Shepherd had brought a climbing rope for each of them, much to The Rope’s disgust. They also had a carabiner on their belt kits. The Rope had nothing but a pouch of resin attached to his belt. ‘So,’ he said, surveying their climbing aids and making no attempt to hide his disapproval, ‘we can be reasonably confident that we have Health and Safety covered, can we?’
‘And what exactly do you do when you fall?” asked Geordie.
The Rope grinned. ‘I don’t.’
‘Well there’s always a first time,’ said Geordie.
‘Aye,’ agreed Jock. ‘And a last.’
The Rope led them off up the track into the mountains, walking alongside the river gorge. To his surprise, Shepherd found himself struggling for breath almost at once. ‘Bloody hell, you sound like my grandad,’ Geordie said unsympathetically, ‘and he died of emphysema.’
‘We’re at almost 15,000 feet here,’ The Rope said. ‘It takes a while to adjust to the altitude and some people take longer than others. There’s no shame in it and no apparent pattern either; sometimes the strongest blokes are the first to suffer. Most people acclimatise fairly quickly but if you do really start to suffer from altitude sickness, the only cure is to go down to a lower level.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, but tell me, why is the water that aquamarine?’ Shepherd said, playing for time while he got his breath back. ‘I’ve never see water that blue before.’
‘It’s caused by billions of tiny flakes of schist and mica ground from the Himalayan rock by the glaciers and carried down by the meltwater that feed the river,’ The Rope said. ‘When the sunlight strikes the water it makes the whole river sparkle like a jewel.’
As they walked on, Jimbo pointed to a series of cables spanning the chasm ahead of them. ‘What the hell’s that?’
The Rope smiled. ‘It’s called a rope-way, and it’s the only way across the gorge other than climbing down one side and back up the other. Don’t worry, it’s not quite as perilous as it looks.’
‘For some reason, the word “quite” in that sentence, doesn’t reassure me,’ Jimbo said. As they got closer, they saw that the rickety wooden lean-to at the near end of the ropes housed a precarious looking cable car barely big enough for two of them to squash into.
‘Is this thing safe?’ Geordie said, eyeing it with suspicion.
‘It’s still up in the air at the moment, isn’t it?’ The Rope said.
‘That’s what worries me - it’s an awful long way down.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s not the fall that’ll kill you,’ said Geordie. ‘It’s hitting the ground that does the damage.’
The Rope ended the discussion by clambering into the cable car and Shepherd joined him. They pulled another rope to begin winching them across the gorge. It wasn’t the most relaxing of journeys because the car shook, rattled and wobbled from side to side as it made its slow, jerky journey across the gorge. Looking down, Shepherd could see the river so far below them that it looked like an aquamarine thread. ‘These rope-ways are an absolute lifeline to the people here,’ The Rope said. They move people, and every conceivable kind of goods, even livestock, by them.’
They waited while the others hauled the cable car back and crossed, and then moved on. Further up the valley, the gorge ended in a sheer cliff down which a waterfall plunged hundreds of feet in a foaming avalanche of white water that raised a cloud of spray that hung in the air for hundreds of yards around it. ‘The first climb,’ The Rope said, gesturing to the rock face alongside the waterfall. ‘I though we’d start with something gentle and build up from there.’
‘Blood and sand,’ Geordie said. ‘If that’s gentle, I’m not sure I want to be around when we get to severe.’
The Rope went first, dipping his fingers into his pouch of resin from time to time to aid his grip as he scaled the cliff, moving with a smooth confidence, pausing briefly to scan the next stretch of rock and then moving upwards again, making use of the smallest cracks and projections as hand- and foot-holds. He free-climbed but trailed a safety rope for the others as they followed him, their movements slow and hesitant by comparison.
Shepherd was barely aware of the biting cold of the air because he was concentrating so intensely. When he reached the top, the muscles of his forearms were still trembling from the effort and he was finding it hard to breathe again. He looked around while he waited for the others to follow him. Beyond the head of the waterfall, the river ran through an ice-gouged hanging valley, weaving a braided course around the vast drifts and moraines of grey gravel and ice-shattered rock swept down from the mountains in the spring floods caused by the snow-melt. At the far end of the valley, right against the wall of the mountains, he could see the sunlight reflecting from the black, still waters of a lake.
