‘No littering, please,’ Kabir said. ‘This is a site of special archaeological interest, remember.’
‘Doesn’t bloody look like it,’ Manish said.
Sai finished the can, crumpled it between his fingers and surveyed it with a thoughtful frown. ‘Just think. If I chuck this away among the rocks, four thousand years into the future some guy like us will dig it up and prize it as an ancient relic of our culture, wondering what the hell it can teach him about the long-lost civilisation of the twenty-first century.’
Kabir smiled. ‘That’s history in action for you. Now let’s go and see what we can figure out about the people who lived here four thousand years ago.’
‘I don’t think they drank Coke,’ Manish said.
‘Nah, something else killed them off,’ Sai joked. ‘Question is, what?’
It was one of the puzzles that Kabir had spent his whole career trying to answer, and it was no joke to him. He tossed his own empty Coke can back into the cooler, then took out his iPhone and quickly accessed the precious set of password-protected documents stored inside.
Those documents were the single most important thing in his life right now. The original from which they had been scanned was an old leather-bound journal dating back to the nineteenth century. Not particularly ancient, as archaeological finds went – and yet its chance discovery, only weeks earlier, had been the most significant he’d ever made. And he was hoping that it would lead to an even bigger one.
Outside of Manish and Sai, there were very few people whom Kabir trusted with his newfound secret. The precious journal itself was still back in New Delhi, securely locked up in a safe while its new custodian travelled out to this arid wilderness, full of excitement and determined to find out if the amazing revelations of its long-dead author were indeed true.
Only time would tell. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. His eagerness to know the truth sometimes bordered on desperation. Yes, it was an obsession. He knew that. But sometimes, he reminded himself, that’s what it takes to get the job done.
Shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, Kabir slowly scanned the horizon. The chopper was parked on a rocky plateau from where the ground fell away into a rubble-strewn valley. Heat ripples disturbed the air like tendrils rising from the ground, but he was able to make out the curve of the ancient dry river bed that wound for miles into the far distance. Millennia ago, a mighty river had flowed through here, nourishing the land and raising lush vegetation all along its banks. Now it was so parched and dusty that even looking at it made Kabir thirsty for another cold drink.
He looked back at the iPhone and scrolled through the selection of documents until he came to the scan of the map from the old journal. The hundred and eighty-plus years it had lain undiscovered had done the book few favours: some pages were nibbled around the edges by mildew and rodents, others so badly faded and water-stained as to be barely legible. Kabir had used specialised computer software to enhance the details, and a UV camera to photograph the worst-affected pages. He’d been pleased with the results. The digitised map now looked as sharp and clear as the day the journal’s author had drawn it in the pages of his book. Its key feature was the undulating, meandering curve of a river whose line, as Kabir stood there comparing the two, closely resembled that of the dry bed that stretched out in front of him.
That was when Kabir knew he was in the right place. A strange chill ran up and down his back.
‘What do you reckon, boss?’ Sai, at his shoulder, was gazing at the screen of the iPhone.
‘I think we found it,’ Kabir replied. His voice was calm, but his heart felt ready to leap out of his chest. He took a couple of deep breaths, then started leading the way down the rocky slope down towards the river valley. He ran ten miles every day, kept himself super-fit and was as nimble as a mountain goat over the rough terrain. Sai markedly less so, being overly partial to calorie-laden Delhi street food, and Manish was a city kid too used to level pavements. But they’d toughen up. Slipping and stumbling and causing little rock slides under their feet, they manfully followed their leader down the hillside. By the time they reached the bottom, Kabir was already tracking along the river bed, walking slowly and scanning left and right as though searching for clues.
It was hard to believe that such an arid and inhospitable area could have once been a major centre of one of the largest and most advanced cultures of the ancient world. But that was exactly what it was.
