Asura

by R P L Johnson

  The misshapen head was not due to any helmet. Instead it was just much larger than a human’s, even allowing for the scale at which the figure had been carved. It seemed more like the head of an animal, like a lion. The front part of the head, from the crown down to the mouth was almost completely smooth with no sign of any nose and only two small, lid-less eyes set low on what passed for the creature’s face. The mouth was large and open in a silent bellow. Its teeth were set in ranks like a shark’s a mixture of broad, compound, scissor-like blades at the front and clusters of needles behind.

  The back of the head was almost completely lost in a mass of muscle that flowed in great triangular slabs towards its shoulder blades where the sculpture melded back into the rock of the cliff.

  ‘What the hell is that?’ McCarthy asked. She stood behind Rose gazing at the muscle-bound nightmare that Rose had uncovered.

  ‘Search me. Hey, Khamas! Come and take a look at this.’

  Khamas joined them on the crowded ledge.

  ‘It is as I thought,’ he said. ‘One of the animal-headed devils of my Hindu brothers.’

  Looking closer, Rose saw that he was right. The statue was more than just some mythical beast. Behind the smooth dome of its forehead its long, straight hair was tied into a braid. The torso below the savage head was clad in some kind of tunic made of overlapping plates that left the huge arms free.

  ‘Do you recognise that thing?’ McCarthy asked.

  ‘No. But the people of the Indus valley have many gods – and even more devils. Their holy books speak of demons, Asuras, with the heads of buffalo and other animals.’

  ‘That doesn’t look like any buffalo I ever saw.’

  ‘So what is this place,’ Rose asked. ‘Some kind of Hindu temple?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Khamas replied. ‘It is certainly very old. That cover stone would have required a team of skilled masons and many porters to transport it to this place and set it in the cave. And then there is the artist who carved the statues. A civilisation capable of producing such men has not existed in the Indus valley for over a thousand years.’

  Rose looked at the cover stone. It must weight close to twenty tonnes, he thought. Even with all the resources of a modern technological society he could not begin to see how such a massive artefact could be hauled halfway up a mountain. In the early history of the Indus valley tribesmen, the task was unthinkable.

  ‘It’s impossible,’ he said finally. ‘Even with a Sky Crane helicopter, we would struggle to get that stone up here.’

  ‘And yet they did,’ replied Khamas.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ McCarthy asked. ‘What do you think that thing is? A hologram?’

  ‘No...,’ Rose replied patiently. ‘Obviously someone got that stone here. But maybe “here” was not here when the stone was moved.’

  ‘Now I know you’re crazy,’ McCarthy said. ‘All this thin air finally getting to you huh?’

  Rose ignored her. ‘Think about it,’ he continued. ‘That cliff out there is a sheer face, like a fault or a failure plane in the rock. It doesn’t look like the rest of the mountain face.’

  Khamas looked at him quizzically. ‘You think that once this cave was lower down the mountain?’

  ‘Maybe not lower. But there may once have been a trail or slope leading up to this point. Some feature that may have disappeared during whatever cataclysm caused that failure in the rock.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ asked Yvonne. She was still slumped against the wall of the cave looking very small and frail inside her voluminous jacket. ‘Who cares how they got that damn stone up here. I just want to know how we're going to get down!’

  Rose looked out into the storm. They had been incredibly lucky so far. Now, with conditions worsening, it would be suicide to try and make it up the remaining cliff face. The smart thing to do would be to sit out the storm in the cave. But Rose knew that they could be stuck there for days and their foot and water was limited.

  ‘Hey Khamas: how far did you explore back there?’

  ‘Only about twenty or thirty feet, although the cave certainly extends much farther than that.’

  ‘Then let’s go and see just how far it goes.’

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ McCarthy said. ‘You don’t seriously think this cave is going to lead back up to the surface?’

  Rose shrugged and gestured towards the cover stone. ‘Someone went to a lot of trouble to seal this cave up. Stands to reason it’s got to lead somewhere.’

  McCarthy looked at the huge stone and then at the hulking statue of the demon that guarded the cave mouth.

