Asura

by R P L Johnson

  But the young nurse’s eyes when she looked towards McCarthy betrayed her true feelings.

  ‘Why don’t I go check it out,’ McCarthy said. She shoved the cold weight of the semi-automatic into one of her jacket’s deep, quilted pockets and did up the zippered and Velcro-flapped seal before leaving the protective bubble of warmth inside the shelter and stepping out into the cold.

  ‘Oh shit!’

  A couple of hundred metres away and closing fast, a huge wall of ice and snow blocked out any view of the crash site further up. In front of it, a tiny smudge of colour skidded along the ice. It was a man, she realised: one of the team that had come to rescue them, distinctive in the bright red, goose down jacket and trousers.

  The man skidded straight toward the camp and seemed to be losing speed. McCarthy was too dumbstruck even to get out of the way, as the hurtling figure was on a collision course straight for her and the shelter.

  As she watched the figure rolled from his belly to his back, and then impossibly managed to get his feet under him and sprung up, already running.

  ‘Get in, get in!’ shouted the man as he barrelled into her and his momentum carried them both back through the half-zippered door of the shelter and flung them onto the floor inside.

  ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ McCarthy shouted.

  ‘Shut up and hang on to something!’ Rose replied.

  McCarthy looked at the walls of the shelter. The pressure-tight material was made up of layers upon layers of tough nylon, like the material seat belts were made out of, but surely even a brick wall wouldn’t stand up in the face of an avalanche.

  That crazy pom may have outrun an avalanche, but if he thought he was safe inside the shelter, he was certifiable. This was it, after all that had happened this was how she was going to die.

  Then all coherent thought abandoned her as a thousand tonnes of snow and ice swept the shelter from the face of the Earth.

  The lights inside the shelter went out as the first violent thrust tore away the umbilical to the diesel generator outside. There wasn’t even a hint of resistance from the guy ropes as they were ripped out of the ice. The titanic force of the avalanche swept away everything in its path.

  Rose held on to a flap of material that hung from the roof of the shelter. The flap had been a screen, dividing the large, roughly circular space into two rooms which had been intended to be a medical ward, and a combination operating theatre and morgue. Now it had found a second lease of life as a life-line for the young Captain as he clung on, alternately dangling from it and then being smothered by it as the shelter rolled around in the turbulent chaos that carried the shelter down the mountain.

  Rose tried to ignore the objects that pelted him from all sides as they fell. It was impossible to see them coming in the pitch darkness inside the windowless bubble of the Svenska shelter, and so it was impossible to avoid being hit, or even to brace for the impact. He just kept his chin tucked in on his chest like a boxer, and concentrated on hanging on.

  Only once did he let go of his lifeline. Something hard and sharp-cornered slammed into his stomach. It could only have been the stainless steel, portable operating table. Rose, winded by the blow, gasped for air: his seal-like barking through his paralysed diaphragm lost in the roar of the avalanche. The blow had knocked him sideways and ripped one hand from its hold on the flapping sheet of woven Kevlar and nylon. His flailing arm caught hold of something in the darkness: another body, although he could not tell whose it was. He clutched his companion to his chest and directed them towards the flapping screen where they held on together.

  Rose was acting almost purely on the natural survival instincts that had kept him alive though several climbing accidents and eleven years with the Royal Engineers. The only thought in his head as they tumbled along in the breaking wave of ice and snow was that the Svenska shelter should act as a giant version of his rucksack’s air-bags. He just hoped that the tough material could hold together through the pummelling of the snow, and the ricocheting impacts of the objects inside. If the shelter tore, then there would be nothing to stop tonnes of snow and ice pouring in, and they would be finished.

  They raced onwards in the tumbling, roaring darkness. And then, without any warning, they began to fall. The avalanche had reached the huge ice fall, and the shelter—along with hundreds of tonnes of snow—fell towards the valley floor below.

