Asura

by R P L Johnson

  Another burst of gunfire, closer this time, clattered from farther down the crevasse. The echoes bounced off the walls like ricochets.

  ‘Looks like we’re not the only ones down here,’ McCarthy said.

  Rose held a finger to his lips and motioned for the others to stay in the shadows of the tunnel, but Khamas ignored him. As Rose crept along the wall of the crevasse, Khamas stayed right behind him, searching anxiously for any sign of his daughter.

  They crouched behind a huge boulder of solid ice and Rose cautiously peered around to look down the long axis of the crevasse. The sight was amazing. The crevasse opened up until it was as wide as a city street. About a hundred feet away, the body of the crashed plane was jammed between the walls like some kind of stage prop from a heavy metal concert. The crevasse was dotted with battery powered emergency lighting that provided the only illumination. From the darkness above, Rose guessed that the avalanche had completely covered the crevasse with a new snow-bridge. There seemed to be no way out.

  Ahead of them a group of white-clad soldiers were in a fire fight with a lone gunman behind a wall of boulders just below the plane’s suspended fuselage. Fortunately the soldiers were all focussing on the battle in front of them. None turned round to see Rose and Khamas hiding at their unprotected rear.

  Rose had a clear shot at least three of the soldiers. They weren’t expecting an attack from behind. But he only had the pistol. He could get one of them, maybe two, before the others turned and blew him to smithereens.

  Khamas gasped. He started to emerge from their shared hiding place and Rose had to grip his jacket to keep him from giving them both away. Khamas pointed across the crevasse. Against one wall, in a natural hollow that was one step away from being a cave, five prisoners huddled together under the watchful eye of an Indian guard. The guard’s rifle flicked nervously from the prisoners to the fire fight farther down the crevasse and back again.

  Rose motioned for Khamas to be patient. He had to get a handle on this situation. A flash of colour caught his eye. The lone gunman jumped out from his cover long enough to loose a volley of shots: not doing any real damage, but keeping the soldiers’ heads down for a few seconds. Rose recognised the bright red jacket. It was the same as he still wore, the same worn by all of the rescue team. The gunman was Frank Marinucci! The crazy bastard was holding off half a platoon from the Special Services Bureau all by himself! But for how long could he keep it up? The soldiers had the advantage of numbers. Some could advance while the others provided covering fire. He was running out of time; Marinucci wouldn’t last for much longer.

  Rose had to help. He spotted Tej and Campbell among the prisoners. If he could get the little Ghurkha free, then maybe they had a chance. Even Campbell would be useful. He didn’t trust the Scot as far as he could throw him, but he would fight to save his own neck. After that, who knew?

  Motioning for Khamas to stay put, Rose hefted his razor sharp ice-axe and crept up to the guard. For a couple of seconds he was exposed as he crossed the open expanse at the centre of the crevasse, but the Indians were too concerned with Frank. Rose crossed the last few steps at a silent run. The girl, Hadeeqa saw him and gave a gasp that alerted the guard. He started to turn, but too late. Rose swung his axe with all his force, driving the axe through the guard’s temple and deep into the grey matter beneath. He dropped like a poleaxed bull.

  Wasting no time, Rose cut the zip ties on Tej’s hands and feet before starting with the other prisoners.

  ‘We haven’t got long,’ he said. ‘Frank is pinned down over by the plane.’

  ‘Frank!’ Tej exclaimed. ‘Are you sure? We saw Carver shoot him.’

  So Carver was in on this too. ‘Well he’s very much alive, now.’ But for how much longer?

  He handed the guard’s rifle to Tej and quickly frisked the body for ammunition finding a spare clip and a couple of hand grenades. The insignia on the man’s sleeve was the lightning bolt of the Indian Special Security Bureau. What were the SSB doing on the Pakistani side of the border?

  He took the guard’s sidearm and offered it to Campbell. ‘Your choice,’ he said. ‘Us or them?’

  Campbell took the pistol. ‘Some choice,’ he said. ‘But I’m with you.’

  Khamas and the others joined them. He immediately scooped little Hadeeqa into his arms. She clung to him as if she would never let him go again and sobbed quietly into his collar.

