around their site quickly gave way to stands of Himalayan spruce and pine nut trees that the locals called chilghoza. On the other side of the valley the warmer, south-facing slopes were covered by forests of oak that spread along the river and as high as eight thousand feet above sea level. Beyond the tree line, verdant meadows with their carpet of short-lived wildflowers extended all the way to the snowline.

  Rose forced himself to concentrate on the square yard of ground in front of him and the nasty surprises that might be buried under it. Even with his eyes cast down to the ground, the landscape seemed unwilling to give up its hold on his attention; it called him back with the cry of a marsh harrier, or a gust of wind carrying with it the entwined smells of juniper and primrose. It had an epic quality to it, as if life was more real here than elsewhere.

  However, the rugged landscape also posed many problems for Rose and his team. The hills were too steep and uneven for traditional, mechanical mine clearing techniques. Armoured tractors with mine destroying flails would never make it up the jeep trail from Skardu, let alone along the tactically important footpaths that linked the remote villages in the high country. Even the Land Rover couldn’t make it much farther than the little clearing they had made in the scrub below. Also, the inhabitants of Rose’s assigned sector were predominantly Muslim and devout beyond anything Rose had experienced in his lax Methodist upbringing. That made the use of sniffer dogs politically sensitive, as the animals were regarded as unclean by many of the locals.

  So they had to fall back on man-power. That meant metal detectors sensitive enough to pick up the wiring in the detonators of the plastic mines, and probing the soil by hand: the most time-consuming and dangerous method in the book.

  Fortunately, the pristine hills were mercifully free of old Coke cans and other garbage. The only man-made items they found up there were old bullet casings and the mines themselves. That fact depressed Rose more than he was willing to admit. Humanity’s only impact on this wilderness was in the form of the little pills of tightly compressed pain and misery scattered liberally along the villages’ supply routes.

  ‘Captain!’ Tej called from the Land Rover.

  Rose turned to see the Ghurkha gesturing skyward over the valley below and the jeep trail back to Skardu. He could just make out a dark speck flying towards them over the hills to the north. After a few seconds, a gust of wind brought the distinctive whup-whup of a helicopter.

  Rose walked back to the Land Rover. ‘Expecting visitors?’ he asked.

  Tej shook his head. ‘Nothing on the radio,’ he replied with only the faintest of accents. The stocky Ghurkha had an impressive facility with languages. He spoke English, Urdu and Shina fluently and after only five months stationed in Barnstable with Rose’s squadron, he had picked up a mild Devonshire drawl on his vowels.

  Rose looked towards the soldiers
working on another grid of brush land. There were two specialists and four Dutch soldiers that formed their escort, all wore the distinctive blue berets of the U.N. They too had stopped what they were doing and were looking towards the approaching chopper.

  The chopper grew closer until it was obvious that it was heading towards their little clearing. Rose recognised it as a Russian-built Mi-8. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from inside the Land Rover: the green circlet of the Pakistan Air Force was clearly visible on the chopper’s nose.

  ‘What do you think they want?’ Tej asked.

  ‘I have no idea,’ Rose replied, ‘-but they’re coming in pretty quick so I guess we’ll find out soon enough.’ He looked around at the orange tape, day-glow flags and stakes that defined the border between safety and sudden, violent mutilation.

  ‘Oh shit!’

  The chopper landed in a whirlwind of dust, leaves and orange flags. The confines of its landing area meant that the blades of its tail rotor were almost spinning above the two Land Rovers and the soldiers hunkering down behind it, shielding their eyes from the stinging dust.

  The engines powered-down to idle, although the rotors kept spinning, and the hatch slid aside to reveal a Pakistani soldier in green fatigues and shirt-sleeves who jumped down and jogged towards them.

  Rose recognised him immediately: Captain Ali Nazir was the liaison between the Pakistani military and the U.N. humanitarian mission. He and Rose had worked closely in preparation for the mine clearing effort as well as in coordinating their efforts over the past three weeks in Kashmir. The two men had much in common: they were similar ages and had quickly discovered that they both shared a passion for mountaineering. Three years previously they had been on competing teams to be the first to scale the north face of the Muztagh Tower in eastern Kashmir. Bad weather had forced both teams to abandon their attempts and unknown to them the two men had spent a fortnight snowed-in at the same base camp waiting for the weather to break.

  They had quickly become friends and Rose often appreciated Nazir’s composure and subtle wit in the sometimes strident posturing of Pakistani military politics. The anger Rose felt at the disruption of his site quickly disappeared. Nazir was no fool. Whatever had brought him out here had to be important.

  ‘Asalam aleikum,’ Nazir said as he approached.

  ‘Wa aleikum salam,’ Rose responded to complete the traditional greeting. ‘What the hell’s going on, Ali?’

  ‘Direct as ever, my friend,’ Nazir responded with a smile. ‘I have known Indian generals more eager to make small talk than you.’

  Rose proved his friend right by fixing him with an exasperated stare.

  ‘In all our talks you never told me that you had climbed Nanga Parbat,’ Nazir said.

  ‘That’s because I haven’t. I was on the summit team of the ninety-eight expedition but...’ Rose trailed away. He had worked hard trying to forget the ill-fated expedition, but the memories were still painful.

  ‘Yes, I read all about the accident, a cruel business. The mountains are like old women, fickle and vindictive. Sometimes they like to break men just to hear them snap. And Diamir can be a real bitch.’

  Rose knew firsthand how right his friend was. Diamir was the old Shina name for Nanga Parbat and literally meant the sacred mountain of the gods. Rose knew that many of the people living around the base of the massive mountain called it by a different name: the killer mountain. Thirty one people died on its slopes before it was first conquered and even among modern mountaineers it maintained its terrible reputation with regular kills.

