Asura

by R P L Johnson

  A black shape eclipsed the beam of light again, followed by a muffled thump.

  That’s one, Marinucci thought.

  Second eclipse: second thump.

  Then a third.

  They had seen four men heading towards the cave, but so far only three of them had squeezed between the boulders and dropped nimbly to the cave floor. Three killers crouched in the shadows only metres away. But where was the fourth? Marinucci silently prayed that the fourth soldier hadn’t elected to stay outside. Maybe their standard procedure was to leave one man to secure the entrance. Tej hadn’t mentioned that tactic, but it was a possibility. That would be a disaster. If even one man escaped to get help, they would suddenly find themselves with not four, but twenty soldiers to contend with. Frantically, Marinucci tried to think up a tactic to get the fourth man. Maybe they could lure him in... Maybe—

  Thump.

  Marinucci tightened his grip on the machine pistol and curled his other fist around the plastic ripcord grip of their little generator.

  Just a few more seconds.

  ‘Now!’ he shouted and yanked as hard as he could on the ripcord, praying that it started first time. The chainsaw roar of the two-stroke engine filled the cave. A split-second later halogen bulbs on top of the three portable spotlights burst into life and the cave was bathed in brilliant illumination.

  The four soldiers were stranded. They had taken off their dark goggles and Marinucci had purposefully waited for their eyes to dilate in the dim light of the cave. Now they were blinded by the harsh spotlights.

  Tej, Carver and Marinucci had no such problems. With their glacier glasses firmly in place they sprang from their hiding places as one.

  Marinucci squeezed down on the trigger of his machine pistol and the compact weapon exploded with a buzzing hail of nine millimetre rounds. The power of the pistol took Marinucci by surprise and his first burst only caught one SSB soldier in the arm before jerking up to pepper the wall above him. Marinucci compensated and unleashed his second burst lower. The rounds chewed their way up the doomed soldier’s body from groin to head.

  As his man fell, Marinucci saw Carver sneaking round the back of the cave, outflanking the remaining men.

  How the hell did she do that, he thought.

  Carver unleashed an economical, three-round burst at her first target. The bullets tore through his throat from behind and he dropped to his knees choking his life’s blood onto the snow.

  Carver swung her rifle though a tight arc and unloaded a second volley into the back of another soldier.

  This one twitched as he died and his rifle, already cocked, clattered to life in his hands. Its rapid-fire recoil jerked him around in a spastic dance as he fell. Bullets and stone chips flew in all directions. Something tore into Marinucci’s thigh and his leg collapsed under him.

  The last soldier swung to face Carver, his rifle barking even before he had trained it on her.

  ‘Ayo, Ghurkha!’ Tej cried as he leapt at the last man. His kukri shone in the spotlights as he brought it down with the chopping flick of the wrist that gave the forward curving blade its deadly power. The last soldier’s rifle fell silent as he clutched his hands to his throat for a second before joining his companions on the cave floor.

  In only a few seconds it was all over.

  Marinucci looked up at Carver. She still held the M4 to her shoulder and panned it round as if looking for another target. For a second it seemed that she was pointing it directly at Tej as he stooped to clean his kukri in the snow. She hesitated for a second, and then let the muzzle drop.

  Marinucci watched her as she searched the bodies of the two men she had killed. For the first time since he had met her, a slow smile spread across her features like a cancer, transforming and corrupting. He clapped his hand over his bullet-grazed leg and shivered.

  Tej knelt next to him.

  ‘How bad is it?’ he asked.

  Marinucci took his hand away from the wound long enough to look. Tej gingerly pulled the quilted fabric away from the bloody gouge.

  ‘It’s not too bad,’ he said. ‘There’s no entry and exit wound, just a deep scratch.’

  ‘Yeah? Well it hurts like hell.’

  Carver strode past. ‘C’mon, Frank. I thought you were tough.’

