Valley of Death

by Scott Mariani

  Then, running his eye up the slope of the still-intact bank to his right, he spotted an incongruous object catching the sunlight about three hundred yards ahead. And he knew he was in the right place.

  Chapter 51

  It was Kabir’s abandoned helicopter. A Bell Ranger, its bright red fuselage dulled by dust. Or what remained of its fuselage. The aircraft was perched near the edge of the bank overlooking the river bed, the key landmark Ben had been hoping to find. Its landing spot was almost exactly bang-on the coordinates Kabir had added to the map. But if he and his associates had found anything up here before they were attacked, there was certainly no sign of it now.

  Ben stopped the car in the river bed below the stationary chopper, turned off the engine and got out into the sand-dry heat. There was dead silence except for the whisper of the wind. Nothing moving but the wave of the odd bush and shrub. The white sun in the pale sky above him, bleached rocks and nothingness all around him.

  He scrambled up the slope, dislodging larger stones and making little slides of smaller ones. Reaching the aircraft he could see why Samarth had made little effort to have its remains salvaged, because after three weeks of locals stripping it for spare parts or scrap metal to sell, not much was left but a bare carcass. The main and tail rotors were missing, probably now doing wind-turbine duty on some remote farm in these hills, while the seats graced somebody’s living room. Ben wondered what possible rustic kind of use a fuselage panel could have. A roof for a pig pen, maybe.

  Standing next to the chopper on the top of the bank he slowly turned in a circle and got his bearings. The winding river bed was heading roughly south–north. A hundred yards further along its twisty course, a big clump of dry-looking thorn bushes was partially blocking the way ahead. To the east, the intact river bank flattened out into a broad, featureless plain dotted here and there with trees and rocks. North-west, across the other side of the river bed where the demolished section of the opposite bank had once been, the sheer drop opened up a barren vista that extended for miles.

  The only direction that offered limited visibility was due west, where the intact part of the opposite bank formed a flat-topped rise blocking his view. But generally he was able to reconnoitre most of the terrain for a good distance around. And he could see nothing moving, not a living soul anywhere. If he’d been expecting to spot a contingent of Takshak’s men organised into a treasure hunt party, busily digging away with picks and shovels while guarding their prisoner tethered up nearby, he’d have been bitterly disappointed. But that would have been too easy.

  Once more he took out Kabir’s printout of Trafford’s map, and spent a few moments studying it. Even accounting for the landslip that might have demolished the opposite river bank since the map had been drawn, something wasn’t quite right. While the coordinates seemed to correspond and the line of the river looked about the same as the sketch on the map, some of the other topographical detail appeared to clash. Like the range of hills over to the south-west, which didn’t feature on the map at all. Ben wondered whether Kabir had noticed the anomaly, too.

  But there was little to be learned by standing there gazing at the landscape. Ben scrambled back down the slope and began exploring the area on foot, starting in smaller circles around the car and gradually expanding his search for clues, tracks, anything of interest.

  It wasn’t long before he found the first spent cartridge case lying on the ground, tarnished and dusty. Then the second, and the third, and more, until he’d picked up over twenty and was satisfied they were all the same type of military surplus 7.62 NATO rifle round that had been used by Takshak’s gang in the attack against Kabir, Manish and Sai. Some of the cases were flattened as though they’d been driven over or crushed under a heavy boot. Ben could tell from the scatter patterns of the ejected cartridges which way the shooters had been firing, diagonally across the river bed with the slope and the parked chopper behind them. He guessed they must have made their approach down the slope, either on foot or in off-road vehicles. Kabir and his guys must have ventured some way from the chopper by then, making them a medium-range target for the trigger-happy morons who’d opened fire on them.

  Ben began walking along the imaginary trajectory of the gunfire, eyes scanning the ground for more evidence. Forty yards, fifty, sixty. Then he stopped and bent down to pick up something small and shiny among the rocks of the river bed. He held it up to examine it more closely.