To say that the lost Harappan, or Indus Valley Civilisation, was Kabir’s overriding interest in life would have been a crashing understatement. Long, long ago, over a stretch of time spanning one and a half thousand years during the second and third millennia BCE, the culture had thrived throughout the north-western parts of South Asia. Their empire had been larger than that of Mesopotamia; greater even than that of ancient Egypt or China. It had covered a vast area comprising parts of what were today Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India. At its peak, it was thought to support a population of five million inhabitants, which by ancient standards was enormous.
And yet, virtually nothing was known about these people. Nobody even knew what they called themselves, let alone how they organised their society. Or what had finally caused their whole civilisation to crumble and disappear. Kabir had devoted most of his career as an archaeologist to uncovering those secrets, and expected to spend the rest of his life doing exactly the same thing.
For years, it had been widely assumed in the archaeology world that the main centres of the Indus Valley Civilisation had been the excavated cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both in Pakistan. Which had been a major frustration for archaeologists from India, since tensions between the two nations made it hard for them to travel freely in their neighbouring country. More recently, important finds made at Rakhigarhi in India’s Haryana region had radically changed that view. Many historians and archaeologists now believed that the sheer size of the site excavated at Rakhigarhi pointed to it being the capital of the entire civilisation. If that was true, as Kabir fervently hoped, then it might offer scholars the opportunity to finally start unravelling the mysteries that surrounded the ancient lost culture.
Exactly what he hoped to find here, twenty miles to the north of the Rakhigarhi site, Kabir couldn’t say for certain. But if the journal’s claims were even half true, he could be standing on a literal treasure. He’d already made some private, tentative enquiries among his contacts in the Indian government. They were unlikely to agree to fund a new excavation project, but as long as they agreed in principle, Kabir was more than willing to pay for it out of his own pocket. His very own private dig, fully under his own supervision. He calculated that to bring in sufficient manpower and equipment to get things rolling would cost him at least a hundred million rupees – about one and a half million American dollars.
Kabir didn’t blink at those figures. The benefits of being born into wealth.
Manish and Sai caught up with him and the three of them walked on, following the river bed. Each man was silent, gazing at the rocky ground underfoot and imagining what wonders might be hidden below. It was a heady feeling. Finally, Manish said, ‘Wow, Prof, you really think it’s here somewhere?’
‘I’m certain it’s here,’ Kabir replied. He held up the iPhone as though it were the old leather-bound journal itself. ‘Masson believed it. That’s good enough for me.’
Sai was about to say something when he suddenly froze. ‘Hear that?’
‘What?’ Manish said.
Now Kabir heard it, too, and turned to look in the direction of the sound.
The approaching vehicle appeared on the ridge above the river valley, some eighty yards to the west. It looked as though it had come from where the helicopter was parked. Kabir instinctively didn’t like the look of it. As he watched, it tipped over the edge of the slope and started bouncing and pattering its way down the hillside towards them, throwing up a dust plume in its wake. It was moving fast. Some kind of rugged four-wheel-drive, l
ike the Nissan Jonga jeeps the Indian army used to use.
‘Who are they, boss?’ Sai asked apprehensively.
‘No idea. But I think we’re about to find out.’
The jeep reached the bottom of the hillside and kept coming straight towards them, lurching and dipping over the rubble. Then it stopped, still a long way off. The terrain on the approach to the river bed was too rough even for an off-roader. The doors opened. Two men climbed out of the front. Three more climbed out of the back. All of them were clutching automatic rifles, but they definitely weren’t the Indian army.
‘Daakus!’ Manish yelped.
Sai’s jaw dropped open. An expression of pure horror plastered his face. ‘Oh, shit.’
Daakus were bandits, of which there were many gangs across north-west India. They were growing bolder each year, despite the increasingly militarised and notoriously brutal efforts of the police to round them all up. Kabir had read a few days earlier that an armed gang of them had robbed a bank in Haryana. Their sudden appearance was the last thing he’d have expected out here, in the middle of the wilderness. But all the same he now cursed himself for having left his Browning self-defence pistol at home in Delhi. His mouth went dry.