  CHAPTER 12

  Tej came to his senses face down in a pile of snow. The dim light and total silence that greeted his return to the land of the living did little to remind him of his situation and it took him a couple of seconds to remember where he was. It took a few more seconds to realise that no, his hearing was not damaged. All was quiet. The avalanche was over.

  Tej took a glow stick out of his jacket pocket, cracked the seal that kept the two chemicals separate, and gave it a good shake like a ketchup bottle to thoroughly mix the two reagents.

  In the green glow from the little plastic tube he could see that they had made it into a narrow cave, little more than a crack in the rock face. It was barely two metres wide at its entrance and tapered quite quickly both in depth and height. The Supacat had made it out of the way of the avalanche, but had almost instantly jammed tight like a bung driven into a hole as the tunnel narrowed. It had stopped their mad flight as effectively as hitting brick wall.

  Their abrupt stop had flung Tej forward into a drift of wind-blown snow that filled the back of the cave almost to its roof. But what had happened to the others?

  ‘Put out that light. Some of us are trying to sleep.’

  It was Marinucci. Tej found him, still strapped into the driver’s seat of the supacat; he was awake, but groggy.

  Campbell was just behind Marinucci on the cargo pallet behind the two seats. He had cracked his head on something, and his face was covered with blood gleaming black in the dim light from the glow stick.

  Tej examined the wound, a deep cut over the eye, right down to the bone, but there was no sign of the spongey feel that would indicate a skull fracture.

  In his examination, he felt a lump under Campbell’s jacket. It was a short-barelled automatic pistol. He pulled it out, more out of curiosity than anything else.

  Campbell’s weapon was no ordinary pistol. It was a Tactical Machine Pistol, or TMP, manufactured by the Steyr-Mannlicher company of Austria. At a little over three pounds in weight, it was only slightly bigger than a standard semi-automatic, and with a box magazine incorporated into the pistol grip it could be mistaken for its less formidable cousin. But the Steyr had an additional grip just behind the muzzle that allowed it to be held two-handed like a sub-machine gun, and at nine hundred rounds per minute, it could empty its thirty round clip of nine millimetre ammunition into a target in only two seconds.

  Tej turned it over in his hands. It was a serious piece of hardware. As far as he was aware, the TMP was not standard issue for any military unit anywhere in the world, and it was certainly not the sort of weapon that a civilian would be able to get hold of easily, or legally. TMPs were usually only carried by bodyguards, and some special forces units on missions where they would be required to conceal their weapons. It was designed specifically to pack maximum firepower into the minimum size and weight, and Tej couldn’t for the life of him think why Campbell would have one.

  Tej decided to keep hold of it for the moment. He also took two extra thirty-round magazines for the weapon that were secured to Campbell’s holster by Velcro tabs.

  Campbell moaned and stirred in his sleep while Tej was doing up his jacket.

  ‘Well at least he’s alive,’ Marinucci said, leaning over the steel roll bar behind the driver’s seat. ‘Any sign of our other passenger?’

  ‘Not here,’ Tej said. ‘Maybe she got thrown forward. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Like roadkill after three days in the sun.’

  Tej looked at him quizzically.

  ‘That means bloody awful,’ Marinucci explained.

  Tej showe
d Marinucci the TMP he had taken from Campbell.

  ‘Something’s going on here,’ he said. ‘I don’t think Mister Campbell is all that he claims to be.’

  ‘You got that right,’ Marinucci replied. ‘Think it was him that blew up the choppers?’

  Tej shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Why would he destroy his only route off the glacier?’

  ‘It wasn’t him,’ said a voice from the darkness. ‘The missile came from the mountains to the south.’

  Millicent Carver stepped into the reach of the glow stick’s pale light. She had Campbell’s M4 in her hands; the strap was taut over her shoulder taking the weight of the weapon. Her hands rested lightly on the pistol grip and barrel merely guiding the weapon, not attempting to carry its weight. With her backpack slung over her shoulders, and the fur lining of her hood framing her pale features, she looked like an arctic warfare commando who had been kitted out by Versace and Hermes.

  She noticed Tej staring at the carbine.

