The Doomsday Testament (33 page)

‘But what can we do?’

‘When the time comes you will have a decision to make, only then will you know what to do.’

Sarah shot an anguished glance towards Jamie, but he had already made up his mind. He felt as if he was bathed in the aura created by the monk’s strength and resolve. This had been his fate from the start. This was the final chapter of Matthew Sinclair’s story. He would finish what his grandfather had started.

‘We should leave in the morning.’

Tenzin set a punishing pace as the fourteen-strong column headed back towards the border, but on the second and third days he became progressively warier. Twice they took cover beneath the rocks at the sound of an aircraft flying at altitude somewhere above them.

‘We are fortunate that they do not have the spare parts to keep their Black Hawk helicopters in the air,’ the Tibetan confided to Jamie. ‘The J-7 and J-11 jets
based
up at Lhasa are too fast to do us any harm among the mountains, but there are reconnaissance planes flying from smaller airfields all along the frontier and if they spotted us, they would call in a patrol to intercept us.’

‘I thought the Black Hawk was an American helicopter,’ Sarah said.

‘That is correct, Miss Grant. Your American defenders of democracy sanctioned the sale of twenty UH-60s to China during the nineteen eighties, which they swiftly used to suppress any resurgence of democracy in Tibet. Ironic, is it not?’

Late in the afternoon, one of the insurgents who had been covering the rear of the little column jogged up and conferred with Tenzin. The monk nodded and his face was grim when he turned to Jamie and Sarah.

‘They are coming.’

If Jamie believed the pace had been hard over the past three days he quickly discovered how wrong he’d been. The Tibetans relieved them of their rucksacks and Tenzin set off at a trot that quickly had Jamie’s lungs screaming for oxygen. Only the knowledge of what would happen if the Chinese caught them kept him going, but, even so, after ten minutes he was willing the monk to ease off or turn an ankle, anything to stop the pain in his chest. It wasn’t until Sarah began reeling on her feet and two of the insurgents were forced to support her that Tenzin slowed to a brisk walk.

‘We must stay ahead of them until dark,’ the Tibetan
leader
explained. ‘If they are
wujing
, they have learned to fear the night and the Ghosts of the Four Rivers and they will halt, while we carry on.’ Jamie’s heart almost stopped at the thought of crossing this unforgiving landscape in the inky blackness of a Himalayan night, but Tenzin’s next words sobered him still further. ‘It is possible the soldiers who follow us are mountain-trained special forces troops. These men fear nothing and are equipped with night-vision equipment.’

‘How will we know?’ Jamie gasped.

‘If they are still with us at dawn,’ Tenzin said, and picked up the pace again.

What followed was the longest night of their lives. Tenzin kept up the relentless rhythm of the march for hour after hour, stopping only once to allow them to rest and take a drink. Ten minutes at the trot, followed by ten minutes at the walk to conserve their dwindling strength. Jamie and Sarah ran with a Tibetan on either side whispering incomprehensible words of encouragement as they kept their faltering charges upright through the rocks. In the gossamer-aired darkness every breath felt like a dying gasp, every heartbeat the hammer blow that preceded a seizure. Eventually, they travelled as if in a dream, their bodies pushed beyond the human norms of pain and exhaustion, their movements automatic and their minds seeking refuge in some weightless nirvana. Time or distance had no meaning, they could have marched three miles or thirty. It was only with the gathering Himalayan dawn, that soft, roseate light which garlanded the faraway peaks like a pink halo,
that
they realized they were alive, would live, and with it came the dread knowledge that soon they would know whether the martyrdom in the darkness had been worthwhile.

Thirty minutes into the new day Tenzin ordered a halt, but insisted everyone stay on their feet. Jamie hated him for it, but he knew that if he had slumped to the ground he would never have risen again. Sarah swayed between her two minders with her eyes closed, mumbling to herself. The Tibetan stared at the far horizon. Jamie followed his gaze, but could see nothing but barren grey rocks.

‘They are here. Two miles.’

‘How do you know?’

‘The wind carries their message. I do not know how, I only know.’

