Asura

by R P L Johnson

  They had been lucky to find it. The plane had fallen into a crevasse; the bulk of its fuselage dived into the ice at a steep angle leaving only the nose sticking out into the softer snow above. The cargo door was open and inside the Major could see the flashlights of his recon party as they surveyed the man-made tunnel deep into the ice.

  The search had also uncovered a few pieces of luggage and wreckage that had been laid at the side of the excavation. None of it was of any interest to him.

  He mulled over several scenarios as he sucked the ice from his bushy moustache. His prize could have been found by the enemy and been on either of the helicopters when they were destroyed. If that was the case, he could claim at least partial success as the prize would be denied to both him and the enemy.

  Or it could be buried somewhere under the thousands of tonnes of ice released by the avalanche. This, he thought, was the most likely option. If it was still inside the plane then they had a chance. If not... the avalanche had wiped the mountain clean and the glacier would not release its secrets until it spat them out with the spring snowmelt in a few hundred year’s time.

  Sergeant Vijay Kumar emerged from the pit and jogged across the snow towards him. He stopped in front of the Major and saluted: a formality that the Major required only for their first encounter of the day.

  ‘Sir. You had better see this. We have survivors.’

  The Major followed Kumar down the steeply pitched tube of the fuselage. The Fairchild had wedged itself between the crevasse walls. The jagged hole at the rear of the plane hung above the deathly cold and rocky blackness of the floor of the crevasse into which it had fallen. His men had rigged a rope ladder and the Major climbed down.

  The recon party had begun to rig spotlights along the crevasse to aid in their search. The giant crack in the ice extended for dozens of yards in both directions. Under one of the lights four figures huddled together under the watchful gaze of his soldiers. Three men, one of them badly injured, and a little girl, barely into her teens.

  ‘We’ve searched them, Sir, but found nothing.’

  ‘Very good, Sergeant. Continue the search. Let me know as soon as you find anything.’

  ‘And the survivors?’

  ‘Keep them under guard until we leave.’

  The prisoners would be kept from causing any trouble until it was time to leave. Then they would be left at the bottom of the crevasse. The mountain would do the rest.

  Kumar was deep in conversation with one of the men.

  ‘What is it?’ the Major asked.

  ‘Sir. Communications has picked up a transponder signal coming from further down the mountain.’

  ‘What of it? It is probably just the emergency transponder from the plane. The signal will never reach outside the valley.’

  ‘Yes, Major. But we saw the tail section to the north of the crash site before the avalanche. That is where the transponder should be. This signal is coming from further west. And, Major... the signal is moving.’

  ◆◆◆

  When Tej woke, it was into a reality more vivid than any dream. The mist from the geothermally heated lake swirled around the town in damp tendrils that would have been clammy if they had not been so deliciously warm. The huge, granite spire loomed out of the mist at the centre of the lake, pointing at the hole in the cavern’s vaulted roof that was now a clear and vivid blue. Tej remembered falling asleep staring at the stars through that opening. With the stars above, and the gentle lapping of the lake on its rocky shore he could easily have imagined himself to be lying on a tropical beach, rather than a volcanic cavern. Only the thin air remained to remind him that this was the Himalayas, not Hawaii.

  After searching the town until late into the night they had made camp on the first story of one of the larger buildings. They had originally thought that the buildings contained only one level, but several contained stone staircases leading to a flat roof that was used like a second floor. With no weather inside the giant cavern, the inhabitants of the town had not bothered to construct a roof, relying instead on a low stone parapet that ran around the perimeter of the building. Gaps in the parapet showed where a network of timber walkways had once connected this second level, mirroring the streetscape below.

  The rest of the group were nowhere to be seen. Tej rose and slipped on the shoulder holster he had taken from the unconscious Campbell. Its nylon straps were down to their last holes to suit the small Ghurkha’s wiry frame. For Campbell they had been adjusted to the other extreme, but either way it served its purpose. He took Campbell’s machine pistol from under the pack he had used as a pillow and thrust it into the holster. It thumped reassuringly against his chest as he walked like a second heartbeat, reminding him that he was still alive and could fight.