  Tej ignored her. ‘Let’s get you back to the lake where it’s warm.’

  Marinucci grudgingly allowed Tej to help him to his feet.

  ‘How in hell did they know where we were?’ he asked.

  Carver stood up from frisking the fourth soldier, the one Tej had all but beheaded with his kukri. She held up a small black box. It had a long, extendable antenna and a simple needle against a scaled dial.

  ‘They picked up a signal,’ she said. ‘Something in this cave is giving away our position.’ She jerked her thumb towards the Supacat. ‘Is there a beacon in that thing? Any kind of GPS tracker?’

  Marinucci shook his head.

  She waved the Indian’s receiver through the air like a dowsing wand. The needle rose steadily up the dial until it was maxed out with the antenna pointing back towards the lake cavern.

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s coming from the lake.’

  ‘The black box,’ Marinucci said. ‘They picked up the signal from the black box.’

  ‘When these guys don’t report back, they will send more soldiers,’ Tej said.

  Carver stared at him with her clear blue eyes. ‘They maybe they should report back.’

  ◆◆◆

  Yvonne Gibbons worked her way steadily across the face of the cliff. She hadn’t been ice-climbing for years and never thought that she’d get a chance to climb on one of the highest mountains in the world. Now, whether it was the adrenaline or just out of necessity, it was all coming back to her.

  She kicked another foothold with the toe points on her left crampon and smoothly transferred her weight over. She wished for about the tenth time that climb that she had brought her own ice axe with her. But she had never expected to do any real climbing. She made do with the small hatchet sized axe she had borrowed from Rose.

  She could almost see the ledge. Only a couple of yards separated her from the chance to sit down and take the weight off her throbbing calves. The trouble with ice climbing was that you were permanently on tip-toe. The points of her crampons were in the ice, but her heels stuck out into thin air. After just a few minutes climbing, she felt like a ballet dancer who had danced her entire performance en pointe.

  The ledge looked dark against the ice. Maybe it was a patch of bare rock that had been uncovered during the ice fall. Even better, Yvonne thought as she edged over another couple of feet.

  She still had one obstacle to overcome before she could rest. At the edge of the ledge, where the ice sheet gave way to the dark rock, some kind of buttress formation stuck out from the flat face of the cliff. She could either climb across it and hope there was a decent hold on the other side, or she could climb further up and over the obstruction, coming down on the ledge from above.

  The burning in her calves made up her mind for her. She would take the direct route.

  Gripping tightly to the ice with crampon and axe, she hugged the bulge of ice and blindly searched for a hold beyond. It was difficult to get any sensation through her thick gloves, but eventually she found a crack big enough to wedge her hand into and took her first firm hold in the bedrock of the mountain since they had started to climb up the giant, frozen waterfall.

  She reached out with a leg until she was almost doing the splits. The spikes of her crampon bit and she carefully shifted her weight until she was straddled across the buttress. It was uncomfortable, but she had decent holds on both sides and for the first time she could get a good look at the ledge.

  It was rock. A dense, unfaulted shelf of black basalt, big enough for all four of them to sit side by side. But at the back of the ledge a tunnel dove straight into the cliff face: an almost perfectly circular opening that looked deep enough to shelter them from even t
he worst of Nanga Parbat’s storms.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ she shouted back to Rose.

  As she turned her head, something caught her eye. There was something inside the buttress of ice that she was splayed against.

  ‘What is it?’ called Rose, but for that moment Yvonne was too engrossed to answer.

  Inside the ice, like a prisoner in suspended animation, a face stared back at her! Small faults in the ice cut the image like a kaleidoscope, but it was definitely a face. She could make out the features well enough to see that he was a clean shaven young man: handsome, with a firm expression that was more regal than threatening. The effect was reinforced by some kind of headgear. A decorated helmet that rose to a point with an ornate decoration encircling the temples like a crown.

  The ice shook.