  ‘It has a torch under the barrel,’ she said by way of explanation, flicking the pencil thin beam on and off. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t shoot myself in the foot.’

  She shone the torch back towards the mouth of the cave. Great boulders of ice gleamed in the light, each block fitted seamlessly against its neighbour by the pressure of the avalanche to form a wall the builders of the pyramids would have been proud of. At the very top of the opening, where the cave tapered until it was no more than a hairline fault running up the mountain, blue light trickled through the joints between the boulders.

  ‘It’s completely blocked,’ Carver said. ‘The avalanche was huge. It’s probably piled up a drift thirty feet high against the face. You got anything in there we can dig out with?’ She nodded towards the Supacat and its trailer.

  ‘Fuck that. What the hell happened up there?’ Marinucci asked. ‘Who would want to fire a missile at us?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Carver replied, pointing at Campbell with the muzzle of the M4.

  Carver told her two rescuers about what had happened while they were getting the black box from the tail section: right up to the part where King and his men pulled weapons on the survivors.

  ‘What happened then?’ Tej asked. ‘Where are the Captain and the others?’

  ‘At the bottom of the crevasse,’ Carver said, straight-faced. ‘King went crazy when the chopper was hit. He shot your Captain and the doctor and just left the rest of us behind. I guess he thought the avalanche would cover his tracks. I’m sorry about your friend.’

  Tej found it difficult to believe. If it hadn’t been for the evidence of the armed Campbell, and the two destroyed helicopters, he would have said Carver had lost her mind in the stress of the last few days.

  ‘Why mount a rescue and then try and kill the survivors?’ Marinucci asked. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Garrett,’ Carver replied. ‘He might have been an old fool, but he was too high-profile to just do away with.’

  ‘So they staged a rescue?’ Tej asked.

  ‘Staged, Hell!’ Marinucci swore. ‘This thing was better put-together than most of my “real” operations.’

  ‘Frank’s right,’ Carver agreed. ‘I think that they always intended to rescue the survivors if they could, even if it was only for debriefing. Something happened to force King to switch to plan B.’

  ‘Whoever fried that chopper seemed pretty forceful.’

  ‘It must have been the Indian army,’ Tej proposed. ‘We came from a base in Pakistan, and I saw King meet with Pakistani officials when we were getting set up. But why would they want to attack a rescue mission?’

  ‘Obviously, this was more than just a rescue mission,’ Marinucci said.

  ‘Yes. Campbell and the others weren’t a mountain rescue unit, they were military. A four man fire team from one of the special forces. King was probably their commanding officer. As soon as King realised that he’d run out of time, he changed tactics.’

  ‘But run out of time for what? What was he trying to do?’ Marinucci asked.

  ‘Just exactly what was on that plane, Ms. Carver?’

  ‘Search me. It was just a regular charter flight. I didn’t mingle much with the other passengers, but they just looked like businessmen, with a few tourists like me. Nothing special.’

  ‘Maybe there was something in the hold. Something smuggled in with the baggage and freight.’

  Marinucci rummaged through the trailer behind the Supacat, eventually finding a coil of nylon line, slightly thinner than a climbing rope. He bound the sleeping Campbell’s hands and feet as quickly and efficiently as as rodeo cowboy trussing a steer.

  ‘The only answers were going to get—’ he said as he worked, ‘—are from sleeping beauty here. And if he is from some kind of fucking X-Files hit squad then I don’t want him running around when he wakes up.’

  He searched the sleeping man, laying his prizes on top of a packing case in the trailer and leaving Campbell nothing except for the clothes that would stop him freezing to death. In the end he found two clips for the M4, two radios (one linked to the throat microphone), a long, clipped-point knife in a moulded plastic sheath and various other bits and pieces of survival kit which could be explained easily by the man’s cover story of being a well-prepared and experienced climber.

  There were no dog-tags or any other kind of insignia as far as Marinucci could see—not even a wallet with a driver’s license so they could confirm the Scotsman’s identity.

