by James Becker
‘And the second half of the line?’ Bronson asked.
‘That’s the tricky bit. The phrase “beyond their shadows” could refer to the pillars, perhaps, if they were free-standing structures. So it might mean that the entrance to the cave is close to the pillars, just beyond the furthest point that the sun casts their shadows. But I suppose it’s also possible that “their shadows” refers to Isaac and his company, in which case it might simply mean that they kept on going north, heading for a point “beyond their shadows”. Or it could be a description of something completely different — something that’s not so far occurred to me.’ Angela sighed in frustration.
‘Look, we’re at the top,’ Bronson said, pointing through the windscreen.
They’d been climbing steadily ever since they’d left Leh, the road steep and rough, but it now looked as if they’d finally reached the crest of the Khardung La pass. As he spoke, he saw a sign at the side of the road bearing characters he didn’t recognize, but underneath were the English words ‘Khardung La’ and below that the height — 5,385 metres, or almost exactly 17,500 feet. The word La means ‘pass’.
‘The last time I was as high as this I was in an aircraft,’ Bronson said in amazement.
The view was, indeed, spectacular. Uninterrupted vistas opened up in all directions from their vantage point, and Bronson had the feeling of being literally on top of the world, because almost everything they could see around them was actually below them. In that instant he had a sudden insight into the reasons why mountaineers found climbing so exhilarating.
‘I guess it’s downhill all the way from now on — at least geographically,’ Angela said, as Bronson slipped the jeep into second gear for the long descent down the east side of the pass to the river Shyok that ran along the bottom of the valley. If he used the brakes to keep their speed down, they’d be useless — the fluid would boil and the pads burn out — long before they reached the end of the slope.
The road up to Khardung La had been steep and impressive, but as Bronson looked ahead he realized that the descent was going to be even more spectacular. He could see a virtual knitting-pattern of steep drops, hairpin bends and only slightly wider turns that marked the route down to the point where the rushing Shyok and Nubra rivers met at the bottom of the valley.
They’d covered about another quarter of a mile down the hill before a scruffy grey Land Rover crested the rise behind them and started the same long descent to the river valley below.
53
On the outskirts of Hushe, in Eastern Baltistan, Nick Masters jumped out of the army helicopter and started supervising the unloading of his men and their equipment.
The weapons were wrapped in sacking to avoid them getting damaged while in transit, although damaging a Kalashnikov with anything smaller than a sledgehammer was quite a difficult thing to do, and the ammunition and pistols were packed in green-painted steel boxes. Masters had even found a Barrett sniper rifle.
At one side of the landing area stood two well-used four-by-fours on Indian plates, and beside them, watching their arrival, was Rodini.
‘Come to check on your investment?’ Masters asked, walking over to him.
‘Just making sure everything is correct,’ Rodini replied, looking at the men who’d accompanied Masters. ‘Let me show you these vehicles.’
He led the way across to the Land Cruisers and swung open the rear door of one of them. The door was heavy, because a spare wheel was bolted to it.
‘This is the clever bit,’ he said. ‘The bumper’s been lowered by about three inches, which is hardly noticeable on a vehicle of this size, and a shallow tray’s been made to slide into the body of the jeep just above it. This is how you release it.’
He lifted up what looked like a pair of worn bolt-heads at the rear of the loading area, but when he’d extracted them from the floor, Masters could see that there was no thread on them — they were both completely smooth, like simple locking pins, which in fact is what they were.
Then Rodini took out a knife, slid the point into a tiny gap at the very edge of the floor pan and levered. A tray slid an inch or two out from the floor pan, and he reached down and pulled it out fully. It was the width of the rear bumper, and had been made to fit along the normal panel joint lines, so that it was effectively invisible. The tray wasn’t big. It was perhaps five or six inches deep and about three feet long, but almost five feet wide.
‘Neat,’ Masters said. ‘You could pack a lot of cocaine inside this.’
Rodini nodded. ‘And that’s exactly what they did. Unfortunately for the smugglers, they didn’t make the right pay-offs to the right people, and that’s why you’re now the proud owner of these two vehicles. Your weapons and ammunition will easily fit in there.’
‘Definitely,’ Masters replied, looking behind him where his men had assembled in a loose bunch, weapons and ammunition boxes and other gear scattered around them. ‘John,’ Masters called. ‘Bring a couple of the AKs over here, will you? And some of that sacking.’
A bulky, bear-like man, most of his face hidden behind a thick black beard, picked up two of the Kalashnikovs and ambled over to the back of the Land Cruiser.
Masters nodded his thanks to Rodini, spread the sacking on the bottom of the tray and laid the two Kalashnikovs on it. Even a casual glance showed that there was room for at least half a dozen of the weapons in the tray, as long as their magazines were detached.
‘That’s good,’ he said. Then, raising his voice slightly, ‘OK, you guys. Take the mags off the AKs and put them in these two trays. The Barrett, too. Pack the ammo around them.’
‘What about the shorts?’ the heavy-set man asked. ‘You want them in there as well?’
Masters shook his head. ‘No — we’ll keep the pistols on us, just in case we need some additional persuasion at some checkpoint.’
