by Peter Heath
The Chinese were there, all right. A battalion of them camped against the base of the jagged precipice which he was peering over. They were settling down for the night, their fires of yak dung glowing cheerfully in the thin cold air. They were a pretty threadbare-looking bunch . . . strictly light infantry from the look of the two old, Russian-made trucks parked side-by-side in front of the largest tent. A line of World War II howitzers—the horse-drawn variety—was drawn up in a loose formation on the outskirts of the tent village. The People’s Republic wasn’t wasting time or money on its Indian border troops—not with Viet Nam at one end and Russia on the other to keep them occupied.
“What fools these slant-eyed sons of goats are,” Da Tenzing now whispered into Jason’s ear. “Only a headless chicken would build his nest under a wall of ice!”
The Sherpa moved off in the darkness, and Jason heard some stifled laughter. Whatever he had in mind, it wasn’t going to improve the spirits of their Chinese brothers down below, thought Jason.
The muffled sounds of packs being opened made him withdraw from his vantage point. With Jason’s money and Da Tenzing’s experience as a guerilla fighter in Burma, the Sherpas had come well-supplied with the special weapons needed for their mission. Swiftly the men broke out packages of plastic explosives, detonating caps, and reels of wire. One by one they vanished into the shadows on top of the ice cornice. The sound of ice-axes picking into the frozen snow reached Jason’s ears. Then the men returned trailing the wire.
“Down the slope! Quickly!” Tenzing urged.
Unreeling the wire behind them, they scrambled and slid until their feet touched firmer ground. Tenzing called a halt.
“An unfortunate accident.” His white teeth flashed in the darkness. “Caused by the stupidity of their officers. In the spring the ice will melt. They will be found. Perhaps by the wolves before their thrice-cursed brothers.”
Tenzing struck a match and, in the light cast by its glow, touched the two wires to the contact points on the detonator.
The result was terrifying and swift.
With an ear-shattering roar the charges erupted. The ground rose up and slugged Jason in the face. Through the buzzing in his ears he heard a slow and rising thunder. The whole opposite side of the cliff was giving way; a million tons of ice, snow and rock were hurtling onto the Chinese encampment. The thunder continued for many minutes. Then absolute silence. They started climbing back up the face at Tenzing’s command.
Jason stared down at the patchwork quilt of snow and rock that half-filled the valley below, a white blanket of death covering a thousand Chinese soldiers . . . soldiers who had deserved, perhaps, a better fate than the one caused by their own carelessness. He turned away. It was time to go on.
The Sherpas led the way through a lunar-like landscape of boulders and outcroppings, the deposits left by retreating glaciers of a million years ago. Then, roped together, they crossed snow-fields whose glittering surfaces were crisscrossed by yawning crevasses. The bright full moon disappeared behind a range of distant peaks, leaving them in darkness. The sky began to show the beginnings of dawn. In spite of his conditioning, Jason constantly fought the desire to wearily fall in his tracks . . . to sleep, with every step. At last, as the first rays of the sun colored the peaks to the east, Da Tenzing called a halt.
“The valley of Lake Manasarovar lies below,” the Sherpa said simply. “We will rest here.”
As tired as he was, Jason waited for the sun to pierce the shadowy landscape that lay below. He had come halfway around the world, he had seen innocent people murdered and his career ruined . . . and now he would see the reason.
The sun rose over the mountain-ringed bowl, throwing its flat surface into harsh relief. The lake was large, and its fingers spread across the valley like spokes on a wheel. Its waters were flat and limitlessly blue in the morning calm. Nothing moved on its surface and nothing moved along its shore. It was a timeless, empty scene. It was a world that had existed forever, a world in which man had not intruded. The valley was empty!
The blood rose in his head, and he felt like smashing something with his bare fist. It was a great joke on them. A wild goosechase that made Wrong-Way Corrigan look right. A silly, stupid one-man operation that would keep them laughing for months inside the CIA’s employees’ lounges. He had started with no proof . . . he was finishing with no proof. It was hilarious. The Chinese had won the game.
