by A. J. Roe
Finally, his fingers wrapped around the hilt and he could back away from the agony. “You need to get to cover. The fuel reserves are already leaking, the plane will explode any second.”
The remaining wing had been twisted in the impact and now sat perpendicular to the rear section of the cabin gushing fuel and feeding the flames.
Summoning depleted reserves of strength, Rick threw the relic as far as he could from the site, taking note of where it landed. This freed up both hands which he could now use for support, dragging each step against the resistance of the knee-deep snow.
A hundred yards from the wreck, Rick dived behind a snowdrift, putting a barrier between himself and the hellscape. The leaking fuel had flowed down towards the front half of the plane and lit it up.
Rick almost vomited as a gust of wind carried in the sickening taste of Chodak’s burning flesh and hair as the pilot was caught in the conflagration.
An instant later, the fuel tank lit and flared with a blinding pulse of energy. The heat emanating from that alone was enough to burn the flesh clean off anyone foolish or unlucky enough to be facing it.
Rick sheltered under his forearms, fighting for breath. It was a good minute before his lungs no longer felt as though they were inhaling molten magma.
A further few minutes of recuperation passed before he was rudely shaken back to reality. A distant drone of helicopter blades echoed over the crackling and popping of the fire.
People. You need to signal for help, some animalistic survival instinct commanded. At that exact moment, a memory of Chodak’s words cut through the jumbled mess in Rick’s head. “He wanted a helicopter.” If it was Sota and his men, help would be the last thing on their minds.
The rotor blades were now droning, filling the sky above them. Peering over the snowdrift, Rick could see the black outline of the chopper just a couple of miles north.
The vehicle was cruising along, a few hundred feet from the ground. Low enough to avoid the swirling mass of black clouds overhead but high enough to easily see everything happening down below. There was no way they would have missed the billowing black smoke of the wreck.
Rick yelled an incomprehensible slurry of profanities at the helicopter, snatched up the relic from where it had landed a few feet away, and broke for the tree line. It would be a goddamn miracle if they failed to see his silhouette against the carpet of white beneath them.
37
The mid-morning sun was set high in an azure sky. Its glare reflecting from the snow swept valley was blinding.
As soon as the helicopter completed its low pass of the trees and circled around the far side of the mountain, Rick knew he was safe, for now at least. He powered out of his cover, trudging as fast as the terrain would allow.
Towering rocky outcrops ahead marked the path to the peak. If everything Thyos had told him was true, upon a plateau high on the western face of the mountain sat a temple, so tiny and remote it was almost invisible. This temple served the dual purposes of revering the holy site and acting as a marker, pinpointing the exact location of the coordinates engraved upon the relic’s surface.
More importantly than any of that, the temple held access to the caverns and the vast cache of ancient machinery below, a place where Rick may just be able to ensure the future of his species.
Four vast stone ledges sat in his path, rising like gargantuan stairs against the top third of the mountain, the peak towered out a few hundred feet above.
Approaching the base of the first step, which was just a rough, grey and brown rock face a hundred feet high, dusted on the top with soft powder like some kind of gigantic, frosted gateau, Rick considered his options. To his left a narrow path snaked up and around, hopefully all the way up to the top, but from here he just couldn’t tell. The only other way would be faster but far more dangerous.
As if coming from nowhere, echoes of the helicopter rotors bounced off the mountainside like a machine gun. They were searching for something or someone, that much was obvious.
Rick stood under the shelter of the overhang as the chopper swept by above him.
“Is it Sota?” He dreaded the question, already knowing the answer.
“Yes. He has a team of five. They know you are here but have not yet laid eyes upon you.”
“How could he know?”
“The only explanation is that he was in contact with Ivan, he must have made a deal for your lives.”
“Then we’re screwed, aren’t we?”
“Not yet. I do not know why but Sota has a significant amount of plastic explosives on board. The detonation system is triggered by a cell phone. Dial the number I say then we can take everyone out in one stroke.”
Rick fished out the phone without a second’s hesitation. Using Thyos’s knowledge to kill Sota from a distance was an undoubtedly a cowardly move, but right now it was a means to an end.
“Give me the numb-,” a worrying thought cut him off. “Wait, what do you mean ‘everyone’?”
Thyos let out something that sounded suspiciously like a sigh, for a moment seeming almost human. “Yuriko is onboard too. She was caught shortly after your train departed. I needed to keep them busy so you could slip through.”
“You mean you got her captured deliberately? Fucking hell, this just gets worse and worse.”
Rick felt sick. He knew Thyos wasn’t exactly human, far from it in fact, but how could she be so utterly void of empathy? “If Yuriko’s onboard then too bad. There’s no way in hell I’m just going to blow her up.”
“I understand that you care for the girl, but this is far more important than the cost of a single life.”
“It’s not happening. There must be another way.”
“Very well. If you can get to the plateau quickly and discreetly, we may still have enough time to reroute my power. However, one of Sota’s team is scanning the mountainside with a Long-Range SIG SSG rifle and will not hesitate to shoot.”