‘There are hundreds of those glacier lakes hereabouts,’ The Rope said, following his gaze. ‘But they all want watching. Every now and again one bursts without warning, with catastrophic consequences for those living further down the valleys.’
‘Thanks,’ Jock said, as he hauled himself over the edge of the cliff. ‘You’re a real bundle of joy, you know that?’
The light was beginning to fade and they turned back at that point, using their ropes and carabiners to abseil back down the rock face they had so laboriously climbed and trekking back down the valley to the police post where the Nepali police had indeed prepared a curry for them, served up with the Nepali beer, Chang, and the fiery spirit, Raksi, distilled from fermented millet.
They spent the next few days enjoying their splendid isolation. They left early each morning and spent each day climbing a different virgin rock face with The Rope. Each time he went first, then lowered a safety rope and encouraged the rest of the team to follow him, making as little use of the rope as they could manage. Whenever one of them got into difficulties over a move, The Rope would give them a little time to solve it themselves and if that failed he would then use his incredible body strength to pull them over the snag until they could start climbing again. Slowly all of them gained in skill and confidence.
They arrived back at the police post on the fifth night to find the garrison on stand-to with the road barricaded and all passers-by were being stopped and searched. The Rope spoke to them in Nepali and then relayed the information to the others. ‘There’s been an incident to the east,’ he said. ‘They won’t say what it was, but it was clearly pretty serious. They are searching for a band of terrorists who are believed to be heading in this direction.’
Shepherd immediately contacted the Embassy from the radio in the police post and when he broke the connection, his face was grim. ‘The Gurkha recruiting party has been ambushed and Gul has been killed, along with several others,’ he said. ‘The Gurkha pension money’s been stolen. The perpetrators are a gang of about twenty Maoist terrorists who are now thought to be heading back towards the tribal areas in the west of Nepal.’
‘No bloody way,’ said Jimbo.
‘Yeah, this is my attempt at humour,’ said Shepherd. ‘Gul’s dead. The bastards killed him.’
‘And so are they,’ growled Jock. ‘They just don’t know it yet.’
The Rope and the patrol had a quick Chinese Parliament to sort out a plan of action; whether they contributed to the discussion or not, everyone took joint ownership of the plan, ensuring that there could be no recriminations after the event.
The Rope took a map from his backpack and traced a route with his finger. ‘They won’t come this way,’ he said. ‘The most likely route for them to take is the parallel valley to the south of us.’
‘So can we intercept them?’ Shepherd said.
‘We would need to climb a three thousand foot sheer wall of rock, but it can be done, if we’re lucky.’
‘Any objections to that idea?’ Shepherd said, but one look around the circle of grim, determined faces was enough to answer his question. With the exception of Jock, they had only known Gul for a handful of days, but they had formed a strong bond with hi
m in that time. But in any case, as a former member of the Regiment they owed him the same duty that they would owe to any SAS man: vengeance on his killers. One look at Jock’s ferocious expression told Shepherd that any Maoist terrorists they encountered were unlikely to continue breathing for long.
They tooled up at once, travelling very light with only their belt kits and weapons. Shepherd, Geordie and Jimbo carried an AR-15 Colt Commando model with a retractable butt. Jock had the patrol heavy weapon, an M-203 Armalite with an underslung grenade launcher.
Almost the first thing every SAS soldier learns is that weapons are never slung except in the most unusual circumstances. They must always be ready for immediate use, so the sling swivels on their weapons were invariably removed to make the weapons lighter. But the fact they were climbing meant that the weapons had to be carried on their backs so they quickly made makeshift slings from parachute cord. They had fixed up The Rope with a spare Sterling 9mm sub-machine gun from the Nepali police post, the boss insisting Spider sign a ledger for the weapon and three magazines of ammunition to satisfy the bureaucracy in Kathmandu. Each of them - even The Rope - also had a coiled climbing rope slung over his shoulder.