  A muffled boom from above echoed around the mountain peaks as the sound of an explosion struggled through the thin, high-altitude air.

  A rain of ice crystals fell around her and Yvonne looked up just in time to see a chunk of ice the size of a tombstone falling straight towards her. She barely had time to scream.

  CHAPTER 18

  Rose felt the tremor run through the cliff before he heard the explosion. The rumble from above ran swifter through the dense rock than through the rarefied air of the Karakorums. It wasn’t another avalanche, but it was enough to shake a few chunks of ice free. He tucked his head into the cliff face as close as he could and let a few fist-sized icicles bounce over him.

  Yvonnne’s squeal was cut short by a crunch that Rose felt rather than heard and suddenly she was falling.

  Instinctively, Rose braced himself to take her weight on his rope, but that wasn’t going to be enough. Yvonne had climbed way beyond her last anchor point. She would bounce off the ice shelf below before she used up the slack in the rope.

  Rose had to take up the slack.

  In the icy shard of the frozen moment after Yvonne lost her grip, Rose made his decision. He yanked his axe from the cliff and leapt out into thin air.

  McCarthy looked up to see Yvonne in freefall. The young nurse flailed desperately at the air, but her hands found nothing except the slack rope that fell alongside her. She had climbed too far, even McCarthy could see that, she would fall way past her last anchor point. Below her, a jagged outcrop stuck out from the side of the mountain and Yvonne was headed straight for it!

  Suddenly, her rope snapped taut. It yanked at the webbing of her harness, slowing her fall and pulling her into a long swing that would take her back under Rose and the last anchor point. But her climbing partner was no longer there.

  Rose fell, swinging too, down towards Yvonne. McCarthy saw what he had done. The two climbers were both linked by the rope umbilical. Rose had slowed her fall, but only at the cost of falling himself. They were two weights linked over a pulley at the ice screw above: as one fell, the other must rise.

  Yvonne’s pendulum swing took her shooting across the cliff. She flew above the jagged outcrop that had so nearly killed her. She was moving too fast to find a hold on the cliff, but maybe there was something else to grab on to. As she and Rose fell, they swung towards each other—one rising, the other falling and both swinging together. This was going to hurt.

  They smacked together in an uneven impact that sent them spinning and twisting away from the cliff. Their ropes twisted around each other until they were no longer two falling bodies, but one dead weight hanging from a single, and much abused, ice screw above.

  Finally they came to rest. Their fall had taken them to an overhanging section of bare granite. They hung suspended five feet from the cliff face that sloped gently away from them, just outside the reach of their ice axes. They were stuck!

  ◆◆◆

  Frank Marinucci lay back in the warmth of the lake cavern while Tej tended to his wounded leg. Stale adrenaline from the battle flooded his system leaving him twitchy and irritable. The intense throbbing from his leg didn’t help. Tej had offered him some painkillers from the first aid kit, but Marinucci had turned them down. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Marinucci would need all his faculties if they were to pull off Carver’s audacious plan.

  He looked down as the Ghurkha tended his leg and immediately regretted it. Although not deep, the wound had already turned a spectacular shade of purple. He gritted his teeth as Tej finished cleaning the wound and pulled the edges of the ragged gouge together, securing them with a row of butterfly sutures. He finished it off with a pad of sterile gauze and a bandage to keep it clean.

  ‘That should do it,’ Tej said.

  Marinucci grunted his thanks as he pulled his quilted trousers back over his bloodstained long-johns. The wound felt tight and painful, but the pain grew no worse when he put pressure on the leg. He could still walk.

  Carver was by the lake. She had laid out the equipment from the dead soldiers on a flat table of dark basalt. It looked like the four men had been ready to fight a war all by themselves and Marinucci silently thanked his lucky stars that things had gone as well as they had. In addition to four automatic rifles, one with a built in grenade launcher under the barrel, they had recovered four automatic pistols, seven hand grenades and another four for the grenade launcher, pouches stuffed full of spare magazines and boxed ammunition and a couple of kilos of combat cutlery in the form of bayonets, boot knives and wickedly curved and serrated survival tools and webbing knives.

