Jon Cleary - The Pulse of Danger

‘Better.’

‘I’m a lucky bastard.’

‘So am I, darling. Don’t ever let our luck run out.’

She bent and kissed him. He held her to him, his rough hands scratching like bark on the silk of her body. Outside the radio was switched on: Wilkins, the other pessimist, searched for Delhi on the dial. Then the voice came over the mountains, lugubrious and hopeless: ‘The Chinese continue to advance …’

Marquis came awake with a start, the shot ringing in his ears like an echo from a dream. Then he heard the shout, and he knew he hadn’t been dreaming. Eve sat up in her bed, her voice cracking with sleep and shock. ‘What’s that?’

Marquis tumbled out of bed, pulled on trousers and sweater over his pyjamas, slid his feet into the old desert boots he wore around camp; then just before he stepped out of the tent he dragged on his anorak and zipped it up to the neck. He was glad that he did: as soon as he came out into the dark morning the cold attacked him. The wind had swung right round to the north, was blowing out of Tibet with all the chill of approaching winter. Marquis shivered, chilled by omen as much as by the wind.

His eyes watered as the wind cut at them, but he saw the dim figure running away from the kitchen tent. It ran towards the stores’ tent; Marquis shut his eyes to blink away the tears; when he opened them, the figure had gone. He wiped his eyes and looked back at the kitchen tent.

Singh had come out of the kitchen tent, a pistol in his hand.

As Marquis crossed to him, Tom Breck and Wilkins came out of their tents. ‘What’s going on? What the hell—?’

Singh said, ‘Someone tried to kill my prisoner.’

Marquis flung back the flap of the kitchen tent. Two rough beds had been made for Singh and Li Bu-fang on the floor of the kitchen; Li lay flat on his back on one of them, his hands still bound. Pots and pans lay about him like discarded helmets; whoever had tried to kill him had been clumsy. A sack of flour had burst: Li was white as far up as his waist, like a man half-way to being embalmed.

‘You all right?’ Marquis said, and the Chinese nodded. He was no inscrutable Oriental now: he was as frightened as the most emotional Occidental. Marquis turned back to Singh. ‘Who was it?’

‘I didn’t see. I heard Li cry out, I saw this shape, I fired at him, but he got away—’

The whole camp was astir now. Eve and Nancy stood in the doorways of their respective tents, each wrapped in an anorak and a blanket. The porters had come out of their tents, but had not moved up towards Marquis and the others; they stood in a broken line, watching carefully like spectators at a political rally they resented. Marquis could not see their faces, they were just black shapes against the lamps in their tents; but he recognised the stiffness of their attitude, he had seen it in Africa and other parts of Asia when trouble occurred. He, Eve, the Brecks, Wilkins were now one with Singh and Li Bu-fang: they were all foreigners.

‘We’d better ask some questions, then,’ said Wilkins. ‘It must have been one of the porters.’

‘Get them up here at once,’ Singh said.

Marquis turned his head slowly. ‘Colonel, this isn’t Poona, or wherever your barracks are. This is my camp – mine , not yours. Don’t start chucking orders around here, or you’re likely to be cut down to lance-corporal. Don’t forget, no one invited you in here.’

The two men stared at each other in the dim glow from the lamp in the kitchen tent. Singh still held his pistol; the barrel of it came up. Marquis tensed, waiting for the bullet; he found it incredible that the Indian should shoot him, but he knew it was going to happen. Singh’s face was distorted with an anger that made him ugly. I was right, Marquis thought, he does belong to another century. And waited for the bullet.

Then down by their tents the porters turned all at once, as if turning away to avoid seeing the murder. Or perhaps they were going to break and run. That thought seemed to strike Singh; the pistol swung away from Marquis in the direction of the porters. And without quite knowing why, Marquis stepped in front of the pistol again, keeping it aimed at himself, but at his back this time as he turned towards the porters. He shouted, ‘Nimchu!’, but the wind snatched away his voice and the shout sounded more like a bleat. Then Nimchu came towards him, another porter with him. It was Chungma, breathing heavily, trembling with exhaustion.

‘What the hell brought you back, Chungma?’

‘Chinese, sahib.’ The boy had only a few words of English; he hissed them into the wind. ‘Down valley.’

‘There are forty or fifty of them, sahib.’ Nimchu had been speaking to Chungma as he had brought the young porter up to Marquis. ‘Camped where this river joins the river from the east. Chungma was camped there himself when they arrived. He was very lucky to escape.’

‘Did they see you, Chungma?’

‘Not know, sahib.’ His teeth glimmered in the lightening darkness; he was still young and innocent enough to joke about disaster. ‘Ran too fast.’

Marquis also grinned, although he was in no mood for joking. He glanced over his shoulder at Singh; the latter had put away his pistol. Then he looked back at Chungma. ‘Which way were they heading?’

Nimchu spoke to Chungma, then turned back to Marquis. The older Bhutanese knew this was no time for joking; his voice had a nervous edge to it. ‘Chungma thinks they are coming this way, sahib. They were coming up the valley, he is sure of that.’

Marquis remarked the nervousness in Nimchu’s voice and at once his own apprehension increased. He cursed, and stood thinking while the wind whetted its blade against his cheek. He could hear it coming down the narrow valley, its sound drowning the hiss and rumble of the river; the trees creaked and keened under its scything, leaves whipping through the darkness like bats. Up in the high peaks he knew that a blizzard must be blowing, the snow whirling through the passes in thick blinding clouds. He wondered why the Chinese should be down the valley, below the camp; then guessed they might be from another post farther west, who had got the word that one of their generals had been captured and had come down one of the side valleys. It didn’t matter where they had come from. What mattered was where they were , down there at the bottom of the valley, oiling the bolts on their rifles, chanting some Red propaganda to keep themselves warm, just waiting for daylight to come marching up the valley.

‘Could it have been one of the Chinese who tried to kill the general?’ Tom Breck said.

‘Why would they want to do that?’ Marquis turned away for a moment, told Nimchu to have Tsering come up to the kitchen tent and start preparing breakfast; then he turned back to Breck and the other men. ‘They wouldn’t travel at night in one of these valleys. Too easy to get lost—’

‘Then it must have been one of the porters,’ said Wilkins.

‘Could be.’ Marquis glanced across at Nancy Breck, still standing in the doorway of her tent. The morning had lightened enough now for him to see more clearly; beneath the blanket she had wrapped round her he could see she was wearing trousers and boots. She was fully dressed and her boots were laced up. He looked at Tom Breck, but the latter looked as innocent as ever. Then he turned to Singh. ‘But I’m not going to start questioning the porters, Colonel. I’ve got other things on my mind right now.’

‘Such as?’

I’m going to give myself a hernia, trying to control my temper with this bastard. ‘Such as trying to work out what we can do to get out of this spot we’re in. You look after your prisoner, Colonel. We’ll look after ourselves. If we don’t, we might all be dead by to-night.’ He heard Tom Breck gasp; Wilkins made a noise that sounded like a snort. ‘Better start packing, Tom. You too, Nick.’ He looked at Singh again, felt suddenly too tired to be angry at the man; the danger of a hernia passed. ‘All these bloody mountains to get lost in, and you had to choose this valley!’