  ‘Maybe wherever it leads is somewhere we don’t want to go,’ she said.

  ◆◆◆

  Major Naik glared at Carver’s back as she led the way into the depths of the crevasse. It would be easy, he thought, to shoot her and leave her here. Or – even better – strangle her with his bare hands. She deserved no less for what she had done. Indeed, he had needed to use every decibel of his commanding voice to stop his men from tearing her limb from limb. Here was their contact, their supposed ally, calmly informing him that it had been necessary to personally terminate at least three of his own men.

  ‘If it helps, I took no pleasure in their deaths,’ Carver said over her shoulder. To cap it all, the woman was damn near psychic too. ‘They fought bravely. You should be proud of that.’

  ‘I would prefer it if they had fought skilfully, rather than died bravely.’

  ‘Ah, but where would the mission be then, Major?’ If your men had killed me, the device may have been lost in the storm. Or, worse, they may have set it off. Do you think the Indus is ready for a new tributary valley? Because that is what would have happened.’

  She stopped in her tracks. ‘This is far enough.’

  The crevasse seemed to go on for ever. They had walked far enough away from the temporary camp to be out of earshot. None of his men knew the true nature of their mission. If they were to some to know the details, or even catch a few salient phrases, they would become a security risk and their lives would be forfeit.

  As the Major watched Carver lay the slim aluminium case down on the floor of the crevasse, he wondered about his own future after the mission. He had the complete trust of his superiors, he knew that. He had worked on enough black operations to know how and when to keep his mouth shut: tight and always. And he had no family or personal life to speak of outside of the SSB. He was a minimal security risk, but this matter was so important its management was in the hands of his superiors’ superiors. Men he didn’t know and who didn’t know him. He suddenly felt very expendable.

  Carver opened the case and turned it towards him so that he could see its contents.

  ‘Doesn’t look like much,’ he said.

  Carver smiled. ‘Trust me. It’ll look a lot more impressive when it goes off. But you won’t want to be around to see it.’

  The Major grunted and closed the lid of the case. ‘So we’re finished here. I will guarantee your safety until we are back across the border. But if I were you, I would stay away from the men. They will not be as understanding as I am.’

  Carver’s smile turned cold. ‘Don’t worry about me, Major. But if you value your men so much, you’d better warn them to stay away from me.’

  ‘As I said: we are finished here. There is to be no more killing.’

  ‘Not, quite finished,’ Carver corrected him and for a second the Major felt a sudden urge to reach for his pistol. The woman’s words had a chill frost of anticipation about them. ‘The prisoners,’ she said. ‘Before we leave, I want to see them dead.’

  CHAPTER 21

  Frank Marinucci awoke coughing blood onto the snow. Each spasm felt like being stabbed in the chest as something inside him dug and bit with every movement. Eventually the coughing fit cleared and with it the worst of the pain, leaving only a dull throbbing and the stale, meaty taste of his own blood in his mouth. Only then did he have the presence of
mind to check if anyone had witnessed his resurrection.

  No, he was alone—left for dead in the snow by Carver and her Indian cronies.

  He levered himself to his feet, wincing at the renewed pain in his chest but momentarily more alarmed by the numb stiffness in his joints. If he had lain unconscious for much longer, he may never have woken up at all. He half walked and half crawled into the shelter of the helicopter’s rear compartment and slumped into one of the sling seats.

  Grimacing with pain he unfastened the heavy double zipper of his jacket. Underneath, behind the tabard of his quilted trousers, a thick grey circle of material was tucked into his waistband. Marinucci pulled it out and dropped it onto the deck. Carver’s three nine-millimetre slugs bounced across the floor.

  His makeshift bullet-proof vest had done its job, but only just. The woven Kevlar and steel strands of the rescue balloon had managed to stop Carver’s shots penetrating, but under his thermal undershirt, his chest was a mass of bloodshot purple beneath the sparse and greying hairs.

  He felt like shit. His wounded leg no longer troubled him, but only because its dull ache had been eclipsed by more acute trauma. He wanted to lie down and sleep—just let his body turn its energies inwards for a few hours—but he knew that was not an option.