A fresh wave of panic swept over Rick. The thought of being gunned down like an animal, so close to the end put the fear of God into him. “How long have you got left?”
“Less than an hour. As soon as they circle out of view you must take the path to your left and move with purpose.”
The whirring blades of the chopper softened as it passed beyond the southern face of the mountain. “I’ve got an idea.” Rick said, glancing up at the first stepped ledge.
“No.”
“It’ll take way too long on foot. You know I’m right.”
“It is too dangerous. If you die, our failure is assured but on foot we at least have a chance.”
The ledge was nowhere near Rick’s tallest climb. But injured, without ropes and in the tail-end of storm winds, made it the most challenging by far. One slip and he would be done. The alternative was hiking around the mountain for at least twice as long and possibly getting shot in the process. “Trust me, I can do this.”
“Very well. I must preserve power until you reach the top. Just remember, there are billions of lives depending on your success, do not let them down.”
“So no pressure then?” The ridiculous situation almost brought a smile to Rick’s face.
Standing in front of the first of the sheer rock faces he intended to free climb, the enormity of the task truly dawned on Rick. Fortunately, the fear of being shot kept the urgency fresh in his head.
Towering above the four great steps ahead was a near vertical snow-covered face. Rick had no idea if it was even possible to scale the treacherous western face of Mount Kailash. The mountain itself was well-known among the adventure sports community as being ‘unclimbable’ due to a combination of extreme elevation, accessibility and religious significance.
As a result, no one in recorded history had so much as attempted to climb it at all, let alone summit the mountain. Until now.
Fortunately, Rick didn’t need to reach the apex, he only needed to get as far as one of the highest-elevated temples on Earth. Besides, he’d never let
little issues like superstition or sacrilege stop him before—and wasn’t about to start now. Not with the lives of Ellie, Sanjay, Yuriko and countless others on the line. A good man never gives up without a fight.
Rick gritted his teeth, tried his best to block the pain from his thoughts and began to climb.
38
Rick pulled his weary body up and over the lip of the final ledge. Emerging out onto the plateau was like being reborn. Gone was the cold, pale fog of the mountainside below. Instead he entered a world of glorious sunshine and fluffy powdered snow, which seemed to melt seamlessly into the vast, endless sea of clouds beneath him.
To the north, the fast-moving storm front that had downed their aircraft was rolling away. But better than all of this was the fact that Rick seemed to be utterly alone. There was no gunfire, no voices, no trace of movement and not even a sound, save for the gentle sigh of the wind.
Scrambling forwards from the lip, Rick fell flat on his back six feet in, taking deep lungfuls of icy air. He rubbed his hands together, trying to restore some feeling to his frozen fingers and basked in the wave of euphoria brought about by his comparatively small victory. I made it.
Ahead lay a level plain, it was roughly rectangular, a hundred or so feet in length and half that wide. The space was dotted with foot-high pillars of grey rocks like some kind of miniature Stonehenge, where ancient visitors had paid homage to the great power that was said to dwell within the mountain.
Rick craned his neck upwards towards the odd, angular peak of Mount Kailash that towered overhead. So much for being unclimbable, he thought. In a strange way, he was tempted to keep climbing just to prove to himself that it could be done.
Under the shadow of the peak, pressed up against the rock, was a tiny temple, no bigger than a garage. The grey stone walls of the structure joined onto a trapezial column, capped with a watchtower. A sloped, slate roof sat on arches of faded red and gold wood at the top.
The building was crumbling and decayed after having stood alone for thousands of years, braced against the blistering storms, freezing snow and scorching sun. From the looks of the tridents and faces inscribed on the dark walls, the temple was dedicated to Lord Shiva, the Hindu deity said to usher in the new cycles of the universe through ritualistic demolition and rebirth. The coincidence of the holy site’s placement, if it was such a thing, was certainly not lost on Rick.
Just then it hit him that he could no longer hear the helicopter. Are they still out there looking for me? It was entirely possible that Sota and his men had returned to refuel or were searching elsewhere. Rick would have loved to know for sure, but with just over half an hour of run time remaining, it would certainly not be a good use of Thyos’s final few minutes of existence.
Shaking out his arms and legs, Rick edged towards the weather-beaten temple and reached out a hand for the faded yellow double doors.
They didn’t move a fraction of an inch, so he leaned his shoulder into the wood and bit his lip in an attempt to block out the pain from his ribs.
There was a creak and a snap from within as something started to give. Spurred on by the splintering frozen wood, Rick pushed harder, digging his heels into the icy ground. Finally, the doors exploded inwards with a triumphant crack and he was flung into the temple. To Rick’s eyes, scorched and half-snowblind, it was black as the darkest of nights.
It took a good ten seconds for his vision to readjust but eventually shapes began to emerge from the darkness of the sanctum. The interior offered warmth, or at least some respite from the cold. The air was musty and wet with the faint scent of rotten wood. Crumbled grey ashes still sat atop a simple stone altar on the far side of the fifteen-foot room.
Rick crept forwards. The temple had a simple serenity that reminded him of being back in the Professor’s hallway, a time that felt like a distant memory now. Yet there was a definite aura of holiness about the site too, as well there should be if it really was the portal to the single greatest secret in all of human history.
