The Avatari (64 page)

Seated with Hal Stevens behind the pilot of the second helicopter, Josh could barely contain his excitement.
So I will finally fulfill the dream
, he thought. Then he realized with a shock that the pilot of the first helicopter, which was ahead of them, was firing at the people below.

‘Don’t hit the colonel!’ he yelled, ‘he’s the key!’

He knew, even as he shouted out the words, that there was no way the pilot of the first helicopter could hear him.

This was the one development Peter had feared and for which they had worked out no solutions. Their arrows were useless against the helicopter and its speed was far greater than the pace at which the three of them moved on horseback. Already, he could hear the heavy machine gun mounted on the turret open up. He reined in his horse and swivelled around.

‘Go on ahead!’ he shouted to Ashton and Susan. ‘Get away, as far away as you can!’

‘What about you?’ Susan cried in anguish.

‘Don’t worry, I’ll get back!’ he assured her, his voice fading away as he galloped back to the mound.

Just as he had anticipated, the helicopter pilot spotted him right away. He came for him now, lunging forward, nose down. Peter pulled his pistol from his waistband and took careful aim. He knew there was a small window in the pilot’s canopy which was unprotected and let off three well-timed shots.

He knew he had missed, because the helicopter flew right over him, strafing the ground around him and raising dust. He knew the longer he kept the helicopter pilot’s attention on himself, the farther Ashton and Susan would be able to get away. But he didn’t have a plan after that.
First things first
, he thought.
Get them away and then we’ll work on getting out of here
.

Behruz Amin marvelled at the audacity of the horseman who had turned and fired at him. He had missed,
but only just
. Dispassionately, he swung the helicopter around. He would take out this brave, but crazy man on this run. The machine gun was inaccurate; he would use the rockets.

Amin had sixteen 57-millimeter S-5 rockets, ideal for an unprotected target like the rider he was tracking. The 1.24-metre-long rocket contained a thickened pyrophoric agent, simply known as TPA; a napalm-like substance, it conflagrated on contact with air. He sighted the rider, made correction for time of flight and released four rockets, pulling the helicopter up sharply at the same time to get away from the blast.

Three of the unguided rockets were way off, but one of them landed close to Peter or where he had been moments earlier, since his horse was galloping away at great speed. Peter had had to veer sharply to the right to avoid a huge mound which had suddenly loomed up in front of him. The five-kilogramme rocket struck the mound, piercing the crust with its momentum which had reached a velocity of 300 metres per second, and bored deep into the natural cavity, before exploding. The fireball the TPA created had attained a temperature of 1,200 degrees centigrade – the melting temperature of cast iron – and Behruz Amin hoped it would engulf the rider and send him back to whichever god he believed in, mostly in a charred form.

Amin got his fireball all right, but it was quite unlike anything he had expected. The exploding rocket ignited the trapped natural gas in the cavity. The resulting explosion rumbled and shook the ground all around the valley. The flaming gases and burnt earth shot straight up into the air like a geyser, the fiery column rising hundreds of metres above the ground. Behruz Amin’s helicopter took the direct impact of the blast and disintegrated in the air. The second helicopter, busy strafing the Jhagun on the other side of the crevasse, escaped the effects of the initial explosion, but was undone by the reaction to the blast wave – the air rushing back to fill the under pressure and occupy the space created by the blast. This was many times more powerful than the blast wave itself and created a vortex, sucking in everything around it like a voracious demon. The people on the ground watched in awe as the second helicopter was flung around in the air like a kite caught in a gale and then crashed to the ground.

Its occupants, including Josh Wando and Dr Hal Stevens, were killed instantly.

As the blast waves died down, the Jhagun continued with their attacks on both sides of the crevasse. The men in the bridgehead who had survived the arrows were still dazed by the blast and were quickly cut down by the horsemen with their short swords.

On the other side, Kurt Stein tried to regain some control, but was cut short by an arrow which went through his ear and emerged from the top of his head. The Jhagun’s foot soldiers, now finding themselves face to face with Claire and Ru San Ko, had halted. They could not attack a woman and the man with her was quite evidently a monk.