  He forced himself to move around the cabin, stretching his stiff joints and rubbing his hands like a miser, trying to get some blood back into his frozen fingers. After several minutes the tips of two fingers on his left hand remained disconcertingly numb and white. He reckoned that he could stand losing a couple of fingerprints to frostnip if that was all that happened by the end of the day. He would steady his rifle on a blackened stump if it meant he could get a shot off at that bitch Carver.

  Two dead soldiers lay on the floor of the chopper: Tej’s handiwork, no doubt. Marinucci scooped up their weapons, stuffing spare magazines into his pockets until they bulged. He slung one rifle across his back and carried the second. He looked like a B-movie hero from some Hollywood revenge fantasy, but he didn’t care because that was exactly what he was.

  He noticed something glinting in the snow just outside the hatch. It was Tej’s kukri. Marinucci slipped it through the belt of his webbing and limped off towards the crashed plane and the entrance to the crevasse.

  The crimpled nose of the crashed Fairchild was still visible above the snow. The glass panes of the windshield were all shattered and the cockpit itself filled with snow. A pit had been dug down one side of the plane as far as the two metre square cargo door. Beyond that the steel and aluminium fuselage of the plane dove down into the crevasse below like a tunnel straight to the underworld.

  Marinucci clambered into the pit and peered over the sill of the cargo door. Al was quiet. The inside of the plane was much as he remembered it from the previous day, except for the steep angle at which it had fallen. Most of the chairs had been removed by the survivors during their days of solitude after the crash to maximise the space in their cramped shelter. The plastic walls were slick, but the Indians had rigged a rope ladder that led down into the darkness below. Marinucci edged down it. Slowly he worked his way down, keeping one hand free and his rifle raised. He just hoped that he didn’t meet anyone coming up, or that if he did, it was Carver.

  But the journey down was uneventful. Soon Marinucci reached the ragged ring of metal where the tail of the plane had been ripped off during the crash. He was still a good twenty feet above the floor of the crevasse. What had become the “roof” of the tortured plane was jammed tight against the crevasse wall and the rope ladder continued out, unprotected, for the remaining distance to the icy floor.

  He stared at the drop below: the point of no return. He could still turn back; maybe he could make it back to the warmth of the lake cavern. Then he heard something that made his mind up for him. A child’s cry.

  Hadeeqa, the little girl, was still alive!

  One of the Fairchild’s small ports faced down the length of the crevasse. Marinucci hung on the rope ladder, trying to catch a glimpse of Hadeeqa or any of the other prisoners. The crevasse ran roughly East-West across the glacier. It was surprisingly broad at its base, almost twenty feet wide at its widest point. It seemed to extend right through the glacier to the rock beneath. Marinucci could see dark shards of granite mixed in with the glassy fracture planes of the huge glacial rent.

  The crevasse was like a grotto of mirrors. Every surface seemed to glitter with sparkling reflections and the shadows of people milling just outside his field of vision.

  Then he saw her. Millicent Carver strode into the middle of the crevasse next to a big soldier with tremendous facial whiskers. They seemed to be in the middle of a heated discussion, but although their voices echoed off the ice it was impossible to hear what they were saying.

  Carver was joined by another soldier who led a ragged bunch of prisoners, all hobbled hand and foot by plastic zip ties. Campbell was easy to spot because of his size, as was Tej immediately next to him. Then they were joined by the others: Hadeeqa clutching Doctor Keyes, Garrett and finally the Frenchman, Morcellet, dragged unceremoniously across the floor and dumped, semi-conscious, at the end of the line.

  Carver raised her machine pistol. She panned it along the line before settling on the tiny, shuddering form of Hadeeqa Khamas. Jesus H Christ! Marinucci thought. This was a firing squad. Carver was covering her tracks.

  ‘NO!’

  Doctor Keyes’s shout was unmistakable. He flung himself in front of Hadeeqa. Carver just shrugged and trained her MP-5 on him instead. The gun thundered in her hand and everything that Doctor Phillip Keyes had ever been burst out through the back of his head in a spray of bloody chunks.

