Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  ‘From who?’ Takshak said, snatching it off him with a frown.

  Hashim came close, so that he could look at it. ‘What’s it say?’

  It was a page torn from a notebook. Takshak held the lantern up to see better. Just four words were handwritten in the centre of the page, in bold capital letters marked with a felt-tip pen. They said:

  COMING TO GET YOU

  Takshak laughed nervously. ‘What the fuck does that mean?’

  He looked at Hashim. Hashim looked at him. They both looked at Sardar. Then all three of them turned to look out of the cave entrance.

  Then the night sky outside suddenly lit up like daylight as a violent, stunningly loud explosion shook the ground under their feet and ripped the trucks apart.

  Chapter 57

  Earlier that day Ben could have offered some professional advice to Takshak. Namely, don’t give away your shooting position by letting the sun glint off your nice, shiny weapon.

  Part of the advanced tactical riflemanship course at Le Val was showing students the best ways to camouflage their equipment against the natural propensity for smooth, reflective metal surfaces to catch the light, to which end the sniper rifles in Ben and Jeff’s armoury had all been treated to a military desert camo matt paint finish, stippled and roughened to make them blend chameleon-like into a multi-terrain background. Failure to take precautions like that could all too easily lead an otherwise perfectly chosen vantage point to be as obvious to the enemy as if you planted a giant day-glo flag saying ‘Here I am!’ in letters five feet high while letting off a crateful of magnesium flares.

  And it was precisely that – the starry twinkle of sunlight on studiously polished, well-oiled blued steel – which had alerted Ben to the fact that he hadn’t been the only hidden observer watching the police helicopter land that morning.

  It had happened just after Captain Dada had finished having his trophy photo taken with the dead dacoits. Ben had been shaking his head in cynical amusement at the guy when the sparkly glitter had caught his eye and he’d canted his binoculars a few degrees sideways and upwards to trace its source. It was coming from high up on a hillside, more or less due west and a good six hundred yards beyond where the cops were going about their business.

  For a large, cumbersome weapon, a scoped bolt-action sniper rifle looks relatively small when pointing right at you, especially from eight hundred yards away. Ben’s compact binoculars offered only modest magnification even on maximum zoom but he made out the shape instantly. And behind it, the shape of a man in dark paramilitary clothing, hunkered down among the crags a hundred feet up the hillside, looking over the plateau that stretched between him and Ben’s own hiding place.

  Ben thought, Hm. And went on watching, now far more interested in the distant sniper than he was in the police.

  In the end, the rifleman had given up and left some time before the cops had, as though he’d got bored with observing. As he’d slipped down the hillside, thinking himself unnoticed, Ben had crept away from his own hiding place and begun skirting around the edge of the plateau, ducking from rock to rock, bush to bush, head down, leaving no trail, well out of view of the cops but never losing sight of his quarry. Right from first visual contact, Ben was certain this was the same man he’d last seen wearing a purple shirt. The leader of the gang. Takshak himself.

  The guy was quite good, all things considered. He moved with far more poise and circumspection than some common criminal, like the coarse-grained thugs Ben and Brooke had briefly encountered on the stairs at Haani’s place. Clearly a trained man, Ben thought. Almost certainly ex-military. Ben figured him for what was termed in army-speak a DM, or designated marksman. Highly skilled with the queen of all small arms, the rifle. But that level of weapons training focused mainly on the art and science of long-range shooting itself, without delving into the whole complex world of advanced fieldcraft and tactics that distinguished a mere marksman from a true sniper. The real deal was a totally different animal. A stealth operator who could reach out and put the finger of death on you from a mile away, any time, anywhere. They would strike out of thin air and then disappear like a ghost. Never seen. Never captured. Ready to return and crucify the next victim in their scope crosshairs just when it was least expected. One of the most dreaded pieces on the chessboard of war.

  Ben had been one of those men. Evidently, Takshak had not. And Takshak had just made a fatal mistake in letting himself be spotted.