  Rose was glad to see father and daughter reunited, but they were far from out of the woods yet.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ he said.

  ‘What about Frank?’ Tej asked. ‘We can’t just leave him here.’

  ‘I agree,’ Rose said. ‘Retracing our steps isn’t going to help us anyway. We need to get off this mountain.’

  ‘That’s going to be difficult,’ Tej said. ‘There is a helicopter on the surface, but the only way to reach it is through them.’ He pointed to the fire fight.

  ‘If we can get to it, I’m pretty sure I could get us off this rock,’ McCarthy said.

  Rose sneaked a look down the crevasse. The Indian soldiers had set up their gun group, two men—one laden with ammunition and the other carrying a M249 ‘Minimi’ machine gun. The heavy weapon would smash through Frank’s cover in seconds. Rose had to think fast.

  ‘Kill the lights!’

  It was Carver; her order was quickly echoed in Hindi and a second later the crevasse was plunged into darkness. At the same time the Indian gun group opened up, its clattering roar filled the crevasse. Tracer rounds flared in the darkness, smashing into the rocks around Frank’s position.

  Rose frisked the body of the Indian guard until he found what he was looking for. In a pouch at his belt, the guard carried a pair of night vision goggles. Rose slipped them on, and instantly the jagged contours of the crevasse became visible again, outlined in green as the goggles’ circuitry highlighted the almost imperceptible light that filtered down through the snow bridge above.

  Rose could see the Indians advancing on Frank. The Australian engineer was still firing, but he was firing blind.

  They didn’t have much time. He looked at the faces of is companions. In the green of the night-vision goggles they looked sallow and frightened. They were blind, trapped by the darkness and the withering barrage from Carver’s machine gun. If they tried to stumble back the way they had come, they would be cut down before they got five yards.

  Then Rose had an idea.

  ‘Get ready to run,’ he said. ‘Head straight towards the plane and start climbing.’

  ‘Are you crazy?’ Garrett said. ‘Run straight into them? I don’t know what you’re thinking, Captain, but I for one am not going to act as your human shield.’

  ‘Just trust me. It’s our only chance. When I give the signal, just run like hell.’

  ‘And just how the bloody hell are we supposed to see this signal? It’s pitch black for Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Rose smiled in the darkness. ‘Believe me; you’ll know it when you see it.’

  Rose took the grenade he’d found on the dead guard. Even without the benefit of the night-vision goggles Rose would have recognised it anywhere, it was an American M67 fragmentation grenade: six and a half ounces of high explosive packed with ball-bearings inside a steel shell.

  Perfect, he thought.

  He stood and threw the grenade as hard as he could. But instead of lobbing the grenade into the ranks of the Indians, he flung it straight up!

  There was a desperate wait as he watched and listened for any sign of the grenade falling back towards them, but there was none. He pushed the night-vision goggles up on his forehead and waited.

  One... Two...

  The grenade embedded in the soffit of the snow bridge thirty feet above their heads exploded like a supernova. The loosely packed snow and ice that covered the crevasse was blown away in a flash, and the tremor sent shockwaves up and down the crevasse, collapsing the fragile roof for dozens of yards in both directions. Chunks of ice
rained down into the crevasse pounding the advancing soldiers. Slabs shattered as they tumbled against the icy walls and suddenly in came the light. For Rose and the others, whose eyes had become accustomed to the darkness the light was painfully, squint-inducingly bright. For the Indian soldiers, with their light-enhancing, night-vision goggles, the effects were a hundred times worse. They screamed and clawed at their goggles, ripping them from their faces and scuttled, instinctively, for the shadows.

  ‘Run!’ Rose shouted and they sprinted towards their only way off the mountain.

  Rose counted on the Indians being blinded for a few seconds at least——not long, but maybe long enough to break through their ranks and make it to the tunnel that led to the surface. He and Tej stumbled along at the rear carrying the weight of the unconscious Morcellet.

