Asura

by R P L Johnson

  Rebecca looked back towards the Fairchild’s crumpled nose. The snow piled up against the broken windscreen was stained pink like strawberry syrup on a snow-cone; old Vijay was long past providing any answers.

  She took a long detour around the mound of snow that covered the dead. Thirty-eight people, herself and Hayat included, had taken off from Tashkent, but only eleven had survived the crash. After the first night, that number had shrunk to eight. Thirty people made a pretty big pile.

  She avoided the snow near the mass grave, and gave the muddy yellow of their combined garbage and toilet site a wide berth, until she eventually came to a patch of pristine, virgin ice–no blood, no ordure or spilled aviation fuel–just the scoop marks of previous visits. After slapping her gloved hands together to get some feeling back into them, she scooped up another pan-full of snow and headed back to the plane.

  The smell inside the cabin was overpowering after the clean, deadly purity of the mountain air. The acid tang of soiled clothing too warm to discard, and the nervous sweat that came even when freezing to death. Rebecca stood for a few moments in the airlock they had created from the cargo cabin: savouring the warmth while trying to ignore the associated stench of close-pressed humanity. Finally, when she could stall no more, she opened the door to the cabin and ducked through the tilted aperture.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Garrett said as soon as she had closed the door. Rebecca thrust the pan at him like a stiletto.

  ‘I can be quicker next time,’ she said sweetly, ‘—as long as you don’t mind drinking yellow snow.’

  Garrett grunted at her and snatched the pan.

  She shrugged off the heavy jacket as she walked the couple of steps to the rudimentary pallet they had constructed for the wounded. The seats had been useless after the crash, canted as they were halfway up the wall. They had managed to remove the ones nearest the front of the cabin and used them to build up a platform, padded with seat cushions on the top, where the injured could stretch out and were kept away from the chill walls of the fuselage. The platform took up most of the width of the cabin leaving only a narrow aisle to one side allowing access to the rear.

  She noticed that while she had been outside, someone had managed to hang a couple of fire blankets from the roof, creating a kind of privacy screen between the front and rear halves of the cabin, and stopping the drafts that occasionally sneaked through their rough patch where the tail had been torn off.

  She lay the jacket over the sleeping form of Philippe Morcellet who awoke as she tucked the sleeves in around him.

  ‘Sorry,’ Rebecca said. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  ‘I wasn’t sleeping,’ said the Frenchman with his deliciously slurred Gallic accent. ‘I was just thinking about food. Where, do you think, is the nearest pâtisserie? I have a craving for pain au chocolat.’

  Rebecca smiled. ‘When we get back to civilisation, breakfast is on me,’ she said. ‘How’s Luc?’

  The Frenchman’s indomitable smile wavered for a second. He looked at his climbing buddy laid out on the pallet next to him. The two Frenchmen had been part of the same party sitting on the starboard side of the plane and had both sustained serious leg injuries as the impact jammed their seats against the bulkhead. Luc had also received a nasty head wound as some loose article from the cabin been flung forward and taken off a chunk of his scalp, as well as knocking him into unconsciousness from which he hat yet to wake.

  ‘He is still sleeping,’ Philippe said eventually. ‘We are giving him water–the little one and I–but his mouth is always dry. I hope that the sleep is doing him good, but I am not sure.’ Philippe nodded towards the little Pakistani girl while he spoke. She huddled with her father in the crook between ceiling and wall, or wall and floor as they had now become.

  ‘And how are you doing?’ Rebecca asked the girl. She looked up at her with huge brown eyes, but said nothing.

  ‘She does understand,’ her father said. ‘But she is nervous speaking English.’

  Rebecca nodded. Strange how their social inadequacies still governed their behaviour, even in times like these. But then, she reckoned, social relationships were often more important in a crisis than raw survival instincts. Especially for the weakest of the survivors.

  ‘She is doing well,’ her father continued.

  Very well, Rebecca thought, given the circumstances. A lot better, in fact, than some of the adults. Her father had escaped the crash with only a a few scrapes and bruises but had quickly come down with the symptoms of AMS, or acute mountain sickness. Although he tried his best to help, his shortness of breath combined with headache and nausea meant that he had yet to muster the strength to venture outside. Philippe was familiar with the condition and had assured him that his body would adapt, although it hadn’t so far.

