The Machine (An Ethan Stone Thriller) (27 page)

‘What about you?’ said Stone to Panchen.

‘I take guns from this truck.  Send them to Lhasa for rebellion against Chinese,’ said Panchen.

‘Great,’ said Stone.  At least Panchen had come clean finally.  It really was a mad scheme.  ‘That should mean a few more deaths for the Western newspapers to report on then.’

‘What say?’

‘Never mind.’  A good thing those bleeding hearts Stone knew back at the university weren’t here to witness this particular version of Tibetan Buddhism.  Tibetans were regarded back home as uniform clones of the Dalai Lama – or Giyenchen for that matter.  The truth was somewhat different.

Panchen stopped them on an asphalt road, a couple of hundred metres below a rise where the road entered the crater.  They could see the glow of the moonlight fading up to the black velvet and the stars above.  Before them was a wide patch of mud and stones where a stream crossed the road.  The monks poured oil over the mud and water.  Some kind of cunning trap for the truck when it appeared. 

Stone was almost relieved.  It really was a mad scheme.  The truck would likely drive on through without noticing the monks at all.  At which point they could all go home and no harm done.   No guns, no riots in Lhasa. 

Panchen tested the mud and oil with his foot.  Incredibly, he was still wearing the sandals.  Was it slippery?  Stone tried it himself.  Possibly, but surely it wouldn’t work. 

Even Carslake was dubious.  ‘Of all the dumb-assed things…’   He stood with Stone, the ridiculous bandana still round his head.  Stone wondered if the more impressionable monks would be sporting bandanas before long.

Presently, the distant noise of a diesel engine was heard.  An orgy 0f
shhh
noises, and finally silence.   Panchen addressed the youngsters, his voice deliberately deep and masculine, before they all shrank back into the trees.

The truck engine was high-pitched, struggling up the hill in low gear, the differential whining through the corners.  The monks were back in the trees, Stone and Carslake with them.  Stone moved up to be near Panchen.  In case he did anything really stupid.  The truck struggled into view, over a rise, whereupon the driver threw it into neutral to coast down the hundred metres into the dip where the stream crossed.  A standard practice.   Chinese learn their road craft on bicycles and habitually freewheel downhill.  The truck would roll over Panchen’s mud patch and engage the gears at the bottom, right on the patch of mud and oil.  Panchen smiled.  He shouted at a kid next to him, and gave the lad a kick forward.  The novice ran into the headlights, robes flowing, just metres in front of the truck.

It worked.  The driver stood on the brake, shouted a volley of abuse through the window, then stuck it into first gear, and the engine howled as the rear wheels spun satisfyingly in the oil and mud. 

Panchen gripped his club.  Bad things were about to happen.  Stone found himself willing the tyres to grip again on the asphalt.  Panchen took a couple of others and jogged up to the side of the truck.  The driver wasn’t looking.  A smash to the side window.  Panchen grabbed the door, hauling the driver out.  The engine had stalled.  The driver’s mate made a lunge for the club of a monk at the other side, but Panchen went round there too.  Dragged him through the broken glass of the window, lacerating his cheek and half pulling his ear off. 

It was getting serious.  Stone flew forward, but Panchen had swung his club twice at the man’s head.  Stone was on Panchen, pulling him back, but the driver’s mate had gone down like a felled animal.  Panchen bellowed in rage and smashed another completely pointless blow into the back of the man’s skull.  Stone bent to the Chinese man, trying to cradle his head, but his fingers slipped into the bone at the back.  Blood flowed into the mud, litres of it. 

Jesus, what was he doing here?  Stone stood back. 

Carslake’s bandana appeared beside him.  ‘I can see the fence from here, in the headlights.  I’m going up there.’

‘Don’t do it, Carslake.  After this they’ll shoot you.’

Stone was appalled that Panchen’s plan looked like it would work after all.  The big Tibetan was up in the cab, ready to drive the truck away.  The engine started up and screamed as Panchen struggled with the shift stick.  Finally a crunching noise as Panchen found first gear, and there was another roar of the diesel motor as the monk stood on the accelerator.  The rear wheels spun, drifting to the right.  Panchen was shouting through the windows, but still had his foot jammed down.  Stone was waving both arms at him.  Panchen had evidently never driven before.

