Jon Rose fired into the horde of charging monsters. Phase one of his plan—rescuing the others—had gone well; phase two—escaping alive—wasn’t going quite so smoothly. He ejected the spent magazine from the P9 and slapped a fresh on into the butt. The pistol was like a pop-gun against the Nagas. He would have to swim for it.
The Nagas shrieked towards him: a grey-white stormfront of rending claws and bristling fangs. Rose readied his last remaining grenade. Hopefully, it would buy him enough time to make it to the relative safety of the open water.
With a battle cry scarcely any less fearsome than the howling Nagas, Major Naik and the SSB charged into the advancing horde. The soldiers were outnumbered three to one, but under the Major’s direction they managed to break the advance of the charging monsters with a withering barrage of fire. They advanced in ranks; as each ran dry of ammunition they dropped back allowing their comrades to step through and continue the fight while the men in the rear reloaded.
The screams of the monsters reached a new level of intensity as the hundreds of rounds from the Indians’ rifles tore into their flesh. Rose didn’t stop to wonder why, he turned and sprinted towards the water.
‘Over here!’ a voice shouted. It was Frank Marinucci. He was rowing frantically, about thirty feet out and parallel to the shore.
Rose splashed through the shallows towards him when suddenly he heard a familiar shriek from behind. He turned just in time to get his rifle up in front of him as a Nagas cannoned into him. The impact drove Rose from his feet and suddenly he was on his back in two feet if water grappling with six limbs of shrieking fury.
Instinctively he pulled the trigger of his P9, the bullet tore through the Nagas’ side. It relaxed its hold for a second and Rose span to his knees and managed to snatch a precious breath before the creature was back on him. He clubbed it away time and time again, but it kept coming back. Over its shoulder he could see the Indians engaged in similar close quarter battles of their own. Any semblance of modern tactics had been lost to a toe-to-toe street fight. They fought with their bayonets, combat knives, fists and feet and, impossibly, they were winning!
With a supreme effort, Rose thrust his attacker away with such force it flew five feet through the air before splashing back into the shallows. It readied itself to spring for his throat, but Rose was quicker. He shot the creature through the middle of its gaping mouth and the bullet punched a gory exit wound through the back of its neck. It dropped into the water.
He turned to look for Marinucci. He had wisely kept his distance and brought his boat to shore about thirty feet away. He stood up to his knees in water, steadying the bobbing craft, ready for a quick getaway.
A roar echoed across the cavern. The Asura had joined the fight! Rose watched in horror as the huge beast surged through the ranks of its own minions and cut down two Indian commandoes with one stroke. It swung its long staff two-handed like some medieval broadsword and another soldier lay dead, split open from shoulder to crotch. Bullets sparked off its armour, but the huge creature ignored them as if they were nothing more than flies buzzing around an enraged bull. One soldier jumped in front of it and opened fire at point blank range. The Asura thrust its staff forward and the long, black rod seemed to grow and taper to a needle-sharp point. It exploded through the body of the foolish soldier in a spray of crimson. The Asura heaved on its spear with all of its massive strength and the soldier was flung away like a rag doll. It bellowed its triumph like a victorious gladiator.
‘Hurry!’ Marinucci shouted. ‘Its after the case!’
Rose knew he was right. For some reason the Asura seemed intent on hunting down whoever held that case. Quickly, Rose shrugged his pack off his shoulders and dumped out the case. He grabbed it by its briefcase handle and tried to run towards the boat but couldn’t. A vice-like grip clenched around his ankle. The creature he thought he’d killed was far from dead. It gripped him with a death grip from two of its arms and tried to drag Rose down to the ground with its ragged, broken forelimbs. Its second and third pairs of limbs trailed useless behind it and its head was canted over to one side revealing the glint of bone splinters between the bloody strands of severed tendon but it was still fighting. Rose clubbed at the creature but it seemed to be beyond pain. It clung on to him like a demonic lover.
