The Seventh Scroll (40 page)

"Something scared the living daylights out of him."

"What?" enquired Royan.

"Could have been anything - a leopard, perhaps," he replied, and he hesitated as he looked down the slope. The caravan of mules and monks had set off already and was following the trail Up along the river bank.

"What should we do?" Royan asked.

"We should reconnoitre the ground ahead - that is if we had the time, which we haven't." The caravan was pulling away swiftly. Unless they went down immediately they would be left behind alone, unarmed. He had nothing concrete to act upon, and yet he had to make an immediate decision.

"Come on!" He took her hand again, and they slid and scrambled down the slope. Once they reached the trail they had to break into a run to catch up with the tail of the caravan.

Now that they were again part of the column, Nicholas could turn his attention to searching the skyline above them more thoroughly. The cliffs loomed over them, blocking out half the sky. The river on their left hand washed out any other sounds with its noisy, burbling current. Nicholas was not really alarmed. He prided himself on being able to sense trouble in advance, a sixth sense that had saved his life more than once before. He thought of it as his early-warning system, but now it was sending no messages. There were any number of possible explanations for the reflection he had picked up from the crest of the cliff, and for the behaviour of the bull kudu.

However, he was still a little on edge, and he was giving the high ground above them all his attention. He saw a speck flick over the top of the cliff, twisting and falling - a dead leaf -on the warm, wayward breeze. It was too small and insignificant to be of any danger, but nevertheless he followed the movement with his eye, his interest idle.

The brown leaf spiralled and looped, and finally touched lightly against his cheek. He lifted his hand as a reflex, and caught it. He rubbed the brown scrap between his fingers, expecting it to crackle and crumble. Instead it was soft and supple, with a fine, almost greasy texture.

He opened his hand and studied it more closely. It was no leaf, he saw at once, but a torn scrap of greased paper, brown and translucent, Suddenly all his early'warning bells jangled. It was not just the incongruity of manufactured paper suddenly materializing in this remote setting. He recognized the quality and texture of that particular type of paper. He lifted it to his nose and sniffed it. The sharp, nitrous odour prickled the back of his throat.

"Gelly!" he exclaimed aloud. He knew the smell instantly.

Blasting gelignite was seldom employed for military purposes in this age of Semtex and plastic explosives, bu was still widely used in the mining industry and in mineral exploration. Usually the sticks of nitrogelatine in a wood Pulp and sodium nitrate base was wrapped in that distinct tive brown greased paper. Before the detonator was placed in the head of the stick, it was common practice to tear off the corner of the paper wrapper to expose the treacle brown explosive beneath. He had used it often enough in the old days never to forget the odour of it.

His mind was racing now. If somebody was expecting them and had mined the cliff with gelignite, then the reflection he had picked up could have been from the coils of copper wiring strung between the explosive in the rock, or it could have been from some other item of equipment. If that was so, then the operator might even at this moment be lying concealed up there, ready to press the plunger on the circuit box. The kudu bull might have been fleeing from the concealed human presence.

"Aly!" he bellowed down to the head of the caravan, "Stop them! Turn them back!'

He started to run forward towards the head of the caravan, but in his heart he knew it was already too late. If there was somebody up there on the cliff, he was watching every move that Nicholas made. Nicholas could never hope to reach the head of the column and turn the mules around on the narrow trail, and get them back to safety before ... He came up short and looked back at Royan.

Her safety was his main concern. He turned and ran back to grab her arm.

"Come on! We have to get off the track."

"What is it, Nicky? What are you doing?" She was resisting him, pulling back against his grip on her arm.

"I'll explain later," he snapped at her brusquely. "Just trust me now." He dragged her a couple of paces before she gave in and began to run with him, back in the direction from which they had come.

They had notcovered fifty yards before the cliff face blew. A vast disruption of air swept over them with a force that made them stagger. It clapped painfully in their skulls and threatened to implode the delicate membranes of their eardrums. Then the main force of the blast swept over them, not a single blast but a long, rolling detonation like thunder breaking directly overhead. It stunned and battered them so that they reeled into each other and lost the direction of their flight.