  The other able-bodied survivors, Rupert Garrett and a middle aged woman called Millicent Carver, had yet to pitch in, or even come to terms with the situation. Garrett acted as if, as a paying customer, the responsibility to get them all out of this mess rested solely on Rebecca. And Carver had been active in ensuring she was as comfortable as possible–even going so far as to go through the pockets of the dead, but refused to help anyone from the rest of the group. She also seemed obsessed about her luggage. In the minutes immediately after the crash, when everyone had been frantically trying to free the trapped and help the injured, Carver had actually crawled over a trapped passenger to get to the cargo compartment and retrieve her two bags. Rebecca remembered thinking that the woman had lost her mind, and half-expected her to clamber outside and try to call a taxi.

  ‘Any sign of a rescue?’ Garrett asked. He had finished melting the pan of snow on Philippe’s little butane stove, and had also drunk a good part of it. He saw the little girl watching him, Hadeeqa her name was, and after a moment’s hesitation, handed her the pan. She immediately held it up to her father’s lips so that he could drink.

  ‘Don’t give him too much!’ Garrett exclaimed. ‘He’ll only puke it up again.’

  ‘All the more reason to keep him hydrated,’ Rebecca said. She locked eyes with Garrett for a few seconds, thinking vile thoughts, and hoping that somehow, telepathically, he was picking up on them.

  ‘The rescue?’ Garret reminded her without breaking the stare.

  ‘We may be here for a while yet. We should start rationing the consumables: food, gas for the stove. And I want to start working on a signal fire and keeping proper watches.’

  ‘What, out there?’ said Garrett. ‘You want us to stand out there for hours at a time on watch. We’ll freeze.’

  ‘It’s not that cold if you keep in the sunlight and stay out of the wind. Beside’s you can wear Philippe’s jacket.’

  ‘It wouldn’t fit me.’

  ‘Then find another! There are still cases we haven’t opened yet.’

  ‘I will take the first watch.’ The speaker was Muhammad Khamas. He had raised his hand to speak as if at school. ‘I am not good for much more than sitting, anyway. I might as well watch the skies as these walls.’

  Thank you, thought Rebecca although she didn’t say it out loud. She didn’t want these duties to be mistaken as favours to ease the burden on her. They were simply necessary if they were to survive, and the sooner people like Garrett started to realise that and pitch in, the easier it would be all round.

  ‘Okay, Mister Khamas. I’ll help you to start with. I want to dig a pit in the snow and get a couple of canisters of gas ready to tip in if we see a plane.’

  ‘If we can find the landing gear,’ said Philippe, ‘—the tyres should produce a very black smoke, n’est pas?’

  ‘Good idea. The nose wheel is buried, but the port wheels are still attached to the wing. We might be able to cut them free. Philippe, can you do without your jacket for a little while?’

  Philippe nodded with a lopsided smile that was almost a leer. ‘Bien sûr. But now you owe me a dinner before that breakfast you promised me, eh?’

  ◆◆◆
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  The Sleeper registered that two full revolutions of the planet had passed since the concussion that had first started to waken Him. For a millennium He had been aware of nothing but the passage of time and the deep black cold that surrounded Him and His brothers. Time and cold: He had forgotten that the universe consisted of anything else. It was as if he had slept through to the end of existence and the heat-death of creation. But the concussion had changed that. There was something else. There was a way out. The concussion brought with it a speck of primitive fire, like a star fallen from the sky. It would be enough. Soon the Sleeper would wake.

  CHAPTER 3

  From above, the rock spur valley was little more than a dark chevron of exposed rock pointing up the mountain towards the source of the Rupal Glacier. The glacier itself split into two around the rock spurs, the main body flowing in a great frozen wave to the south, and the smaller sliver–sliced off by the old bones of the mountain–continuing for a hundred metres to the north east before terminating in a mass of moraine.

