Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (24 page)

Venkatesan had lent us suits of extreme cold weather gear, including parkas, thermal mittens and insulated trousers, all in snow pattern camouflage. These helped, though not by much.

Matsya was the only one of us who didn’t wear one. Subzero temperatures didn’t bother him. He was full of antifreeze glycoproteins which inhibited the formation of ice crystals in his flesh and bodily fluids and protected him from cold damage. He could swim in the darkest ocean abysses, he said, and be unaffected.

Krishna’s chariot wouldn’t carry us at this sort of altitude, so we tramped on foot. Our rendezvous point was an Indian army camp on a small plateau a mile upslope from the
Garuda
’slanding zone, nestled against the base of a crag that afforded some shelter from the elements.

The camp consisted of tents and igloos, without the consolation of a rigid-walled structure anywhere, and was home to an infantry unit under the command of Captain Sawhney. He and his troops were a straggle-bearded, hollow-eyed bunch, their faces roughened and reddened with chilblains. They looked as though they had been up in the mountains, manning this hopelessly remote sentry post, for far too long. I saw a couple of them warming the barrels of their rifles over a kerosene stove to defrost them. I also saw a man squatting over a hole in the snow at the edge of the campsite, not caring that he was in full view of everyone as he took his dump.

“Welcome to the ‘third pole,’” said Sawhney. “I would invite you to make yourselves at home but, as you can see, my friends, there is little in the way of home comforts here.”

“Never mind that,” said Parashurama. “The Pakistanis. Where are they?”

“We have scouts further north. They have spied Sno-Cats and snowmobiles, and a column of men, coming down the glacier. An estimated two hundred troops in all. We were told to wait until you arrived before engaging. Now that you’re here, we can get down to business.”

“How far away is this column?”

“Eight, ten miles.”

“And how many men do you have in total?”

“Forty. Forty of the best. A little frostbitten and altitude-crazed, but they’re as hardy as you could wish for, and itching for some action. This has been a long time coming. There have been phony wars and false alarms. Up here the Pakistanis are foolish and tend to shoot at anything. Their gunfire echoes all the time. They piss bullets away like they’re one-rupee coins. But then they don’t have the resupply issues that we have. Geography is in their favour. They have road access on their side, whereas we must rely on airdrops. So we sit tight and wait for them to calm down, and keep our safety catches on while they take potshots at us from across the valley. There’s only so much of that a man can endure before he starts hankering for payback.”

“Forty of you plus ten of us, against two hundred,” said Parashurama. “Seems like a fair fight.”

The Indian grinned. “With the Dashavatara in our corner, how can we fail?”

In short order Sawhney had roused his men and we were trekking northwards. The Indians joked and sang songs as they marched.

I quizzed one of them, a young private, about life in Siachen. He didn’t speak great English but I gathered that his tour of duty had lasted a year so far, with several months still to go.

“Down in base camp, at foot of glacier, it is nice,” he said. “Huts. Carpets. A hospital. Satellite TV. It is heaven. Here, hell. Very dangerous. I’ll tell you a story. We are out on patrol, not long ago. My friend treads on snow. Looks like ordinary snow. Suddenly he is gone. Walking next to me, then gone, downwards.” He mimed a steep plummet. “Into deep crack in ice.”

“Crevasse?” I said.

“Exactly. Crevasse. No one sees it. Covered over by bridge of snow. My friend does not even scream. Too fast. We never find him. Too far down.”

I watched my footing carefully after that.

A wind whipped up. Clouds sailed in, blanketing the blue firmament. They seemed so low overhead you could reach up and touch them. We moved across an expanse of rugged white ground, ridges of purple-black rock boiling up around us. Here and there the ice formed pinnacles, thrust up by the immense glacial pressures below. The landscape was so ugly, it was almost beautiful.

The wind brought snow. First a few flakes, like heralds. Then a thick onslaught, a blinding television-static whirr of white motion.

Our progress slowed to a trudge. Rama took point, peering ahead through the near-whiteout, looking for the first sign of the enemy. Nobody was singing or making jokes any more. The Indians kept their heads down and their mouths shut as the snow rimed their beards and eyebrows, turning them into yetis.

