Asura

by R P L Johnson

  ‘What happens if you hit a tree?’ Rose asked.

  Marinucci took the rucksack back. He deftly replaced the pack’s little gas bottle and rolled the airbags back into their pockets.

  ‘Hey, trees, rocks, cliffs... No system’s perfect. But what would life be without a little risk?’ He tossed the recharged pack back to Rose fumbled in the pockets of his green survival suit. Eventually he fished out a crumpled packet of cigarettes and struggled to light one with a spluttering lighter.

  Doctor Keyes wandered over from the communications tent. ‘You know, you really should try to cut out the ciggies while you’re at altitude,’ he said. ‘It lowers the respiration rate during sleep leading to an increase in pressure in the pulmonary arteries.’

  Marinucci just grunted and continued to struggle with his lighter. Keyes produced a brass Zippo and lit it with a flourish. He held out the steady flame for Frank before applying it to his own cigarette that he had conjured as if from nowhere. His long fingers were yellow with nicotine.

  ‘Fortunately,’ he said through a cloud of smoke, ‘—we won’t be spending the night on the mountain.’

  ‘Do as I say, not as I do, eh Doc?’ Marinucci said. ‘I've never met an M.D. yet who didn't drink like a fish and smoke like a chimney.’

  ‘”Do as I say, not as I do.” The hypocritical oath,’ Keyes replied with a broad, reptilian grin. ‘Taken immediately after the Hippocratic.’

  ‘You’re worried about altitude sickness, Doctor?’ Rose asked.

  Keyes nodded. ‘The first rule of any rescue party: make sure you won’t need rescuing yourself.’

  Rose hefted the pack onto his shoulder. King had managed to pull together a good team. In just two days he had assembled a party of ten experienced climbers with a good mix of skills and experience in emergency medicine, disaster relief and mountain rescue, not to mention the equipment he had managed to scrounge from both civilian, and military sources. And all this in the middle of nowhere, eighty kilometres from the nearest sealed road, and hundreds from the nearest airport. He was good, Rose had to give him that. He just hoped that there was still someone up there to rescue. He gazed up at Nanga Parbat. Their team certainly had plenty of tricks up their sleeve, but what, he wondered, would the mountain have in response?

  ◆◆◆

  She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when McCarthy woke the storm had passed and a chill light filtered in through the coverings over the ports.

  She left the others to their dozing and picked her way to the hatch. The early morning sunlight streamed down from a dazzling blue sky and glared off the newly fallen snow, turning the glacier into a plain of burning magnesium.

  The fire had died during the night, but it had left behind a greasy residue that lined the pit and stank like a burned out clutch. The twisted union of burnt meat and rubber at the pit’s base looked spiky and alien in the early morning light like a piece of coral, or a virulent fungus seen under high magnification. McCarthy had to force herself to look at it, trying to see some feature that had escaped the blaze, but there was none. Blackened bone, or charred rubber she just couldn’t tell.

  She paced around the pit, recreating the night before in her mind. The snow had wiped out their footprints; even the deepest depressions had been smoothed to nothing more than shallow dimples in the snow. She retraced her steps, feeling vaguely ridiculous as she pranced around like a dancer without a partner. It all seemed so ridiculous. If not for the ache across her belly where the creature’s claws had raked her skin she could almost believe that the whole episode had been a dream: some hypoxic hallucination brought on by stress and lack of oxygen.

  ‘Can’t sleep?’

  McCarthy turned. Carver was leaning casually against the fuselage watching her.

  ‘Could you?’ McCarthy replied.

  Carver walked towards her and peered into the pit. ‘Not much left of our friend. We should get some more av-gas ready. It’s going to be a clear day: good weather for the search party.’

  ‘What do you think it was?’ McCarthy asked.

  Carver shrugged. ‘Snow leopard? I don’t know.’

  ‘But you saw it; that was no leopard. It was bald. It had six arms for Christ’s sake!’