Rodini shook his head. ‘I would strongly suggest that you don’t get into a fire-fight with the Indian Army patrols across the border. I can almost guarantee that you’ll lose.’
‘Noted,’ Masters said. ‘But I don’t want all our weapons locked away and inaccessible, just in case we do run into any trouble.’ He watched as his men stowed away the weapons and ammunition, and closed the two secret trays in the backs of the Land Cruisers.
‘Now,’ Rodini said, ‘crossing the border. You all have your passports and Inner Line permits?’
Masters nodded. He’d personally checked the documents when Rodini had handed them back after the forgers had done their work, and he also had a set ready for JJ Donovan when he finally arrived.
‘We’re here.’ Rodini opened up a map, spread it out on the bonnet of the Land Cruiser, and pointed at a spot about ten or twelve miles from the border between Pakistani and Indian territory. ‘On the tracks that pass for roads in this area, the border’s about a half-hour drive down to the south-east. What I propose to do is quite simple. I intend to escort all of you down there under guard and then hand you over to the Indian troops.’
54
‘We’re still pretty high, aren’t we?’ Bronson asked.
They’d descended all the way to the bottom of the Khardung La pass, and crossed the bridge over the Shyok, the river that ran along the bottom of the valley. At the T-junction on the other side of the fast-flowing waters, they turned left and again began descending, but this time more gently.
‘Yes,’ Angela replied. ‘This whole area’s at an elevation of about ten thousand feet.’ She glanced at her map. ‘Pretty soon we’ll come to another junction, and one fork of the road will go south, back across to the other side of the Shyok. We need to stay on this side, the east side, of the river, and we’ll keep on heading more or less northwest until we reach the town of Panamik.’
In a few minutes they reached the junction.
‘Just pull over for a second, could you?’ Angela asked.
‘What is it? Something wrong?’
‘No, nothing,’ Angela said. ‘Just hop out and follow me.’
She climbed down from the passenger seat of the Nissan and waited in front of the vehicle as two other four-by-fours — a Land Rover and a Toyota — drove past them heading north-west, trailing clouds of dust behind them. She crossed to the other side of the road, Bronson following, and pointed over to the south-west, towards the river.
‘Over there,’ she said, indicating a wide stretch of the river, ‘is where the river Nubra — which is also known as the Siachen, the same name as the glacier that feeds it — and the river Shyok meet.’
Bronson looked across the rocky ground towards the bottom of the valley. Even from the distance he was looking, he could see the tumbling and disturbed water where the two rivers converged.
‘And you think that’s “the meeting point where waters tumble”?’
Angela nodded.
‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Bronson said. ‘You know, I don’t suppose the landscape here looks a hell of a lot different now to how it did two thousand years ago.’
They got back into the jeep. ‘If we’re right, the road we’re following now would have been roughly the same route Isaac and his companions walked,’ Angela said, also struck by the enormity of it all. ‘It would have taken them at least a whole day to reach the major fork in the road, but we should be there in about an hour. And then we start looking.’
As Bronson drove on, he passed several four-by-four vehicles parked on the rough ground that bordered the road. Most of them were surrounded by tourists dressed in warm clothing — Puffa jackets, parkas and brightly coloured anoraks were much in evidence — looking at maps or taking pictures of the scenery.
But one, a dusty grey Land Rover, stood out slightly, simply because there were only two people in it — both men — and because they were still inside it, sitting with the engine running, parked a few yards off the metalled road. Bronson knew he’d never seen either man before, but he took a mental note of the registration number as he drove the Nissan past the vehicle — just in case.
‘If that isn’t a bad joke,’ Masters said, ‘you’d better explain exactly what you mean.’
Rodini smiled at him. ‘Think it through. You’re driving Indian-registered four-by-fours. You all have India visas in your passports — forged India visas, I know, but they’re pretty good quality — and you’re carrying Inner Line permits plus about a dozen photocopies each. The simplest way to get you into India is to claim that you were already in it, but somehow you got lost and crossed into Pakistani territory.
‘When we get to the border I’ll berate the Indians for allowing a bunch of Americans to cross into Pakistan so easily. I will also tell them that we’ve interrogated you, so if one or two of you can rough each other up a bit — fake some bruises and maybe a cut or two — that would add realism. My guess is that they’ll be so embarrassed that they’ll just check your papers, shout at you, and then let you go. And if they decide not to, for some reason, then I can claim that I’ve just received instructions to re-arrest you all for further questioning.’
Masters nodded slowly. There was a kind of simple genius about Rodini’s suggestion that he had to applaud. He’d known all along that trying to sneak across the border was going to be difficult and dangerous, but simply driving to a checkpoint and claiming to have crossed into Pakistan in error eliminated that problem. And Rodini was quite correct — they had all the papers and documentation they needed to be in the Nubra Valley area so, as long as Rodini’s forgers had done their work, the Indians should have no reason to detain them.
‘You have good relations with the Indian troops?’ he asked.
‘Good enough,’ Rodini replied. ‘There are occasional skirmishes, but most of the time nothing happens in the border area, so we do talk to each other, that kind of thing. Before we actually attempt to cross the border I’ll call one of the senior Indian Army officers and explain that we’ve arrested a group of trespassers, just to gauge his reaction.’
