Age of Shiva (The Pantheon Series) (5 page)

5. THE CAVALRY

S
PHINCTER-PUCKERING, KNUCKLE-WHITENING, GUT-CHURNING
terror.

We’re going to die. They’re going to shoot us out of the sky. We’re going to die.

The
Garuda
went into a nosedive, and pathetically I assumed the brace position just the way flight attendants tell you to during the pre-takeoff safety spiel. No practical use in the event of the aircraft blowing up, but if my head was between my knees at least it would be easier to kiss my arse goodbye.

We plummeted, the captain pouring on speed. I had no idea how fast a Mirage could fly, or a Sidewinder missile for that matter. I had to hope that the
Garuda
was faster than either. Otherwise this was just some pointless stunt, a desperate, futile attempt by Captain Canuck to evade the inevitable.

We bottomed out of our kamikaze plunge with a juddering, teeth-rattling lurch that shot me bolt upright. G-forces pressed me into my seat hard enough, probably, to leave a permanent Zak-shaped impression in the upholstery. Someone was screeching like a girl, and I assumed it was Aanandi, but, embarrassingly, it turned out to be me.

Now the
Garuda
was scooting along at low altitude. How low? I glimpsed the glitter of moonlight on water not far beneath the wingtips, less than fifteen feet. The crazy thing was, the ocean seemed to be getting closer. The captain was bringing us right down until we were brushing the wave tops, and I was no aeronautical expert but I didn’t reckon this was a very sensible plan of action. The
Garuda
wasn’t a seaplane, as far as I could tell. I’d seen wheels but not pontoons. Ergo, landing on water did not strike me as viable or advisable. Wouldn’t we just sink?

Besides, we weren’t decelerating, the flaps weren’t down, no reverse thrust – nothing to suggest we were landing at all. So what was the purpose of the exercise?

“Okay,” said the captain, “hold tight, everyone.”

Then we were bouncing along on the sea’s surface like a skimming stone. I dug my fingernails into the armrests, expecting that at any moment the
Garuda
would flip and go cartwheeling end over end, disintegrating piece by piece until there was nothing left of it but scattered smithereens.

Instead, it settled onto the water, coasting like a powerboat. Plumes of sea foam sprayed up over the wings.

“Wrongfooted those PAF boys with that manoeuvre,” said the captain, “but we haven’t shaken ’em off. They’re coming down for a closer look, and the targeting radar lock is still active. We’re going to have to lose them once and for all, and that means reconfiguring.”

“Reconfiguring?” I said to Aanandi with a frown.

“Wait and see.”

“Good news is, the cavalry’s on its way,” the captain added. “Couple of minutes out, inbound. It’s going to be tight but I think they might make it in time to help.”

One of the Mirages thundered by overhead, then went into a sharp banking turn to come around.

Meanwhile a succession of tremendous whines and rumbles shuddered through the
Garuda
’s frame. I saw the wings retract, telescoping inwards until they were a fifth of their original span, more like fins now. Then what appeared to be a pair of turbines folded out from recesses in the fuselage. Their fans started to turn. All the while we lost speed, the jet engine powering down.

“This is...” I started to say, but in fact I didn’t know
what
this was. It was something, certainly.

The Mirage returned for a second flyby, shooting up afterwards into a perpendicular climb.

“His buddy’s at five o’clock, zeroing in,” said the captain. “Looks like it could be a kill run. But if you’d care to take a gander out of the starboard windows you’ll see a sight to gladden your hearts.”

Out there, a pinprick of light glimmered on the horizon, growing fast.

“The chariot,” Aanandi said with satisfaction.

“We’re submerging in ten,” the captain said. “You may have just enough time to catch the fireworks first, though.”

The approaching light resolved into the flare of a rocket engine, propelling a kind of open-topped airborne sled in which two figures were visible. One manned the controls. The other rode behind, legs braced and apart for balance. They must have been doing two hundred miles an hour, yet the standing figure didn’t appear to be having any trouble staying upright. More than that, he didn’t appear concerned in the least.

And he had a bow in his hands.

If ever there was a time to exclaim “What the fuck!?” this was it, and I did.

The chariot shot past.

The bowman unleashed an arrow, a streak of silver in the gleam of the full moon.

There was a burst of golden orange, the unmistakable bright cascade of fuel igniting.

Then water bubbled up over the
Garuda
’s windows, rising like ink, blotting out the sky.

We plunged into the depths of the Laccadive Sea, the
Garuda
humming happily to itself, quite at home.

6. THE TRINITY SYNDICATE

GRAND HOSPITALITY PROJECT

I
STEPPED OUT
from my room onto the patio, into a billow of humid morning air. In the shade of an awning, breakfast had been laid out for me. Hot coffee. A huge bowlful of fresh pineapple, mango and papaya. Porridge. Bacon and eggs under a domed steel lid.

I ate and drank like I hadn’t seen food in weeks.

