Asura

by R P L Johnson

  After the avalanche had carried them over the lip of the ice fall that marked the northern edge of the glacier bowl, McCarthy had been sure that their number was up. But then she had been sure of that before: first during the crash, and then again as she saw the avalanche racing towards her. She didn't mind being proved wrong.

  The avalanche had carried an enormous amount of material off the glacier, as well as shaking loose the overhanging ice that teetered from the lip in stalactites as tall as ten storey buildings. Their olive green, army issue bubble had landed on top of a pile of loose snow and ice that was almost as big as a mountain in its own right. It cushioned their fall, and their buoyancy kept them on the surface of a stream of snow that carried them four hundred metres away from the icy cliff before it finally came to rest.

  The shelter now nestled between boulders of blue-white glacier ice so clear they could have been sapphires. It looked a little forlorn: without the hot air fan to keep the internal pressure up it had deflated a little. Only the high pressure ribcage of tubes that ran through the material stopped the shelter from collapsing into a shapeless sack.

  Inside everything was chaos. Although the four occupants of the high-tech tent had escaped without any major injuries, they were all battered and bruised from their trip down the mountain. The folded steel operating table was pitted with dents, each one a testament to some ringing collision with a head or knee, but by and large the human occupants had proved to be more resilient than the equipment inside the shelter. The big heater with its two fans the size of dinner plates was smashed beyond repair. In any case, the generator that had powered it had been lost. They might get lucky and find it washed up somewhere near them, but Rose wasn't counting on it. Its weight would probably have taken it straight to the bottom of the pile.

  They had the sterilising bath which Rose had rigged to run off a couple of twelve volt batteries, a few oxygen tanks—which mercifully had been secured to the walls of the shelter before the avalanche—plenty of medical supplies spread in disarray over the floor and a few tubular steel and fabric cots in various states of repair. Not much, but better than nothing. And at least they were alive.

  McCarthy sat down next to Rose, almost falling in a heap from exhaustion.

  ‘You knew we'd make it, didn’t you?’ she asked. ‘You knew the shelter would give us some protection.’

  Rose shrugged. ‘I didn't know for certain. It was better than just standing there on the ice, waiting for the avalanche to hit.’

  ‘Isn't that what an English gentleman is supposed to do? Dress for dinner and go down with the ship: stiff upper lip and all that. Just like those guys on the Titanic.’

  ‘Not me,’ said Rose with a smile. ‘I've never been one for that “...and the band played on” attitude. I'd rather lash a couple of cellos together and swim for it.’

  McCarthy smiled at the image. ‘Well as long as there's room on your raft for the rest of us, that's fine by me.’

  ‘Count on it,’ Rose said.

  ‘What happened up there?’ Gibbons asked.

  Rose filled her in on the way King had deserted them.

  ‘Do you think any of them are still alive?’

  ‘I honestly don't know,’ Rose replied. ‘Maybe. Marinucci might have managed to outflank the avalanche, he had a pretty good head start. Garrett and Morcellet might still be alive. The plane would have given them some protection. At least they wouldn't have been smothered immediately. Garrett might be able to dig himself out of wherever they ended up.’

  Khamas followed the conversation intently. ‘And what about my daughter,’ he asked.

  ‘She and the Doctor fell into the crevasse. There was nothing I could do. I’m sorry.’

  Khamas swung his legs off the cot and tried to stand.

  ‘You also fell into the crevasse and you survived, did you not?’ he asked. ‘It may have offered some protection against the avalanche. We must go back and check. We must...’ he trailed away in a fit of coughing and Gibbons gently replaced his oxygen mask.

  ‘Why?’ McCarthy asked. ‘Why did the bastards do it?’

  ‘You were the first officer,’ Rose replied. ‘You must know if there was anything on board that plane worth killing for.’

  She shook her head, genuinely baffled. ‘I must have done this route over a hundred times, and there was nothing special about this trip. Not until the engine failure, anyway.’