A cool hand gripped his shoulder. “Listen,” said Cyber, his green eyes full of some kind of special concentration.
Then Jason heard it.
It was the distant but unmistakable sound of an airplane, the steady throb of piston-driven engines. A speck appeared far to the East. It grew steadily larger until Jason’s eyes could resolve a familiar shape. It was an old C-47, the military version of the DC-3, the two-engined workhorse of the last World War.
Now it was circling over Lake Manasarovar, spiraling down toward the flat desert floor, Red Chinese markings clearly visible on its brown wing-tips. The pilot lined up along an arm of the lake, dropped his flaps, and brought her in. Instead of fishtailing wildly across the supposedly rugged surface of the makeshift landing place, the aircraft touched down smoothly and rolled straight. In a few seconds it was taxiing up to what looked, from Jason’s vantage point, like a low hill with a few sparse bushes crowning its top. Then the pilot cut his engines and the plane rolled to a stop.
Then something strange happened.
The hill moved. It stretched like a thin sheet of gauze and came apart and, at the same time, Jason’s eyes captured the true perspective of the scene which they had failed to perceive moments ago. He was looking at a well-camouflaged building. A low, concrete-walled structure covered with a skillfully designed net, supported by long bamboo poles. From two miles away it blended perfectly into the floor of the valley.
With his binoculars, Jason swept over the area. Other shapes resolved themselves—a whole complex of squat, one-story buildings floated through the shimmering heat. They were all camouflaged beautifully. The largest building was attached to an open, barbed-wire-enclosed compound with low towers on the perimeter. Tiny figures moved aimlessly across its bare surface. It looked like a prison camp. He swung back to the transport plane.
Its clamshell doors were opening, and the Chinese ground crew was swarming out of the building. A group of men started climbing down the short ladder from the plane, some of them in the drab military uniforms of the classless Chinese People’s Army. Two of them were dressed in western clothes and, judging from the handshakes and bows, they seemed to be the big wheels. The whole group started toward the building. Then Jason’s hand tightened around the binoculars—one of them had stopped. He turned around, and Jason caught the distant flash of carrot-red hair. Otto Krupt was paying a visit to his hardworking friend, Dr. Hsin Lau. The group moved away and Jason, his mind working rapidly, scrambled down behind the ledge where Da Tenzing and his men were snoring peacefully under the rays of the hot morning sun.
The Sherpa was awake and on his feet instantly. When Jason had described the situation, he moved up the ledge to have a look for himself. He came back down not looking as pleased as the night before.
“There are many Chinese, and they protect themselves with machine guns,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” agreed Jason, “except that the last thing they are expecting is what we’re going to give them—a heavenly display of the wrath of the gods calculated to make their superstitious eyeballs pop out.”
* * *
Chapter †
FOURTEEN
THE MOON HUNG on silver threads of wind-blown snow behind the twisted finger of Nanda Devi, its light varnishing the icy surface of the valley below. A keen, cold wind knifed down through the passes, raising swirls of dust up toward the black night sky, and lashed the surface of Lake Manasarovar into a white-toothed froth. Nothing moved except the wind. The sound of an occasional low moan came from the direction of the prison compound.
The Sherpas were concentrated at the other end of the airstrip, ready to assault the machine gun emplacements that protected its open flank. Da Tenzing knew his business. The men were armed with lightweight mortars, grenades, burp guns, and what Tenzing called “the stinger,” a forty-millimeter recoilless rifle, apparently smuggled into India and sold on the black market and secured as the spoils of some forgotten engagement in Viet Nam.
Jason had a few toys of his own: phosphorous grenades, a Thompson sub-machine gun, and a rucksack full of plastiques, each with a radio-controlled detonator. Cyber, as usual, went empty-handed. The man from the future had never, to Jason’s knowledge, picked up a weapon, except to examine it as if it were some kind of medieval curiosity . . . worthy of children, perhaps, but useless to him.