  Carver looked at her quizzically. ‘I only saw it from behind as I was dragging it off you. It all happened pretty fast and it was dark.’ She kicked some snow over the melted and re-frozen remains. ‘Maybe it was an abominable snowman,’ she joked. ‘Pity you fried it; it could have made us rich!’

  Carver smiled an economical smile, all thin lips and nothing else. She should be pretty, McCarthy thought, but for some reason—or rather a number of small reasons—she wasn't. She had flawless skin that made her age difficult to determine: older than twenty one, not yet forty. Her black hair was still sleek despite two days without being washed. She was slim, although her broad shoulders hinted that she was the type to bulk up as she got older. But her features were slightly too strong: the line of her jaw too sharp, and her Roman nose too pronounced. She was handsome, rather than beautiful. If she had any brothers, McCarthy thought, they'd be knockouts.

  ‘You can stay inside if you like,’ McCarthy said. ‘I’ll take the first watch.’

  ‘No thanks. Garrett snores like a pig. I’ve never met anyone who could be just as unpleasant asleep as awake.’ She gazed up into the clear sky. ‘What are our chances?’ she asked. ‘Do you think they’ll find us?’

  ‘Oh they’re sure to find us. The only question is when. We’ve only got a limited amount of food and gas to melt snow for drinking water. If we’re not found before they run out, things could get pretty nasty.’

  ‘Isn’t there a transmitter in the plane? A black box?’

  ‘The flight data recorder is in the tail. There’s a transmitter inside that the rescue services can home in on if they’re close enough. In this kind of terrain it might not carry far, and they might get some ghost echoes off the mountains, but they should pick it up eventually. They'll be searching by air, working outwards from our last known position. It shouldn't be too hard to find us. The tail's about a kilometer down the hill, but once they find that, they'll find us.’

  ‘When you say “they” you mean...’

  ‘The Pakistani Civil Aviation Authority. We were passing through Pakistani airspace when we lost power. I think we’re still in Kashmir somewhere.’

  There was a flash of something unreadable in Carver's expression: a blankness, neither disappointment nor delight.

  ‘Any idea why we crashed?’

  McCarthy ran a hand through her tangled mane of chestnut hair. ‘That one's really got me stumped,’ she said. ‘Some kind of engine failure, but don't ask me why. I wasn't in the cockpit at the time.’

  Carver looked towards the buckled nose and smashed cockpit.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 6

  The two olive-green helicopters rose into the sky, their rotors beating the thin air as they hauled their heavy loads skyward. Below each chopper a Supacat swung in its cradle of cargo netting like the pendulum of some futuristic timepiece.

  Rose and Tej rode in the lead chopper with Marinucci and the medical team. The other five members of the rescue party—King and Alan Frazier’s climbing party—were following in the second chopper, just visible through the starboard windows. Talking in the cabin was almost impossible, they were not designed with passenger comfort in mind and what allowances there were had largely been stripped out to save weight. The seats were little more than webbing slings fastened to the walls and were so uncomfortable, Rose thought he might be better fixing his climbing harness directly to the ring behind him and sitting in that for the duration of the flight. The lack of any insulation allowed the engine noise from the two Russian turbo shaft engines to roar through the cabin as if the passenger space was no more than another chamber in the power plant. So the five team members sat side-by-side, each in his or her own little world, preparing for the challenges ahead.


  The weight that had been saved at their expense had at least been put to good use. The rear cabin of Rose’s chopper was filled with equipment on special pallets complete with broad plastic skis. The pallets were tough enough—so Marinucci claimed— to be dragged across rocks and broad enough to spread the load of the equipment over even the softest snow.

  Rose took a lungful of oxygen from the small canister fixed to his climbing harness and gestured to the other members to do the same. For a second he felt like some bizarre analogue of a flight stewardess as he mimed placing the clear mask over his mouth and nose. The others caught on, and took a few gulps. Only Doctor Keyes refrained, holding up his lit cigarette between yellow fingers by way of explanation. Rose’s safety-first engineer’s soul quivered at the notion of the doctor continuing his vice even inside a flying aircraft with half of his comrades sucking on pure oxygen around him. But before Rose could make his feelings known to the good doctor, he stubbed the butt out on the deck and mixed the smoke in his lungs with a good lug of oxygen. Before leaving, Rose had lectured them all on the importance of keeping the blood oxygenated. If they waited for the first symptoms of altitude sickness to appear, it would probably be too late.