  ‘Don’t tell me you came all the way out here just to swap climbing stories?’ Rose asked.

  ‘I wish that I had, but unfortunately, no. I came to ask for your help. I cannot order you to accept, but I have been given the authority to reassign you if you are willing.’

  ‘Reassign me? To what?’

  ‘An expedition to Diamir. Unfortunately I do not know all the details yet; all I know is that a plane has been lost. We will be briefed together at the base camp on the Rupal glacier.

  ‘Rupal? That’s a long way off the usual trekking routes.’

  ‘Nevertheless, will you come?’

  A lost plane and a camp halfway up a mountain in Pakistan. What the hell was going on?

  Rose beckoned Tej over. The Ghurkha had been born in the mountains and was an able climber.

  ‘My sergeant’s coming with me. This had better not be some wild goose chase.’

  Nazir looked relieved. He turned to the cockpit of the idling chopper and made a spinning gesture with one finger as if he was winding up the rubber band of a toy aeroplane. The pilot gave him the thumbs up in return and soon the rotors were back up to speed.

  Within minutes, Rose, Tej and their kit were aboard the Mi-8 and the powerful helicopter was lifting off and heading west over the hills.

  Nazir walked back from the cockpit and strapped himself into a seat next to Rose.

  ‘Here,’ he shouted above the thunder of the chopper’s engines. ‘You’ll be needing these.’

  He handed Rose a couple of small capsules and gave another two to Tej. The word Diamox was printed in tiny letters on each tablet. Rose had taken them before; they were Acetazolamide capsules. High altitude climbers took them to ward off the effects of altitude sickness.

  Rose looked through the chopper’s port at the huge mountain range that dominated the horizon outside the window.

  Not again, he thought.

  ◆◆◆

  It took three of them to get the body inside the tent.

  Rose struggled with the legs, fighting the numbing cold that seemed through his gloves and trying to ignore the unnatural angle of the limbs.

  The fall had broken Val. And the combined effects of rigor mortis and three days exposure to the Himalayan cold had frozen his smashed body into a grotesque sculpture. They had not been able to fit him inside the sleeping bag and so they had bound him as best they could in the storm cover of one of the tents. The fabric had helped them transport the body back from the base of the cliff, but it did little to hide the damage from the fall.

  One arm thrust out vertically as if signalling for help. That had been the first thing the rescue party had seen: kindling the cruel notion that he was still somehow alive. His other arm was folded into a frozen, lumpen mass where he had landed on top of it. His legs were twisted, dislocated and smashed: the bones shattered like plate glass by the impact and driven through the flesh of his calves and thighs as if his body had grown thorns.

  Val’s torso was misshapen where it had burst. Blood had pooled under the body before freezing, giving Val’s corpse statue its own integral plinth of bloody ice. Rose’s grip slipped and the weight shifted. He just caught it, grabbing a new handhold—a frozen loop of spilled intestine. He fought the urge to gag.

  They wrestled the body inside and laid it on Val’s old cot. The aluminium tubes of the cot’s frame creaked under the unaccustomed weight of the ice-encrusted body. Miller folded the tarpaulin back across Val’s face. His head was still intact—held together by his climbing helmet. Eyes open, still staring up with the same expression that had haunted Rose for the last three days.

  It was cold, even at base camp, but with three of them inside tent soon started to warm up. The loose flakes of snow that had fallen on Val’s face started to melt, running down his face like tears.

  Rose looked up and saw that Miller was crying too. Rose looked back down at the smashed body on the cot, but the tears wouldn’t come. He didn’t deserve them.

  CHAPTER 2

  The crumpled fuselage of the Fairchild F27 lay at an angle in the snow like a discarded beer can. The tumbling impact had sheared the port wing off halfway along its length and ripped the starboard one out by the roots, leaving a long rent down the middle of the plane’s tubular body. The tail section was also missing. Where it should have been, there was only a pinched and twisted ring of jagged metal. Beyond the crash site, a trough scarred the surface
of the snow for nearly three hundred yards. At its start, it was discontinuous – a line of dots and dashes like Morse code where the plane had bounced and spun back into the air for seconds at a time. No doubt accident investigators would have been able to piece together the last moments of Flight PA-403 from that staccato pattern alone, had the chill winds not already started to fill the furrow with fresh snow.

  With a groan, the forward cargo door opened—more like a skylight, than a door now—and a bulky figure in a yellow goose down jacket crawled out.

  Rebecca McCarthy slid down the side of the plane and plunged up to her hips in the soft snow churned up in front of the crashed plane like the bow-wave of a ship. Cursing, she struggled out onto the firmer footing of undisturbed snow and tramped towards the rear of plane in a pair of oversized plastic climbing boots. The aluminium pan she carried was already ice cold, and she regretted wearing only the cotton under-gloves and not the bulky mittens Philippe had offered her. Even oversized as it was, Philippe’s cold weather climbing gear was one of very few blessings she could count.

  Rebecca almost looked forward to these trips outside as it meant she could don the thick quilted jacket and trousers for a few minutes. When she returned with a pan-full of clean snow, she would have to return the warm clothing to the rota that had been started between the injured. Outside, she could wear it without guilt, and in volunteering for the unpopular jobs of waste removal and water collection, she could ease the pangs of guilt that had nagged her constantly since the crash.

  What had gone wrong?

  In the two days since the crash she had taken three long walks back along the furrow they had ploughed across the glacier, looking for clues. Although she had found both wings, one with the big Rolls Royce ‘Dart’ engine still attached, she could find no clue as to why the engines would have cut out simultaneously the way they had. Sure the weather had been bad—when was it not—but bad weather didn’t stop engines. Each of her solitary pilgrimages had left her nothing more than tired, cold and frustrated.