The Asura still danced its dance of death among the Indians. They looked like children in front of the towering monster. Its weapon blurred in its claws: the black rod flowing in response to its master’s movements—one second a lance thrust through the neck of one soldier, the next second a blade severing a man’s arm. With a final cry of triumph the Asura cut its way through its remaining adversaries and charged towards him.
Rose tried to run, but it was no use. Weighed down by the half-dead creature still clinging to him, he had no chance of getting to the boat in time. He swung the case, testing its weight, before hurling it towards Marinucci.
‘Get out of here, Frank,’ he shouted.
The silver case glinted in the sunlight as it flew. Rose’s aim had been perfect and the case thumped into Marinucci’s waiting arms.
‘Swim for the mountain when you can,’ Marinucci called. ‘I’ll draw that thing off.’
Marinucci threw the case into the boat. Suddenly he felt a blow to his side, as if he’d been punched. He looked down: a knife hilt protruded from his flesh, the cloth of his survival suit was already black with blood. The stain grew rapidly.
‘How many times do I have to kill you, Frank?’ Millicent Carver said. Without a word Frank Marinucci dropped into the water at her feet. Carver grabbed the case as he fell.
Suddenly a streak of black cut through the air. The Asura’s staff cleaved through Carver like a missile, slicing through her from breast to hip and thudding into the lake bed behind. She screamed an inhuman screech like a broken radio as if she was already something less than human. There was no coming back from a wound like that. She screamed with no thought of saving her breath for future life as if she knew that was no longer an option. But she remained standing, pinned like a butterfly in a collection.
The Major dragged himself to his feet and steadied himself against a blood-spattered boulder. His men were dead, the Nagas were dead, and they had come so close. As he watched Carver’s death throes on the Asura’s spear he looked sorrowfully at the broken corpse of his signalman and waited for the inevitable.
CHAPTER 30
The Asura closed in on Carver. She was still alive—barely. Although she had lost the strength to move, her eyes rolled up to look at the giant creature that approached her. It gripped the staff and ripped it out, sending Carver’s guts splashing into the water an instant before her dead body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut.
The Asura reached into the boat and grabbed the case. It cast a baleful stare back at Campbell and the others and started to march towards them.
‘What does it want now?’ McCarthy asked. ‘It’s got what it wanted.’
‘Revenge,’ Garrett replied.
Campbell pointed a thumb at the blue portals through which the Asura had arrived. ‘More like a way out,’ he said.
He was right. The Asura stomped towards them, no more inclined to go around their little group than they would have been to avoid a group of insects in their own path.
Campbell dragged himself to his feet. Without a word he took the big Busse knife from McCarthy and strode over to the scattered equipment strewn across the shore. He selected a curved and wickedly sharp ice-axe and marched towards the advancing monster.
‘Are you crazy?’ McCarthy called after him.
‘Keep back!’ Campbell shouted over his shoulder. ‘Head for the chopper and get the fuck out of here.’
He ignored her repeated pleas and marched to a patch of level gravel right in the path of the monster and held his ground. The last couple of days had taken a terrible toll on his body. His broad back was awash with blood from dozens of cuts, but beneath the skin his huge muscles bunched and rol
led.
But even Campbell was dwarfed by his massive opponent.
The Asura bellowed at him: a final warning to get out of its way.
Campbell stood firm. He made no attempt to get out of the way, or even to ready himself for combat. He stood, relaxed and loose.
The Asura flicked its staff forward. The impossible weapon shot out, tapering to a twenty foot long lance aimed squarely at the centre of Campbell’s chest.
But the big Scot was ready for it. With amazing speed for such a big man he neatly side-stepped the thrust and the needle-sharp tip passed harmlessly through the empty air.
Campbell swatted the lance away with a casual wave of his axe. It wasn’t a parry: the Asura’s blow had already missed its mark. It was just to show that he could.
The Asura roared at him again, but stopped its advance. It looked him over and snorted down its slit-like nostrils. Keeping its black eyes trained on him, it carefully placed the case on the ground and gripped its staff with two massive hands.