  ‘Could that have anything to do with it? Maybe King or whoever he works for was trying out some new weapon: one that can bring a plane down and make it look like an accident.’

  ‘And test it on a civilian charter flight?’ McCarthy said, incredulous.

  ‘Maybe you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe King was just trying to cover up a terrible mistake...’

  McCarthy had gone silent.

  ‘What is it?’ Rose prompted.

  ‘Just something you said. The wrong place at the wrong time. Well, we were in the wrong place, that's for sure. There was a really bad storm that night. We'd gone a lot further east than our usual route, trying to avoid it.’

  ‘How much farther? A few miles... Fifty?’

  ‘It's difficult to say. That old bird was pretty basic. My pilot was pretty much navigating by eye. We were going to pick up the Gilgit beacon once we were over the mountains.’

  ‘So you could have been a long way off course?‘

  ‘Look, all I'm saying is that if we did blunder into some kind of military testing zone, then it wasn't on any of the charts. And there was nothing up there to shoot at but us, no drones, no nothing. Just us and some bad ass weather, that's it.’

  ‘That just doesn't make sense,’ said Rose. He scratched his fingernails through his military crew cut. ‘King was definitely looking for something. And whoever took out those choppers sure as hell wanted to make sure he never found it.’

  ‘And now it's gone... Either King found it, in which case it was on the chopper when it blew up or it was scattered during the crash, or the avalanche. So where does that leave us?’

  That was exactly the question that Rose had been pondering. They were miles from the camp on the Diamir Glacier. The distance they had covered in little more than half an hour by chopper would take them the best part of a week on foot. It looked pretty grim, and yet the alternative was even worse. They would have to climb over two hundred metres up a sheer cliff, hope that Marinucci had managed to escape the avalanche and then call for help with the radio on the Supacat.

  ‘We wait,’ Rose decided. ‘I don’t know what was going on here, but I bet that King’s whole ruse was as much for the Pakistani’s benefit as ours. My friend would have warned me if he’d known anything of King’s real motive. I’m sure Nazir was kept in the dark just as much as the rest of the rescue team.

  ‘We’ve missed our last two radio check-ins. Nazir will know that something is up. We just sit here and wait for the cavalry’

  ‘Are you willing to stake your life on that?’ McCarthy asked. ‘All of our lives?’

  ‘What choice do we have?’

  McCarthy had no answer to that. All they could do was wait for Nazir and hope that whatever dealings King was tied up in had not embroiled Rose’s friend.

  Nazir would come through. He had to.

  ◆◆◆

  Marinucci had given up trying to figure out what the barrier was made of. It wasn't ice, that much was certain, unless they had discovered a hitherto unknown form of ice that could exist at about ten degrees above freezing. His best guess was that it was some kind of natural glass. Maybe whatever geological furnace had originally formed it was still warming it somehow. Maybe they'd bust through it and find themselves in some kind of swami heath spa, complete with natural Jacuzzi. All he was sure of was that the light that made it through the opaque barrier had dimmed significantly over the past hour. Whatever was beyond that barrier was open to the outside, and the sun was setting. That was good enough for him. The only way out of the cave was through
that ice... glass... whatever the fuck it was.

  The barrier had so far stood up to everything Marinucci had thrown at it. Any hope of it shattering like plate glass had disappeared when his ice axe had almost been jarred out of his hand at his first swing. The impact had jarred him all the way up to his shoulder and left his cold hand stinging in protest. His kicks and curses immediately after that first attempt had not moved it either. He had tried melting it with the oxy-acetylene torch, but it too made very little impression. He could use up his whole reserve of gas without making a hole big enough even to allow the svelte Ms. Carver through, let alone Marinucci's gut.

