Jack Higgins - Chavasse 02

by Year of the Tiger

  Once over the top, the track circled the base of a great pillar of rock. Chavasse accelerated and swung the wheel to take them round the shoulder and then Katya screamed a warning and he slammed his foot hard on the brake.

  But he was too late. The track was washed out in a great sliding scoop that ran over the edge into space. The front wheels dipped into the hole and the jeep slewed towards the edge. He frantically tugged at the handbrake. For an instant, it seemed as if it might hold, and then the jeep lurched and one of the front wheels dipped over the edge.

  They had only seconds in which to act. He jumped to the ground, turned and helped Katya down, then Hoffner after her, his black bag clutched firmly against his chest.

  At that moment there was a protesting, shuddering groan and the jeep started to slide. Chavasse reached in, grabbed the machine pistol and the stick grenade and jumped back as the vehicle slid over the edge.

  It hung there for a moment and then disappeared. There were three terrible, metal-wrenching crashes as it bounced its way down into the valley, and then silence.

  Chavasse moved back along the track and peered round the edge of the bluff. The wind was beginning to sweep snow across the steppes in a great curtain, but he could see quite clearly the two jeeps parked on the other side of the bridge and the soldiers moving down on foot to cross the river.

  He returned to the others. “It doesn’t look too good. They’re crossing the gorge on foot.”

  Katya looked strained and anxious, but Hoffner seemed extraordinarily composed. “What do we do now, Paul?”

  “According to the map, we’re only about ten miles from the border,” Chavasse told him. “If we leave the track here and cross over the shoulder of the mountain, we’ll come into the Pangong Tso Pass. About two miles along it, there’s an old Tibetan customs post marked. There may be soldiers there, of course, but we’ll have to risk that.”

  “It’s impossible, Paul,” Katya cried, the wind whipping her voice into a scream. “I couldn’t walk a mile in this state. Neither could the doctor.”

  He grabbed her arm and urged her up the slope. “We don’t have any choice.”

  Hoffner took her other arm and they moved upwards, heads bowed against the driving snow. They paused for a moment in the shelter of some rocks and Hoffner turned suddenly, his face grey.

  “My briefcase, Paul. I left it in the jeep.”

  Chavasse stared blankly at him and then rage gripped him by the throat, threatening to choke him. Everything he had worked for, all the suffering of the past weeks—all for nothing.

  Hoffner grabbed his arm. “It doesn’t matter, Paul. It’s all here in my head, that’s the important thing.”

  “That won’t matter a damn if Colonel Li gets his hands on those papers,” Chavasse said. “Don’t you realize that?” He pushed the stick grenade into the old man’s hand. “Here, I know you aren’t much with a gun. If anyone comes at you, just pull out the pin and throw it at them.”

  He turned, the machine pistol in his left hand, and slid back down the slope to the track. The slope continued on the other side and he went over without hesitation, glissading down to the wrecked jeep forty feet below, squeezed between great boulders.

  He found the briefcase almost at once, wedged under the crumpled driving seat, and he pulled it out and started back up the slope. His heart was pounding and there was blood in his mouth, but he held the briefcase and machine pistol in his left hand and pulled himself up with his right.

  He scrambled over the edge of the track and started across. He slipped and fell to one knee and as he got up, he heard voices shouting through the falling snow.

  He turned and looked down the track quickly as half a dozen soldiers came round the corner of the bluff, bunched together. He dropped to one knee, braced the machine pistol across his arm and loosed the whole magazine in one continuous burst. He continued across the track and scrambled up the slope, his heart heaving like some hunted animal’s.

  He heard the shouts of the men behind him as they started to follow and then the stick grenade he had given Hoffner sailed over his head down to the soldiers and there was an explosion. As it died away, he heard not the sounds of pursuit, but the cries of the wounded and dying.

  He had no strength left. For a moment he lay there on his face, and suddenly the snow balled up around him, hiding the valley below.