It seemed Campbell had got its attention.
Like two gladiators in an ancient arena, Campbell and the Asura circled each other.
The Asura swing its staff in a wide arc. Campbell made no attempt to block the attack, but instead ducked underneath it. He had been watching the Asura as it tore through the SSB commandoes. In particular he had watched its staff weapon. What looked at first glance like a rod of black iron was something far more versatile. The material seemed to be sensitive to movement. When swung through the air, the circular rod flattened to a blade as broad as a shovel. When it was stabbed forward along its long axis, it grew and tapered to a spear, adding the force of its own elongation to the initial power of the thrust. In both cases, spear tip and blade honed themselves to almost molecular sharpness. Campbell’s plan was simple. Stay away from that fucking edge.
The Asura lunged again and Campbell saw his chance. He dived under the thrust, rolling to his knees behind the Asura. He lashed out with the Busse held underhand like a dagger and felt its razor-sharp edge bite deep into the meat of the monster’s hamstring.
First blood to Campbell.
The Asura roared in pain and swiped down with its staff. The impossibly sharp blade cut a deep furrow in the rock where Campbell had been only a split second before.
Campbell danced around the monster. His blond beard, mated with blood from his crushed nose, split in a fearsome smile. He looked like some Norse god of war. All his life he’d never been good at anything, except this. He was born to it.
He swung the serrated spike of the ice axe before him: keeping the blade moving, not allowing himself to fall into a pattern that his enemy could exploit.
The Asura swung its staff again: blade-like, a black singularity slicing through the air in an arc of instant death. Campbell dodged it, but couldn’t avoid a swipe from the Asura’s claws that raked across his chest. He staggered back, three bloody furrows stretching from nipple to rib. An inch closer and the Asura would have gutted him like a fish.
The Asura roared in triumph and pressed home the attack. It spun its staff in complicated figure of eight, unknown to any earthly practitioner of the martial arts. At the same time it struck out with its huge reach, each swipe missing Campbell by inches. The huge creature was easily as fast as the nagas that served it.
Campbell dodged blow after blow until finally a backhand swipe caught him under the chin. The huge man was lifted bodily off his feet and thrown backwards, skidding through the gravel. Campbell rolled to the side, missing a spear thrust by a fraction of a second and rolling to his feet.
He was in trouble. The creature’s blow had nearly taken his head off, and yet the wound in its leg had barely slowed it at all. Campbell would have to start landing some more blows and fast.
Jon Rose couldn’t believe his eyes. He’d seen Campbell’s blade bite deep into the Asura’s leg, but the blow that would have hamstrung a normal opponent hardly had any effect on the huge Asura.
He took aim along the iron sights of his pistol. Campbell and the Asura circled each other making for a difficult shot. Difficult but not impossible. He aimed for the base of the creature’s skull, just above the armoured plates that protected its upper back.
He squeezed the trigger.
The shot went low. The round pinged off the hard armour and fizzed harmlessly away.
But the distraction was enough. Campbell pressed home the attack, lashing out at knee groin and throat; each blow would have brought the fight to a swift conclusion against a human opponent, but the huge Asura just roared with rage.
Rose aimed again and squeezed the trigger.
Click!
Empty.
Campbell attacked constantly with all the prodigious power of his mighty frame. The Asura reeled and roared under the assault. Sparks flew where the grated teeth of Campbell’s axe struck the Asura’s armour. Black blood spurted where his knife bit into the monster’s flesh.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the Asura was weakening. It swung its staff—a single blow from that weapon could still end it all—but Campbell was quicker. He ducked under the blow like a prize-fighter and attacked again, swinging his axe. He was Beowulf against Grendel, Heracles against Cerberus.
Campbell roared and slammed his axe home. The serrated prong tore through the Asura’s bicep, transfixing the mighty arm, and stuck fast!
For a split second the combatants were locked together. That was all the time the Asura needed. It grabbed Campbell’s shoulder in a vice-like grip and thrust its staff into his gut.