On the other hand, without Cyber’s help, Jason would never have completed his machinery, the machinery that was now resting three miles away on a high ledge under the peak of Nanda Devi. They had built it out of wood, tin cans, and electrical tape; it was the weirdest-looking contraption that man or gods had ever seen. A home-made rocket ten feet long and a foot in diameter . . . except where the skin bulged in the wrong places. It was sitting on a makeshift trough that angled toward an imaginary point a half-mile above the center of the lake. It was a two-stage affair, powered by a solid fuel of Cyber’s concocting. It was a combination of gunpowder, high explosive, and pulverized rock. “Naturally occurring silicates and nitrates,” Cyber had explained. The whole mess had been bound into two solid lumps with a rubber raincoat melted over a well-hidden slow fire. The payload? Well, that was something else again, and that something he would soon see.
Jason didn’t have long to wait. Thirty seconds later, a shower of sparks appeared on the distant ridge. The home-made time fuse had ignited stage one on schedule. Trailing a plume of fire, his rocket mounted into the night sky. It pitched over into its pre-planned arc as the burning fuel changed its center of gravity—a primitive but effective guidance system, thought Jason. As the fiery trail reached its zenith, he began to count down the seconds on his wristwatch.
With a distant pop, the payload was ignited by the last of the burning propellant. A half-second later, Lake Manasarovar and the entire valley was ablaze with incredibly bright light. A huge, whirling ball of fire appeared in the sky over the lake. Great tentacles of red, orange and green flame shot out from the incandescent central core. It looked as if the sun had gone insane and was destroying itself.
Even Jason was impressed with his handiwork. The mixture of phosphorus and magnesium—stripped from twenty grenades—and the oil-soaked rags was providing part of the diversion they would need before the attack began. The other part was under his direction. As the fireball floated over the valley on its jury-rigged parachute, his hand poised over the radio-detonator. A few more seconds passed as the fireball consumed itself. Then, as the intense heat melted through the dynamite-filled metal core of the device, it exploded into a million glowing fragments, which quickly winked out, plunging the valley into darkness.
Jason pressed the little button on the small box, setting off the charges placed across the great snow cliffs that brooded over the arid valley. A roar went up. It was soon replaced by a growing thunder as the walls gave way and avalanched down toward the opposite shore of the lake.
“Let’s go, Adam,” Jason whispered, scrambling over the rocks that had served them as a hiding place. The display was over. If it had worked, the complex should be in an uproar. The half-educated Chinese soldiers were a superstitious lot. When the heavens blew up in their faces, there was no telling what their first reaction would be.
Jason wasn’t long in finding out.
He and Adam ran toward the main building, now a plainly visible silhouette under its truncated camouflage net. As they approached, Jason heard a strange sound. It was a low moaning, interspersed with a rapid singsong chant. Then he saw the machine-gun emplacement. It was off to their right, and the sounds emanated from its hidden interior.
As they slipped past it, Adam whispered, “The soldiers pray to their gods for protection against the mighty hand of the snake devil.” So far so good, thought Jason. But the first burst of gunfire would alert the soldiers to their earthly jobs, and then things would get a bit tricky.
Leading the way, he crossed the remaining twenty yards to the edge of the net. It was staked down with metal pegs, an easier job than cutting through wire. A yank or two and they were inside. The laboratory was directly ahead, its windows blacked out from the inside. The prison compound was behind the building.
The door was unlocked and swung open. The place looked like a hospital. Followed by Cyber, Jason went down the antiseptically clean corridor, his footsteps echoing on the tiles. The hallway led past darkened examination rooms and a couple of small labs equipped with the usual paraphernalia for the treatment of human illness. At the far end was a turn. They reached it, and Jason stuck his head out and peered around.
The Chinese are bad disciplinarians all the way around, he thought. First they don’t convince their troops that Communism is a better form of religion than devil worship; second, they allow their guards to fall asleep on guard duty. He was looking at a snoring soldier, feet propped on a desk in front of a double set of green doors. The soldier had a machine gun, and its barrel was tickling his plump belly. Jason went forward on tiptoe until he was standing over the sleeping Chinese.