They arrived at the foot of the cliff in darkness and The Rope began climbing even before it got fully light. All of them struggled at times, but Jimbo found it the most difficult, struggling to haul his big frame up the often sheer rock face. They paused to eat some rations, clinging to a narrow ledge, then carried on climbing. Shepherd’s fingers were bruised and bleeding and his forearms and shoulders were sore with the effort of hauling himself upwards. But with a cold, furious determination he kept on moving up, working his way from handhold to handhold, each one marked by the faint traces of resin that The Rope’s fingers had left as he pioneered the route.
Shepherd was moving up fast, gaining in confidence, but had just released his hold with his left hand when the flake of rock he was gripping with his right suddenly sheared off. He shouted a warning as the rock plummeted towards the others climbing below him, and felt himself beginning to fall away from the cliff. He made a frantic grab with his left hand and his fingers scrabbled at the rock, then caught. There was a stab of agonising pain as a fingernail was torn off, but his grip held. He hung there for a few seconds, his heart beating wildly, then found a hold for his right hand and, having checked that his comrades below were unhurt by the falling rock, began to climb again.
Snow flurries blew around him from time to time and ice that had formed in shaded crevasses was another hazard, but he kept working his way upwards, focusing only on the next hold, the next move, and avoiding the temptation to keep looking up to see how far there still was to climb.
About a hundred feet from the top they encountered a smooth slab with few visible handholds at the top of which was an overhang - a ledge jutting out at right angles to the cliff. The SAS men paused while The Rope moved slowly ahead, feeling for any tiny crevice or projection from the rock face that would serve as a handhold, inching slowly upwards.
‘Bloody hell,’ Jock said, his chest heaving. ‘The guy is like Spiderman.’
‘Or Spiderman’s dad anyway,’ Shepherd said. ‘We’re in our twenties and he’ll be drawing his pension in a year or two, but he’s leaving us for dead on this climb.’
It took The Rope forty minutes to negotiate those few feet of smooth rock, but at last he had reached the underside of the overhang. He paused there for a couple of minutes, giving his aching muscles what rest he could and bracing himself for the next effort, then he jammed the fingers of his left hand into a narrow crevice, using his thumb to wedge them in place, and launched himself outwards and upwards. The first time his scrabbling fingers fell just short and he dropped back, crashing against the cliff face with an impact that made Shepherd wince, but The Rope merely steadied himself, took a deep breath, and then launched himself again. This time his flailing fingertips caught the very tip of the ledge and held firm. He adjusted his grip a fraction, braced his feet against the smooth rock face for what little extra traction they could give and then, in one movement, pulled his left hand free of the crevice and grabbed at the ledge. He was now hanging, parallel to the ground almost 3000 feet below, but in another astonishing demonstration of his upper body strength, he pulled himself up as easily as a man doing chin-ups in the gym, swung a leg over the ledge and next moment was kneeling on it, lowering a rope to Shepherd and the others, waiting below.
Half-climbing, half-hauled by The Rope, each man in turn joined him on the ledge and from there to the ridge line was a relatively easy climb up a deeply-fissured rock face. It had taken them all day but they finally reached the top. They inched their way forward to look down the other side and in the fading light they could see faint smudges of smoke drifting up from camp fires on the valley floor below them.
They ate the rest of their rations as darkness fell and then, using the ropes, they descended the rock face in stages. Enough moonlight was filtering through the cloud cover to help them navigate their way down the cliff, but the dense thickets of rhododendrons and clumps of scrub alders along the valley floor made the darkness there almost impenetrable, though the faint smell of wood smoke on the breeze showed that the terrorists’ campsite was not far away.
They held a brief whispered discussion at the foot of the cliff. ‘The terrain and the vegetation may make it difficult for us to infiltrate undetected,’ Shepherd said. ‘Without a recce, we don’t know what sentries they’ve got posted and twenty of them will be a challenge if they’re alerted before we get to them. So I think we’d be better moving a little further west. We’ll lie up there and intercept them as they move off after daybreak.’