But the decision was taken out of their hands, for Claire had whipped out a handgun and fired at one of the warriors. As the bullet struck him in the chest and he went down, she shouted at the remaining five who had surrounded her, ‘Stand back or I’ll kill you! I just want a horse to get away!’

The men understood no English; nor would it have made much difference if they had. For as Claire ran ahead towards the spot where the horses were tethered, one of the warriors aimed his short lance at her. It passed through her abdomen, pitching her forward and impaling her to the ground. She died screaming in Russian, another language the men around her did not understand.

Ru San Ko stared at the warriors. Then he went down on his knees and bowed deeply. With a gesture, he requested a sword which one of them brought forth and handed to him. He remembered the Teacher’s curse:
he would embrace the third daughter.
Mara, the Lord of Sin and Death had three daughters – Tanha, desire; Raga, lust; and Arati, regret and revulsion. They had
all
visited him and he had succumbed to them,
the last daughter at the very end
. Without a word, he fell forward on the sword. As he lay dying, all the warriors around him went down on their knees and bowed, paying silent homage to the departing soul.

The blast knocked Peter off his horse and as he landed on the ground, he felt the fiery wave scald his body. For the second time in three days, there was blackness.

When he came to, someone was sprinkling water on his face. He opened his eyes with painful effort. Everything hurt and his vision was blurred, but he recognized Susan.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked him.

What a stupid question
, he thought.
Of course I’m not
!

‘Will you marry me?’ he asked, his tongue thick and almost inert.

He had passed out before he could hear the answer, which was just as well, because Susan swore at him in a language that made Tashi, who was kneeling close by, blush with embarrassment.

So this is how the women in the outside world speak
, he mused.

After Peter had recovered enough to be able to sit on a horse, they resumed their journey till they climbed a ridgeline, getting out of the ‘Lake of Dreams’. At the top of the ridgeline, they could see the peak of the three-faced Trimukha Mountain, resplendent in the rays of the sun. They made for the mountain and came to a river straddled by a wooden bridge. It was here that Tashi made them halt. A small boat was tied to a stake on the bank.

‘It is here you will have to make a decision, my friends’ he announced, looking serious. ‘Once you cross this bridge you will enter the area of the monastery, leaving the world you came from behind forever.’ He then added for emphasis, ‘You cannot cross it back’.

‘Antahkarna,’ Susan remarked quietly, ‘the Rainbow Bridge that leads from this world to the next.’

Ashton, Peter and Susan stood staring at the bridge and then at each other for sometime without saying anything.

‘I think I should be crossing that bridge’, Ashton said, finally breaking the silence. The other two came up and hugged him. Susan took his hand and pressed something into it. Ashton opened his palm and saw it was a platinum ring.

‘David would have wanted to accompany you’ she said simply, tears welling up in her eyes.

Ashton nodded in understanding.

‘And if we do not wish to cross the bridge?’ Peter asked Tashi. ‘What if we want to go back to our world?’

Tashi smiled. ‘Then we take the boat you see there.’

There was not much left to say. Ashton held their hands.

‘I thought you might need something to start off with,’ he told them both. ‘I’ve left word with my bankers that everything is to go to Susan.’

‘How about me, Colonel?’ Peter asked in mock anguish.

Ashton silently placed Susan’s hand in Peter’s. ‘Take good care of her,’ he told the younger man. ‘Just take good care of her.’

Peter, Susan and Tashi stood watching, until Ashton and the entire group had crossed the bridge, made their way to the shining, three-faced mountain and were out of sight. Then, they got into the boat.

POSTSCRIPT

In March 1294
CE
, shortly after the death of Kublai Khan, a great dispute would break out in the Kuriltai, the Great Assembly, in Khanbalik over which of the two grandsons, Temur and Kamala, should ascend the throne and inherit the empire. According to a matriarch, Nambui, Kublai Khan had decreed that of the two young men, his rightful heir should be the one who could recite the sayings of Genghis Khan with greater eloquence. Temur’s memory was flawless, convincingly beating his cousin who struggled to mouth the utterances of Genghis. And it was thus that the former inherited the greatest empire the world has ever seen.