  Ben never let him go after that. When Takshak had returned to his cave, glancing cautiously left and right as though to make sure nobody was watching, he’d had no idea his every movement was being monitored. Just as it was when he’d re-emerged from the cave a little while later to watch the police helicopter leaving.

  Ben could so easily have taken out the lookout that the gang had posted on the hillside. He’d have done it so quickly and quietly that the guy wouldn’t have known what was happening until he woke up in hell. But the sentry was bound to be in radio contact, and sooner or later he was bound to be recalled to base. If he went incommunicado or failed to return, it would only serve to alert the rest. In a situation like this, everything was about timing.

  Likewise, when Takshak himself had set out on foot to hunt for Ben, it would have been easy to ensure that he didn’t come back. He’d never know it, but as he’d been checking out the Maybach concealed in the bushes, Ben was standing just ten yards from him, as still and silent as empty air. The sole reason Takshak had survived his unwitting close encounter was because of what would have happened if his men suddenly found themselves without a commander. Panic, disorientation and chaos were all highly desirable effects to wreak on the enemy, but not when there was a precious hostage involved. It took only one nervous, overreactive trigger finger for things to turn out very badly for the prisoner.

  Instead, Ben wanted them to feel completely safe and comfortable. For the moment, until the time was right. And so, when the gang had piled into their vehicles and left the cave to begin their day’s work, he’d scouted along in their wake and watched from a bushy ledge high up in the rocks just eighty yards away. The three medium utility trucks looked like the kind of thing that military logistics corps would sell off to the civilian market after a hard service life. Their olive paint was scuffed and worn, and their open load spaces had skeletal metal framework where the canvas roofs would have been. Ben counted four men in the back of each truck, plus a driver. The convoy was moving in single file behind a battered open-top Jeep, at whose wheel Ben recognised the man he’d identified as Takshak, the leader.

  Sixteen men in all. A larger number than he’d anticipated. Then Ben spied a seventeenth. He was different from the others, not least in the manner in which he was travelling. He’d been bundled into the back of the Jeep and was grimly hanging onto its roll cage to keep from being too badly jostled about.

  Even from far away, Ben knew him instantly. It was his first glimpse of Amal. He looked as if he’d been knocked around quite a bit. He was barefoot and his shirt was torn and bloodied down the front. But he was alive.

  The relief flooded through Ben’s system like an intravenous triple shot of cask-strength scotch. Just hold on a little longer, Amal. I’m coming for you soon.

  Ben had been expecting to have to follow the vehicles on foot, which concerned him in case he lost them. He needn’t have worried, because they didn’t travel far. As he sat watching, they stopped in almost the very same spot where Kabir and his friends had been attacked, in the dry river valley just a few hundred feet from the abandoned helicopter. Everybody got out. It was the first time Ben had been able to get a good look at the enemy forces all massed together.

  Takshak was the only gang member armed with a pistol, in military officer fashion, while the rest of his crew carried rifles like the lower-rank infantrymen they were. Ben guessed they’d soon be exchanging their weaponry for the collection of pickaxes and shovels that lay in the backs of the trucks. He went on watching, hidden, immobi
le, physically relaxed but mentally on constant high alert for the slightest sign that he’d need to intervene.

  His own rifle lay ready to hand, for that purpose. The old SLR warhorse had been much respected for its medium-range combat accuracy back in the day, and would be more than adequate at eighty yards. He’d use it if he had to, though the last thing he needed right now was a pitched battle with sixteen armed criminals and an unprotected hostage in the middle.

  The first anxious moment had happened almost as soon as they arrived. Takshak walked around to the rear of his Jeep to speak to Amal. It didn’t look like a friendly conversation. Ben couldn’t make out the words Takshak was yelling in Amal’s face, but he cou ld guess. The reason Amal was still alive was because Takshak thought he needed his help to find Kabir’s treasure.

  Whatever Amal had said in reply, Takshak didn’t like it. When he’d grabbed his prisoner by the throat and flung him violently to the ground, Ben had thought, ‘Shit, here we go,’ and snatched up his rifle.