Campbell grunted as the black spear burst through him. There was almost no pain: just a penetrating chill down to his core. He tried to fight back but the Busse dropped from useless, twitching fingers.
The Asura ripped out its staff and raised it high above its head. With a primeval roar of victory it brought it crashing down and struck Campbell’s head from his shoulders.
‘No!’ Rose shouted, but it was too late. The Asura stooped to pick up the case and limped towards the nearest blue portal.
Rose threw down his useless weapon and raced towards the retreating monster. As it passed the threshold of the portal, the blue material contracted. The hole shrunk until it was the size of a basketball. Rose sprinted towards it, but he was too late. The hole flowed back into the seamless barrier it had once been and Rose’s desperate fists pounded in vain against its surface.
CHAPTER 31
Rebecca McCarthy and Tej raced over to the crumpled form of Frank Marinucci. The water around him was cloudy with spilled blood and his limbs bobbed flaccidly with the movement of the water like a piece of refuse half washed-up against the shore.
Tej splashed into the water at his side and supported the Australian engineer’s grizzled old head. Marinucci’s eyes fluttered open at the contact, but then closed again.
‘Hang on, Frank,’ McCarthy pleaded. ‘You’re going to be all right.’
Marinucci’s eyes stayed closed, but his lips curved in the beginnings of a smile. ‘I’ve never been all right,’ he said. ‘And I’m not going to start now.’
With Tej’s help, McCarthy dragged Marinucci onto dry land and tried to ignore the gory remains of Millicent Carver that floated nearby. She got what she’d deserved.
‘It’s deep,’ Tej said, examining the wound. ‘I’m not certain, but I think he’s bleeding internally. We need to get him to a hospital.’
‘No shit,’ said Marinucci sarcastically.
‘If he doesn’t get medical attention soon, he could go into shock.’
‘Fuck shock!’ Marinucci swore. ‘When I’m in a hospital bed with a pretty nurse to look after me, then I’ll go into shock. Now I’ve got work to do.’
‘Let’s get to the chopper as quickly as we can,’ McCarthy said. ‘I can get us to Gilgit within an hour once we’re in the air.’
She looked around for any sign of the Indian commandoes, but all she could see were corpses. The white smocks of fallen commandos mingled with the ash-g
rey bodies of the Nagas. They were all dead. There didn’t seem to be anything stopping them from escaping to the chopper. Finally, after all that had happened, they could escape that awful mountain.
Jon Rose sat on his haunches against the blue barrier through which the Asura had left. There was nothing to show that it had ever been anything more than a featureless blue wall. The other portals had also closed. They were alone.
He looked across the strip of blasted shore dotted with blood-splattered grey and white lumps. A war had been fought here, and although he was still alive, he couldn’t shake the feeling that somehow they had lost.
McCarthy walked up to him. She looked odd, concerned. Rose suddenly realised what he looked like, dripping wet and disconsolate. Not the square lawed leader that they all needed. Well fuck ‘em! He’d had his share of leadership and look where it had got them.
‘We should get out of here,’ McCarthy said.
‘I couldn’t save him,’ Rose replied. He knew that was not what McCarthy wanted to hear, but he suddenly found that he needed to say it. ‘I had the chance, and I missed. And now he’s dead.’
McCarthy gazed off into the distance. Rose wondered if it was because she couldn’t look him in the eye. ‘You can’t blame yourself for what happened to Campbell,’ she said eventually. ‘He could have walked away. You should be proud: we owe you our lives.’
‘Tell that to Campbell and Yvonne and others. They trusted me: they looked to me to get them out of here.’
McCarthy crouched down next to him and leaned back against the wall. Together they stared out towards the mist-shrouded, underground sea.
‘You saved me,’ she said. ‘You saved Hadeeqa and Tej and Frank. Christ, you even saved Garrett!’
‘Frank’s alive?’
‘We need to get him to a hospital, but Tej seems to think he’s going to make it. He’s a tough old bastard. He’ll make it out of here, but he’ll need your help. We all do.’
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