All at once Rama raised a hand. We halted. Sawhney, with a few gestures, directed his men to fan out and assume defensible positions. They scattered to either side, setting themselves up to deliver criss-cross volleys of enfilading fire downslope onto the approaching Pakistanis. Those with tripod-mounted heavy machine guns flattened out on the snow, adjusted the sights and fed belts of armour-piercing rounds into the breeches. The Avatars, meanwhile, spaced themselves out in a line that stopped just short of the Indians’ field of fire.

The drone of far-off engines mingled with the mournful sough of the wind, sometimes faint, sometimes almost inaudible, but gradually getting clearer and more distinct.

I was in a quandary. Part of me wanted to run for cover behind the nearest rock and not come out until the shooting stopped. Another part knew I should be standing shoulder to shoulder with the Dashavatara, especially Rama. It was my rightful place.

As the pulses of engine noise increased in volume, I felt a quickening sense of excitement that made my fears seem pathetic and immaterial. Cowering behind a rock? What kind of feeble creature did that? Certainly not the Son of the Wind, the firstborn and favourite of Anjana the cloud spirit, she who was cursed by the sage Brihaspathi to take fleshly form but whose curse was lifted by the act of giving birth. Certainly not the adventurer, the trickster, the leaper, the laugher, the light-hearted one, Hanuman.

A pair of Sno-Cats emerged through the swirling flurries of snow, headlamps glaring. Captain Sawhney snapped an order over the shortwave band, and bullets strafed the two vehicles from either side. Windscreens shattered; holes were punched in bodywork. A caterpillar track broke in two and flailed around the drive wheels. Crossfire tracer rounds lit up the snowstorm like stroboscopes.

Pakistani troops scrambled out from the Sno-Cats, returning fire with German submachine guns and Type 56 assault rifles.
²
More Pakistanis bundled in from the rear, joining their comrades beside the Sno-Cats and kneeling to shoot.

Snowmobiles arced out on either side of the valley, heading for the Indians’ firing positions, hoping to outflank them. Each carried a driver and a pillion rider whose job was to blast away over the driver’s shoulder. The snowmobiles’ speed and manoeuvrability made them much harder targets than the lumbering Sno-Cats.

But that was all right, because the Indians had deva reinforcements.

Rama sent arrows through the goggles of three of the snowmobile drivers. The vehicles veered wildly, slithering to a halt.

Narasimha loped across the ground on all fours and sprang to intercept another of the snowmobiles. He snatched the driver out of his seat and was eviscerating him even as the two of them spun through the air.

Varaha lowered his head and charged straight at an oncoming snowmobile. He grabbed it by its engine shroud and flipped it over onto its back; the driver was bent double underneath and crushed to death, while the pillion rider was thrown free. He landed near Buddha and sprang to his feet, rifle raised, but with just a few words and a calming gesture, Buddha made him sit down and start etching pictures in the snow with his gun barrel. The soldier looked as happy as a kid in art class.

A snowmobile turned and made for Kurma, kicking up a peacock tail of snow behind it. The Turtle stood his ground. Bullets pinged and whined off his armour. The driver gunned the throttle, fully intent on mowing Kurma down. The pillion rider egged him on, clapping him on the helmet. The snowmobile struck the Avatar head-on and exploded. It was as though it had run into a concrete pillar. Kurma stepped away from the heap of fiery wreckage, using handfuls of snow to damp down the splashes of burning fuel on his leg and chest.

Krishna commandeered one of the driverless snowmobiles and, with Parashurama on the back, set off at speed towards the main body of Pakistani infantry, who were coming up from the rear, some on skis, the rest on foot. Kalkin did the same, straddling his vehicle like the horseman he was, talwar aloft.
³

Together, the Avatar-driven snowmobiles roared into the Pakistanis’ midst. Parashurama’s axe and Kalkin’s sabre swung and chopped, their blades a glinting whirr of motion like dragonflies’ wings. Men toppled, minus a limb, a head, even a heart, or else hewn evenly in two, trunk folding over legs.

