The Avatari (60 page)

Claire nodded and took out a small leather satchel from her rucksack in which the transmitter was housed. After fiddling with the switches, she looked up at Stein.

‘No luck. I’m not catching anything.’

‘Well, keep it on, at least. It might just catch the satellites suddenly; that’s what happens in the mountains.’

‘I will.’

‘You have the batteries for that, I hope,’ he cautioned, catching her nod, before turning away and signalling to the men that they would set up camp.

The helicopters were their lifeline. If their plans were on track, the birds were to refuel and bring Josh Wando and Dr Stevens to this place. But they would take off only when they had a fixed position to go by. Claire’s transmission would have to be picked up by the satellites and relayed to the base. If she could trust the colonel’s feedback, she thought, there was a higher mountain range they would have to cross and she doubted the helicopters could climb any higher; as it was, they were already at their ceiling height.

Peter

Peter opened his eyes once and wondered for an instant if he was delirious, as the bearded contours of a man’s face loomed in front of him. But the throbbing in his head was so hard to bear that he sank back into the welcome relief of unconsciousness. He felt his head swell painfully, his temples throb. There was a buzz in his ears and a terrible weight on his chest that he feared would crush him to death. As he coughed and spluttered, the water choking him, he willed himself to get the weight off his chest, trying to direct his hands to push it off. But they would not obey him, those leaden, inert, useless hands. Then he was retching, water dribbling from his mouth and nose. The water in his nose choked him and he gasped as he tried in vain to inhale a deep lungful of air. His vision cleared for a fleeting moment and he saw the bearded man pressing down on his chest, his mouth open in a wide grin. He shouted for the man to get off, but no words came. Too exhausted for any effort, he felt himself slip away again.

He felt the slaps raining down on his cheeks and face. His head rang with the impact of those blows. Within a few moments, he felt his strength return and he was able to make the effort to push himself upright. He heard the sounds at first, travelling down to him across a vast distance. They made no sense. Then gradually, they coalesced into a voice and words, but he still couldn’t understand what was being said. Another wave of nausea hit him. He retched violently. A long, wheezing series of coughs followed. The voice said something again and now Peter was able to make his eyes focus.

There was one man – no, many men – and then, the face of an animal, a very hairy beast, with huge, flared nostrils. He felt hands on his face. He couldn’t see whose hands they were and he struggled against them, but found himself held down. The men standing over him had brought the pony right up to where Peter lay, with the animal’s neck placed just above his mouth. Two men held it in place and a third severed its jugular vein with one sharp stroke of his short sword. The animal bucked in agony, but powerful arms held it down and the blood spurted out, warm and thick, on to Peter’s face. Another man blocked Peter’s nose with his palm and forced his mouth open so that the blood trickled in and filled his mouth.
Salty, sticky, all over my face
, he thought,
thick all over
. Then the palm moved to the mouth so that when Peter breathed in again, he was forced to swallow a mouthful of the animal’s blood. They repeated the process again and again, until the animal was dead, its life force having ebbed from it and entering Peter’s body.

When he woke up again, it was dark. He found he was lying on his back under a night sky studded with a sprinkling of stars. He was sweating profusely and struggled to throw off the covers. His body was burning and he knew he had fever. Turning on his side, he groaned in pain. He realized, then, that he was bruised in many places. He felt his head throb powerfully. His hand went up tentatively to the source of the pain on its side, his fingers tracing the bump and cut. The cut had some kind of stitches on it, but his fingers came away sticky; the wound was still oozing blood. There was also a cut on his foot where the bullet had nicked him. Now that he was lying on his side, Peter could see that he was in the lee of a boulder, with a small fire burning near him. He was covered in thick skins, but his clothes, still damp against his body from the soaking in the river, had not been removed. A man who had been sitting by him, but whose face he could not distinguish, now rose to his feet and muttered something that was incomprehensible to Peter. He couldn’t see clearly, but he thought the man facing him looked like one of the Indians on the reservations back home. Peter gazed at him for a long time, trying hard to focus on the figure so that he could be sure he wasn’t hallucinating. But he found himself quite incapable of concentrating. The man came up to him now and made him drink from a wooden bowl. The mixture tasted of tea and some other stuff, but in the end, the taste that remained on Peter’s tongue was one of powdered opium so bitter, it made him want to retch. But he was too weak even for that. Then he blacked out.