  Tej tapped Rose’s arm and pointed towards the flight deck where one of the two Pakistani flight crew was beckoning him to join them. The military pilots were the only concession King had managed to win from the Indian government on their ban on Pakistani personnel in the disputed zone.

  Rose unhooked his harness and made his way to the front. The ice white expanse of the Karakorum mountain range glittered beyond the windscreen like a field of gigantic crystals, each more brilliantly angular than the next. It was a sight he had only seen before after many days of hard slog up the side of a mountain and he made a promise to himself to ease off on the climbing next time he took leave, and take some flying lessons instead. He didn’t notice the co-pilot offering him a set of headphones until he was tapped on the chest with them. Colonel King was on the radio from the other chopper.

  ‘Enjoying the view, Captain?’

  ‘It’s pretty amazing.’

  ‘Well make the most of it. In a few minutes well be ducking down into that valley ahead. If the plane is where we think it is, we should be right on top of it in about fifty minutes.’

  Rose stayed on the flight deck as they followed the glacier into the valley. The rocky shoulders of Nanga Parbat gathered all around them until it was impossible to pick out the true peak as visible from their base camp. It was like trying to pick out the tallest building in New York from street level in Lower Manhattan. The great monoliths crowded around the two speeding helicopters, soaring upwards in glassy walls of ice and stone, each steeper and more imposing than the next.

  The glacier continued upwards in a series of great cracked plates, shot through in its lower reaches by crystal clear, melt water streams. The ice around the streams was carved into organic curves like huge, bleached bones. There would be caves there under the ice. Beautiful, transient grottoes, untouched and sterile, as treacherous as they were temporary.

  As they travelled higher, the melt water slowed to a trickle and the glacier became an unbroken white sheet. The edges of the flow were streaked with grey where the sides of the valley were ground to rock flour by the glacier’s constant abrasion. The middle of the ice was pristine except for a few nunataks: islands in the ice where an old ridge or giant erratic boulder still peeked up into the sunlight.

  They valley they were following ended abruptly in a sheer wall where some ancient geological upheaval had thrust the floor of the valley upwards like a step carved for giants. The movement had snapped the glacier in two. Above, it still flowed down from its source on the high slopes of the mountain before reaching the rift and tumbling, one sky-scraper sized block at a time, over the lip to shatter into a million sparkling shards at the base of the wall.

  The glacier jutted into space like the coins in an old penny-drop game at an amusement arcade. It seemed that just one more fall of snow would start the big payout, but Rose guessed that the amazing feature had been standing for more winters than any of them had seen.

  The two choppers rose up the feature, the smooth surface of the geological slip plane tracking before their windows like tarmac under a car’s wheels. As they rose over the teetering lip, they saw the fist signs of the crash site. A dozen metres beyond the lip of the glacier, the tail of the crashed plane knifed upwards from the snowfield like the dorsal fin of some snow-bound shark. But the rest of the plane was nowhere to be seen. The furrow they had seen from the satellite photo marked the path of its impact, but the white fuselage of the Fairchild was hidden in the glare from the fall of fresh snow that covered the glacier.

  ‘Take us up higher,’ Rose ordered, and they climbed skywards, the glacier unfolding beneath them until like a general surveying his army from a high hilltop, they could see the crash site in its entirety.

  The plane had come down in a cirque, a natural bowl-like depression over a mile in diameter. The surface of the glacier sloped smoothly down from the black cliffs of exposed rock that guarded its perimeter before tumbling over the fault that led to the valley floor below. This was the source of the glacier, a frozen lake that lay at the base of the catchment area formed by the ring of peaks that surrounded it. A few smaller valleys fed into the vast snowfield; they may once have been tributaries to the lake before the whole area was thrust upwards in the geological cataclysm that formed the Himalayan mountain range.