  A piece of glass from a shattered wristwatch dial. It had dried blood on it. Which could have belonged to any of the three victims, either the two who’d died here or the third who’d managed to escape the scene.

  Prem had reported second-hand from the gunmen that Kabir had fallen down a slope while making his break for it. The angles and distances told Ben that the slope in question had to be the fallen-away left river bank. A fit man, even injured, could have made it from here to the edge at a run.

  He walked over and looked down the steep valley that the landslip or earthquake had created. It was quite a drop, almost a precipice, its edge crumbly and precarious. A man would have had to be desperate to throw himself off it. Though anything was better than getting shot to pieces.

  Ben wasn’t here to solve the mystery of what had happened to Kabir, but curiosity was getting the better of him. He walked along the edge, peering down. Then he stopped, noticing something else on the ground. It was a small flat rock, smoothed by millennia of river current. Imprinted on its surface was a russet-brown handprint. The colour of blood after baking in the heat for about three weeks.

  No question, this was where Kabir had gone over. The sheerness of the incline made it impossible to see the foot of the slope. Ben tried to scramble down the incline, but after a few yards he was in danger of losing his footing on the loose rocks and tumbling all the way to the hidden bottom, which could be a long drop. He needed a rope, preferably an abseil harness too, and had neither. But if he skirted along the edge of the drop to where the river bank was still intact and made his way to the top of the rise there, he should be able to find a good vantage point from which he could observe the foot of the slope.

  The police had claimed to have searched the area, but that didn’t necessarily mean much. Ben was prepared to believe that their efforts to find Kabir’s body had been desultory at best. Which could very well mean that it was still down there. Only one way to find out.

  He reached the base of the bank and clambered up the steep rise on all fours, making little landslides as he went. It was about a forty-foot scramble to the top, and as he’d guessed, the summit of the rise gave him a pretty good view westwards and north-westwards, spanning the hills beyond the ancient river bed and the deep valley that the earthquake had carved out below. He could see all the way to the bottom, some two hundred feet down, where huge chunks of rock had piled up into mounds now thinly grown over by thorn bushes. A few trees had grown up at the foot of the valley, making it hard to observe with the naked eye.

  He wiped his hands on his trousers and delved inside his bag for the compact binoculars that accompanied him everywhere on his travels. He raised them up, twiddled the knurled focus ring for a sharp picture, and slowly scanned the thicket of trees at the bottom of the slope. He was half expecting to spot the rumpled shape of a corpse down there, not looking too pretty after three weeks in the sun.

  No sign of anything. If Kabir was down there, Ben couldn’t see him.

  But then something else caught his eye. Something he’d have missed if he hadn’t climbed up to the top of the rise.

  Two hundred yards to the west, a column of black smoke was rising.

  Chapter 52

  The source of the smoke was hidden from view by the undulations of the terrain, which rose and fell like waves. But as the old saying went, there was no smoke without fire. And whatever was burning down there, Ben wanted to investigate. He put the binoculars away, shouldered his bag and started making his way towards it, jumping and clambering over rocks, scrubby brittle v
egetation tearing at his trouser legs.

  The wind was blowing gently westwards, or else he’d have smelled the acrid stink that reached his nose as he got closer. The smell of burning rubber and diesel was one of the battlefield scents forever imprinted on his memory. He wondered what he was about to find down there.

  Some three hundred yards from the remnants of Kabir’s Bell Ranger, Ben jogged up the last of the blind rises blocking his view, and finally was able to see where the smoke was coming from. The wreck of the old Mahindra four-wheel-drive truck looked as though it had been blazing for a long time, and still had a while to go before its tyres burned away completely. Its windows were shattered and the interior was just a melted-out shell. Its blackened, heat-blistered bodywork was punched through with so many bullet holes that it looked like a colander.

  So did the body of the man who was lying nearby.