Kurt Stein

The wind had suddenly picked up and Kurt Stein, who knew he had a long trek ahead of him, decided to make camp. The men he had recruited were all tough and capable soldiers, but after they had left the Pashtun hideout that lay at an altitude of 9,000 feet in the Waziristan mountains, they had ascended several thousand feet farther and would now be at 14,000 feet. It meant that they were in no way fully acclimatized. Stein certainly didn’t want altitude sickness of all things to whittle down his strength.

Finding a small rocky outcrop standing in solitary splendour on the featureless ground, Stein and his group had approached it and discovered, along with the scattered dung of animals, the traces of fires long extinguished. In the desert, the choice of camping grounds was limited and wise travellers generally stayed on the beaten path; that way, one tended to live longer.

As the men unloaded the animals and put water on the stoves to heat, Stein issued directions for the sentries. The sky had turned an ominous black and the wind was pushing a mass of dark clouds across its expanse, briefly lit up by flashes of lightning so high up and distant that minutes passed before they were followed by a muted roll of thunder. It was not just the sky which was restless tonight, Kurt Stein thought grimly. There was a rumbling in the ground as well as tremors, wave upon wave of them, their vibrations travelling up their feet and settling uneasily in the back of their necks.

Stein’s sergeant, a weathered Chilean, now asked him if it was necessary to send out the sentries; after all, they had picked up no signs of any human presence. The sergeant wanted to rest his men while they still had the chance. He also muttered something about the men saying they were afraid, that the land was cursed.

‘
No seas mammon
! Don’t be stupid!’ Stein had snapped and ordered a perimeter patrol sent out for good measure.

But as he stretched in his sleeping bag, the small stove lit next to him, Stein felt himself secretly agreeing with his men. He drank from the small silver hip flask, gasping at the sting the apricot brandy left in his throat. His mind wandered to the time he was a small boy and his grandfather would make him listen to Wagner’s ‘Flying Dutchman’ on the small record player in their home in the German commune in Valdivia. As the thunder rolled around them now, it sounded like the bassoons he remembered from childhood which had opened the overture with a premonition of the curse about to befall the phantom ship. Kurt Stein had seen far too much in his adult life to be afraid of curses and ghosts. That was not what worried him; it was something else. Peter Radigan could well have fallen accidentally into the river, but he wasn’t counting on it. Somehow, it just didn’t feel right. Stein wasn’t the only person in their group who was troubled. Claire Donovant had come up to join Ru San Ko who was sitting in front of a small stove.

‘Not asleep yet?’ she asked pleasantly.

She looked at the small man – a pair of deep, sunken eyes was the only distinctive feature in an otherwise unremarkable face – and shivered inwardly.
Where have I seen those eyes before?
It was probably the intense cold which made her feel so ill at ease. Or could it be the restless rumblings of the night sky above or the movements in the ground beneath? She shrugged away her apprehensions, but the monk seemed to sense them.

‘You are afraid, Ms Claire? Perhaps you are having doubts?’ he said, throwing a question at her in response to the one she had asked.

‘It is a not a peaceful night,’ she admitted, piling up some sand, so she could sit near the monk.

‘Indeed it is not, Ms Claire,’ he replied tonelessly, but there was the hint of a smile on his face. ‘The elements and the earth, they are testing our resolve.’

‘Why do you think I am having doubts, Mr Ru San Ko?’ she asked, half-expecting him to parry that with another question.

She felt the stirrings of irritation within and was not unhappy for it. It helped to cover her unease.

‘Please call me Ru San Ko,’ he said, then addressed her question. ‘I can understand that given the way you look at it, there are many doubts. The helicopters have gone; perhaps they will not return? We are in a desolate and unforgiving wasteland which, till today, remains uncharted territory. And,’ he paused for emphasis and now she could clearly make out the smile, a distinct one, his teeth yellow in the weak, flickering light of the stove, ‘you are now on a mission that heavily relies on a vision seen in a dream by a retired English colonel.’