Just yards from where I sat lay a white beach caressed by blue wavelets. A leatherback turtle was lugging itself across the sand, making for the shallows. A pair of scarlet-clawed crabs were engaged in some kind of turf battle or mating ritual, tangoing back and forth amid the coarse shoreline grass, pincers locked. Brown, nondescript little birds fluttered onto the table, hoping to snaffle some scraps.

In the light of a new day, the events of the previous evening seemed distant, incomprehensible, almost surreal.

Had I really been in an aircraft that doubled as a boat and trebled as a submarine?

Had we really come under attack by Pakistan Air Force planes?

Had I really seen someone armed with a bow and arrow take out a Dassault Mirage in midair?

I could scarcely believe any of it. If someone had come to me with a story like that, I would have told them to lay off the wacky baccy for a while.

Yet all I had to do was turn round, my back to the beach, to know that it was all true.

Behind me loomed a mighty, outward-curving building, a giant edifice occupying almost the entirety of one of the lesser Maldives at the far northern end of the island chain. It was steel and concrete and tinted glass, narrower at its base than at its summit, flaring like a conch shell, with barely a straight line anywhere in its architecture.

This, of course, you will all know as Mount Meru.

At the time, though, it had another name, a much less evocative, more prosaic one. It was known as the Trinity Syndicate Grand Hospitality Project. It was – or so everyone had been led to believe – a gigantic hotel complex, the largest and most ambitious undertaking of its kind, a billion-dollar attempt to create a kind of static cruise ship, an isolated and self-contained venue for leisure, entertainment and relaxation. It was touted as a Mecca for wealthy vacationers who wanted a combination of high-end luxury resort and the balminess of the tropics, Las Vegas but with breezes and ocean views.

I had seen pictures of the complex in the news media, both computer-generated artist’s impressions of how it would look when completed and work-in-progress update photos. I think I might have marvelled at the sheer audacious folly of it and reckoned I’d never be able to afford to stay there in a month of Sundays even if I’d wanted to.

It was beautiful, no question. An aerial shot I’d seen showed how the building radiated out in seven concentric layers. The petal-like rings rose towards the middle in an inverted funnel shape. They were divided by courtyards and gardens and connected on their upper levels by walkways and skybridges.

Some of the solutions to the technical problems thrown up by the complex’s construction were spectacular, too, such as driving dozens of steel-and-concrete monopiles half a mile deep in order to create foundations which could support the immense weight of such a structure. Without them it would have crushed the stack of compressed coral it stood on and sunk beneath the waves like Atlantis.

The Trinity Syndicate Grand Hospitality Project was also entirely self-powered, using the photovoltaic properties of the paper-thin solar tiles – alternating layers of graphene and transition metal dichalcogenides – with which every exterior surface apart from the windows was covered. Electricity was abundant and free.

And now I was staying there myself, as a guest – or a something, I wasn’t yet sure what. But I had been given a set of clean clothes which fit and were made of light cotton, just right for the climate, and I’d had an amazing super-hot multi-nozzle shower before coming out for breakfast, and I’d shaved, and now I was eating heartily, and I felt, in a word, resurrected.
¹

My upbeat mood was in no way diminished by the arrival of the lovely Aanandi.

“How are you feeling, Zak?”

I patted a belly that resembled an expectant mother’s. “Gloriously stuffed.”

“Ready for a meeting?”

“What? Now? Who with?”

“The bosses. The Trinity Syndicate. Busy men, like I said, but they’ve made time to fit you in. They’re eager to say hi.”

She led me through the complex’s outer ring in a clockwise direction, up and down a number of staircases. The place had that new-building smell, all freshly poured concrete and just-dried plaster. Pot plants glistened. Slabs of slate and marble gleamed.

What I was seeing now confirmed the impressions I had gathered the previous night: if this was a hotel, it was the oddest one I’d ever been in. There was no reception or main lobby that I was aware of. The communal areas seemed more like rec rooms at an office, full of low chairs and discreet soft furnishings, with drink dispensing machines, flatscreen TVs and table football. There were staff, Maldivians all of them, but their uniform was informal – T-shirts and sweatpants bearing a three-heads logo that was a bit like the biohazard symbol – rather than the trousers and ties that were regulation dress for employees at a posh hotel.

We passed people who I took to be fellow “guests” like me. They were a motley assortment, ranging from pudgy bespectacled boffins with Doc Brown hair to smoothly efficient and smartly groomed city types who could only be dabblers in the dark arts of corporate public relations.

In short: hotel, shmotel. This was no more a resort destination than Disneyland was a concentration camp. The Trinity Syndicate Grand Hospitality Project was a front, hiding something utterly other.

Finally, after a lengthy indoor trek, Aanandi ushered me into a conference room. One wall was an unbroken, floor-to-ceiling window, showing me two equal fields of flat colour, the aquamarine sea and the cerulean sky, like something Rothko might have painted in one of his mellower phases. That triple-head logo was embedded in the ceiling as a quartz mosaic, and repeated in the pattern of the carpet.