‘They must have seen us landing,’ Sai said in a hoarse, panicky whisper. ‘What are we going to do, boss?’ Both he and Manish were looking to their professor as though he could magically get them out of this.
The five men were striding purposefully towards them. Spreading out now. Raising their weapons. Taking aim. Looking like they meant it.
‘Run,’ Kabir said. ‘Just run!’
And then the gunshots began to crack out across the valley.
Chapter 2
One month later
The walls of the single-storey house were several feet thick and extremely well insulated, solidly reinforced on the outside and clad on the inside with thick, sturdy plywood. The house featured several rooms and offered spacious facilities well suited to its purpose.
But it wasn’t a dwelling in which anybody would have wanted to live. Not even the mice that inhabited the remote compound’s various other sheds and outbuildings would have been tempted to make their nests in its walls. Not considering the activities that went on there.
Yet, the building wasn’t empty that autumn afternoon. At the end of a narrow corridor was the main room; and in the middle of that room sat a woman on a wooden chair. She wasn’t moving. Her wrists and ankles were lashed tight and her head hung towards her knees so that her straggly blonde hair covered her face. To her right, a kidnapper in torn jeans reclined on a tattered sofa with a shotgun cradled across his lap. To her left, another of the woman’s captors stood in a corner.
Nobody spoke. As though waiting for something to happen.
The waiting didn’t go on for long.
The stunning boom of an explosion shattered the silence and shook the building. Heavy footsteps pounded up the corridor towards the main room. Then its door crashed violently inwards and two men burst inside. One man was slightly taller than the other, but otherwise they were indistinguishable in appearance. They were dressed from head to foot in black, bulked out by their body armour and tactical vests, and their faces were hidden behind masks and goggles. Each carried a semiautomatic pistol, same make, model and calibre, both weapons drawn from their tactical holsters, loaded and ready for action.
The two-man assault team moved with blinding speed as they invaded the room. They ignored the hostage for the moment. Her safety was their priority, which meant dealing with her captors quickly and efficiently before either one could harm her. The taller man unhesitatingly thrust out his weapon to aim at the kidnapper in the corner and engaged him with a double-tap to the chest and a third bullet to the head, the three snapping gunshots coming so fast that they sounded like a burst from a machine gun. No human being alive could have responded, or even flinched, in time to avoid being fatally shot.
The other man in black moved across the room to engage the kidnapper on the sofa. Shouting, ‘DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON DROP THE WEAPON!’
The kidnapper made no move to toss the shotgun. The second assault shooter went to engage him. His finger was on the trigger. Then the room suddenly lit up with a blinding white flash and an explosion twice as loud as the munitions they’d used to breach the door blew the shooter off his feet. He sprawled on his back, unharmed, but momentarily stunned. His unfired pistol went sliding across the floor.
The room was full of acrid smoke. The kidnapper in the corner had slumped to the floor, but neither the bound hostage nor her captor on the sofa had moved at all. That was because they were the latest type of life-size, high-density foam 3D humanoid targets that were being used for live-fire hostage rescue and combat training simulations here at the Le Val Tactical Training Centre in Normandy, France. The ‘kidnappers’ had already been shot more full of holes than Gruyère in the course of a hundred similar entry drills performed inside the killing house. So had the hostage, more than her fair share. But they’d survive to go through the whole experience another day, and many more.
The taller of the two assault shooters made his weapon safe and clipped it back into its holster, then pulled off his mask and goggles and brushed back the thick blond lock that fell across his brow. His haircut definitely wouldn’t have passed muster, back in his SAS days. He walked over to his colleague, who was still trying to scramble to his feet.
Ben Hope held out a gloved hand to help him up. He said, ‘Congratulations. You’re dead, your team are dead, your hostage is dead. Let’s review and start over.’