Claire Donovant shifted uncomfortably on the mound of sand. She felt the colour rush to her face.
The bastard was mocking her!

Taking a deep breath, she fought the anger within and said calmly, ‘You are quite right. But what about you? Don’t you have any doubts yourself?’

‘Not the ones you have, Ms Claire,’ came the prompt reply. ‘The man you see as a retired English colonel is blessed with a destiny he is fulfilling. He is an
avatari
or Rimpoche, a man who has forsaken nirvana to complete an earthly task. What he sees is the way; it is as the texts say.’

‘This is given in the Zhang Zhung?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied, again with that hint of a smile. ‘Tonight, we must weather the night demons of the plains. Tomorrow, we shall enter the “lake of dreams”. And then we shall be in sight of the peak which the colonel saw.’

She looked at him carefully and nodded. ‘Well, I’m glad you are satisfied with the colonel.’ She began getting up, dusting her pants. And then, because she was still irritated, she asked, ‘You said you had doubts of your own, Ru San Ko, did you not?’

The monk did not reply. He simply looked at her, the smile gone from his face, his body rigid. She looked into his eyes, then turned away and stumbled into the night, her insides turned to water. She now recalled where she had seen those eyes – at the National Gallery in Dublin. It had been a wet week and she had just decided to take up the CIA’s offer to turn. She was to wait for a contact over the weekend and, with nothing to do, had decided to go and see the paintings. She remembered standing for a long time in front of one and shivering; it had, somehow, connected to her own life,
The Taking of Christ
by Caravaggio. Ru San Ko had the same wild eyes of Judas Iscariot as he kissed Jesus in the ultimate act of betrayal, identifying him for the Roman soldiers to take away.

Ashton

Ashton and Susan had found a rock for themselves. They lit their stove and huddled in their sleeping bags around it.

‘Do you think you will get us there, Henry?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ he replied simply.

‘How are you so sure? What is it that’s guiding you?’

He did not answer for a while. Then he spoke, choosing his words carefully.

‘It is not easy to explain
what
I see or, for that matter,
how
.’ For a moment, he lapsed into silence. ‘When I try to explain,’ he began again, ‘it somehow doesn’t seem right.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘But what does seem right is that I must follow the path I am being shown. I feel as if…as if I’m going home.’

‘But how did this come about all of a sudden?’ she asked gently, not wanting to offend him. ‘Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m just curious. I mean, when I first met you, you weren’t driven by any such realization. In fact, you had to be practically pushed to make the trip.’

‘You’re right about that, but I’m sure you’re also aware that much has happened to us on this expedition since that time. It tends to change your perspective on many things,’ he said with a weak smile. ‘It’s happened to all of us, I would imagine.’

He refrained from telling her that he had seen glimpses of the same vision many times earlier in his life, inexorably nudging him along towards the path. On those occasions, he had been afraid and had backed off, pushing the images away. But not any more. He had Duggy to thank for that.

‘Yes, it certainly has,’ Susan admitted, trying to smile back at him, but her voice was tremulous. After a pause, she added, ‘I’m glad for you, Henry.’

They lapsed into a long silence which Ashton finally broke.

‘What did he say?’ he asked her quietly.

He knew what was on her mind.

‘Who?’ she enquired, surreptitiously brushing the tears away from her eyes.

‘Peter. What did Peter say to you, before diving off the ledge?’

‘What makes you think he said anything to me at all?’ she asked, incredulous.

‘Because I know Peter. I also know he wouldn’t have been thrown off a ledge by a mule.’

Ashton didn’t tell her that he had seen the glint of the mirror too.

‘Peter said he would come back for me,’ her voice was a ragged whisper, ‘but he’s dead, isn’t he?’ She was sobbing now. ‘He couldn’t have survived the fall – and the bullets!’

Ashton came up and put his arm around her. Her hair was in his face.

‘He’ll come back for you, Susan,’ he said simply, still holding her. He remembered another girl with dark hair in Saigon, a long time ago. ‘I’m sure of that.’