‘Agreed,’ Jock said. ‘A linear ambush: minimum effort, maximum results.’
They moved away from the cliff, threading their way around the densest patches of rhododendrons, until they reached a track, the dusty ground underfoot shining pale grey in the moonlight. Shepherd turned to The Rope. ‘We’ll set up the ambush here, you stay in cover while we deal with the bastards that killed Gul.’
‘Like hell I will,’ The Rope said. ‘He’s family, I’m family. I’m in this with you.’
Shepherd grinned. ‘I thought you’d say that, but I had to make the offer!’
They chose a place where the track ran through a broad clearing and lay up in cover at the edge of the undergrowth, forming a linear ambush, all on the same side of the track, in a long line and spaced at twenty-yard intervals. Shepherd and Jock stationed themselves at either end with The Rope in the middle, flanked by Geordie and Jimbo.
As the first greying of the sky signalled the approach of dawn, they settled themselves, lying prone with their weapons at the ready and began the long wait.
About an hour after the sun had risen, Shepherd, closest to the terrorists’ camp, heard the first faint sounds of movement and a few minutes later, the first of them came into view, moving cautiously, the barrel of his gun tracking his gaze as he scanned the ground ahead and to either side. Shepherd lay motionless as the man passed, unseeing, within twenty yards of him. He could have killed him in an instant but that would have alerted the rest of the gang and instead he allowed him to pass by. He watched man after man move past in single file, with the two in the middle of the line carrying bulging sacks over their shoulders. Shepherd kept his finger resting on the trigger, waiting for the first shots from Jock that would trigger the ambush.
As the last gang-member came level with him, Shepherd heard the first whip-crack sounds of shots as Jock opened up. Shepherd began firing a heartbeat later, and heard the rattle of gunfire from the others in the same instant. Cool and methodical, Shepherd fired short, targeted bursts, killing man after man. Some returned fire but they lacked the SAS men’s discipline and accuracy, and most of the rounds merely shredded the undergrowth around them. Half a dozen turned and ran, three of them cut down instantly as they did so, but the others plunged into the rhododendrons and were lost from sight.
As the last of the remaining terrorists caught in the open was cut apart by simultaneous bursts from Jock and Jimbo, the SAS men leapt to their feet and sprinted across the clearing, diving into the undergrowth in pursuit of the escaping terrorists. The rhododendrons were almost impenetrable in places, but Shepherd could follow the track of one escaper easily by the bruised and broken leaves and stems he had caused as he ran for his life. There were bloodstains on the ground and a few leaves he had brushed against too, showing that he was wounded, but Shepherd was taking no chances. He checked as he came to an open area surrounded by more thickets of rhododendrons and began scanning the vegetation, using all his jungle fighting experience to refocus his eyes, looking through the foliage rather than at it. On the far side of the clearing, he saw a brief flash of fabric, pale against the dark green leaves and an instant later Shepherd’s rifle barked twice and the body of the terrorist crashed backwards, his own weapon sending a burst of fire upwards into the sky. Still cautious, Shepherd moved forward and made certain with a double-tap to the man’s head.
As he made his way back towards the clearing where the ambush had been set, he heard another double-tap away to his left.
He paused, calling to the others to warn them of his approach, before emerging into the open, rather than risk being shot by mistake. He found Jock, Jimbo and Geordie in all-round defence with one of the sacks on the ground beside them. ‘Where’s The Rope?’ Shepherd said.
‘He went that way, in hot pursuit,’ Jock said gesturing towards the undergrowth. A moment later they heard another double-tap and soon afterwards The Rope appeared, carrying the other sack over his shoulder. ‘I reckon it was the leader carrying that one,’ he said, ‘but I put paid to him.’ He opened the sack, peered inside and then brandished a fistful of hundred dollar bills at them. ‘Life can be a bitch sometimes,’ he said. ‘All through my entire career in the Army and then the Regiment, I used to pray that I’d get a chance to ambush a paymaster one day. Now I’ve finally done it and got my hands on a bloody fortune, and I’ve got no option but to give it back.’
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