‘Then we’re finished.’ Jamie fought the urge to let himself collapse to the ground. He and Sarah might be kept alive, but there was no hope for this man he had come to respect and admire.

‘Perhaps not,’ Tenzin said. ‘Like most special forces, they operate in small units, perhaps only four or five strong. If they originally accompanied a
wujing
patrol they will have left them behind during the night. It’s possible they may look at us and decide we are too strong for them. Then again, they are the best trained troops in the People’s Liberation Army – the equivalent of your Special Air Service – and they have pride. That pride may keep them coming. One thing is in our favour: we are less than two miles from the border.
If
we can stay ahead of them we will reach Indian territory.’

‘Will they stop at the border?’

Tenzin shrugged. ‘We will see. It depends on what orders they have and how important to them we are. If they came across our trail by chance and decided to track us, they will not cross. If they know we were at the crater . . .’

He shouted a command and the column moved off, with two scouts in the lead and two guarding the rear. The man on Jamie’s left grinned at him, but the grin didn’t reach his eyes. Above the usual aroma of yak butter and unwashed body Jamie could smell something else, rank and strong. Fear. He knew the other man would have the same scent in his nostrils.

He turned to encourage Sarah, but she was beyond encouragement, hanging between the two Tibetans like a rag doll. He gritted his teeth and ran.

The first shot came when they had covered less than a mile, a whipcrack in the thin air that echoed like a volley from the mountains around them. Jamie staggered to a halt and looked backwards along the track. He could see them now, six tiny figures dogging their trail the way a stoat follows a rabbit.

‘Come.’ Tenzin shook his shoulder. ‘That was just a warning shot. They will be in range soon. Keep going.’

Jamie willed his legs to move and took up the mental refrain of the military route march.
One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other
. Another shot
cracked
out and he heard the distinctive zzzip-zzzzing of a bullet ricocheting from a boulder to their left.

Tenzin barked a new order and two of the Tibetans peeled off and moved into the rocks by the side of the trail. Jamie felt sick. The two men were the price of his life, and Sarah’s. No matter how determined the pursuit, the Chinese soldiers would have to deal with the threat to their flank. It would delay them. Not for long. Two barely trained guerrillas against the élite of the Chinese army. But long enough for Tenzin to get them to the border.

With the knowledge that they were going to survive, his legs found new strength and he shrugged off the man beside him, staggering along under his own power. More shots followed but none came close. They had reached a broad escarpment fringed by jagged, boulder-strewn hills that first rose then plummeted away almost vertically to the south. The only way out was ahead where two peaks were split by a pass that Jamie assumed must mark the border.

He risked a glance back just as a rattle of automatic fire confirmed the first contact between the pursuers and the two men left behind. Jamie knew it would only be a matter of minutes, but the pass was closer now and—

A muted thunder turned into a paralysing, gut-shaking roar. For a split second a monstrous shadow blotted out the sky, then it was gone. He looked up to see a turbo-prop plane similar to an RAF Hercules sailing towards the pass. As he watched the pilot banked
across
their route and a string of white dots left the big plane. Within seconds they had blossomed into fifteen or twenty massive parachutes. At first he thought it must be some sort of supply drop, then he realized that the size of the parachutes was to compensate for the thin air in the mountains and what hung below them was not canisters, but more of the special forces troops who pursued them. They were trapped.

TENZIN REACTED INSTANTLY.
He broke right towards the hills a quarter of a mile away where the boulders offered more cover than the open trail. Chiru, the youngest of the guerrillas, attached himself to Jamie’s shoulder and shepherded him away from danger, all the time darting wary glances back to where the paratroops were now deploying in loose formation. The Tibetans formed a protective circle round the two outsiders, but Jamie knew it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed. Against six, even six of the Chinese élite special forces, they would have had a chance, but not against four times that number. They were hopelessly outgunned.

A rock formation in front of Jamie shattered and a heartbeat later he heard the distinctive ripsaw clatter of a burst of automatic weapons fire. As a storm of lead savaged the air around them the man to his left gave a sharp cry and fell to the ground. Without thinking, Jamie picked up the fighter’s rifle and stripped him of
his
ammunition while Chiru checked the fallen man for signs of life. The boy shook his head and they ran together to the base of the hills where Tenzin had set up a defensive perimeter among the rocks, with Sarah, who looked dazed and sick, at its centre.