  Mark Campbell ran with his eyes fixed on one spot, but it was not the plane and the rope ladder that led to the surface. He kept his gaze fixed on a particularly large boulder of ice on one side of the crevasse. Just a few seconds earlier, he had seen Millicent Carver dive for cover behind its jagged mass. As the others ran past, Campbell leapt behind the boulder ready to tear Craver apart with his bare hands, but there was no-one there! Carver had all the survival instincts of a slaughterhouse rat. But she had left something behind: a slim, aluminium camera case. The same case King had been searching for. He didn’t know what it had to do with anything, but he was sure that it was important somehow. He grabbed it and hurried to catch up with the others.

  ◆◆◆

  Frank Marinucci couldn’t believe his eyes. Just as he was expecting a final charge to overwhelm him, suddenly the whole cavern was bathed in light and he found himself staring, not at an advancing enemy, but at Jonathan Rose and the others as they scrambled through the rocks towards him.

  But the Indians were not finished with them that easily. One soldier popped his head up from cover and almost succeeded in getting of a shot at the backs of the fleeing survivors. Marinucci was faster and the Indian ducked back down as Marinucci’s bullets fizzed past him.

  Marinucci continued to give covering fire and within a few seconds all the survivors were hunkering down behind the boulders around him.

  ‘Nice of you to drop by,’ Marinucci said as Rose jumped down beside him.

  ‘Oh, you know—I was just in the area.’

  A barrage of shots pinned them down for a second. But now they had four rifles to return fire. Tej, Campbell, Marinucci and Rose unleashed a hailstorm of their own.

  But they were still outgunned.

  ‘We need to get out of here,’ Marinucci said.

  Rose nodded. ‘Are there any more Indians on the surface?’ he asked.

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  Rose handed his rifle to Khamas. ‘You know how to use this?’

  Khamas nodded curtly. ‘I learned to shoot before I learned to read. An unfortunate necessity in my homeland.’

  ‘Take it, just in case. Go with Mac and get the chopper started. We’ll buy you as much time as we can and then follow you up.’

  Khamas nodded and slung the weapon across his shoulders. He placed a foot on the first wooden slat of the rope ladder that led to the surface. Just then the Indian gun group opened up again. The survivors ducked down behind their icy barricade, but the shots were not aimed at them. The bullets cut through the lightweight aluminium fuselage of the plane above them—punching hole after hole through the tortured metal, completely shredding it. The bullets also found the rope ladder. The onslaught cut through the main load-bearing ropes some twenty feet above their heads and Rose watched in horror as their route out of the crevasse dropped in a pile of wood and hemp at their feet.

  CHAPTER 23

  They were trapped, but the Indians weren’t finished there. More soldiers concentrated their fire on the fuselage. Round after round sizzled through the suspended cylinder like a buzz saw. The scream of tortured metal mixed with the mechanical clatter of the barrage of automatic fire.

  ‘It’s going to fall!’ Marinucci shouted above the din. ‘They want to crush us!’ Just then one of the plane’s main supporting ribs sheared through and the huge mass of metal lurched alarmingly downwards.

  ‘Run!’

  The shattered fuselage gave way with a grinding shriek like a slow-motion car crash. It dropped onto the floor of the crevasse, pulverising the ice boulders below and raising a plume of snow and ice crystals that billowed out up and down the length of the crevasse. It stood on its crumpled tail for a second before the huge segment of the once proud airliner toppled towards Rose and the fleeing survivors.

  The jagged, bullet-scarred end of the tube sliced towards them like a ten-foot wide crown of razor blades. It slammed into the ice just a couple of feet behind Rose—the concussion shaking loose more of the shattered snow-bridge above and knocking Rose sprawling on the ice.

  Rose felt a hand grip the straps of his rucksack. It was Campbell. The giant Scot hauled him roughly to his feet and all but flung him along the crevasse one-handed. At the same time he kept up a withering barrage of fire with his rifle held in the crook of his other arm. But the Indians weren’t following them, at least not yet. The collapsed wreckage of the plane blocked the crevasse with a barrier of razor sharp metal.

  ‘You got any more of those grenades?’ Campbell asked.