  Marinucci gingerly hobbled over to Carver, still unsure of his leg and not wanting to burst his sutures. He picked up one of the stubby rifles and held it experimentally to his shoulder.

  ‘That’s a Fabrique Nationale SCAR assault rifle,’ Carver said. ‘It’s state of the art. Are you sure you know what to do with it?’

  ‘Just point it at the problem and pull the trigger until it goes away,’ Marinucci ventured.

  ‘That would work, I suppose, as long as ammo wasn’t an issue.’

  She picked up a second rifle and pointed to a three way switch near the grip. ‘Single shot. Three round burst. Full auto. Got that?’

  She quickly showed him how to change magazines and cock the weapon by pulling back the long bolt behind the rear sight.

  ‘If everything goes to plan, you won’t have to fire a shot,’ she said.

  ‘Did you learn all that in the girl scouts too?’ Marinucci asked.

  ‘I’m a security consultant. It’s my job to know.’

  Job? More like vocation, Marinucci thought as he remembered how Carver had taken out the two soldiers back in the cave. His hand was still shaking from the battle, but Carver hadn’t even worked up a sweat. Her hands were rock steady as she casually flicked nine millimetre rounds from the soldiers’ pistol magazines and transferred them to her MP-5.

  ‘Security consultant?’ Marinucci said. ‘I don’t suppose that means you can fly a helicopter?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘So that’s it. We just drive up to it and fly off?’ Marinucci looked at her quizzically.

  ‘Frank, did anyone ever tell you you’re a natural pessimist?’

  There was a shout from the lake, a half-swallowed yelp of pain.

  ‘Frank!’ Tej called. ‘You’d better get over here.’

  Frank limped gingerly in the direction of Tej’s shout and watched Carver as she jogged easily across the boulder-strewn lakeshore, one of the Indian rifles tucked into her shoulder.

  Frank could see Tej standing over the seated bulk of Mark Campbell. As he drew closer he could see that the big Scot was still tethered by the rock screw set into one of the big boulders that lined the still water of the underground lake, but the screw had been worked halfway out of its socket. Campbell’s fingernails were ragged and bloody, but his efforts had almost borne fruit: a few more minutes and he would have been free.

  The giant glowered up at them from beneath bushy brows, swollen and black where he had hit the Supacat’s roll bar.

  ‘He pretended to be asleep when I checked on him,’ Tej said,
‘—but when I saw the screw, he went for me.’

  Frank noticed a fresh bruise on the Scot’s face, little more than a reddening of the skin around a thin line of red where the tissue had split just below Campbell’s left eye. It seemed that his escape attempt had only earned him a clout from the pommel of Tej’s kukri.

  Carver still held the rifle to her shoulder, its long, slotted muzzle trained unerringly at their prisoner’s forehead.

  ‘Didn’t get very far, did you?’ Carver taunted. The big Scot glared at her and spat deliberately at her feet.

  ‘Just who the hell are you Campbell?’ Frank asked. ‘What is going on here?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ Campbell replied.

  Carver’s response was instantaneous. Her rifle panned the merest fraction and she unleashed a three-round volley that missed the tip of Campbell’s nose by scant centimetres. She was so close the muzzle flash nearly blinded their prisoner. The three rounds ricocheted off the rocks behind Campbell, the echo lingering.

  Campbell had flinched instinctively away from the shots but seemed anything but cowed by Carver’s display.

  ‘Baseless accusations won’t help you here,’ Carver said. ‘Choose your next words carefully. They may be your epitaph.’

  Campbell remained tight-lipped.

  ‘What should we do with him?’ Tej asked.

  ‘Tie him up and leave him,’ Carver replied. ‘That’s more than he deserves.’