‘What now?’ Jamie demanded.

‘We can hold them here for a while, I think,’ Tenzin said, his dust-coated hawk’s face creased in a frown of concentration.

Jamie saw he was right. The Chinese paratroop commander now faced the choice of attacking over the open ground the Tibetans had just crossed or a long flanking movement to the east. The first would cost him casualties, the second might give the beleaguered insurgents a chance to escape. It all depended on just how determined he was to kill them.

A sustained burst from a dozen assault rifles on fully automatic signalled his decision. Jamie curled into a foetal ball as the rocks around him exploded. For the first time in many days he thought of his grandfather. This combination of exhaustion and sheer terror was the life Matthew Sinclair had lived for six long years. The knowledge lit some spark in him and he raised his head and sighted the Type 56 carbine on the open ground just as a dozen green-clad soldiers broke cover and rushed forward, shooting as they ran. All hell broke loose around him as the Tibetans opened fire and Jamie joined in with short controlled bursts that set the rifle shuddering in his hands. The man who had found Matthew Sinclair’s journal would have fired warning
shots
over the attacker’s heads. The man who had read it and fought for it took deliberate aim at the chest of the leading attacker. His first shots flew high and he automatically sighted lower, watching as the shots kicked up dust among the charging men. First one went down, spun by a burst that caught him in the upper chest, then a second who dropped like a stone. In an instant, the landscape was empty, the survivors melting into the dusty ground.

Tenzin called out an order and the firing died away, apart from a few desultory single shots from the Chinese four hundred yards off on the far side of the track.

Jamie turned and saw Sarah struggling to get to her feet. He ran to her at a crouch and pulled her down. ‘Do you want to get your bloody head shot off?’

‘Hey, Saintclair,’ she mumbled, ‘I can look after myself.’

Jamie lifted her chin and wiped flecks of vomit from her lips. Her eyes were dilated. His heart sank as he recognized the signs. Altitude sickness. The longer they stayed at this height the worse it would get. Unless he could get her out of here and down to the foothills she could die.

‘Sure you can, tough guy.’ He matched the words with a reassuring smile, but she wasn’t fooled.

‘Screwed, huh?’

‘’Fraid it looks like it, love.’

‘We gonna surrender?’

‘I’m not sure they’ll give us the option.’

A soft plop like a bubble of mud bursting in a hot
spring
punctuated the sentence and he threw himself on top of her.

‘Christ, Jamie—’

‘Mortar!’

The explosion twenty yards to the right sent razor shards of shattered stone whizzing through their refuge and Jamie cried out as he felt the sting of something slicing across his brow.

Sarah reached out and touched his head and her fingers came away red. ‘You’re hurt?’

‘It’s just a scratch,’ he insisted, because it was, but for a moment he felt like a bit-part actor in a cowboy movie and the thought almost made him smile. Tenzin and Chiru were huddled in conversation behind a nearby rock and as Sarah dabbed ineffectually at his forehead with her sleeve, the Tibetan leader crawled to where they lay.

‘There may be a way to get you out of here, it will be dang—’ The next mortar blast was much closer and to their left. Tenzin frowned. ‘Ranging shots. You know what comes next. Chiru will lead your way; with him you have a chance, stay and . . .’

Jamie knew what staying meant. The next round from the two-inch mortar, or the one after that, was going to land in the little circle of rocks and kill or disable them all. It was the simple arithmetic of war. Two or three ranging shots and one in the bull’s-eye. But there was something else. ‘What do you mean he will lead us? What about you and the others?’

Tenzin’s amber eyes were lit with the same inner glow
as
the night he had burned the juniper leaves over the fire. ‘We stay. The Ghosts of the Four Rivers will cover your retreat.’

Jamie shook his head. ‘But—’

The Tibetan was already moving. ‘There is no time for buts, Mr Saintclair. If you go, it must be now.’

‘No,’ Sarah gasped. ‘We can’t leave you.’