  Frank Marinucci had always been a belt and braces man. He had brought along absolutely everything he thought he would possibly need for the rescue attempt, and he had brought it twice. Every indispensable item had been duplicated with one in his personal Supacat, and a spare at the shelter. The Colonel had bitched about the weight, but Marinucci had argued, quite rightly, that if they lost a life because some ‘soldier-boy fuckwit’ as he put it dropped their only acetylene tank down a crevasse, then it would be on the Colonel's head. In the end Colonel King had relented. Probably because the old bastard knew none of us was going to make it off the fucking mountain, Marinucci thought. What did he care about weight limits if he was only going to shoot the survivors and leave them for dead anyway?

  Everything he had brought along for the rescue attempt was still there in the back of his 'cat, and he routed around in his treasure trove until he found what he was looking for: an airtight, plastic case with the words, 'DANGER – EXPLOSIVES' stencilled on the front.

  Tej had set up a couple of their spotlights in the tunnel, pointing at the ancient carvings that adorned its walls. Marinucci had only needed one for his work, and had told them in no uncertain terms that he needed no help in getting through the obstacle. His exact words had been, 'There were too many cooks pissing in the soup'. Tej saved that one away for later. He would surprise his comrades back at Barnstable with the new, colourful idioms that he was picking up from the Australian engineer.

  As they had little else to do, he had turned his attention to the carvings. Although their style was unusual, many of the images were familiar to him. The scene of Mount Mandala, which he had discussed with Ms. Carver, was only one of them. There were also other legends, mostly concerning the long standing feud between the gods and the devils that he had first heard as bedtime stories from his father in a close approximation of the oral tradition by which the legends had been handed down for over four thousand years.

  There were tales from the Rig Veda as well as the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata. Other tales seemed to include characters from Tibetan Buddhism which shared some of the Hindu gods and legends, but with which Tej was only vaguely familiar.

  Tej tried to make out which branch or sect had carved these amazing friezes high up in the mountains where no one but the most devout pilgrim would ever get to see them. He eventually decided that he had no idea. It would take a better scholar than him, armed with a library of reference material to find out to which thread in the intricate tapestry of Hindu and Buddhist history these treasures belonged. But even he could see some similarities between the various stories told by the friezes. They were all the more obvious because, as he had said to Carver, they had significant differences from the tales he had been taught as a boy.

  One ten foot long stretch of frieze dealt with a tale from the Mahabharata. Three demon brothers founded three cities: one in heaven, made of gold; one in the sky that was made of silver; and an iron city on Earth. The cities were quite clearly carved as great, soaring citadels with strong defensive walls girdling a forest of towers and spires. In the ancient legend, the great god Shiva allowed the cities to exist for many years, over which time they attracted a huge population of demons. Then Shiva destroyed them, burning the cities to ash, and throwing them and their demonic citizens into the depths of the ocean.

  However, the intricate carvings told a different story. Tej had searched through each richly detailed panel, but he could find absolutely no sign of the god Shiva. In the story that unfolded on the dark, long-forgotten walls in front of him, the cities of demons were assailed not by gods, but by human armies. The giant, buffalo-headed demons were turned into pin-cushions by hundreds of arrows from massed ranks of archers and charioteers. Corpses – graphically realised and obviously human – littered the fields of battle in gory, anatomical detail.

  Other tales had similar inconsistencies. In all of them, wars were fought, and individual battles between hero and demon won and lost, but the Hindu trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva were nowhere to be found. Tej was no scholar, but he was rapidly coming to a conclusion that was reinforced by every panel he studied. The temple they had uncovered was old – very old.

  Tej guessed that it predated the first written texts of the Hindu scholars. Tales of ancient wars between tribes had mutated first into legend of heroes battling demonic armies, and then been incorporated into Hinduism, forming the basis for the old Vedic myths. Tej was not a particularly religious man. His parents had practiced a typically Nepalese mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism with a hefty dose of local tradition and superstition thrown in for good measure, but Tej's natural inclination towards engineering and the applied sciences had shown him a different path.