  A rudimentary camp nestled between the split streams of ancient ice. Rose could see a second helicopter squatting in a circle of whitewashed stones. Away from the crude helipad a fuel dump of sixty gallon drums mimicked the mountains that marched away from the camp to the south east. A cluster of tents, a mixture of army-olive and vivid civilian technicolour, were arranged in ragged ranks before the thin brown line of a jeep trail that snaked past the truncated offshoot of the glacier, and off down the mountain towards the Karakorum highway.

  As Rose watched one of the tents, larger than the others and almost perfectly spherical, collapsed in on itself and a team of workers clad in white alpine camouflage smocks started to pack it away.

  ‘It’s a military camp,’ Rose exclaimed.

  ‘One of the highest in the world,’ Nazir agreed proudly. ‘We are now well over fifteen thousand feet above sea level. Fighting a war at this altitude is crazy.’ He flashed Rose a manic smile. ‘But who ever said war was sane!’

  Rose looked down on the camp below. He knew all about the long-standing conflict between India and Pakistan. For over twenty years the two nuclear powers had been fighting a staccato border war in the high mountains of the Karakorums. There were flashpoints all along the border. The so-called ‘line of control’ divided the ancient kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir into two portions: the west controlled by Pakistan and the east by India. But the remote northern regions of Kashmir were never adequately defined in any treaty. The high glaciers were assumed to be so inhospitable, so totally incapable of sustaining any permanent population, that their sovereignty was simply not important. That was of course until one side claimed them as their own.

  And so for two decades the war had dragged on. A war where more soldiers were killed by avalanches than by bullets and more limbs were lost to frostbite than to enemy mines. No outside observers knew for sure how many soldiers were involved in the conflict, but conservative estimates put the figure at around three thousand men on each side. Rose knew that there were dozens of camps scattered along the line of control, but this was the first time he’d heard of any outsiders actually seeing one.

  The chopper circled the camp once before coming in to land next to its twin. Nazir unbuckled himself from the sling seat and flung open the hatch. Brilliant light spilled in forcing Rose to shield his eyes against the glare. He jumped down onto the soil, iron-hard with permafrost, and was immediately thankful for the thick jacket and trousers that Nazir had supplied. Before picking them up, their Pakistani liaison had loaded the chopper with climbing gear and supplies. Both Rose and Tej wore brand new, expedition weight thermal jackets and trousers as well as glacier goggles and plastic-shelled climbing boots.

  The camp was certainly much higher than the juniper scented hills north of Skardu. Although the sun beat down from above, and glared in from all sides, reflected by the white ice, it carried no heat: only a pure, white brilliance that could cause snow-blindness within minutes.

  ‘Come on,’ Nazir said. ‘I’ll introduce you to the others.’

  The camp was a hive of activity. Rose and Tej followed Nazir through the maze of tents. They passed barracks of rough concrete blocks overlaid by a second skin of timber and white tarpaulin. The starkly utilitarian mess hall doubled up as a mosque. A squad of soldiers trooped out and stood by the side of the path, regarding them sullenly and sparking up thin, hand-rolled cigarettes. Even in the relative safety of the camp the men wore side arms and carried assault rifles slung over their shoulders. The camp was a long way from Rose’s regimental headquarters in Devonshire. This was a front-line base; when soldiers went out on patrol, there was a real chance that they would not come back. That knowledge was burned into the face of every man they passed deeper than any snowburn.

  The path opened onto a parade ground. A squat row of administration buildings lined the far side and in front of these a large store of equipment was laid out on blue tarps. Bundles of silver, thermal blankets were stacked neatly next to crates of medical supplies and emergency rations. Portable generators, stretchers, oxygen bottles, tents and climbing gear: all were neatly arranged under the watchful eye of a stocky, ruddy-faced man who prowled down the aisles between the tarps.

  ‘You must be Rose,’ he called out as they approached. He had a surprisingly deep voice, and a broad Australian accent.

  Rose nodded. ‘And Sergeant Rai of the Ghurkha Corps of Engineers,’ he said.

  The man stopped a couple of paces from them and gave them both a quick once over. His gaze lingered on Tej’s kukri.