As everybody says all the time—sorry about this, he thought. His arm described a short, savage arc and the side of his rigid hand caught the Oriental across the back of his neck. He eased the unconscious soldier down to the floor, relieved him of his weapon, and motioned to Cyber. As he started toward the door he heard the first burst of gunfire. It was faint and coming from the direction of the airfield. Da Tenzing and his men were going into action.
The element of surprise was still riding with them, and Jason took full advantage of it. With Cyber behind him, he kicked open the double doors and stood looking down at the startled upturned faces of the men at work below.
He was standing on a steel platform overlooking a large, concrete-walled room. The floor was covered with machinery . . . mostly electronics, with wires and cables snaking everywhere. White-coated technicians were hunched over test benches, and the steady hum of high voltage filled the air. Then Jason saw something that made his blood run cold. One side of the room was given up to a row of small, double-barred, wire-enclosed cages. The occupants of the cages moved restlessly to and fro, like the monkeys that he had seen in zoos all over the world. From time to time they uttered anguished whimpering sounds, the expressions of age-old fear and pain. They were quite naked, and their bodies were covered with angry red welts, the marks of whips.
They were—or had once been—human beings.
Next to the cages a large inclined table with heavy straps was set up. It was surrounded by test-stands full of equipment that Jason recognized. A tall, white-coated figure moved through it, his back turned. He was even more familiar. It was Dr. Hsin Lau, and he was preparing to conduct another experiment with Jason Starr’s stolen mind-control machine.
In the few seconds that had passed since his sudden appearance, only two or three of the Chinese had been alerted. Lau was still issuing instructions and the rest of the twenty or thirty people were busy with their mindless work. Then a warning yell echoed through the room. It came from Jason’s left. He swing around and saw the man who had given it—a young Chinese who was in the process of drawing a Luger out of his belt.
The
re was no time to be polite.
Jason blew his chest to smoking ribbons with a short burst from the Thompson. The Chinese screamed once and slid under a lab table. Then the room erupted into a maelstrom of running, twisting, diving figures.
On the wall next to the cages there was a rack of weapons, undoubtedly for the protection of the hardworking torturers. Jason dropped down onto the platform and let them try to get to it. It wasn’t quite fair, but it was the only way to convince them that he meant business. The Thompson stitched a pattern of death across the space in front of the gun-rack. The Chinese were quite fanatical about the whole thing; they kept on coming—and Jason kept on firing. They tried to divert him by throwing wrenches and other tools at his head, but he was well-protected by the height and the steel floor. Then they tried to electrocute him with a long, black cable that five of them carried, creeping forward across the shell-littered floor. He let them get within ten feet before he depressed the muzzle of the Thompson and ended their little party.
Then it was all over. Jason was surprised to see how few of the Chinese had decided that discretion was the better part of valor. Only three men stumbled forward out of the smoking shambles with their hands raised high over their heads. One of them was Dr. Hsin Lau.
The cold-eyed doctor stepped forward and let his hands fall to his sides. His face was an impassive mask. He looked neither startled nor particularly concerned. He looked like a man who has been annoyed by a temporary interruption. When he was standing in the middle of the floor he spoke. His English was pure, precise and cultivated, the hallmark of his British education.
“Ah, Mr. Jason Starr, if my surmise is correct . . . ? Your sudden appearance was rather startling . . . but, I must say, not totally unexpected. When your movements were traced to Simla by my good friend, Dr. Krupt, whom I believe you have met on one previous occasion, I suspected you might have gained information that would lead you here to my—ah—experimental hospital. Accordingly, I made arrangements for additional troops and protective measures. You have been a lucky man, so far.” The doctor paused. His eyes narrowed into reptilian slits. “Mr. Starr,” he continued, “it would be foolish for you to continue your one-man interference in the affairs of the Chinese government. Not only foolish—but unpleasantly fatal.” Lau’s voice sank into a malignant whisper.