Nicholas seized her in a steadying embrace, and looked back. He saw a series of explosions leap from the crest of the cliff. Tall, dancing fountains of dirt and dust and rubble, pirouetting one after the other in strict choreography, like a chorus-line of hellish ballerinas.

Even in the terror of the moment he could appreciate the expertise with which the gelignite had been laid. This was a master bomber at work. The leaping columns of rubble subsided upon themselves, leaving the fine, tawny mist of dust drifting and spiralling against the clear blue of the sky, and for a moment longer it seemed that the destruction was complete. Then the silhouette of the cliff began to alter.

Slowly at first the wall of rock started to lean outwards.

He saw great cracks appear in the face, opening like leering mouths. Sheets of rock collapsed and in slow motion slithered down upon themselves like the silken skirts of a curtseying giantess. The rock groaned and crackled and rumbled as the entire cliff began to fall into the river far below.

Nicholas was mesmerized by the awful sight, and his brain seemed to have been numbed by the explosion. It took a huge effort to force himself to think and to act. He saw that the centre of the explosion had occurred further down the trail, near the head of the mule caravan. Tamre was up there, beside Aly. He and Royan were at the tail of the caravan. The bomber up on the cliff had obviously been waiting for them to come directly into the epicentre of his explosive trap, but had been forced to trigger it when he saw them running back down the trail and realized that they had been alerted and were about to escape.

Yet they were not clear - they were about to catch the peripheral force of the landslide that was developing above them. Still holding Royan, Nicholas stared up the falling cliff face and made a desperate calculation. He watched in petrified fascination as the vast tide of falling rock swept over the trail ahead of him, picking up men and mules and carrying them with it over the edge and down into the river bed. It swallowed them, lapping them up like the tongue of some fearsome monster and chewing them to pulp with razor fangs of red rock. Even above the rumbling roar of the rock tide he heard the terrified screams of men and animals as they were ploughed under.

The wave of destruction spread towards where he and Royan stood upon the trail. If they had been directly under the explosion they would have stood as little chance as those others, but as it ran down the cliff its destructive momentum was dissipating. On the other hand, Nicholas realized that there was no hope that they would be able to outrun it, and what was about to fall upon them would still be devastating.

There was no time to explain to Royan what they had to do - he had only seconds left in which to act. Sweeping her up in his arms, he leaped over the bank towards the river. He lost his footing almost immediately and they went down together, rolling end over end, but thirty feet down there was a spur of rock the size of a house. As they came up against the upper side of it, it broke their fall.

They were half-sturined, but Nicholas dragged Royan to her feet and guided her into the lee of the rock wall.

"Mere was a cut-back here, and they crept into it and crouched flat. Pressing themselves hard against the wall, they both held their breath as the first chunk of cliff came bounding and bouncing down towards them like a gigantic rubber ball, picking up speed with gravity, until it smashed in to their shelter with a force that made the solid rock against which they were cringing vibrate and resound like a cathedral bell, and the hurtling missile leaped high over their heads, spinning massively in flight before it dropped into the river. It raised a tidal wave from the surface that broke like storm surf on both banks.

This was merely the forerunner of the maelstrom that now poured over them. It seemed that half the mountain was falling upon them. As each slab crashed into their shelter daggers and splinters burst from its leading edges, filling the air they breathed with fine white dust and the sulphurous stink of sparking flint. This immense cascade flew over their heads or piled up in front of their shelter, and loose chips and pebbles rained down upon them.

Nicholas crawled over the top of Royan, and covered her with his body. A stone struck the side of his head a lancing blow that made his ears ring, but he gritted his teeth and fought the impulse to lift his head and look up. He felt something warm and ticklish snaking through the short hairs behind his right ear. It crept down his cheek like a living thing, and it was only when it reached the corner of his mouth and he tasted the metallic salt that he realized it was a trickle of blood.