  He scrambled wearily to his feet as hooves clattered over loose stones and a horse moved down the slope to meet him.

  The man who sat on its back wore a fur hat, the robe of a snow leopard and soft black boots. A rifle was crooked in one arm.

  Chavasse stared helplessly up at him and then the brown, handsome face split into a wide grin.

  17

  The snow was a living thing whipped by high wind across the steppes, but down in the hollow between the tall rocks it was strangely quiet.

  Chavasse sat with his back to one of the boulders and bared his arm so that Hoffner could give him another injection. Osman Sherif, the Kazakh chieftain, squatted beside him, rifle across his knees, and grinned.

  “The ways of Allah are strange, my friend,” he said in Chinese. “It would seem we are fated to make the last stage of our journey together.”

  Behind him beside the horses stood his wife, together with Katya. The chieftain’s two young children, heavily muffled in furs, were already mounted, one behind the other.

  Chavasse rolled down his sleeve and stood up. “If we don’t get moving soon, we might not even reach the border.”

  Osman Sherif looked up through the falling snow at the sky and shook his head. “I think things will get worse before they get better. I had intended making camp here for the night. It is a good place.”

  “Not with Chinese troops liable to arrive at any moment,” Chavasse told him.

  “But we cannot cross the border before nightfall,” the Kazakh said.

  “We don’t need to,” Chavasse said. “If we carry on over the shoulder of the mountain, we come into the Pangong Tso Pass. About two miles from the border, there’s an old Tibetan customs post. It can’t be more than six or seven miles from here. We could rest and cross over later.”

  “What if there are Chinese there?”

  “That’s a chance we have to take. In any case, there wouldn’t be more than half a dozen of them.” He turned to Hoffner. “What do you think, Doctor?”

  “I don’t see that we have any other choice,” Hoffner said.

  Osman Sherif shrugged. “It is with Allah. It will mean that we must leave many of our personal possessions behind so that each of you may have a horse.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Chavasse said. “When we reach Kashmir, you’ll be well taken care of. I’ll see to it personally that you’re transported to Turkey to join the rest of your countrymen on the Anatolian Plateau.”

  Sudden warmth glowed deep in the Kazakh’s eyes. “You should have mentioned that earlier, my friend.” He slung his rifle over one shoulder and started to unbuckle the load on the first packhorse.

  Chavasse moved across to Katya and smiled down at her. “How do you feel?”

  She looked alarmingly pale and her eyes had sunk deep into dark sockets. “I’ll be all right, Paul. Don’t worry about me. Are we going to make it?”

  He patted her reassuringly on the shoulder. “We’ll make it all right, don’t worry about that,” and then he went and helped the Kazakh with the horses.

  When they rode out of the hollow ten minutes later, Osman Sherif was leading the small column and Chavasse bringing up the rear.

  The horses sank to their fetlocks in the deep snow and Chavasse rode with his head bowed against the wind, alone with his thoughts. He wasn’t afraid any longer. He was calmly certain that he would survive anything that was to come, even the menace of the man who followed him somewhere back there in the wind and snow.

  He started to think about Colonel Li, remembering the endless interrogations and the strange, perverted friendship the other
had tried to create between them. The habit he had seized on from the very beginning, for instance, of calling him Paul, as if they were good friends. As if they might conceivably have something in common.

  Any possibility of friendship was doomed from the start, of course. It was just another of Li’s psychological tricks that hadn’t worked. And yet the man had seemed almost sincere. That was the most incredible thing about the whole affair.

  A sharp stab of pain cut into his face and he winced and reined in his mount. To his surprise he found that the horse was almost knee-deep in snow, and when he wrenched off his glove and touched his face he felt caked snow and ice on his cheeks and discovered that the flesh had split in several places.

  He frowned and pulled on his gloves and then panic ran through him quickly because when he raised his eyes, he saw that he was alone and that darkness was falling.