  ‘Well, I’ve never met a Gurkha I didn’t like. Mainly ‘cos you’re the first, and you seem okay.’

  He took Tej’s hand in a two-fisted, politician’s hand shake and pumped it up and down as if drawing water from a well, before moving on to Rose and giving him the same treatment. ‘Frank Marinucci,’ he said. ‘Glad to meet’cha.’

  ‘Frank is also an engineer,’ Nazir explained. ‘He’ll be going with you up the mountain.’

  ‘Done much climbing, Frank?’ Rose asked.

  ‘Climbing, diving... Whatever’s required. I led the Jungfrau cable-car job a couple of years back. That was about three thousand metres.’

  Rose remembered the event from the news at the time. A pylon had collapsed halfway up the Jungfrau Mountain in Switzerland. Two cars filled with skiers fell twenty metres, and many more were left stranded, suspended up in the air in heavy winds.

  ‘That was a bigger job than this,’ Marinucci continued, ‘—although we could air-lift the wounded straight to Bern. This time around... Well, we’ll be lucky if there are any survivors at all.’

  ‘Now then, Mister Marinucci, that sort of attitude just won’t do...’ Rose turned to see the speaker striding towards them across the parade ground. He was a tall man, angular even through his thick clothing. His heavily lined face was dominated by a beak of a nose, sunburned and peeling. Rose put his age at somewhere in the fifties and the years had tended to desiccate rather than soften him. The hand he extended was large and long-fingered like a concert pianist or professional strangler.

  'Charles King,' he said. 'I'm in charge of this moveable feast. And you must be Captain Rose.'

  Nazir quickly made the introductions and King led them towards the administration buildings. A hemispherical dome squatted at the end of the row of utilitarian offices and they headed towards it. On one side a porch stuck out of the wall like the tunnel leading into an Inuit’s igloo. But instead of ice, this structure was fabricated from tough fabric stretched taut between stiffening ribs that ran through the walls and framed the occasional transparent skylights.

  'We saw one of these from the air,’ Rose said. ‘It's an inflatable shelter. They were used as mobile operating theatres in the Gulf War.’

  ‘That’s right,' Marinucci replied. ‘You can use these for just about anything. Pump them full of cool, filtered air and yeah, you've got an ideal desert field hospital. We'll be hooking ours up to an industrial
heater you could roast chickens with, but the principle's still the same. Hell, they even float! This one will be staying here as our temporary base of operations. The one you saw was the one we’ll be taking with us up the mountain.’

  ‘The pressure test was successful, then?’ King asked.

  ‘And how! Damn thing’s stronger than my house. The ribs are pneumatic like a bicycle’s tyres. We just hooked 'em up to a compressed air cylinder and it sprung up like we’d opened a pop-up book. The material is layered nylon and PVC shot through with ballistic grade Kevlar, good for winds up to a hundred knots.’

  Rose looked up at the sky. There was not a cloud to be seen, but the weather in the mountains could change in an instant.

  King caught his gaze. ‘Don’t worry, Captain. The forecast shows that we have a couple of days before we can expect any real weather. We’ll be in and out before then.’

  Yes, but in and out of where?

  Marinucci unzipped both doors of the airlock style porch.

  ‘On site we’ll be keeping the internal pressure at about six hundred Torr with an increased partial pressure of oh-two to relieve the symptoms of AMS, but here we’re just keeping it at ambient.’

  AMS, acute mountain sickness, Rose knew it well. At extreme altitude the atmospheric pressure dropped to a fraction of the eight hundred Torr experienced at sea level. As the lungs became starved of oxygen, their natural defense mechanisms came into effect, constricting the delicate alveoli—the tiny air sacs that permeate the lungs—and slowly strangling the climber. The increased blood pressure in the capillaries of the working lung tissue forced fluid through the walls of the blood vessels themselves. This build up of fluid, known as a pulmonary oedema, reduced the available lung capacity still further until, without immediate evacuation to lower altitude, the climber essentially drowned in their own blood. AMS also caused fatigue, loss of coordination and in extreme cases, hallucinations: any of which could be a killer.