  Marinucci slapped him across the face, hard, but Campbell was out like a light. They weren’t going to get the answers they wanted from him for some time, so instead they concentrated on their second problem: how to get out of the cave. After digging out some torches from the Supacat, they set about exploring their cold, rocky tomb.

  ◆◆◆

  Major Parindra Naik looked down on the glacier through a pair of high-powered binoculars. The devastation was total. Where there had once been a crashed Pakistani aeroplane and some kind of base of operations for the rescue attempt, there was now nothing apart from a flat expanse of virgin snow, without even a footprint to show that anyone had ever been there.

  Major Naik stood up and shook the cold out of his cramped legs. He was an impressive figure, standing over six foot four inches tall, and his powerful frame was apparent even through his heavy parka and white camouflage smock. His name Parindra meant lion, in the ancient Sanskrit language, and he certainly suited the name. He wore his moustaches long, and the way his bushy but well-kept facial hair joined his equally full sideburns gave the impression of a jet-black mane encircling his piercing, deep brown eyes.

  His bearing, also, was proud and leonine. Even gazing with exasperation down towards the glacier below, he looked as if he was posing for a sculpture. He had a natural, regal air, and after a lifetime of service in the Indian army he was physically incapable of slouching.

  Major Naik led a platoon of the very best soldiers that massive country had ever produced. The Special Security Bureau, or SSB, represented the very peak of military excellence in the Indian sub-continent and – to the Major’s mind – the whole of Asia. Only the special forces of Great Britain, the USA and possibly Israel could match them and even then, on their home territory in the high mountains of Northern India, they would come a poor second behind the men of the SSB.

  Unlike India’s other main Special Forces unit, the Special Action Group or SAG – otherwise known as the Black Cats because of the plain black fatigues they wore – the soldiers of the SSB did not rotate back to their parent units at the end of three years. The SSB ruthlessly poached the best young soldiers from every branch of the Indian army, and then guarded them jealously. Major Naik himself had been in the Bureau for seven years, and a platoon commander for the past two. He was recognised by both his superior officers and the men under his command as being one of the very best that the elite unit had to offer.

  But on this occasion, the Major had to admit his nose had been blood
ied by the enemy. He had underestimated their ruthlessness and their desire to keep their prize out of his grasp. The man-made avalanche – and the Major had no doubt that it had been deliberately started by the enemy – had claimed the lives of his JCO and six other good men. They had all disappeared down the mountain when the sheet of ice the size of a basketball court on which they had been standing gave way after the detonation of whatever explosive charge had been used to start the avalanche.

  Not that the Major hadn’t returned the enemy’s initial jab with a knockout punch of his own, but he took the loss of any man very hard. It was both a personal tragedy, as he thought of each of his hand-picked soldiers more like sons than subordinates, and it was also a slur on his ability as a military tactician.

  The Major was not a cold, calculating killer, although he often gave that impression to those that did not know him well, or who only met him from the wrong end of a bayonet. He was a deeply emotional man, capable of profound affection and towering, fiery, monumental rages.

  The Major sucked on his upper lip, tasting the ice that had settled in his whiskers. Staff Sergeant Vijay Kumar, who stood at the big officer’s side, recognised this as a sign of some inner conflict. But when the Major spoke, it was, as always, with a thorough conviction in his choice of action.

  ‘Come along Sergeant. We still have work to do.’

  Sergeant Kumar knew better than to point out the dangers of traversing the unstable and loosely packed snow that covered the glacier field. He was confident that the Major had considered the risks and had determined that they were worth taking when considering the importance of their mission. That was good enough for Vijay Kumar.

  ◆◆◆

  Doctor Phillip Keyes finished re-setting the Frenchman’s leg for all the good it would do. He had needed to perform the procedure without anaesthetic, as he had lost his bag in the avalanche, and with it all their morphine. Not that it mattered: Morcellet was only semi-conscious and his waking moments were far from lucid. He operated in a kind of dreamworld where time was malleable and all the nightmares of the past few days were rolled into one.