Bronson stiffened. ‘I passed one a few minutes ago,’ he said.
‘Where? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘You’d just waved me over,’ Bronson said mildly, getting up and pulling her to her feet, ‘and I thought you’d found something right here.’ He pointed out to the east, back the way he’d come. ‘Let’s go and see what I found, shall we?’
Two minutes later Bronson led the way in through what actually appeared to be little more than a crack in the rock. But inside, the cave widened out considerably.
‘It’s a lot bigger than it looks,’ Angela said, staring around her in the light from Bronson’s torch.
‘But no sign of anything that you could interpret as “the darkness formed of man”,’ Bronson pointed out, shining his torch around the interior of the empty space.
Facing them was a flat rock wall, boulders and lumps of wood resting against it in a tumbled heap. To the right of the rock wall a short tunnel the height of the cave opened up, but terminated in another solid wall of stone after perhaps ten or twelve feet. To the left, there was an even shorter tunnel, just three or four feet deep.
‘No,’ Angela said sadly. ‘To me, this just looks like a cave.’
She turned to leave, but Bronson reached out and grabbed her arm to stop her.
‘Doesn’t anything strike you as odd about this place?’
Angela shook her head. ‘No. It’s just a cave, a hole in the rock.’
‘But we know that somebody’s been in here.’
‘How can you tell?’
Bronson pointed at the wall opposite. ‘What do you see over there?’ he asked.
‘Rocks and bits of wood. Why?’
‘Exactly. The only way wood can get into a cave is if some person or animal carries it in. Which means that somebody else has been in here too. The question is, when were they here? And what could they have been doing?’
Bronson strode over to the wall and looked down at the debris. ‘Some of these look to me like worked timbers,’ he said.
He knelt down and started rooting about. Then he picked up a lump of wood, but it crumbled away almost to nothing in his hands.
‘These bits of timber must have been in here a long time,’ he said slowly, shaking the dust and slivers of wood off his hands. He bent forward and examined the remaining lumps of timber more closely. ‘I think this could be a part of a wheel,’ he muttered. ‘It looks like the rim of a solid wooden wheel. The edge of it is definitely rounded.’ He stepped back and looked down again. ‘You know, this could possibly be the remains of a cart, something like that.’
‘Makes sense,’ Angela said dejectedly. ‘When the monks from the Namdis Gompa monastery built that house of meditation we’ve just been in, they’d have had to haul worked stone up here to do it, and they would have needed some sort of cart. When they’d finished it, they probably just stored it here rather than dragging it back down the mountain again.
‘They could have worked the stone up here,’ Bronson suggested. ‘It would have been easier than shaping it down in the valley and then hauling it all the way up here from the monastery.’
‘Maybe. .’ Angela said, clearly still unconvinced.
Bronson took another look at the lumps of wood lying on the floor, then turned back towards the entrance. Then he stopped suddenly.
‘Just come over here, will you?’ he said quietly.
Angela stepped across to where he was standing. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
Bronson didn’t reply, just pointed upwards.
‘What?’ Angela asked again.
‘There, in the roof. See those two parallel lines? There’s no way those are natural. Somebody cut those out of the stone with a hammer and chisel.’
On the right-hand side of the rock wall, the cave extended a short distance back into the mountainside, into a short, blind-ended tunnel. What Bronson was pointing at were two straight lines that extended from the side of the vertical rock wall over to their right, a distance of about five or six feet.
‘What are they?’ Angela asked.
‘I know what they look like,’ Bronson said, ‘though that’s almost unbelievable. But there’s one way to check.’
‘How?’
‘Let me show you.’
From his vantage point on the cliffs above, Nick Masters watched the two figures vanish from sight into what he presumed was a cave.
He looked away from his binoculars for a few seconds and stared at his watch. Then he glanced behind him to where Donovan stood, leaning against a boulder, looking uncomfortable.
He slid back from the cliff edge and waved to Donovan to join him. Donovan crouched down and weaved towards him in a clumsy parody of a soldier’s advance that would have been funny in any other context. When he got closer, Masters waved him to a stop and knelt beside him.
‘Right,’ he snapped, his voice low and urgent. ‘Keep down, and keep quiet. I know the wind’s blowing real hard, but you’d be amazed how far sound can travel at times like this.’
‘What’s happening?’
Masters explained what he’d seen. ‘If they stay in that cave for another ten minutes, I’m giving the go signal.’
Donovan nodded agreement. His instructions to Masters had been very specific — let Bronson and Lewis find the relic, but on no account let them touch it.
‘Do you think they’ve got it?’ he asked, his heart pounding with anxiety.
‘I don’t know,’ Masters said. ‘But we’re sure as hell going to stop them if they have.’
60
Back in Karu, Killian and Tembla stared intently at the video screen. Through the data-link from the Searcher UAV they’d watched two tiny figures look at the ruined monastery building, walk deeper into the valley, and enter another small structure, from which they’d reappeared almost immediately. But now they’d vanished completely.
‘They’ve found a cave,’ Killian muttered.
‘There are lots of caves in that valley,’ Tembla pointed out. ‘Let’s see if they come out again.’
Five minutes later there was still no sign of the two figures.
‘They’ve found something,’ Killian said, standing up. ‘We must leave.’
Tembla leaned over to the serviceman who was piloting the UAV and issued a series of orders. Immediately, the image widened as the man switched from the telephoto lens to a wide-angle view that covered the valley walls as well as the floor. Then he began to zoom in on one particular area.
‘What are you doing?’ Killian asked.
‘Checking on the opposition.’ As the picture tightened, Tembla pointed at a number of slow-moving dots that were just coming into focus. ‘There are the men Donovan recruited. Including Donovan, there are six of them in the valley, the four you can see there and two others who are still watching from the valley wall. There are a couple of others we spotted driving a four-by-four, but they’re some distance away, and we don’t yet know if they’re also a part of the group. And you’re right — from the way they move, they are mercenaries. They’re also carrying assault rifles, which is good for us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it gives us the perfect excuse to eliminate them. You know what we’re looking at here, but I’ll make sure that all the pictures from the Searcher will just show a group of heavily armed men who’ve almost certainly entered India illegally. We are entirely within our rights to engage them. Using the Hind might be considered to be overkill, but I’ll argue about that later.’
Tembla issued a further instruction and the image changed again, to the view of the rocks where Bronson and Lewis had vanished.
‘They’re inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘Mark that spot and pass the coordinates to the chopper pilots. Right, Father. It’s time we got airborne.’
* * *
Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.