  The guy had been dead for about as long as the truck had been burning. He was sprawled out flat on his back with his left arm carbonised by the flames. He didn’t smell too good, either. Ben crouched beside the corpse and looked him over. He was Indian, lean, stringy, twenty-something with a shock of wild black hair and a long black beard, all dusty and caked in blood that had leaked from his mouth after he’d been lungshot. It was hard to tell whether that had been the bullet that killed him. He’d taken at least half a magazine full in the belly and chest. His tattered, bloody clothing was a bastardised mixture of obsolete military surplus stuff and he wore a green canvas ammunition bandolier crossways over one shoulder, bandit style. The bottle-necked rounds in the bandolier matched up to the old Russian-made AKM military rifle that lay in the dirt a few inches from his clawed, outstretched right hand. He’d probably been rattling off bullets even as he fell dead.

  The guy had not died alone. Ben found eight more corpses scattered among the rocks and bushes, in a ten-metre radius of the burning truck. All similarly bearded and scruffy and lean, armed with ex-Soviet hardware, and kitted out in guerrilla-style military surplus outfits that had obviously seen a lot of countryside. They’d all suffered a similar fate, too, pretty much shot to bits. The ground all around them was littered with spent brass. Two of them were wearing utility belts with live hand grenades still attached. This had been quite a skirmish. But against whom had they been fighting, and over what?

  Ben discovered the first part of the answer when he came across a further three bodies lying among a cluster of bullet-scarred rocks forty yards away. All three had met the same violent death. And all three had also been packing the same kind of gun, different from the ones they’d been shot with. These were old decommissioned SLRs, short for self-loading rifle. The official military appellation had been L2-A1, the squad automatic weapon version of the L1-A1 that had seen decades of service with the Indian and British armies. A squad automatic weapon was, in essence, a lightweight machine gun. Serious pieces of kit that had been released by the thousand onto the black market when the Indian military had modernised their stock.

  But what most interested Ben about the guns was that they fired the same 7.62 NATO round that had been used against Kabir and his friends.

  Examining the corpses one by one, he soon found more of interest. The first was still wearing the same Rambo T-shirt he’d had on when he and his buddy had approached Ben for a light at the Chhatta Chowk bazaar back in Delhi. A favourite garment, no doubt, though it was past its best now. Stallone’s head was a big hole where a rifle bullet had blown out its wearer’s chest cavity.

  The second body, Ben didn’t recognise. While the third was that of a particularly stumpy fellow, squat and wide. Built like a fireplug, or a fire hydrant, one of those things. Brooke’s words, when she’d described Amal’s kidnappers to him the day he’d arrived in Delhi. And very hairy, like an animal. The hairiness in question was now all matted and slicked down with blood from multiple high-velocity gunshot wounds and a grenade blast that had severed his right leg below the knee and blown a crater in the ground. Otherwise, Brooke’s description fitted the guy perfectly.

  Which meant these three belonged to Takshak’s gang.

  Ben thought back to the encounter at the bazaar. He visualised the taller man in the open-necked purple shirt who had been with Rambo that day and done all the talking. He remembered the mirror shades, the blunt features, the air of masculine confidence. The guy had been about Ben’s own height, and of similar build. Which matched Brooke’s description of the leader of the kidnap gang the night Amal had been snatched. Ben hadn’t put it together until this moment. Now he was wondering: had the guy in the purple shirt been Takshak?

  Then Ben ran back through the series of events since. Soon after the bazaar incident, Takshak had turned the tables on Prem and snatched Amal for himself. Up until that moment Prem must have instructed the gang to tail Ben and keep tabs on him, considering him a threat to the operation. Or, possibly, to find the appropriate moment to take him out of the picture entirely. If that was the case, Rambo had missed his chance now. Ben wondered if he’d been part of the original kidnap team along with his hirsute fireplug comrade, and maybe the other guy too.