  He had paused beside a great black finger of rock standing on its own like some silent sentinel, and already the wind was whipping the snow into a frenzy, obscuring the tracks left by the others. As he urged his horse forward, they disappeared completely.

  For what seemed like hours he rode blindly on, trusting to the instinct of the horse, and the wind spun around his head and sliced at his cheeks until his face was so numb, he could feel no more pain.

  He raised his head as his horse came to a halt. Rearing out of the gloom, thrusting upwards into the falling snow was the black finger of rock he had passed at least an hour earlier. He had been travelling in a circle.

  He lowered his head against a sudden blast of wind and when he looked down at the ground, he saw great slurred prints in the snow. He urged his weary mount forward so that he could follow them.

  The wind was howling like a banshee and he was completely covered with frozen snow, but he kept his head bowed and his eyes on the ground and after a while he saw a fur glove.

  The cold had chilled his brain and his mind worked at half its normal speed. He examined his hands. He was wearing gloves; therefore, to whom did this glove belong?

  A little farther on, he came across a Chinese military fur cap. He dismounted and picked it up and stared at it uncomprehendingly, and then a figure emerged from the whirling darkness and staggered into him.

  Chavasse dimly discerned a frozen white mask and when he looked down at the hand that rested on his shoulder, he saw that it was bare and frozen.

  He raised his glove and wiped snow from the face before him and gazed into the vacant, expressionless eyes of Colonel Li. Chavasse stood there for a long moment looking at him and then he pulled off his glove and reached into the right-hand pocket of his sheepskin coat for the automatic he had taken from Captain Tsen.

  He brought it out, his finger already tightening over the trigger, and held it against Li’s chest. Quite suddenly, he put it back in his pocket and pulled on his glove.

  Why don’t I kill you, you bastard? Why don’t I kill you? There was no answer—nothing that would have made any sense—and he dragged Colonel Li unresistingly towards the horse and tried to lift him up into the saddle.

  But it was no good. He didn’t have that kind of strength anymore. He leaned against the horse, one arm around his enemy’s shoulders, and there was a coldness on his face, a sense of limitless distance, and he felt his remaining strength ebbing.

  But something white-hot still burned deep inside him, some essence of courage that refused to allow him to give in. He took a deep breath and made a final and supreme effort, which ended in Li hanging head-foremost across the horse. As Chavasse pulled himself up into the high wooden saddle and urged the beast forward, Osman Sherif came riding out of the storm to meet him.

  18

  The hut was low-roofed and built of great blocks of rough stone. Outside, the wind howled through the pass all the way from Mongolia, piling snow against the walls in great drifts.

  It was more like a stable than anything else, with the horses occupying at least half of the available space, and Chavasse sat in a daze drinking hot tea from a bowl while steam rose from his sheepskin coat.

  On the other side of the fire Katya, utterly exhausted, slept beside the two children, and their mother waited patiently for more water to boil in an iron pot.

  In the corner farthest from the door, a small butter lamp flickered in a niche, and in its feeble light, Hoffner and Osman Sherif crouched over Colonel Li. He groaned several times and Hoffner spoke soothingly to him; once he reared up convulsively and the Kazakh had to force him down again.

  After a while the old man got to his feet and returned to the fire, instructing Osman Sherif to cover the Chinese with a sheepskin.

  “How is he?” Chavasse said.

  Hoffner sighed. “I’ve had to amputate three fingers on his left hand. A drastic step, but better than gangrene. It’s a good thing Osman Sherif found you when he did.”

  The wind roared through the great tunnel of the pass and Chavasse shuddered. “We wouldn’t have lasted long outside on a night like this. He’s quite a man. It took a lot of guts to come looking for me in that blizzard. I’d already circled back on my own tracks when I found Colonel Li.”

  Hoffner filled his pipe slowly and frowned. “I used to think I understood him rather well, but now I’m not so sure. I wonder what drove him on to follow us on foot in such appalling weather.”

