by James Becker
‘Suppose somebody else comes along here?’ Cross asked.
Masters just stared at him. ‘Out here?’ he snapped. ‘Get real. The worst that could happen to the weapons is that a goat could come along and crap on them. And gimme that sat-phone.’
Five minutes later they’d locked their vehicles and were heading towards the gully where Bronson and Angela had parked their vehicle.
On the side of the Saser mountain, the grey Land Rover was again mobile, following the same route Bronson had taken. Their plan was to collect the weapons Masters had left for them, drive past the gully, and stop half a mile or so away. They would then position themselves in the hills to the west, too far away to intervene in what was going to happen in the valley, but they’d make sure nobody could get out in that direction.
Caught between two groups of armed men, Bronson and Angela were walking into a trap.
58
‘You need to get ready,’ Tembla instructed as he walked into the briefing room. He was wearing a set of flying overalls, a survival belt including a holstered pistol around his waist. ‘Bronson and Lewis are proceeding on foot up into the valley.’
Killian stepped across to the table and looked down at the map.
‘They’re here, near these ruins,’ Tembla said, ‘not far off this road that runs east from Arann. It looks as if they’re heading towards the centre of the valley.’
Outside the building, Killian could hear the sound of a jet engine spooling up, and there was a faint whiff of burnt kerosene in the air.
‘When do we leave?’ he said.
‘Not yet. The moment we fly into the valley, everyone will know we are there. Until we’re sure they’ve found something, it’s better if we watch what happens through the camera on the Searcher. But I’ve ordered the helicopters to be manned and their engines started, so we can take off at any moment.’
Killian nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Can I see the images?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Follow me.’
A couple of minutes later, Killian was sitting in an adjacent room staring at a small video screen. On it was an image that moved slightly as the Searcher manoeuvred in the sky, though the area displayed remained reasonably stable.
‘This is the jeep,’ Tembla said, pointing to an oblong shape in the bottom right of the screen, more or less in the middle of which was a small circle of colour — the mark Tembla’s man had painted on the roof of the vehicle. ‘Bronson and Lewis are here, standing beside these ruins. But I’m afraid that if they think what they’re looking for is inside that building, they’re going to be disappointed.’
Bronson stepped around the corner and past the overhanging rock, turned to his right and then stopped.
‘What the hell is this place?’
The structure in front of them was very obviously ancient, but at the same time had a strangely modern look, with straight grey-brown stone walls unadorned with decoration. It rose from a level area of ground perhaps fifty yards square, and had two storeys topped by a flat roof, most of which appeared to have fallen down inside the building. All the windows and the two doorways they could see were simply openings in the walls, nothing more. They could see into the building through one of the doorways, where rubble and unidentified rubbish lay scattered across the stone floor.
‘I know what it looks like,’ Angela said, pulling out her map.
‘A deserted monastery?’ Bronson suggested. ‘A small one?’
‘Spot on. Yes, it is — or rather it was — a monastery. In fact, it’s even marked on this map.’
She folded the map so that Bronson could see where she was pointing.
‘Just there. That symbol and the note right beside it.’
Bronson read the words aloud. ‘There’s a sort of castle symbol with the words “Namdis Gompa” beside it,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit surprised it’s deserted. You’d have thought some wandering goatherd might have appropriated a place like this for his own use.’
‘The locals are very superstitious. This was once a monastery, a holy place, and they’d respect that. They’d never dream of squatting here.’
‘Could this be it, do you think?’ Bronson said, looking up at the old building. ‘The text said something about man-made darkness, which could mean there’s a hidden room inside.’
‘I wish it was that easy, Chris,’ Angela said. ‘But we haven’t passed through that cleft in the rock up there, the one the text described as the “pillars”.’
‘Maybe the writer was referring to the rocks on either side of the gully, down by the road.’
‘But the dates don’t work. I don’t know exactly when this monastery was built, but most of them seem to have been constructed anything from three to five hundred years ago. Even if we’re generous with the dating, and assume this was built half a millennium ago, what we’re searching for was hidden here fifteen hundred years earlier than that. There’s no point in even looking in here.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said, staring back up the slope, ‘onwards and upwards.’
The gully that Bronson and Angela were exploring began as little more than a break in the rock wall. Just to the north of this was an area of sloping ground, at one side of which, and behind a rocky outcropping, the monastery of Namdis Gompa had been built. Beyond that was the cleft in the rocks which Angela had spotted. On the north and north-east side of the valley was a steeper and wider area, dotted with small plateaus where stunted bushes and other scrubby vegetation had gained a precarious foothold.
All this was obvious to Nick Masters as he lay on his belly near the crest of one of the hills that bordered it. He was looking through a pair of binoculars at the scene below him, while about fifty yards back the rest of the men who’d accompanied him sat or lay on the ground, weapons cradled in their hands, bored and waiting for his orders. The exception was Donovan, who was pacing up and down, clearly excited — and irritated.