  But none of those speculations could solve the riddle of what had happened here. Ben sat on a rock, lit a cigarette and thought about it. The eight dead men on the other side looked fairly hardcore, like guys who lived rough in the hills and had been doing so for most of their adult lives. They’d probably never set foot in the big city. Real bandits, Ben guessed. As opposed to Takshak’s crew, who were more of the urban guns-for-hire, loan shark, wide boy, bone-breaker and drug dealer set. If his guess was right, it looked as though shortly after arriving here, Takshak’s gang had drawn the notice of some local dacoits, who’d probably decided their territory was being invaded by some rival group and put up a fight.

  From the imbalance of casualties, three to eight, Ben had the impression that Takshak’s crew had come out decisively on top. Whereupon, the victorious survivors hadn’t hung around for long, and had evidently been in such a hurry to get away that they’d left behind a small arsenal of weaponry along with their dead. Maybe more dacoits had been incoming. Or maybe Takshak’s gang had managed to beat off a force of superior numbers, and then made their escape before they came back.

  Ben didn’t really care, either way. Three dead men among Takshak’s crew meant three fewer he’d have to deal with himself. He salvaged the best of the SLR squad weapons they’d been using, along with four full spare magazines, which he dumped in his bag. Then he walked back across the killing ground to revisit the eight dead dacoits and unclipped the hand grenades from their belts to stuff them in his bag, too. With enough munitions to start a small war, all he had to do now was track down the rest of the gang.

  And kill every last one of them.

  And find Amal. And bring him home.

  To Brooke.

  Then, as Ben was strapping up his bag, he heard a sound that made him turn and peer upwards at the sky with his hand shading his eyes.

  Chapter 53

  It was the unmistakable thud of helicopter rotors in the far distance. Scanning the horizon he caught the tiny glimmer of the incoming chopper as it reflected the morning sun. Still a very long way off, just a speck against the sky, but he had no doubt it was heading this way. The black smoke still rising from the burning truck could probably be seen for miles across the hills and rocky plateaus stretching to infinity westwards.

  Ben had no desire to make the unexpected visitors’ acquaintance until he knew who they were, and probably not then either. Easy enough to hide himself, but the huge black limo was another matter.

  He started running back towards the car. Three hundred yards across rough terrain with little time to waste. The sprint took him a minute and five seconds exactly, which was one second longer than the average time for a fit young police or military trainee. But that was on a running track, not leaping and scrambling over rough ground and rocky slopes carrying a rifle and a heavy pack. Ben reached the limo only slightly out of breat
h. He glanced up again at the sky. The chopper was closer now. Too much closer, and the big black Maybach would soon be unmissable from the air.

  He set down his weapon and bag. Got behind the wheel of the car and fired up the engine, slammed it into gear and hit the gas. The Maybach’s tyres scrabbled for grip on the loose rocks of the river bed. He didn’t have far to drive. Just a hundred yards upriver was the thick clump of thorn bushes partially blocking the way, which he’d have had to negotiate if he’d gone on in that direction. The car lurched and bounced and scraped its way towards the bushes. He steered towards the densest part of the thicket, meeting resistance at first, then giving it a little more gas to push the nose of the car deeper into the tangled mass. Once he’d forced an initial gap, the bushes parted with a lot of squealing and raking of sharp thorns against metal to engulf the front wings and the whole length of the bonnet. He yanked the gearstick into neutral, killed the engine and quickly opened his door and jumped out as the car went on rolling deeper into the bushes under its own momentum. Five tons of armoured limousine was swallowed up among the thorns as though it had never been there.

  Satisfied it was well enough hidden, Ben turned and sprinted back the hundred yards to where he’d left his rifle and bag. The chopper was a fast-growing black and yellow blob against the western sky, like a giant wasp. The screech of its turbine and the thud of its blades were becoming loud. Definitely heading right this way, and losing altitude as though it were coming in to land. There was a slender chance that he might already have been spotted by an eagle-eyed pilot or co-pilot, but he was willing to gamble.