Stone looked round for Carslake.  It was dark save for the headlights of the truck on the road, but he saw the bandana slipping away, back into the trees with the radar set.  Arsehole.

Then from behind the truck, the familiar, savage banging of an AK47.  Chinese-made, of course, like the ones in Afghanistan.  Its jagged muzzle flash lit the little scene like a strobe light, with freeze-frame images of the monks shifting into the trees or airborne, throwing themselves to the ground.  Stone lay behind the canvas of the truck, holding a large stick.  Shout, fire, shout, fire.  The weapon hammered and reverberated, alternating with silence.  Bark splintered away from the trees.  

What an unholy mess.  The Chinese guy with that gun had no idea what he was doing either.  Only he had an assault weapon, and that meant he was calling the shots for now. 

Stone kept the gun out of view, and waited for the sound.  It stands to reason that a man should not run in front of a machinegun.  Yet soldiers do it.  Some are killed, some get away with it.  Yet still they run in front of automatic weapons.  Stone thought he’d learned that lesson.  But he hadn’t.

Then a pause.  Silence.  The forest had taken over once more.  Still as a forest should be at midnight.  The Milky Way arced above them and there might even have been a shooting star above the trees.  Stone was ready for it.  Here it came.  Click.  The magazine being changed.  Stone stepped out, brought the club down on the guy’s hand.  Broke the wrist, hopefully. 

A curtain of blue light had appeared from the direction of the mine workings, above the rise.  The searchlight was dazzling all of a sudden, from over the rise, two hundred metres ahead.  Game over.  Panchen turned for trees with his handgun.  Monks were running, scattering - out of the trees, back into the trees.  And Carslake?

Stone knew what was happening with Carslake.

-oO0Oo-

Stone crouched behind a tree for a minute or so – maybe two.  The blue light was still there, eerie, washing over everything from over the rise ahead.  Stone had assumed it was a searchlight, but it was not – it was just a huge eruption of milky, blue light, suffusing everything – the road, the truck on its side, and penetrating right into the trees behind him.  The blue suddenly dominated the whole horizon to one side of him.  He lay flat to the forest floor and made his way forward on his elbows towards the eerie blue light.  It was brighter and brighter the nearer he got.

Chapter 47 -
11:56pm 9 April
- Garzê Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

It took Stone about ten minutes edging forward on his elbows before he crested the ridge.  There were no more trees, no more forest.  Stone was looking over the edge of a crater, stretching away in front of him.  One, maybe one and a half kilometres across.  Bare, flat, dry earth.  An unnatural barren circle in the verdant landscape. 

The road dipped down into the barren crater, and there were high gates and a fence about a hundred metres in.  Exactly as depicted in Ying Ning’s photo back in Hong Kong.  The one Oyang had sent them.  But the fence itself was somehow superfluous.  There was something so unnatural about the place that no one was stepping in there by accident.

Stone was still lying in the last scraps of undergrowth.  He needn’t have bothered.  About twenty metres away, Carslake stood, staring wide-eyed into the crater.  Like a conquistador looking out at the Pacific.  Like he’d finally found what he’d been looking for all his life.   He turned around to Stone.  ‘Man, you cannot tell me that extraterrestrials have not been here.’

Stone could tell him that.  But it wouldn’t have done any good. 

People see what they want to see.  In reality, there was nothing – nothing at all.  The arc lights were bright – like stadium lights at night – and no doubt the alarm had been raised after the attack on the truck.  But there was nothing to see, except to some tiny huts in the distance.  It was the nothingness itself that was eerie.  The unearthly light washing it milky blue.  The silence of the crater, next to the cicadas, the bugs and the odd creak of the Sichuan pines behind. 

Carslake had put down the radar set at the edge of the trees.  Stone worked quickly on it, his fingers working the dials and switches of the radar.  There was a high-pitched whine as the power supply was switched on.  Stone smoothed out a flat patch of earth to bed the machine in, while Carslake plugged in the data collection unit and checked the connection.  No warning lights.  They were in business.  He set the radar to run, taking its pictures of what lay beneath. 

One thing was for sure.  There may be nothing here on the surface, but if the gravity anomaly figures were correct, there was most definitely something beneath the surface.