  Campbell was still where they had left him the previous night. Marinucci had drilled a rock screw into a large boulder and used it as a kind of ball and chain to secure the big Scottish soldier. He was still unconscious, but the warmth seemed to be doing him some good. His skin had lost its deathly pallor and he was snoring softly.

  ‘A little help over here!’ Marinucci’s voice echoed across the cavern.

  The Aussie engineer was manhandling what looked like a small boat through the tunnel opening that led back to the wedged Supacat. He had it tilted over on its side to fit between the broken shards at the edges of the tunnel barrier and was dragging it unceremoniously along on its gunnel. It took a second for Tej to recognise it. It was the trailing sled from the Supacat. After Marinucci dragged it from the tunnel, Millicent Carver appeared behind it with a double armful of equipment.

  The ‘cat’s amphibious,’ Marinucci explained as Tej helped him in righting the sled and lowering it down the steep incline to the cavern floor. ‘These sleds are made up of two layers of plastic filled with foam. You could riddle this thing with bullets and it’d still float. I thought we might do a little boatin’. See what’s on the other side of that lake.’

  Once they got the sled down onto the cavern floor it was an easy job for the two men to carry it over to the lake shore. On the way they passed a pile of equipment: Marinucci had obviously already made a couple of trips to empty the sled before trying to drag it through the tunnel. The lurid orange transponder from the plane sat on top of the pile.

  ‘You should have woken me,’ Tej said.

  ‘Nah. You were sleeping like a baby. Besides, we don’t have a motor for this thing and you’re paddling.’

  They dropped the sled at the water’s edge and Carver handed them each a shovel.

  ‘Looks like we’re both paddling,’ Tej said.

  The journey across the lake was like a trip down the river Styx. The mist rose around them, enveloping them until it was only by using Marinucci’s compass that they were sure they were steering a straight course. The mist swirled around their makeshift paddles and every stroke brought with it a sulphurous stench that lingered around them as they slid through the water.

  ‘How deep do you think this is?’ Tej asked.

  Marinucci shrugged. ‘One way to find out.’

  ‘Are you volunteering to go for a swim, Sergeant?’ Carver asked with a faint smile that did nothing to soften her severe features.

  Tej thought about the old Vedic myths carved along the entrance tunnel. When the gods had stirred the sea of milk, all manner of things had risen from its depths including kalakuta, the dreadful poison that even burned the throat of the great god Shiva.

  ‘No thanks,’ he said.

  Marinucci’s paddle crunched into the lake bed, and a second later the shallow sled-turned-rowboat came aground on the lake’s western shore. They quickly hauled it up the bank; no one had any desire to swim back through the stinking water after losing their only boat. With Marinucci leading the way, they scrambled up the rocky shore.

  The jagged floor of the cavern made walking difficult. There were no stalagmites as would have been found in a limestone, water-carved cave. But the floor was studded by jagged black p
rotrusions: man-high blades of black, volcanic glass. They scrambled through a forest of knives, too sharp even to grasp for stability as they climbed steadily upwards out of the mist.

  In the end it was the mist that led them to the way out. The hole in the roof of the cave was too wide to sustain a constant convection current. The rising warm air was quickly chilled by the frigid temperatures outside and it condensed and fell back into the cavern as mist coating the granite spire with a slick layer of ice on its upper slopes.

  Several fissures led away from the chamber. All were surrounded by carved Mandalas, similar to the tunnel through which they had come in, and all were sealed by sheets of blue-white glass that seemed to have grown like a living crystal from the very rock itself. Marinucci was ready to set more charges and blow every one of the barriers to smithereens, but there was one that was different: a dark opening, with no surrounding Mandala, and more importantly no barrier. The entrance to the tunnel was rimed with frost and a cold wind blew in and out, as if an ice giant from Norse legend had made the tunnel its home and lay there in wait. The current was barely discernable, apart from the wispy fingers it drew from the cloud of mist by the lake.

  They checked their torches and refastened any zippers they had loosened in the relative warmth near the lake. Eager to find a way out, even if it meant going back into the freezing cold, they pressed on through the tunnel.