Masters was careful to keep in the shadow of a rock, because the last thing he wanted was a ray of the afternoon sun to reflect off the glass of his binoculars and alert Bronson to his presence. He kept as low and as motionless as he could, just the way he’d been trained.
He’d already identified the position of their jeep, and now he focused on the two targets themselves. Judging by their gestures, they appeared to be talking about the ruined building in front of them, and for a fleeting moment Masters wondered if this could be the end of the operation, if this old ruin was the resting place of the relic Donovan was so desperate to recover. But then he saw the woman shake her head firmly and point further up the hill. A few moments later they’d both turned and started walking up the slope.
‘I didn’t expect this,’ Bronson muttered as they passed through the cleft in the rocks. In front lay an expanse of rocks and tufty grass. ‘It could take us days to search this area properly. Is there any other information that could help narrow down the position?’
Angela shook her head helplessly, then pulled out her notebook and read the lines of the text again. ‘It says “between the pillars and beyond their shadows / into the silence and the darkness formed of man”. We’ve passed between the pillars.’ She pointed at the jagged-edged gap in the rocks a few yards behind them. ‘The next phrase means either that they walked north, so their shadows were in front of them, or maybe that they had to go some distance beyond the shadows cast by the rocks that form those pillars. Either meaning would work, I suppose.’
‘Yeah,’ Bronson agreed, ‘but neither really helps us. It’s needle-in-a-haystack time.’
‘Don’t be so negative, Chris.’
‘I’m being realistic.’ He waved his arm at the widening valley in front of them. ‘This must cover two or three square miles, and over the last two millennia hundreds, maybe thousands, of people must have walked all over it. If there was still anything here to find, surely somebody else would have found it by now?’
Angela nodded. ‘But nobody has. When this relic was hidden, the people in
volved obviously concealed it really well.’
‘OK.’ Bronson straightened up. ‘Let’s look at this logically. We’re standing on a sloping rocky hillside. The only two possibilities, as far as I can see, are that the treasure is either in some kind of building or hidden inside a cave.’ He turned to Angela. ‘Let’s split up. That way we can cover more ground.’
* * *
Masters watched the two people in the valley below him separate and start to move in different directions. He watched them for a few moments longer, then eased back away from the cliff edge and walked across to where his men were waiting.
‘They’re moving further up the valley, so you can move parallel to them.’ He pointed at an outcropping of rocks about a quarter of a mile north-east of where they were standing. ‘Go there, quietly, and make sure you keep out of sight. Keep the sat-phone switched on, but on silent, and wait till I give the word. You stay with me, JJ.’
As his men picked up their weapons and moved off, Masters crawled back to his vantage point and resumed his scrutiny of the valley below.
‘Chris!’ Angela called out, waving her arm. ‘Come here.’
With the constant howling of the wind, Bronson was too far away to hear her distant yell, but he saw her wave and ran across the valley floor towards her.
‘Remember the text?’ she asked, as he stopped beside her.
‘Most of it, yes,’ he replied.
‘Notice anything?’
Bronson glanced around. ‘No.’
‘Actually, it’s not something I saw — it’s something I heard. Listen.’
For a few seconds Bronson listened intently. Then he shook his head.
‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘That’s what I mean,’ Angela said. ‘In this area there’s no wind noise, and I don’t know why. I guess it must be something to do with the shape of the valley.’
Bronson realized she was right. He’d got so used to the constant moaning of the wind that his subconscious mind had tuned it out. But here his brain wasn’t having to do any filtering — they were standing there in virtual silence.
‘The text says, “between the pillars and beyond their shadows / into the silence.” We’ve come through the pillars and headed north, walking beyond their shadows, and I think we’ve just stepped “into the silence”.’
Bronson stepped towards her and hugged her. ‘Did I ever tell you how amazing you are?’ he said.
Angela grinned. ‘We’re not there yet,’ she said, pushing him back. ‘And this “silent” area is pretty large. It could cover quite a big part of this side of the valley.’ She pointed towards the valley wall to the west. ‘It’s most likely that cliff which diverts the wind. It’s probably just blowing right over our heads.’
‘But we must be close,’ Bronson said. ‘Come on — let’s keep searching.’
They moved on, further up the valley floor, checking all around them as they went, looking for anything that could possibly match the last half of the penultimate line of the text that had brought them halfway around the world — “the darkness formed of man” — anything, in short, fabricated by human beings rather than a product of nature.
Bronson saw it first. In a small plateau just off to their left he caught a glimpse of a small square structure. He stopped dead.
59
‘That can’t be it,’ Angela said firmly. To their left was a small, cubical building. The stones that made up its structure were the same texture and colour as the surrounding rocks, which was why neither of them had noticed it before. But now they could see it, they also saw the single oblong opening in its front wall — a doorway without a door.
‘What?’
‘I need to explain something about Lamaist monasteries,’ she said, sitting down in front of it. ‘Most of them, and certainly all the larger ones, actually consist of two buildings or groups of buildings, in two different places. There’s the main structure, like Diskit Gompa that we saw down below, where the two rivers meet, and a second, much smaller building. This is usually quite some distance — maybe three or four miles — from the monastery proper, and usually at a higher altitude. It’s like a simple cell, with almost no facilities, and it just provides shelter and a place to sleep.