The second man’s name was Yannick Ferreira and he was a counter-terror unit commander with the elite Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale or GIGN, here on a refresher course. He’d wanted to hone his skills with the best, and there were none better to train with than the guys at Le Val: Ben himself, his business partner Jeff Dekker, their associate Tuesday Fletcher and their hand-picked team of instructors, all ex-military, all top of their game. Ferreira was pretty good at his job too, but even skilled operators, like world-class athletes, could lose their edge now and then. It was Ben’s job to keep them on their toes.
Ferreira said, ‘What the hell just happened?’
Ben replied, ‘That happened.’ He pointed at the floor, where a length of thin wire lay limp across the rough boards where Ferreira had snagged it with his boot.
‘A tripwire?’
‘You must have missed it, in all the excitement,’ Ben said.
The wire was connected to a hidden circuit behind the wall, which when broken activated the non-lethal explosive device right beneath Ferreira’s feet. Seven million candlepower and 170 decibels of stunning noise wasn’t quite the same as being blown apart by a Semtex booby trap, but it certainly got its message across.
‘Devil’s in the detail, Yannick,’ Ben said. ‘As we all know, our terrorist friends have no problem blowing themselves to smithereens in order to take us out with them. It can get just a little messy.’
Ferreira shook his head sourly. ‘I can’t believe you caught me out with a fucking flashbang. That was a dirty rotten trick, Ben.’
‘Dirty rotten tricks are what you’re paying us for,’ Ben said. ‘How about we stroll back to the house for a coffee, then we can come back and run through it again?’
Chapter 3
‘Keep pouring,’ Jeff said grimly, holding out his wineglass until Ben had filled it to the brim. Jeff downed half the glass in a gulp like a man on a mission, and smacked his lips.
‘I think I’ll get rat-arsed tonight,’ he declared.
‘Sounds like a brilliant plan,’ Tuesday said dryly. ‘Don’t expect me to carry you back to your hole after you fall in a heap, though.’
Another busy work day had ended, evening had fallen and the three of them were gathered around the big oak table in the farmhouse kitchen, preparing to demolish the pot of beef and carrot stew that could have fed the French army, which was simmering on the s
tove. Ben was seated in his usual place by the window, feeling not much less morose than Jeff despite the glass of wine at his elbow, his loyal German shepherd dog Storm curled up at his feet and one of his favourite Gauloises cigarettes between his lips.
While he’d been working with Yannick Ferreira, Jeff and Tuesday had been putting two more of the GIGN guys through their paces on Le Val’s firing ranges. Tuesday had been a top-class military sniper before he’d come to join the gang in Normandy. His idea of fun was popping rows of cherry tomatoes at six hundred yards with his custom Remington 700 rifle, which generally upstaged and occasionally cheesed off their clients. Especially the ones with a tough-guy attitude, who for some reason didn’t expect a skinny Jamaican kid who was forever smiling and ebullient to be so deadly once he got behind a rifle.
Ben had warned Tuesday in the past about the showing off. ‘We’re here to teach them, not embarrass them.’ Still, Ferreira’s guys hadn’t taken it too badly. After class the three trainees had driven off to the nearest town, Valognes, in search of beer and fast food to help soothe their wounded pride and prepare them for another day of humiliation ahead.
Even Tuesday’s spirits were dampened by the gloomy atmosphere around the kitchen table. But the glumness of the three friends had nothing to do with the tribulations of their work. The theme of the dinnertime conversation had been women troubles. Tuesday, who appeared to enjoy a stress-free and uncomplicated love life largely because he was always between girlfriends, had nothing to complain about. For both Ben and Jeff, however, it was a different story.
Ben had recently returned from an unexpectedly adventuresome trip to the American Deep South. There, in-between dodging bullets and almost getting blown up and eaten by alligators, he’d met and befriended a female police officer called Jessie Hogan. They had dinner and went to a jazz gig together, and although Jessie made it pretty obvious that she liked Ben, nothing happened between them. Ben drove back to New Orleans and boarded his flight home without so much as a kiss being exchanged. But that wasn’t the impression that Ben’s French girlfriend, Sandrine, had formed.
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