  But then Amal had done something that had surprised Ben even more than it seemed to surprise his captors. He got up again, a little wobbly but standing his ground, and pointed at the rocks near Kabir’s helicopter. Ben lowered his gun and picked up the binoculars again to resume his observation. He could see Amal was okay. And relatively safe for the moment, because he was staying in control by pointing out the spot to start digging, as though he knew exactly where the loot was buried. Clever, too, thinking on his feet like that, capitalising on the greed of his captors to buy him more time. Not to mention, he showed considerably more mental and physical toughness than Ben had ever given him credit for. Ben had to smile out of admiration.

  Maybe, just maybe, Brooke had married the right guy, after all.

  The crisis over, Ben had settled in for the long haul and gone on watching as the work party got organised and began to dig. From the way the group interacted, some of them seemed to know each other better than others, which suggested that several were new guys, hirelings brought on board for this particular job. It seemed unlikely that Takshak would be willing to divide up his loot so many ways. He wouldn’t be planning for them all to return to Delhi, that was for certain.

  By a process of elimination, Ben was able to identify the core members of the gang. The only other man apart from its leader not allocated a shovel or pickaxe was obviously Takshak’s second in command. He looked like a serious kind of character, not someone to tangle with casually. Possibly ex-military like his boss, Ben thought. The others didn’t have that look. Especially not the big guy, because no regular army quartermaster on earth would be able to provide boots or a uniform to fit a giant of his stature, still less a parachute strong enough to break his fall from an aircraft. When Brooke had described one of Amal’s kidnappers as being seven feet tall, Ben had thought she was letting her imagination get the better of her. But she’d been right on the money. The guy was a monster, so huge that Ben found himself wondering how many bullets it would take to bring him down, when the time came.

  Hours came and went. The men dug. Takshak and his Number Two went on doing little except smoking and chatting. Amal was lying still in the back of the Jeep. Now and then, Ben laid down the binocs and stretched his muscles. Nothing was happening.

  Not until the second dramatic event of the day’s dig. One of the hirelings had seemed to have an issue. Words had ensued. Then Takshak had calmly relieved the guy of his shovel, paused a beat and then chopped his skull open with it.

  Under normal circumstances Ben would have appreciated the sight of the enemy killing one another. It made his own task that bit easier. Something to be encouraged. But it didn’t comfort him to witness the fact that Amal was in the hands of an obvious psychopath. He could tell from the body language of the other crew members that several of them were having exactly the same thought, not for Amal’s sake but their own.

  In the next moment, Takshak had whipped out his sidearm and pointed it at Amal’s head. Ben’s rifle was instantly on target. Eighty yards. Finger on trigger. If Takshak hadn’t lowered the pistol when he had, Ben would have spattered his brains all over the rocks. He’d have had no choice, even though it would have ruined the plan taking shape in his head.

  Then the imminent danger had passed by, and Ben had known they wouldn’t kill Amal. Not until tomorrow, when the next fruitless dig caused Takshak to lose control altogether. He’d watched as the weary work party tossed their shovels and picks into the three trucks and climbed in with them. Takshak led the convoy back the way it had come, with Amal chained up once again in the back of his Jeep.

  From Ben’s hidden OP he had a view of the whole vista stretching between the dig site and the enemy’s base camp. The convoy threw up a plume of dust in its wake as it bounced and lurched back across the rocky basin and scrambled up the slope to the mouth of the cave. Takshak’s Jeep drove straight through the dark fissure and disappeared, while the trucks parked haphazardly outside and the men disembarked and dragged their tired feet in after him. They left their tools in the trucks but carried their weapons inside.

  Then, nothing. Stillness and silence returned to the landscape, just the low whistle of the wind rustling the dry vegetation. Ben had let some time pass, thinking through his plan and making a few preparations. One preparation in particular, which had come into his mind earlier as he’d lain there watching the men dig.

  When that was done, he’d left his OP and scouted closer to the enemy camp. The terrain undulated away from the cave entrance in a series of rocky dips and rises studded here and there with dense clumps of the same kind of thorn bushes as he’d hidden the car in. He’d found a good spot due east of the cave to set up a temporary camp of his own, made himself as comfortable on the hard ground as he was going to get, and waited. He was good at waiting.