‘Before a monk can become a lama, he is required to spend quite a long period of time in a building like this. He’s supposed to meditate in the solitude, completely undisturbed. The monastery provides him with basic food and drink, which is delivered once a day, so that the monk doesn’t have to disturb his meditations by preparing meals. It’s a bit like the forty days and nights of solitude Christ is supposed to have spent in the desert in Judea after being baptized. And I’m pretty certain that what we’re looking at here is the separate house of meditation that belonged to the Namdis Gompa monastery.’
‘Oh, shit,’ Bronson muttered. ‘But it fits the text so well. It’s in this weird area of silence, and it’s clearly man-made, not to mention dark inside.’
‘I agree. It was probably built here precisely because this particular spot is inside this sort of cone of silence, so the constant noise of the wind also wouldn’t disturb the meditation of the monks. But you’ve got exactly the same problem with the dates, Chris — they just don’t work. We can take a look inside it, by all means, but it was definitely constructed far too late to be what we’re looking for.’
They walked across to the small building and peered into it, but it was empty, just four bare stone walls. There was a tiny cubicle in one corner that had possibly functioned as an earth closet, and a flat stone bench that was presumably intended to be a bed. But apart from that, there was nothing else.
‘So what now?’ Bronson asked, sitting down beside Angela on the bench.
Angela sighed. ‘I still don’t think we should be looking for a building, because it just wouldn’t be still standing now, not after all this time. I was hoping we’d find a cave, something like that.’
Bronson stiffened. ‘I passed one a few minutes ago,’ he said.
‘Where? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You’d just waved me over,’ Bronson said mildly, getting up and pulling her to her feet, ‘and I thought you’d found something right here.’ He pointed out to the east, back the way he’d come. ‘Let’s go and see what I found, shall we?’
Two minutes later Bronson led the way in through what actually appeared to be little more than a crack in the rock. But inside, the cave widened out considerably.
‘It’s a lot bigger than it looks,’ Angela said, staring around her in the light from Bronson’s torch.
‘But no sign of anything that you could interpret as “the darkness formed of man”,’ Bronson pointed out, shining his torch around the interior of the empty space.
Facing them was a flat rock wall, boulders and lumps of wood resting against it in a tumbled heap. To the right of the rock wall a short tunnel the height of the cave opened up, but terminated in another solid wall of stone after perhaps ten or twelve feet. To the left, there was an even shorter tunnel, just three or four feet deep.
‘No,’ Angela said sadly. ‘To me, this just looks like a cave.’
She turned to leave, but Bronson reached out and grabbed her arm to stop her.
‘Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about this place?’
Angela shook her head. ‘No. It’s just a cave, a hole in the rock.’
‘But we know that somebody’s been in here.’
‘How can you tell?’
Bronson pointed at the wall opposite. ‘What do you see over there?’ he asked.
‘Rocks and bits of wood. Why?’
‘Exactly. The only way wood can get into a cave is if some person or animal carries it in. Which means that somebody else has been in here too. The question is, when were they here? And what could they have been doing?’
Bronson strode over to the wall and looked down at the debris. ‘Some of these look to me like worked timbers,’ he said.
>
He knelt down and started rooting about. Then he picked up a lump of wood, but it crumbled away almost to nothing in his hands.
‘These bits of timber must have been in here a long time,’ he said slowly, shaking the dust and slivers of wood off his hands. He bent forward and examined the remaining lumps of timber more closely. ‘I think this could be a part of a wheel,’ he muttered. ‘It looks like the rim of a solid wooden wheel. The edge of it is definitely rounded.’ He stepped back and looked down again. ‘You know, this could possibly be the remains of a cart, something like that.’
‘Makes sense,’ Angela said dejectedly. ‘When the monks from the Namdis Gompa monastery built that house of meditation we’ve just been in, they’d have had to haul worked stone up here to do it, and they would have needed some sort of cart. When they’d finished it, they probably just stored it here rather than dragging it back down the mountain again.
‘They could have worked the stone up here,’ Bronson suggested. ‘It would have been easier than shaping it down in the valley and then hauling it all the way up here from the monastery.’
‘Maybe. .’ Angela said, clearly still unconvinced.
Bronson took another look at the lumps of wood lying on the floor, then turned back towards the entrance. Then he stopped suddenly.
‘Just come over here, will you?’ he said quietly.
Angela stepped across to where he was standing. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
Bronson didn’t reply, just pointed upwards.
‘What?’ Angela asked again.
‘There, in the roof. See those two parallel lines? There’s no way those are natural. Somebody cut those out of the stone with a hammer and chisel.’
On the right-hand side of the rock wall, the cave extended a short distance back into the mountainside, into a short, blind-ended tunnel. What Bronson was pointing at were two straight lines that extended from the side of the vertical rock wall over to their right, a distance of about five or six feet.