  Rose tossed him his last one and the Scottish SAS soldier wedged it under a piece of wreckage. When he was sure that the spring-loaded handle was firmly secured, he carefully removed the pin.

  ‘A little surprise for when those bastards try to clear the wreckage,’ Campbell explained. ‘Should slow them down.’

  ‘Pity we don’t have a few more,’ Rose said.

  ‘Aye. But they don’t know that, do they? After being caught once they’ll have to check every nook and cranny between here and the surface.’

  They ran onwards, the crevasse sloped down but they had no choice but to follow it. Ice gave way to rock as the path led back into the darkness at the heart of the mountain. Once again they were out of the glacier and scurrying through the petrified arteries of the mountain itself. The constant darkness was oppressive, and the jagged rocks—untouched by the smoothing hand of erosion—were as sharp as tooled flint. It was otherworldly, barren and stark. It had not been laid down from above: Rose could search for the rest of his life and never find a single fossil embedded in it. Rather, it had been raised, bodily, from the underworld as if Hell itself had been ripped off its foundations and thrust upwards into the world of men.

  Suddenly they stopped.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Rose asked. ‘Keep moving.’

  Rebecca McCarthy flicked on her torch: its beam fell on a sharp knife-edge of black rock. Beyond, the gaping maw of a deep ravine swallowed the little finger of light.

  ‘Just bloody marvellous!’ Garrett swore. ‘We’re stuck’

  Rose still had his pilfered night-vision goggles. He pulled them back down over his eyes. The goggles were image intensifiers; they could magnify any existing light, no matter how feeble. McCarthy’s torch glowed like a star but beyond—away in the middle distance below them—another weak light source was visible. With no natural light in the cave system, that could only mean one thing!

  ‘What is it?’ Yvonne asked. ‘What do you see?’

  ‘There’s a light ahead. It’s very faint, but it could be a way out. There’s a ledge on our left. It’s narrow but it gets wider after a few yards. Stay together in the torch light and follow me. We’ll get out of here yet.’

  Rose went as quickly as he dared. Although Campbell’s booby trap would make their pursuers think twice before charging after them, the task ahead of them was still monumental. Their path would have been difficult enough to follow in broad daylight. With the night-vision goggles, it wasn’t too bad, but for the others following behind with only the light of one torch to guide them, it was proving almost impossible. Only the fact that almost certain execution awaited them if they stopped kept them going.<
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  Rose went ahead, finding the best routes and then guiding the others on where to place hands and feet. All the time he kept scanning their surroundings, looking for any sign of another way out to the surface.

  Nothing.

  They were following a ledge that ran along the side of an underground ravine that dropped into nothingness just scant feet away from their stumbling steps. All around was black rock: the ancient bedrock of the Earth that had been thrust upwards millions of years ago when in the millennia-long cataclysm that had formed the Himalayas.

  The other side of the ravine was lost in darkness, even under the magnified glare of the night-vision goggles. Above them, the rock soared much higher than the steep, icy walls of the crevasse.

  Rose waited at a widening of the path for the others to catch up. They were making painfully slow progress, their torch beams dancing crazily as they stumbled along the uneven ledge. Although there was no sign of pursuit, it would only be a matter of time before the Indians cleared a path through into the cavern.

  As Tej clambered towards him, Rose fell in step and they climbed together.

  ‘I never said how good it is to see you again, Havildar,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, Captain-Ba,’ Tej replied, tacking the friendly but respectful Nepali word for ‘father’ onto Rose’s rank. ‘I, myself had no doubt that I would be seeing you again.’

  ‘How did you know I was still alive?’

  ‘I didn’t. I thought you were certainly dead, but there were so many unfinished conversations that I felt I would surely be seeing you in the next life!’

  Rose laughed. ‘Well, it seems neither of us is ready for that journey yet... So Carver was part of this all the time?’

  ‘Indeed.’ With his usual, military economy Tej filled Rose in on everything that had happened since the avalanche, including their discovery of the lake cavern, the battle with the snowmobiles and Carver’s betrayal. Rose listened carefully, turning each piece of information over in his mind and fitting it into the picture that was slowly coming together in his mind.