The fine talcum dust powdered them and irritated their throats, so that they coughed and choked in the uproar.

The dust seeped into their eyes, and they were forced to clench their lids and keep them tightly shut.

One mass of rock the size of a wagon sprang high in the air and then fell back close beside where they lay. The impact made the earth jump so violently that Royan, with Nicholas's weight on top of her, was struck in the belly and diaphragm with a force that drove the wind from her lungs, and she thought that her ribs had been crushed.

Then gradually the downpouring of earth and rock began to subside. The breath-stopping impact of great boulders into their shelter became less frequent: The fine dust they were breathing began to settle. The rumbling and roaring let up gradually, until the only sound was the slip and slide of settling earth and rock and the burble of the river below them. Warily, Nicholas at last lifted his head and tried to blink the dust off his eyelashes. Royan stiffed under him, and he crawled back to let her sit up. They stared at each other. Their faces were caked into kabuki masks with the antimony-white dust, and their hair was powdered like the wigs of eighteenth-century French aristocrats.

"You are bleeding," Royan whispered, her voice husky with dust and terror. Nicholas lifted his hand to his face and it came away covered with a paste of dust and blood. "It's just a nick," he said. "How are you!'

"I think I may have twisted my knee. I felt something give when we fell. I don't think it's serious. There is very little pain."

"Men we have both been ridiculously lucky," he told her. "Nobody deserved to survive that."

She made an effort to stand, but he restrained her with a hand on her shoulder. "Wait! The entire slope above us is broken and unstable. Give it time. There will be loose rocks coming down for a while yet." He untied the Paisley bandana from around his throat and handed it to her.

"Besides which, we don't want-' But he changed his mind and did not finish his sentence, While she wiped her face she asked shakily, "You were going to say, besides which-?"

don't want to give those bastards

"Besides which, we up there any idea that we have survived their little party.

Otherwise we will have them down here finishing the job, cutting throats. Much better they believe that we snuffed it, as intended."

"Do you think-they are still up She stared at him.

there, watching us?"

"Count on it," he answered grimly. "They must be pretty chuffed with the fact that they have at last succeeded in getting rid of you. We don't want to pop our heads up right now and spoil it for them."

"How did you know what was going to happen?" she asked. "If you hadn't grabbed me-' Her voice petered out.

In a few words he explained about the scrap of gelignite wrapping.

"Simplest thing in the world to pick one of the narrowest sections of the trail and mine the cliff-' He broke Off as, faintly but unmistakably, there came the sound of an aircraft engine and the flutter of rotors in fully fine pitch for takeoffs

"Quickly," he snapped at her. "Get in as close as you can to the overhang." He pushed her back against the sheltering boulder. "Lie flad'

When she obeyed without question, he lay beside her and piled loose rubble over them both.

"Lie still. Don't move, whatever you do."

They lay and listened to the sound of the helicopter approaching, and circling overhead. It moved up and down the valley, flying a few feet above the surface of the river.

At one point it was directly above the ledge on which they lay, and they were buffeted by the down-draught of the rotors.

"Looking for survivors," said Nicholas grimly. "Don't move. They haven't spotted us yet."

"If they were watching us before the blast, they should have been able to come directly to where we are," she whispered. They seem confused."

"They must have lost us in the dust of the avalanche and the break-up of the cliff face. They aren't sure where we are lying." The sound of the helicopter moved off slowly along the river, and Nicholas told her, "I am going to risk a peep, to make sure it's the Pegasus job - not that there can be many other choppers in this area. Keep your head down!'

He lifted his head slowly and cautiously, and one glance was sufficient to confirm all his speculations. Half a mile upstream, the Pegasus jet Ranger hovered over the river. It was moving slowly away from him, so that from this angle Nicholas was unable to see through the windscreen into the cockpit. But at that moment the engine beat changed as the pilot changed pitch and pulled on the collective.