  The frozen lake was far from pure. The ice and snow that tumbled down the mountains around it brought loose rock in chunks that varied in size from gravel to house-sized boulders. On the western side of the bowl, a huge field of scree sprayed shattered rock in a great fan across the surface of the ice. From their altitude, they could see the waves of rock; dark shadows in the ice spreading out like ripples from the scree field, where big rock falls had been buried by snow and eventually drawn into the glacier on its slow march downhill. In a few tens of thousands of years the latest fall, some of which was still visible poking above the snow, would reach the bottom of the glacier and be deposited in earthy humps of moraine. If they could wait that long, nature herself would have brought the plane down the mountain to meet them, on its gigantic conveyor belt of motile ice.

  ‘Over there!’ The co-pilot pointed towards the middle distance where a thin pencil of smoke rose vertically in the still air. Rose could have sworn that it wasn’t there a second ago. This was not the smouldering remains of the crash. Someone down there had lit a signal fire.

  ◆◆◆

  Mohammad Khamas was jumping up and down next to the burning pile of rubber of their signal fire when McCarthy climbed out of the cargo hatch. Despite the chill in the shadow of the mountain above, he had taken off Philippe’s red jacket and whirled it around his head like a lasso. His daughter was still banging on the side of the plane with her tiny fists in a rapid tattoo.

  Khamas pointed down the valley, and instead of jumping down to the snow, McCarthy climbed out onto the fuselage and stood there with here eyes cupped against the snow’s glare. She could just make out two specks against the mountains beyond.

  Helicopters!

  ‘They’re here!’ she shouted down into the belly of the plane. ‘They’re here!’ She didn’t need to say any more. Within seconds Garrett had joined her on the roof of the plane, and Millicent Carver stood in the cargo hatch with her elbows on the fuselage.

  McCarthy whooped with exhilaration, and Garrett shouted a great ‘Hooray!’ as he waved frantically at the approaching aircraft. Only Carver seemed quiet—overcome with emotion, she guessed.

  From inside the cabin, Philippe swore with the casual fluency of someone speaking a second language. ‘One of you fuckers tell me what is fucking happening!’

  ◆◆◆

  The two helicopters circled the crash site and its madly waving survivors. Rose counted five figures on or near the plane. Five out of thirty-eight.
Considering the state of the plane, they were lucky that there were any survivors at all. The crumpled tube lay up to half its height in snow with a wide, flat area behind it where the sliding fuselage had acted as a kind of snow-plough. The blue-white ice in the mid-stream of the frozen river was visible where the top snow had been scraped away, but so was something else. A dark shadow ran across the line drawn by the sliding plane. A long, thin whisper of darkness under the ice.

  ‘Captain, do you see that?’ King asked over the radio.

  ‘Yessir,’ Rose replied. He gazed out at the glacier, noting the orientation of the shadow and trying to spot others. He found one, smaller than the first and parallel to it, about thirty metres away.

  ‘It’s definitely a crevasse,’ Rose said. ‘I can see another from my position.’

  ‘Any chance it could be debris in the ice itself?’ even through the tinny speakers of the headphones, King’s optimism sounded forced.

  ‘I don’t think so, Sir. It’s right across the flow of the glacier, just where you’d expect. And the ice fall at the southern end sure as hell puts a lot of stress into the ice.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Marinucci from behind him. The Australian engineer had come up to the flight deck bulkhead, and peered over Rose’s shoulder at the plane straddling the dark line under the ice. ‘Lucky she stopped across it, otherwise it could have opened up right under her.’

  ‘We can’t put down here,’ Rose said to the stout Aussie, although King picked up on it as well through the mike.

  ‘Agreed,’ King said. ‘I see blue ice south-west of your position. We’ll set up there, and approach the site on the Supacats.’