James Becker - The Messiah Secret

‘What are they?’ Angela asked.

‘I know what they look like,’ Bronson said, ‘though that’s almost unbelievable. But there’s one way to check.’

‘How?’

‘Let me show you.’

From his vantage point on the cliffs above, Nick Masters watched the two figures vanish from sight into what he presumed was a cave.

He looked away from his binoculars for a few seconds and stared at his watch. Then he glanced behind him to where Donovan stood, leaning against a boulder, looking uncomfortable.

He slid back from the cliff edge and waved to Donovan to join him. Donovan crouched down and weaved towards him in a clumsy parody of a soldier’s advance that would have been funny in any other context. When he got closer, Masters waved him to a stop and knelt beside him.

‘Right,’ he snapped, his voice low and urgent. ‘Keep down, and keep quiet. I know the wind’s blowing real hard, but you’d be amazed how far sound can travel at times like this.’

‘What’s happening?’

Masters explained what he’d seen. ‘If they stay in that cave for another ten minutes, I’m giving the go signal.’

Donovan nodded agreement. His instructions to Masters had been very specific — let Bronson and Lewis find the relic, but on no account let them touch it.

‘Do you think they’ve got it?’ he asked, his heart pounding with anxiety.

‘I don’t know,’ Masters said. ‘But we’re sure as hell going to stop them if they have.’

Back in Karu, Killian and Tembla stared intently at the video screen. Through the data-link from the Searcher UAV they’d watched two tiny figures look at the ruined monastery building, walk deeper into the valley, and enter another small structure, from which they’d reappeared almost immediately. But now they’d vanished completely.

‘They’ve found a cave,’ Killian muttered.

‘There are lots of caves in that valley,’ Tembla pointed out. ‘Let’s see if they come out again.’

Five minutes later there was still no sign of the two figures.

‘They’ve found something,’ Killian said, standing up. ‘We must leave.’

Tembla leaned over to the serviceman who was piloting the UAV and issued a series of orders. Immediately, the image widened as the man switched from the telephoto lens to a wide-angle view that covered the valley walls as well as the floor. Then he began to zoom in on one particular area.

‘What are you doing?’ Killian asked.

‘Checking on the opposition.’ As the picture tightened, Tembla pointed at a number of slow-moving dots that were just coming into focus. ‘There are the men Donovan recruited. Including Donovan, there are six of them in the valley, the four you can see there and two others who are still watching from the valley wall. There are a couple of others we spotted driving a four-by-four, but they’re some distance away, and we don’t yet know if they’re also a part of the group. And you’re right — from the way they move, they are mercenaries. They’re also carrying assault rifles, which is good for us.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it gives us the perfect excuse to eliminate them. You know what we’re looking at here, but I’ll make sure that all the pictures from the Searcher will just show a group of heavily armed men who’ve almost certainly entered India illegally. We are entirely within our rights to engage them. Using the Hind might be considered to be overkill, but I’ll argue about that later.’

Tembla issued a further instruction and the image changed again, to the view of the rocks where Bronson and Lewis had vanished.

‘They’re inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘Mark that spot and pass the coordinates to the chopper pilots. Right, Father. It’s time we got airborne.’

* * *

Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.

‘Look at this,’ he said to Angela. He took a knife from his belt — one of the various items of camping equipment he’d bought back in Leh — and pressed the blade into the soil. The tip penetrated no more than a quarter of an inch. Then he moved the blade a few inches away and repeated the operation. This time, the blade slid into the dirt for about six inches. He withdrew the knife blade, moved it even further, and again the tip hit solid rock within less than half an inch.

‘You see,’ he said. ‘There’s a groove that runs from the edge of the rock wall across towards the right-hand side of the cave. It’s directly below those two lines on the roof.’ He paused and looked at Angela. ‘In fact, what you’re looking at up there isn’t a pair of parallel lines at all — it’s actually a groove cut into the stone itself, and it’s mirrored by an identical groove cut in the floor of the cave.’

‘You don’t mean. .’ Angela’s voice trailed away as she looked from the floor to the roof of the cave, then to the rock wall itself. She stepped forward and carefully felt the stone, running her hand up and down the edge of the wall.

Bronson nodded. ‘That isn’t a wall of rock. That’s a sliding door made of solid stone that somebody went to a lot of trouble to conceal. What we have to do now is find a way to open it.’

Nick Masters checked his watch once more — it was ten minutes and eighteen seconds since Bronson and Lewis had disappeared. He considered his options for a few more seconds then made a decision. Beckoning to Donovan, he moved back from the cliff-edge and made a call on the sat-phone to the small group of mercenaries who were waiting a short distance up the slope.

‘The targets have gone into a cave. There’s a small stone building on the valley floor — you’ll see it when you get down there. The cave entrance is maybe seventy yards east of that. Move forward now, slowly and quietly. Then hold position about thirty yards clear of the cave entrance.’

Next he made a call to the two men who’d been in the Land Rover — and issued orders to them as well.

Finally he checked his Kalashnikov was fully loaded, shouldered the sniper rifle and began a careful descent down into the valley, Donovan following cautiously behind him.

‘A stone door, Chris? In your dreams! How would they do it?’

‘You’re the one who’s always banging on about how technologically advanced the ancient races were,’ Bronson said, continuing to dig around in the earth with the sheath knife. ‘The pyramids have been standing for what — about five thousand years — and you’ve told me that even today nobody actually knows for sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to build them.’

Angela nodded, almost reluctantly. ‘True enough. And some of the passages in them were deliberately blocked by massive stone blocks to foil tomb-robbers, so the technology obviously existed — or at least it did in Egypt. It’s just that up here in these mountains, in this country — it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find.’

Bronson pointed at the floor, where he’d exposed a long straight-sided groove. ‘Once they’d slid the door closed, they jammed rocks under the base of it to stop it moving, filled the channel in the floor with earth and covered it, and the front of the stone door, with rocks and wood. But they couldn’t do anything to conceal the channel they’d had to cut in the ceiling.’

He looked up, then back down at the floor. ‘They must have used rollers of some kind,’ he said, almost talking to himself, ‘probably lubricated with animal fat or something like that. I just hope that they used stone instead of wood because of the weight of the door. No, in fact, they must have used stone. After two millennia wooden rollers would have simply disintegrated, and the door would have dropped, and maybe even fallen out of the top groove.’