  “God knows. The workings of the Communist mind are too complicated for my understanding.”

  Osman Sherif squatted beside them and grinned as his wife handed him a bowl of tea. “You make things too complicated; that is the trouble with you Westerners. Out here, our values are more basic. The hunter never stops following his quarry until he has made the kill or is himself dead.”

  Hoffner shook his head and said softly, “No, there’s more to it than that in this case. It needed something stronger to drive a man on in the state Colonel Li was in.”

  “It’s perfectly simple,” Chavasse told him. “He was after the briefcase.”

  “But how could he have been? Captain Tsen didn’t get a chance to report back to him.” Hoffner shook his head and said gently, “I think it was you he wanted, Paul.”

  “He was after all of us,” Chavasse said. “That’s obvious.”

  Hoffner shook his head again. “I meant something more than that, but it doesn’t matter now.” He leaned back, his head on his briefcase, and pulled a sheepskin coat over his body. “I think I’ll get a little sleep.”

  Chavasse stretched out beside him and stared into the fire and tried to make some sense out of it all, but there was no answer. Or none that he could think of. After a while, he drifted into sleep.

  He awakened and lay for several moments staring up at the low roof, trying to decide where he was. So many places, he thought. So very many places, and where am I now? As realization came, he tried to sit up.

  His hands were swollen and chapped and his face hurt. He touched his cheeks and winced as his fingers probed great splits in the flesh.

  Everyone seemed to be asleep and he leaned forward to stir the embers into life. As the flames leapt up he saw that Katya was crouching beside Colonel Li.

  She looked pale and ill as she picked her way between the sleeping bodies and sat down beside him, holding her hands out to the blaze.

  “How are you feeling?” she said.

  “I’ll survive. How’s our friend?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and heard him groaning. I thought I’d better take a look. What’s wrong with his hand?”

  “Frostbite,” Chavasse said. “Doctor Hoffner had to amputate three fingers.”

  Her breath hissed sharply between her teeth and he put an arm around her shoulders. “I know this has all seemed like some terrible nightmare, but it won’t last much longer. As soon as the weather clears, we can move across the border.”

  For a little while there was silence and then she said, “Paul, why do you think he continued to follow us alone and on foot in such awful weather?”

  “Whatever it was, it must
have been eating him up inside,” Chavasse said. “Hoffner thinks it was me he was really after, not the rest of you.”

  She turned, a slight frown on her face. “What did he mean by that?”

  He shrugged. “In Colonel Li you have a man who lies by faith as much as any priest, but faith in the political creed on which he has based his life.”

  “But what has all this to do with you?”

  “I can only guess. I think that for some strange personal reason, it was of supreme importance to him that I not only confess my crimes against the People’s Republic, but that I also become a sincere convert to Communism through his agency.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because I believe he likes me, God help him.” Chavasse sighed. “I think that in another time and place we could have been friends.”

  There was a long silence before Katya said softly, “And what happens now?”

  Chavasse shook his head. “I don’t really know. I’ve shaken his faith in his belief, because I refused to accept it, even under coercion. He can’t continue in that state of mind. Now he has no choice. If he fails to destroy me, he destroys himself.”

  “Strange,” she said with a frown. “You speak of him with words that suggest compassion, and yet there is no kindness in your voice.”

  “Pity’s the last thing I feel for him. There’s too much blood on his hands for that.”

  “What will you do with him when you leave?”

  “Give him one of the horses and a little food. He can make it from here to Rudok easily if he wants to. I’m not going to kill him if that’s what you mean. There’s no longer any need.”

  “Because you will have destroyed him anyway?”

  He nodded. “Something like that.”

  She gazed into the fire in silence for a while. “And what about me, Paul? What will happen when we cross over into Kashmir?”

  He smiled and gently kissed her on the cheek. “I’m sure we’ll find a use for you.”