Temur wed many women and took several concubines as well, but it was the beautiful Chinese maiden he married just before the Great Khan’s death whom he chose for his queen. Following his ascent to the throne, the first child she bore him was a girl. Despite the promise he had made to the Great Khan, Temur could not declare her his heir, for a woman could not ascend the throne. He lavished all his love on his daughter, however, and she grew up to be an accomplished artist. The second child from his queen was a boy whom Temur, true to his covenant with the Great Khan, declared his successor.

* * *

The search party from Lhasa led by the senior lama, Kewtsang Rimpoche, reached Taktser Village in the Amdo province of north-eastern Tibet late on the afternoon of 13 June 1938. They were searching for the
tulku,
or reincarnation, of the Dalai Lama; the signs had foretold he would be found here. The thirteenth Dalai Lama, Thyupten Gyatso, had passed away in 1933. While the embalmed body was lying in state during the funerary rites, the head was discovered to have changed position; from facing south, it was now facing north-east. The Regent, himself a high lama, had made the pilgrimage, as tradition dictated, to the sacred lake of Lhama Lhatso where again, in keeping with tradition, he had had a vision which indicated to him where the successor to the Dalai Lama would be found.

And so they had made their way to the house of a small farmer, where lived a little boy who could turn out to be the celebrated child they were looking for. Deciding not to reveal the purpose of their visit, Kewtsang Rimpoche asked the farmer for permission to stay the night in his home so that they might better observe the child and determine if, indeed, he was the one they had come in search of. The Rimpoche spent much of the evening playing with the three-year-old, discovering, to his delight, the ease with which the child recognized him and addressed him by his formal name, Sera Lama, ‘Sera’ being the name of the monastery Kewtsang belonged to. In the subsequent tests the toddler would be put through, the deputation placed certain objects before him to gauge his reaction. The child recognized and pointed out only those articles that had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama, disregarding the others.

It was thus that the boy, Lhama Thondup, came to be recognized as His Holiness. Assuming the name of Jamphel Ngawang Lobsang Yeshe Tenzin Gyatso, he would become the fourteenth Dalai Lama, believed by his followers to be Avalokiteswara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, seventy-fourth in a lineage that can be traced back to a Brahmin boy who lived during the time of Buddha Shakyamuni.

He would also be the first Dalai Lama to live outside Tibet – in exile.

* * *

Admiral Neeson, Chairman of the Intelligence Oversight Board, was a huge man who bulged equally from every part of his sparkling white naval uniform. He was also a man of few words.

‘I’ll come straight to the point, Mr President,’ he now said to the man seated behind the desk in the Oval Office.

He glanced over his shoulder before he spoke again, but that was an ingrained habit for a man who had spent all of his life in intelligence. He needn’t have bothered; there were only the two of them in the room.

‘This is about an internal enquiry we had conducted into the disappearance of Dr Hal Stevens, chief of our Scientific Weapons and Intelligence Facility at Langley, and Gregory Krakowski, the station chief in Islamabad.’ He paused and gave the President a shrewd look. ‘I take it the CIA hasn’t briefed you about it?’

The President silently shook his head.

‘According to our departmental enquiry, the disappearance and presumed death of Dr Stevens and Krakowski occurred in an air crash in northern Pakistan that has been attributed to possible technical failure or bad weather or both, while the men were on a tour of the area.’ He paused, allowing the information to sink in, before adding softly, ‘Just the way it was originally reported.’

‘I take it there’s more to it than that?’

‘Regrettably so, Mr President,’ Admiral Neeson confirmed. ‘It has been brought to our notice that the deputy director of operations had authorized – without appropriate clearance – the use of secret prototype devices which could have severely compromised our NAVSTAR programme. This involved the use of a satellite transceiver and the services of our Second Space Wing, Falcon Air Force Station, Colorado Springs.’ He coughed delicately, before adding, ‘Again, both unauthorized.’

‘Where was this used?’ the President asked.

‘We tried to locate the target area through the coordinates we picked up from Falcon. Then we sent in our KH-11 Satellite, the QuickBird, which does our broad-coverage photo-recon. We could pick up nothing. It’s somewhere along the border between China and Afghanistan. Nothing but mountains there; the satellite picture confirmed that.’