The scan was done in under a minute.  Carslake looked pleased with himself.  This piece of kit was exactly the right thing, used to take pictures of underground workings, aquifers, rock formations.  The software built a 3D image of what was below.

Carslake looked at the tiny screen on the data collection set, and as soon as it was finished, went back to staring, looking out over the crater.  This was his
Nirvana
.  Stone was glad of the quiet.  He made a note to come back in the light, handed Carslake the data unit to carry, and led on through the trees to find  the forest track back toward the monastery. 

By the time they’d walked the seven kilometres back to Shanglan, there was a sign of dawn, perhaps an hour away in the East.  The gathering blue light was beginning to dim the stars in the impossibly clear sky above.  The band of the Milky Way was fading, but Venus stood laser bright on the horizon. 

Perhaps Carslake had never heard of the words “stealthy” or “careful”.  He strode along in the undergrowth, thrashing at the spring flowers with a branch.  Stone breathed in the cool night air, soughing over from the Great Snow Mountains and the Himalaya.  By the time they came in sight of the temple’s gold and red portal, Carslake was talking wildly again.   Stone had to virtually gag the man as they made for the living quarters. 

Early prayers had already begun.  The smell of incense had met them hundreds of metres from the temple, and Stone could hear the soft chanting from the monks within.  The eerie calm of the blue night air above the crater was still with him.   He walked around to the temple and stood in silence to drink in the quiet chanting of the older monks, all inside the warm glow of the temple.  Giyenchen was in their midst, shaven-headed and ecstatic, eyes closed to the world and cleansing his mind with nothingness.  The solitary monk stayed without on the steps of the temple, the old guy with the lined face, spinning scripture reel in hand, humming his
omm
noises. 

No sign of Panchen.  That guy was going to need double helpings of cymbals and chanting to cleanse himself after what he’d done. 

Stone stood tall and walked through shadow, as if from the front of the temple, and then straight inside the sleeping block at the back of the temple.  Carslake pushed ahead of him.  The blackened, wooden floor creaked, and a single oil lamp burned at the end of the corridor.  Silent, undisturbed. 

Then there was another creak in the floor ahead of them.  Carslake’s tall figure shoved back past him, scrambling to get out.  Idiot. 

Stone span round like a top.  It was all over.  In the lamplight, the muzzle of an assault rifle peered malignantly round the door where he had just come in with Carslake.  There was a determined Chinese eye looking at them over the barrel.  Carslake changed tack.  He walked straight up on impulse, as if oblivious of the gun.  He certainly had some nerve.  Or was it stupidity?

It could have been worse.  The soldier smashed the butt of the rifle into Carslake’s solar plexus.  He went down gasping in pain, like he couldn’t breathe. 

Stone walked up slowly, and the gun was turned on him. 
Let’s see what he’s made of.
  Stone made eye contact with the soldier, and held it.  Didn’t raise his arms.  The soldier glanced down, and stepped nimbly over Carslake, keeping his weapon on Stone.  He was tall, as tall as Stone.  He didn’t break the stare, just advanced steadily, till the muzzle of the gun was a few centimetres in front of Stone’s cool, grey eyes. 
See you and raise you
. 

It’s difficult to stare down a bullet.  Stone put his hands up. 

  Chapter 48 -
3:11am 10 April
- Shanglan Monastery, Garzê Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan, China

Ying Ning came in view with her arms bound tight and high behind her, like a wild animal.  She was kicked and force-marched across in front of Stone and Carslake, who were kneeling on the ground outside the accommodation block, cuffed, with their hands on their heads.  One guy held the arms high behind Ying Ning’s shoulders, on the point of dislocation, and another was pulling her head back by the hair.  A strip of her black T-shirt was tied in a vicious ligature across her mouth.  Lips pulled back, red and bleeding at the side.   Her teeth protruded around the tight gag, preternaturally white and vulpine despite the darkness.  They were ordering her to kneel, pulling the spiky hair back in their fists and shoving her shoulders down.  She looked suddenly small and slight with the soldiers towering over her, but still refused to kneel for them.  Finally an officer came round and kicked her knees viciously at the back until her legs buckled and her kneecaps thumped into the ground.  Stone turned his eyes to her slowly.  She stared ahead, a bloody contusion above her left eye.  She looked tiny, a thin, bloodied wraith.  But undiminished.