  Evening had begun to fall. The sun inching lower in the west, turning from golden yellow to shimmering arterial red. Ben had narrowed his eyes against its last rays, and watched as it slipped into the band of darkening clouds on the far, far distant horizon, way beyond the mountains, over the border into Pakistan. The red orb flattened out like a squashed egg and then sank from sight, and the shadow drew over the empty land as though someone had closed a curtain, and the light faded away.

  Ben had gone on waiting. The night enveloped him and grew colder. He caught the whiff of campfire smoke drifting up out of the fissure that served as a chimney outlet from the cave. Working by feel alone, he carried out a final inspection of his weapons and the grenades he’d taken from the dead dacoits. Then checked the faint green glow of his watch dial. Thinking back through the plan, step by step, contemplating distances and speed and synchronisation and a whole host of complicated factors that had to be balanced if things were going to work out right.

  Events had been set in motion now. There was no going back. The clock was ticking. Timing would be everything, like always. Strike too early, strike too late, you fail. You lose. And the wrong people die.

  Another hour had passed. He had become just another shadow in the night, as rooted and immobile and patient as the hills and valleys. He was in his element here in this dark, savage place. He was ready. Waiting for the right moment.

  And then, at last, the right moment had come.

  Chapter 58

  Ben gathered up his bag and rifle, and slipped away from the cover of the bushes to stalk as close as he dared to the cave entrance. The ground sloped gently upwards to its foot. He pressed himself into the shadowy crevices of the rocks a few feet away, and watched, and listened. He could see the flicker of firelight and the glow of paraffin lanterns emanating from within. Heard the low mutter of voices.

  All fifteen remaining members of Takshak’s crew were right inside the cave. Trapped with no backdoor means of escape. But that was also the problem from Ben’s point of view, because Amal was trapped in there with them. And there was no way one man could storm an enclosed space like that, against those kinds of odds, without getting the hostage
killed – if not himself along with him. Which was precisely why Ben’s plan called for a diversion. This would only work if he could get the enemy out of their hidey-hole, into the open air where he needed them to be.

  He moved silently away from the entrance and looked up the faintly moonlit hillside. The trickle of campfire smoke was still rising gently from the natural fissure that was serving the gang as a chimney. Careful not to dislodge any rocks he clambered up the slope towards it, and flattened himself on the ground to peer down through the crack. The smoke stung his eyes and throat, but he could see right inside the cave. The fissure was easily wide enough for a man his size to scramble through. He estimated it would be about an eight-foot drop to the cave floor. Getting in would be easier than getting out. The law of gravity could be as much your enemy as your friend, at times.

  Ben made his way back down to ground level and skirted wide around the cave entrance towards the three trucks. They were parked in an untidy row, all facing down the slope to make it easier to set off for tomorrow’s excursion.

  He crept up to the nearest. Its sides were chest high, so he had to pull himself up to peer right down into the load bed. It was full of dusty picks and shovels, along with a few other tools, a coil of rope and bits of the kind of assorted junk people carry around in utility trucks. He had no use for the tools, but the rope was handy. He took it and lowered himself down and looped the coil around his body like a mountaineer. Then stepped along the length of the truck and peered inside its cab through the open driver’s side window. It was too dark to see properly. Not daring to use his torch he reached an arm through the window and ran his hand down the steering column until his fingers brushed the dangling ignition keys. They would make his job a little easier.

  He unlatched the truck door, very slowly so as not to let it creak. Then hauled himself up behind the wheel and laid his bag and rifle in the passenger footwell. Next he slipped the gears into neutral and softly released the handbrake, and the truck began to roll down the slope away from the cave entrance. Its knobbly tyres crunched softly on grit and dirt and its suspension gave out a few low creaks and groans as it picked up speed and the heavy body pitched from side to side on the uneven terrain. All kinds of subtle noises that Ben was worried could be heard from inside the cave. He kept his eye on the mirror, watching the entrance.