He looked round at the men. Not one of them had moved. ‘No takers? OK, get ready. We leave in two minutes.’
Bronson shrugged a haversack on to his back. Inside it were bottles of water and half a dozen chocolate bars, plus a couple of sweaters and a handful of tools he’d bought in Leh that he thought might be useful. They left the rest of their survival equipment in the Nissan — if they had to spend the night in the open, they’d have to return to the vehicle.
‘Are you ready?’ he asked.
‘Ready and eager to get going,’ Angela said with a smile.
Bronson led the way up a gentle slope, clambering around boulders and over fallen rocks, and paused to help Angela over the last section. As he stretched out his hand to her, he saw her eyes widen as she stared at something behind him, something he obviously hadn’t noticed.
Bronson spun round. ‘What is it?’
‘There,’ Angela said, pointing directly behind him. ‘Just beyond those rocks. There’s a straight line. It looks like the corner of a building — something man-made, at any rate.’
Bronson stared at the feature she’d spotted. The rocks closer to them curved slightly outwards, and so only the very bottom of whatever lay around the corner was visible from where they were standing. But from what he could see, it did look like the base of a vertical stone wall.
‘Let’s check it out,’ he said.
‘Just over there,’ Masters gestured to an area of ground on the left-hand side of the track they’d followed for perhaps a quarter of a mile from the road.
The driver swung the wheel and braked to a halt.
Masters waved the driver of the second four-by-four to park beside it. His four men piled out and stood waiting for orders.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Break out the assault rifles. Make sure all your magazines are fully charged right now, but do not — I say again — do not chamber a round in either the AKs or your pistols. We can’t afford a negligent discharge now. Leave two of the Kalashnikovs and a couple of pistols, plus ammo, between the jeeps for the recce team to collect.’
‘Suppose somebody else comes along here?’ Cross asked.
Masters just stared at him. ‘Out here?’ he snapped. ‘Get real. The worst that could happen to the weapons is that a goat could come along and crap on them. And gimme that sat-phone.’
Five minutes later they’d locked their vehicles and were heading towards the gully where Bronson and Angela had parked their vehicle.
On the side of the Saser mountain, the grey Land Rover was again mobile, following the same route Bronson had taken. Their plan was to collect the weapons Masters had left for them, drive past the gully, and stop half a mile or so away. They would then position themselves in the hills to the west, too far away to intervene in what was going to happen in the valley, but they’d make sure nobody could get out in that direction.
Caught between two groups of armed men, Bronson and Angela were walking into a trap.
58
‘You need to get ready,’ Tembla instructed as he walked into the briefing room. He was wearing a set of flying overalls, a survival belt including a holstered pistol around his waist. ‘Bronson and Lewis are proceeding on foot up into the valley.’
Killian stepped across to the table and looked down at the map.
‘They’re here, near these ruins,’ Tembla said, ‘not far off this road that runs east from Arann. It looks as if they’re heading towards the centre of the valley.’
Outside the building, Killian could hear the sound of a jet engine spooling up, and there was a faint whiff of burnt kerosene in the air.
‘When do we leave?’ he said.
‘Not yet. The moment we fly into the valley, everyone will know we are there. Until we’re sure they’ve found something, it’s better if we watch what happens through the camera on the Searcher. But I’ve ordered the helicopters to be manned and their engines started, so we can take off at any moment.’
Killian nodded, somewhat reluctantly. ‘Can I see the images?’ he asked.
‘Of course. Follow me.’
A couple of minutes later, Killian was sitting in an adjacent room staring at a small video screen. On it was an image that moved slightly as the Searcher manoeuvred in the sky, though the area displayed remained reasonably stable.
‘This is the jeep,’ Tembla said, pointing to an oblong shape in the bottom right of the screen, more or less in the middle of which was a small circle of colour — the mark Tembla’s man had painted on the roof of the vehicle. ‘Bronson and Lewis are here, standing beside these ruins. But I’m afraid that if they think what they’re looking for is inside that building, they’re going to be disappointed.’
Bronson stepped around the corner and past the overhanging rock, turned to his right and then stopped.
‘What the hell is this place?’
The structure in front of them was very obviously ancient, but at the same time had a strangely modern look, with straight grey-brown stone walls unadorned with decoration. It rose from a level area of ground perhaps fifty yards square, and had two storeys topped by a flat roof, most of which appeared to have fallen down inside the building. All the windows and the two doorways they could see were simply openings in the walls, nothing more. They could see into the building through one of the doorways, where rubble and unidentified rubbish lay scattered across the stone floor.
‘I know what it looks like,’ Angela said, pulling out her map.
‘A deserted monastery?’ Bronson suggested. ‘A small one?’
‘Spot on. Yes, it is — or rather it was — a monastery. In fact, it’s even marked on this map.’
She folded the map so that Bronson could see where she was pointing.
‘Just there. That symbol and the note right beside it.’
Bronson read the words aloud. ‘There’s a sort of castle symbol with the words “Namdis Gompa” beside it,’ he said. ‘I’m a bit surprised it’s deserted. You’d have thought some wandering goatherd might have appropriated a place like this for his own use.’
‘The locals are very superstitious. This was once a monastery, a holy place, and they’d respect that. They’d never dream of squatting here.’
‘Could this be it, do you think?’ Bronson said, looking up at the old building. ‘The text said something about man-made darkness, which could mean there’s a hidden room inside.’
‘I wish it was that easy, Chris,’ Angela said. ‘But we haven’t passed through that cleft in the rock up there, the one the text described as the “pillars”.’
‘Maybe the writer was referring to the rocks on either side of the gully, down by the road.’
‘But the dates don’t work. I don’t know exactly when this monastery was built, but most of them seem to have been constructed anything from three to five hundred years ago. Even if we’re generous with the dating, and assume this was built half a millennium ago, what we’re searching for was hidden here fifteen hundred years earlier than that. There’s no point in even looking in here.’
‘Right,’ Bronson said, staring back up the slope, ‘onwards and upwards.’
The gully that Bronson and Angela were exploring began as little more than a break in the rock wall. Just to the north of this was an area of sloping ground, at one side of which, and behind a rocky outcropping, the monastery of Namdis Gompa had been built. Beyond that was the cleft in the rocks which Angela had spotted. On the north and north-east side of the valley was a steeper and wider area, dotted with small plateaus where stunted bushes and other scrubby vegetation had gained a precarious foothold.
All this was obvious to Nick Masters as he lay on his belly near the crest of one of the hills that bordered it. He was looking through a pair of binoculars at the scene below him, while about fifty yards back the rest of the men who’d accompanied him sat or lay on the ground, weapons cradled in their hands, bored and waiting for his orders. The exception was Donovan, who was pacing up and down, clearly excited — and irritated.