  The saw no signs of any carvings on their way from the hidden cavern. Tej put that down to the tunnel being a new feature in the cave system. Although it could have been formed at any time within the last three thousand years, that was practically yesterday by geological standards.

  They followed the soft exhalation of the mountain upwards until it eventually opened into a small, V-shaped crevice that was open to the sky. It ended in a sheer drop down to the valley below.

  ‘That’s a hell of a climb,’ Marinucci said. ‘We could try it as a last resort, but...’

  Tej climbed over the wall of ice that blocked their view to the north. From it he reckoned he'd be able to see down into the cirque, and take their first look at the glacier since the avalanche. What he saw took his breath away. The plane was gone, the campsite was gone, even the wreckage of the crashed helicopter had disappeared. He was looking out onto a valley that was born again.

  The Indians’ camp was clearly visible. Although the white tents were well camouflaged against the snow, no attempt had been made to hide the large black helicopter that squatted like some immense insect on the other side of the camp. Tej recognised it as a French-built Cougar armed transport. He knew that in addition to the chopper’s two side-mounted machine guns it carried external armament pods bristling with sixty-eight millimetre rockets. But the formidable machine did not worry him as much as what he saw next.

  Tej fumbled for his binoculars and trained them down on the cirque. Two snowmobiles were heading away from the camp. Each carried two soldiers in arctic camouflage smocks. And they were heading straight towards the entrance to the cavern!

  CHAPTER 17

  So far so good, Rose thought as he fixed an ice screw into the cliff. He clipped his rope through the screw and gingerly applied some weight to it. Only when he was sure that it was secure did he sit back in his climbing harness and shake out the throbbing muscles of his legs.

  On any other day, he would have enjoyed the climb. The weather was perfect: the wind had dropped with the rising of the sun and they climbed into a clear blue sky that had spread across the mountains from the east. But when every metre took him deeper into the range of the Indians’ rifles, to say his feelings were mixed was an understatement.

  The others were doing well. Yvonne was proving to be a fantastic technical climber and she had a good eye. Twice she had directed Rose around some difficult features when she saw he was struggling with his chosen route. McCarthy and Khamas had no mountaineering experience, but both were fit and uncomplaining.

  Rose had rigged slings from blankets for the two non-climbers. Without axes or crampons they had no chance of making it up the cliff otherwise, even if they had been world class climbers. Instead of climbing, they relied on Rose and Yvonne to secure ropes to the cliff with ice screws and pitons. Then, sitting in their slings, and with each foot in a loop of webbing, they hauled their own weight up the rope with ratcheted handgrips, a technique known to climbers as jugging.

  So far the technique was working well. They were a third of the way up the cliff. Below them, the Svenska shelter looked like no more than a discarded paper bag: a torn, earth-toned smudge nestled amongst shards of blue ice.

  Rose sat in his harness and swigged some water while he rested. He scanned the valley below. There was no sign of the Havoc, but the climb was taking longer than he had planned. If they were caught exposed on the cliff face they wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Yvonne climbed past him. Below the black discs of her Julbo glacier glasses, her zinc-painted lips were spread in a broad smile.

  ‘Just take it easy,’ Rose reminded her. ‘This isn’t the X-Games. There are no extra points for speed.’

  ‘You think this is fast? With respect, Sir, you must be getting old.’

  She climbed past him before Rose could think of a suitably cutting reply. He stretched out his left calf that was threatening to cramp up on him and wondered if there wasn’t some truth to her jibe.

  Below him, McCarthy and Khamas were still steadily jugging up their ropes. It was a slow and tiring way of climbing. With no fixed point at the top, the two non climbers had to stop every fifteen metres or so clinging precariously to the cliff and either fix onto a new rope, or allow their only lifeline to spool through their hands while Rose or Yvonne fixed it securely to an anchor further up the face.

  Rose had insisted that the two teams climbed separately. Rose and Yvonne were tied together, but the line they fixed for McCarthy and Khamas to follow was independent. The method slowed their progress, but avoided overstressing any one rope. It also meant that if tragedy struck, at least one of the two pairs should survive rather than all four climbers being dragged to their death.