  Hadeeqa screamed and threw herself on the body of her would-be protector. Carver dropped the muzzle of the gun a fraction and a cold smile spread across her lips. Her finger tightened on the trigger.

  Marinucci fired straight through the glass of the view port. Bullets struck stinging chips of ice from the wall of the crevasse behind Carver’s head and she dived for cover. Marinucci tracked her with a barrage of fire, throwing up a trail of shattered ice and sparks where the bullets ricocheted off the granite beneath.

  He ran his magazine dry in seconds and slammed a fresh one home but when he sighted along the barrel, Carver was gone. The body of Phillip Keyes lay where it had fallen in the middle of the crevasse but the rest of the prisoners had managed to crawl away to whatever cover they could find.

  ‘Damn it!’ he swore. He’d blown his only advantage, the element of surprise, with nothing to show for it. Carver was still out there and he hadn’t even managed to save Keyes.

  He heard a noise below him an instant before a volley of shots tore up the inside of the plane. They missed him by inches, so close he could feel the supersonic shockwave as they passed. Shouts in Hindi below him told him that he had been spotted.

  His wounded leg throbbed and he doubted if he could make it back up the rope ladder; he couldn’t outrun a bullet in any case. There was only one way to go.

  Marinucci dropped from the rope ladder just in time as a fusillade of small arms fire turned his impromptu sniper’s nest into Swiss cheese.

  An Indian soldier appeared below him with his rifle raised. Whatever he had been expecting it probably wasn’t a size ten boot driven with all the force of a plummeting, Australian engineer. Marinucci smashed into him before he could get a shot off. They rolled together like wrestling drunks before Marinucci got his rifle between himself and his enemy and jammed his finger down on the trigger. At point-blank range the burst of automatic fire nearly cut the Indian in two.

  Marinucci pushed the corpse away and hunkered down behind a rocky outcrop, breathing heavily and on the lookout for the rest of the commandoes.

  The crevasse was deathly quiet. Carver and the remaining soldiers had gone to ground father down the crevasse where jagged, icy outcrops provided good cover.

  He had been lucky so far, but now he was toe to toe with an elite unit of Sp
ecial Forces.

  CHAPTER 22

  Rose, McCarthy, Gibbons and Khamas raced through the darkness. They had been following the tunnel for over an hour—winding steadily upwards and heading generally south as far as Rose could tell—when the sound of gunfire shattered the subterranean silence.

  Rose played scenarios out in his mind as he scrambled along the uneven, rocky corridor. None of his ideas made sense; all he knew was that if there was a gunfight, he didn’t want to get trapped in the tunnel with his only exit the sheer drop off the face of the cliff.

  Light, artificial light, stated to beckon them onwards with ghostly, luminescent fingers. Soon Rose was able to switch off his torch and advanced more cautiously with their only weapon, the nine-millimetre semi-automatic, cocked and ready.

  The tunnel stopped abruptly at a sharp junction. Beyond, the granite walls gave way to ice. Rose felt like he was emerging from the subway into a world transformed by an ice age. Huge columns and glittering buttresses of ice reached towards a ceiling that was lost in darkness. Fresh snow covered an uneven, rocky floor. The whole space was lit by the reflections from some unseen light source farther down the broad ice-highway. The illumination was dim, but after an hour of the tunnel’s darkness lit only by a solitary torch beam, Rose’s new surroundings glittered like Piccadilly Circus. The overall impression was like walking through the alleyways of downtown Manhattan, only the skyscrapers had been replaced by icebergs.

  ‘A crevasse,’ Rose exclaimed. ‘We’ve come right through the cliff and into the bowl of the glacial cirque.’

  ‘McCarthy joined him and gazed suspiciously into the darkness above as if she was not sure that their new surroundings constituted any kind of improvement.

  ‘If it wasn’t so damn cold, I’d say, “Out of the frying pan...” Where the hell are we?’

  ‘We’re somewhere underneath, or rather inside, the glacier,’ Rose explained. ‘Your plane crashed in what’s called a cirque. It’s a natural bowl of rock formed by the seasonal freezing and thawing of the ice. We’ve cut through the lip of the bowl and into some kind of crevasse system in the glacier itself.’