Jumbo-sized Vamana grabbed one of the crippled Sno-Cats by the chassis and tipped it over onto the group of Pakistanis crouching behind it, squashing them all.

Matsya wriggled like an eel through snow banks, popping up here and there to bring an enemy combatant down in an inescapable chokehold.

Meanwhile the Indians kept pouring bullets at the foe. The echoes of gunshots rippled around the theatre of conflict like endless thunder.

Two Pakistani soldiers ran screaming at Rama, sidearms drawn. He killed one outright with an arrow and transfixed the other’s gun-hand with a second arrow. The man fell with a shriek, and Rama stepped in to deliver the
coup de grâce
.

He didn’t spot the third soldier who had drawn a bead on him from behind.

Luckily, I did.

I leapt from a standing start, covering ten metres in a single bound, and came down on the Pakistani’s back, driving him face-first into the snow. I pounded on him until I felt things break beneath my fists. I rose, bloody-handed, triumphant, exhilarated.

After that there was no stopping me. The threat to Rama was all I’d needed to galvanise me into action. Once I’d joined the fray, I was committed. I chased down enemy troops; I clubbed them with the stocks of their own rifles. I twisted their heads until neck vertebrae crackled. I throttled and I fractured. I was Hanuman, who could move as fast as his father Vayu, lord of the winds, blew. I was the cavorting, chattering monkey god who was your best friend and your worst enemy. You laughed
with
me, never at me. Either you danced to my tune or I danced on your grave.

From the Sno-Cat that still remained upright, Pakistani soldiers produced a pair of shoulder-mounted rocket-propelled grenade launchers. They managed to loose off one of the RPGs at the Indians. Its thermobaric warhead took out six men in a single tremendous flash that turned a patch of the glacier to steam.

They didn’t get the opportunity to fire another.

I looked down on them from on top of the Sno-Cat. I had my legs apart, my hands on my hips. It was a self-consciously superheroic stance, but bugger me if it didn’t feel right for the occasion.

“Gentlemen,” I said, “you have two choices. The one that involves putting down that bazooka and surrendering, or the one that’s completely stupid.”

Good line, eh?

It’s possible that none of the Pakistanis had any English, but they must at least have grasped from my tone of voice what I was offering them.

The guy with the RPG launcher aimed it at me all the same.

This next thing really happened. I have a hard time believing it myself, but it did.

The man holding the weapon depressed the trigger. The RPG round burst from the barrel. It was greeny-brown and shaped like a mace, stubby-ended. It sailed up at me and I caught it by the stem, just above its fiery tail, as though it was a Frisbee. I swung round through 360°. The power of a billion souls behind me, the faith of a billion believers inside me. I let the RPG go. It shot straight back to where it had come from. I back-flipped off the Sno-Cat’s roof as two kilogrammes of explosive lit up a small sun and reduced men to cinders.

Not long after that, the Pakistanis laid down their arms.

Of the original two hundred, less than fifty were left. The Indians had contributed, but we devas accounted for the most of the dead.

Beaten and bewildered, the Pakistanis allowed themselves to be marched to the Indians’ camp. A few choice words from Buddha kept them nice and docile. I did my bit as Hanuman by skipping around them, mocking and crowing. Then Rama called me over.

“
Tranquillement, mon ami
. You have been using your siddhis extensively. You must take things easy now, or risk crashing.”

It was hard to calm down. I had seen battle. I had killed enemies who had been trying to kill me. As appalled as I was that I had taken lives, I was thrilled too. Hanuman was fearless. Hanuman was lethal. His speed and daring and ruthlessness were intoxicating. He paid no heed to consequences. He did what he had to, and he enjoyed it.

I had had my first taste of something very sweet. By God, I was liking being a god.

But I took Rama’s advice, remembering how wretched that siddhi crash had made me feel. I slowed to a walk. I tried to be more Zak Bramwell, less deva. Mainly because I didn’t want to crap out suddenly in front of everyone and lose face.