  ‘I think I see the ledge,’ Yvonne called from above. ‘It looks decent. It should give us plenty of cover.’

  Rose looked up. Even through the polarised lenses of his glacier glasses he was forced to block out the worst of the glare with his hand before he could see Yvonne. She was moving crablike across the face of the cliff about thirty feet above him. Glittering dust fell from her crampons as she kicked a toe hold in a pristine pane of glassy ice: one of the remnants of the frozen waterfall that had covered the cliff. Rose fed some rope through his ice screw as Yvonne transited across the cliff towards her find. Rose noted that she had not fixed another screw before beginning her transit. She was climbing thirty feet above her last anchor point. If she fell, she would have to fall past that and then a further thirty feet before she caught up with the slack in the rope.

  ‘Hey!’ he called. ‘Make yourself fast.’

  ‘Can’t,’ she replied. The ice here is mushy. I’d have to climb past it anyway. I’ll go ‘round and tie off at the ledge.’

  Rose didn’t like it. He looked down the cliff below Yvonne, who was now many yards to his left. A jagged outcropping jutted out below her. He tried to judge the distance. It was certainly close to sixty feet. If Yvonne fell, she would careen off that outcrop before she ran out of slack. At this height the ice was like concrete. It would be like hitting the pavement from a seven story fall.

  He looked up at the young nurse. She was climbing well: confidently, taking no unnecessary risks. The transit—what Rose could see of it from below—looked straightforward. There was no reason to be overly anxious. Then again, they were climbing, without backup, straight towards a platoon of mountain warfare specialists who probably had orders to shoot first and ask no questions—ever. This wasn’t just a weekend scramble. They were climbing for their lives. Sometimes a measured amount of risk had to be accepted.

  Rose payed out
another length of rope. I hope she knows what she’s doing, he thought.

  ◆◆◆

  The cave was as black as a wolf’s throat. At the east end, high above the packed jumble of ice boulders that blocked the entrance, an electric-blue filigree of light glistened around the topmost boulders like a broken, neon spider’s web.

  Below, three figures crouched in the darkness. Frank Marinucci’s fist curled around the grip of Campbell’s machine pistol. Tej had relinquished it preferring the curved steel of his kukri in the tight battle that was to come.

  And so they waited. One soldier, one engineer and one crash survivor planning to ambush a four man fire team from one of the world’s elite fighting forces.

  A muffled scraping drifted through the cracks in the ice, although the dim light grew no brighter. Marinucci had said that it would take a pound of TNT to get through the wall of ice that blocked the entrance to the cave. He was about to be proved right.

  The scraping stopped.

  There was an instant of silence.

  The detonation shook the entire cave. Light knifed in, blinding Marinucci even as his other senses were overwhelmed by the concussion wave and the roar of the explosion that seemed to echo through the rocky crack for long seconds after the instant of the explosion. Something dropped from the roof of the cave to hit the wedged Supacat with a ringing clang. More rocks fell around Marinucci with earthy, fatal thumps and flying ice cut his face.

  They’ve gone too far, he thought. They’ve brought the whole bloody cave down.

  But eventually the noise died away until it was just a ringing in his ears. He uncurled himself from a protective ball.

  A spear of white light cut across the cave like a torch beam from a hole high on the wall. The hole was barely big enough for a man to crawl through.

  Christ, thought Marinucci, we must be even deeper than I imagined.

  A bulky shape eclipsed the beam of light and Marinucci braced himself for another explosion. Tej had told them that the Indians would probably try to clear the tunnel with grenades before venturing in. The Ghurkha had been right. The second explosion was even worse than the first. More ice and rock showered the cave from above, and shrapnel from the grenade’s casing pinged off the cave walls. If they hadn’t have heeded the Ghurkha’s warning it would have been game over right there. Fortunately they had stayed deep in the cave, hunkering down behind piles of rock and natural curtains of steel-hard volcanic glass. Even after the second explosion died away, Marinucci still kept to his hiding place, waiting. His hands felt tacky with sweat inside his gloves.