By Rick’s reckoning he still had almost thirty minutes to find the entrance and reroute Thyos’s power, a task that she claimed was simple enough. With her guiding him step-by-step it couldn’t be that difficult, could it?
Reaching out a hand for the altar, he pushed aside a brass figure of some unknown deity and a faded chain of prayer bells that sat at its side. One item had caught his attention the moment head clamped eyes upon it.
In front of the wall, lying on a raised wooden stand, was the head of a trident—a gold, three-pronged item like a spearhead, a foot and a half long. The trident’s blades were wide and flat. They curved with a symmetrical wave-like bend as they tapered into a point. It was decorated with intricate swirling patterns that occasionally caught the light of the world outside as the wind gently billowed the doors back and forth. For a fleeting moment, he wondered how much it must be worth but quickly banished the idiotic thought.
Rick reached out for the weapon. A fraction of a second before his fingers found the metal, worn and faded from centuries of isolation, he froze. The same feeling of respect overcame him as it had when he’d gone for Grandmaster Samurai’s sword back in Voss’s mansion.
For some reason, Rick felt the need to ask permission. With no one listening, he simply muttered his question to the temple itself. “May I?” He waited a moment, suddenly aware of the irony that he had been converted, by technology itself, from a firm atheist to someone now attempting to converse directly with an unknown God.
Everything around him seemed to fade into the background. Just as his first trembling finger made contact, a thundering roar of energy burst through his brain. Rick’s vision exploded with fractals of light and the world spun before his eyes. Something was very wrong.
The next thing he felt was the cold of the floor. The back of his head bounced off the stone, leaving a patch of warm blood where he’d been hit. Someone had been planted here, waiting for him, knowing he was coming. How could I have been so stupid?
The outline of a figure appeared above him, backlit by the bright white beyond the doorway. The next thing Rick knew, a pair of rough hands were wrapped around his ankles. Cold stone squeaked against skin as he was dragged out into the blinding sun, fighting for consciousness. I was so close.
39
Kneeling in the snow before the temple, Rick could feel the energy emanating from the mountainside itself—it was no wonder this site was so holy to so many.
Whether it was the result of electro-magnetic interference or a feature entirely more ethereal that he could sense, Rick was glad for the distraction. His head felt as though it was being crushed in a vice, while the rest of his body was exhausted beyond belief.
A man on either side pinned him down on his knees with a palm on each shoulder. The cold steel of an automatic pistol was pressed against his temple.
The sound of engines swelled as the helicopter rounded the far side of the mountain. It was a sleek black machine, with a pair of silver slashes that ran across its body and glinted in the sunlight.
The chopper hung over the plateau for a few moments, as if to mock Rick for being so easily lulled into a false sense of security. It lowered slowly, blasting a swirl of snow and ice into the air before its skids finally touched down just fifty feet from the temple
The door rolled back and a figure swung down from the shadows, landing sure footed on the snow. Sota pulled himself up to his full height, seemingly uncaring about the rotor blades still spinning less than a foot overhead.
He was dressed in a thick dark trench coat and his hair was swept back, highlighting a pair of sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw. At his side, was a Wakizashi—a shorter one-handed version of the Samurai sword—in a gleaming, black lacquered sheath. Rick had already seen the weapon draw blood once, with speed so astonishing it was nearly supernatural, and was hoping not to repeat the experience.
Finally, the helicopter's engine cut out and a massive cooling fan whirred for a few seconds before silence return
ed.
Sota grinned, swaggering into the centre of the plateau as though he owned the mountain itself. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” he said, opening his arms wide before him as if he was going to walk over and give Rick a hug. His English was accented but natural, sounding far more educated and cultured than the criminal he’d been out to be like from Yuriko’s descriptions.
To Sota’s rear, a second man threw a large black duffel bag from the cabin of the helicopter and it landed with a thud in the thick snow. There was no doubt in Rick’s mind as to its contents but what the gangster planned on doing with a bag of high-density explosives, was a different question entirely.
Rick recognised the man that followed as the one he had smashed in the face with the gun barrel back in the Professor’s office. His nose was still crooked and his eye swollen and purple on one side. This coupled with his shaven head and thick gold chain made him hard to mistake.
“Hinata, bring her out,” Sota called back to the man with the broken nose. He dragged Yuriko out by her arm and stood her beside the hull of the helicopter with the barrel of his gun pressed to her stomach.
Rick’s fists clenched, his nails digging deep into the soft skin of both palms. “Why did you need to bring her here? This is between you and me,” he shouted to Sota and tried to stand, only to be forced back down, with a foot in the back of his knee.
“You’re wrong.” The gangster’s voice boomed, brimming with confidence. “This is between me and her. You’re just mixed up in something you don’t understand. Besides, she is not the one you should be worrying about.”
“Why? I found the relic, I’m the one that led you here!”
“Yes, but unlike you, she and I have spent our lives in training for this day. It is in our blood. Your presence here is nothing but dumb luck.”