  He had no problem with stories that told of a time before the triumvirate of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva. No doubt a Hindu scholar would have come to a completely different conclusion given the evidence Tej had just studied, but he was sure that he was right. The carvings were legends that pre-dated Hinduism itself. The temple they had found was over four thousand years old.

  His thoughts were interrupted by Frank Marinucci as he strolled down the tunnel on his way back from his work on the obstacle.

  ‘You might want to cover your ears,’ said Marinucci casually as he walked past.

  At that moment the charges went off, blowing almost all the air out of the tunnel, and then sucking it back in along with a storm of snow flurries to fill the void left by the expanding gasses of Marinucci's handiwork.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘Jesus Christ, Frank!’ Carver shouted. ‘Did you have to bring down the whole mountain?’

  Marinucci ignored her. He grabbed the portable compressor from the Supacat’s trailer and a couple of other pieces of equipment he thought he might need and headed back down the tunnel.

  ‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I’ll call you when it’s safe.’

  Talc-fine ice crystals and rock dust swirled around his feet as he retraced his steps.

  The barrier was still there. He had used two full cartridges of Geldyne and it was still there. The gelatine dynamite would have made short work of even the hardest rock, but the blue material had proved to be more resilient than he had first thought.

  The tunnel was still blocked, but the explosion had opened up a crack down the middle of the barrier about four inches wide.

  ‘Okay, let’s see what we can do with this,’ Marinucci said to himself as he worked.

  He put down the portable compressor and took out a square of tough material about a foot to each side. The square was banded in both directions by additional strips of reinforced fabric and a brass, non-sparking nozzle was stitched into one corner. It was a pneumatic lifting bag: a neoprene bladder reinforced by Kevlar and steel mesh. Used by the rescue services to lift rubble and wreckage it could be squeezed into spaces smaller than any conventional jack and lift weights of up to twenty tonnes. Marinucci worked the bag into the crack, wedging it in until only the brass nozzle protruded. He connected the air compressor to the bag and started it up. The bag instantly started to expand as he fed in compressed air through the hand-held regulating valve. The dial on the valve crept up towards the red sector at 140 pounds per square inch.

  Marinucci stood back as far as he could and hunkered down at the side of the tunnel. The barrier material creaked as the pressure on it built. The crack down its middle s
eemed to widen almost imperceptibly. Marinucci started to think about other possible options: like driving wedges into the depths of the crack, or drilling into it to plant more charges of Geldyne. Suddenly it gave way with an almighty bang. The barrier split right down the middle. Blue shards the size of axe heads flew in all directions, missing Marinucci by inches and, with the solemn grace of a felled tree, a huge slab of the barrier toppled forward, slamming into the tunnel floor and raising another cloud of ice crystals.

  Light streamed in through the opening. Sunlight! Marinucci stepped through the opening. What he saw took his breath away.

  Millicent Carver fanned her gloved hand in front of her face to ward off the clouds that billowed from the tunnel.

  ‘What the hell are you doing in there!’ she shouted, but there was no answer.

  Carver looked back at Campbell. He was still unconscious in the back of the Supacat; even Marinucci's explosive wake-up call had not managed to rouse him. Carver flexed her cold fist around the pistol grip of the M4. After what he'd done, it would be easy to squeeze off a few rounds, making sure that he never woke from his slumber. But she thought better of it. They were not out of trouble yet, and if the big Scotsman did ever wake up they might have need of his strength. She flicked the safety catch off and on a few times with her thumb, displaying a casual familiarity with the powerful weapon.

  Clouds continued to waft from the tunnel long after the echoes of the explosion had died away. Odd, Carver thought. She knelt in the haze that swirled knee-deep around the whole cave. There was no dustiness or grittiness to it, nor was it snow.

  It looked like fog.

  There was still no answer from Marinucci.

  ‘Hey, Frank. Are you still alive?’

  ‘Carver!’ Marinucci replied from the tunnel. ‘You'd better come take a look at this.’