‘Won’t he want to report it, tell his superiors what’s going on?’
‘I doubt it. If he admits that two jeep-loads of American tourists managed to sneak across the border in his sector, and on his watch, only to be captured and returned by Pakistani troops, it’s going to look as if he and his men have been negligent. The last thing he’ll want to do is tell anyone about it.’
Rodini smiled at Masters. ‘Time to get going,’ he said. ‘Next stop, the Indian border.’
55
‘You know, I can see why people come here,’ Bronson said, gazing through the windscreen at the expanse of the Nubra Valley. ‘At this altitude, in this kind of terrain, you just don’t expect to see anything like this.’
The broad floodplain stretched out in front of them, flat and comparatively level, but despite the altitude — the valley was about 10,000 feet above sea level — much of it was a carpet of vegetation, vivid green patches that contrasted sharply with the grey-brown of the mountain slopes that bordered it on both sides. Pinpricks of colour, yellows and pinks and reds, marked the positions of wild roses, and darker grey-green patches delineated clumps of lavender, waiting for the heat of August to come before they started to flower.
And it wasn’t just the different colours. There was a huge contrast between the plain itself and the mountains, which seemed to rise almost vertically from the edge of the level ground. No foothills, no gentle slopes rising up to meet the mountains. In some ways it reminded Bronson of the Norwegian fjords, where the steep sides of the peaks plunge straight down into the icy waters.
‘This valley has the best climate in the whole of Ladakh,’ Angela said, ‘and, as you can see, it’s well cultivated and very fertile. As I told you before, in the ancient language of this area, it was known as Ldumra, meaning the “Valley of Flowers”. There’s even a theory that this area was the source of the story of the original Garden of Eden.’
‘Well, you can see why,’ Bronson said. ‘For somebody flogging their way along the paths that lead here, seeing nothing but rocks and mountains, and then suddenly being confronted by this sight. I mean, why wouldn’t they think they’d found a kind of paradise?’
‘But actually, this valley has been quite well-travelled over the centuries. It’s only in modern times that it’s been turned into a kind of dead end because of the disputes between India and Pakistan, and of course with China. We’re not that far from the Chinese border right now. But originally, this was a part of the so-called Silk Route or Silk Road, that ran from the capital of the old Chinese Empire — Chang’an, which is now called Xi-an — to several different locations around the Mediterranean, like Alexandria and Istanbul, and elsewhere.’
A large brown animal moved among a clump of bushes off to one side of the road they were following.
‘What was that?’ Bronson asked, catching just a fleeting glimpse of it before switching his attention back to the road.
‘It’s a Bactrian Camel. That’s the kind with two humps,’ Angela replied, swivelling round in her seat to look at it more closely.
‘A camel? I wouldn’t have thought you’d find camels at this altitude.’
‘They’re hardy beasts, well equipped to endure harsh conditions — whether it’s very hot or very cold. In fact, about the only animals you’re likely to find up here are camels and goats.’
On the opposite side of the river, above a reasonably large settlement surrounded by apricot plantations, a strangely modern-looking building was set into the hillside. It was square and mainly white in colour, but with some parts of it painted red, brown and yellow, and with tall and thin flags fluttering from its roof. It looked almost like a block of flats.
‘What’s that over there?’ Bronson asked.
Angela looked down at her notes and the map. ‘The last place we drove through was called Khalsar, but that was just a small hamlet, so that must be Diskit village. It’s one of the bigger settlements in this region. It’s got a few hotels and guest houses, and even a handful of shops.’
‘I meant that buildi
ng on the side of the hill.’ Bronson took one hand off the wheel and pointed to his left.
Angela checked the map again. ‘Oh, that’s Diskit Gompa. It’s the oldest and biggest monastery in the whole of the Nubra Valley. It’s about three hundred and fifty years old.’
‘So the word gompa means “monastery”?’
‘Yes,’ Angela said. ‘I think most of the villages here have one, though some have fallen out of use as the population’s moved around in the area. Many of them seem to have the same kind of construction — the square corners, flat roofs and square or tall thin windows are typical, and they can be quite colourful. And the monks that live in them are pretty colourful as well — they usually wear dark red robes and sometimes golden headdresses.’
‘What about the flags?’
‘They have prayers written on them. I think the wind whipping past the flags is supposed to send the message in the prayer straight to Buddha.’
They drove through Sumur and carried on, heading north and occasionally catching sight of the river on their left-hand side.
‘Right,’ Angela said, as they saw a scattering of buildings on either side of the road ahead of them. ‘That should be Panamik up ahead. We need to check out the condition of the road at the north end of the village.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Roadblocks,’ Angela said simply. ‘Non-locals aren’t allowed to go any further north than Panamik, and the place we need to get to is quite a way beyond it, so we’ll have to either try to talk our way through or drive back and then go cross-country to get around the patrols.’
‘And if we’re stopped out in the bundu?’ Bronson asked.
‘We’re stupid foreigners. We’ll say we got lost and didn’t realize where we were.’
