Jack Higgins - Year Of The Tiger

The driver screamed once as hands reached for him, dragging him from behind the wheel, and Kurbsky stood there, his face frozen with horror, the camera still half-raised. He threw one terrible, agonized glance at Chavasse and then was pulled backwards out of his seat.

For a brief moment, he managed to get to his feet, covered in dust, blood on his face, and then they swarmed over him like a great sea, blotting him from sight.

Chavasse found himself scrambling over the side down into the crowd, his mouth open in a soundless scream as he tried to claw his way through the living wall towards the Russian.

Faces turned towards him, blind with fury and passion, lips drawn back from decaying teeth. As hands clawed at his clothing, he smashed a fist into someone’s mouth and then a searing pain flooded through his head and he plunged into darkness.

He opened his eyes slowly. For a moment, his mind was a complete blank, and he struggled up on one elbow, panic moving inside him.

He was lying on a narrow bed in one corner of a dark and windowless room. A flickering butter lamp hung from a chain in the centre and all the gods and devils in the Buddhist pantheon chased each other through the shadows on the ancient tapestries which covered the walls.

Their great demons’ faces loomed out of the darkness at him and he closed his eyes for a moment and became aware of a low, monotonous voice. When he opened them again, he realized that a saffron-robed monk in a conical hat was sitting in the shadows a few feet away, beads clicking between his fingers as he prayed.

As Chavasse moved, the old man stopped praying, got to his feet and came forward. He looked incredibly old, his yellow parchment face netted with a thousand wrinkles. Quite suddenly, he smiled and, pulling the tapestry at the end of the bed to one side, went out through a low arch.

Chavasse felt completely rested and his headache had vanished. He flung the sheepskin to one side and swung his legs to the floor. At that moment, the tapestry was pulled back and Joro entered.

The Tibetan was dressed in the brown robe and sheepskin shuba he had worn on the plane and there was a smile on his face. The other Joro, the one who had worn the mask of the King of Hell, might never have existed.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

“All things considered, pretty good,” Chavasse told him. “I don’t know what made me act the way I did. I think I had a touch of fever or something.”

“It was the mountain sickness, nothing more.

It makes a man do strange things. The abbot gave you something for it while you slept.”

“That was a pretty neat trick you pulled out there in the courtyard,” Chavasse said.

Joro shrugged. “They had the machine gun so we had to be careful. I’m glad it worked. I had to walk most of the night to get here in time. But I knew they would take you to Changu and this meant that they would have to pass through here.”

“What happened to the Russian? Is he dead?”

Joro nodded. “Naturally. To my people, the Russians and the Chinese are simply two sides of the same coin. Here is your Walther. I found it in his pocket.”

Chavasse sighed, a feeling of genuine regret running through him. “He was a good man, by any standards.”

“Not by mine,” Joro told him. “To me this is war and he was the enemy. It is as simple as that. In any case, I couldn’t have stopped the people once they got started. I had enough trouble saving you when you got in among them.”

“My thanks for that, anyway.”

Joro shook his head. “They are not needed. I was simply repaying a debt. It was your quickness which saved me at the lake.”

“You’ve found the arms, I suppose?” Chavasse said. “They were in the rear of the jeep.”

Joro nodded. “Some of my men are preparing them for use in the next room. Why not come through. There is a fire there and some tea. Tibetan, I’m afraid, but it’s time you got used to it.”

He plucked back the tapestry and Chavasse followed him into a much larger room with a low, crudely plastered ceiling and tiny windows set high in the wall. The guns were laid out on a large wooden table and three Tibetan warriors cleaned them expertly.

“They seem to know their stuff,” Chavasse commented.

Joro nodded. “They are quick to learn. This is something the Chinese have yet to discover.”

A fire of yak dung burned brightly on the large stone hearth and as Chavasse watched, Joro crumbled a handful of brick tea into a cauldron of boiling water and added butter and a pinch of salt.

“You haven’t got such a thing as a cigarette, have you?” Chavasse asked.

Joro nodded across to the table. “One of my men emptied the Russian’s pockets. His things are over there. There were three of four packets of cigarettes, I believe.”

Chavasse crossed to the table and stood looking down for a moment at all that remained of a man: a wallet, his travelling papers and three packets of cigarettes.

He lit one slowly and, carrying the wallet and travelling papers, returned to the fire, where he sat down on a rough wooden bench.

The wallet contained a wad of Chinese bank-notes, a couple of letters obviously received from friends in Russia and a membership card for a Moscow press club. There were no intimate little snapshots of wife or children, and feeling curiously relieved, Chavasse turned to the papers.

There were the usual travelling permits plus a special visa for Tibet, date-stamped Peking and countersigned by the military governor in Lhasa. They were smeared with blood and badly damaged by a knife-thrust, but Kurbsky’s face still stared out from the photo of identification.

Chavasse sat there looking at the papers, so deeply immersed in thought that when Joro pronounced the tea ready and handed him a metal cup, he drank the contents down without thinking.

“The tea.” Joro smiled. “You like it?”

Chavasse looked at the empty cup in his hands with a slight frown and then grinned. “I didn’t even feel it go down. You’d better give me another.”

It was curiously refreshing and he felt life returning to him. He lit another cigarette and said, “How far is Changu from here?”

“Perhaps ninety miles,” Joro said. “Two days’ hard travelling by horse.”

“What if we went in the jeep?”

“That would be impossible,” Joro said. “There are at least two hundred troops stationed there, and they patrol the vicinity regularly. If we even tried to approach the town in the jeep, we would be arrested.”

“But what if we drove right in?”

Joro frowned in bewilderment. “How would this be possible?”

“By my telling the authorities that I’m Andrei Sergeievich Kurbsky, a Russian journalist touring Tibet on a visa from the Central Committee in Peking. I speak excellent Russian, by the way.”

“And what about your escort?”

“Murdered by the bandits who ambushed our camp during the night. You can be the guide I hired in Lhasa who pretended to fall in with them and saved my life by persuading them to hold me for ransom.”

Joro nodded slowly. “I see – and presumably we escaped in the jeep while the others slept?”

Chavasse grinned. “You’re catching on fine.”

The Tibetan shook his head. “There is one thing you are forgetting. The Russian’s papers – they carry his picture.”

Chavasse tossed them into the fire. The bloodstained documents started to go brown and curled at the edges. For a brief moment, Kurbsky stared out at him for the last time. Then they dissolved in a puff of flame.

“Let’s say the bandits emptied my pockets,” Chavasse said. “Anything else?”

Joro shook his head. “Only that it will be very dangerous. There is possibly one thing in our favour. One of my men arrived from Changu last night. Apparently, Colonel Li is away for a few days visiting the outlying villages. Only a captain called Tsen is in charge, and he is young and inexperienced.”