The Cloud Maker (2010) (43 page)
‘Get up,’ the soldier whispered, his eyes anxious.
Luca dragged himself upright, his bruised body leaden and unresponsive. He stared at the soldier from puffy, black-ringed eyes, the whole left side of his face swollen and distorted. His mouth hung open, dry blood splattered across his lips as he just sat there, his mind reeling with confusion.
The soldier reached forward with one arm and dragged Luca closer to the opening.
‘Get boots on,’ he said, keeping his voice low.
Luca reached down automatically, pulling the tongue of the boots wide and jamming them on over his iced up socks. Without laces, the boots flapped open as he crawled outside into the cold night air.
The soldier was standing in front of him, Bill’s rucksack in his hands. A few coils from a climbing rope poked out from the half-closed top.
‘Go!’ he breathed, pointing to the snow gulley. ‘Dawn one hour. You leave now.’
Luca blinked, trying to wake himself up. Could this be some kind of trick? He looked past the soldier towards the other tents but the entire campsite was still. They were alone. The numbness that had paralysed him for so long, driving every thought from his mind, seemed to finally thaw, replaced by an overwhelming desire to escape. With a sudden jerk of his arm, he snatched his rucksack from the soldier’s grasp and turned to leave. Then he suddenly stopped.
A few feet ahead of him, Bill’s body lay in the snow. His arms were still outstretched and his face angled towards Luca. For a moment, Luca stared, transfixed. Bill’s eyes were dull and glassy. His face looked different, like a carbon copy of the original. It was as if the real Bill had gone, leaving only a likeness behind.
‘He dead,’ Chen whispered, shaking Luca’s shoulder. ‘But you have chance for living.’
Luca tore his gaze away, staring direct into Chen’s eyes.
‘How do you live with such horror?’ he asked.
Not waiting for an answer, he turned and sprinted forward without looking back, every ache and bruise forgotten as he powered his way up through the deep snow.
Chen watched the Westerner’s outline fade to grey before disappearing into the shadow of the overhanging cliff. He turned, walking back to the campsite with his head held low. Pulling one of the collapsible shovels from the ground, he dug it in the ground and began shovelling snow over Bill’s frozen body.
Without completely understanding the Westerner’s last words, he had gathered their meaning.
There was only one hour left till dawn. Very soon Zhu would order the raid on the monastery. Right now, he couldn’t afford to think.
‘Shara!’
Luca’s shout drifted out across the black rocks. He stopped, listening for the slightest sound.
‘Shara!’
Looking up, he saw the first flecks of dawn rising over the eastern sweep of mountains, bathing the sky in long, blood-red streaks. As each minute passed the light grew in strength, seeping across the sky and burning off the night’s gloom.
Luca stared from one rock to the next, desperately trying to make sense of the landscape. Everything looked so damn’ similar.
‘Shara!’
From somewhere to his left, he heard a muffled echo. It was closer to the cliff edge than he had been looking. Sprinting forward, he leaped over a few boulders in his way then changed direction as he heard the noise again. It was clearer now. It could only be Shara.
Luca bellowed her name as he frantically scanned the ground. Finally, he saw it.
‘Luca! We’re down here!’ Shara’s voice flooded up through the crack in the rock, bringing tears of relief to his eyes. He scrabbled in his rucksack, pulling out the rope and tying it off around a boulder.
‘Tie yourself on,’ he shouted.
He began emptying the top half of his rucksack, scattering the contents in a semi-circle around him. Brushing aside the fuel bottles for the MSR stove and a spare pair of gloves, he untangled the long sling filled with their climbing hardware and pulled it free from the pack. Unclipping two pulleys and some carabineers, he uncoiled two stretches of five-millimetre prussic rope, wrapping them onto the main line down to Shara. Attaching the pulleys on to the same rope, he then started heaving backwards on the rope system, slipping the prussic knots forward with each pull. Metre by metre, Shara and Babu were hoisted up.
Shara’s hand came over the edge first. Luca turned his body to offset the strain and grabbed on to her wrists, dragging her whole body out from the ground. With Babu still clinging to her neck, she fell forward against him, hugging him tight.
‘Luca!’ she whispered, her face buried in his shoulder. ‘We thought you weren’t coming back. It was so dark . . .’
After a moment she pulled back from him, her eyes passing across his broken face.
‘What did they do to you?’
He didn’t answer, shutting his eyes as the images flashed through his mind. His head tilted down towards the ground as he tried to speak.
‘They . . . they shot . . . Bill,’ he managed finally, his voice cracking.
Shara’s face froze. Then her eyes widened slowly in disbelief, begging him to tell her it was not true.
‘Why?’ she whispered.
‘There was no reason. I’d told them everything they wanted to know.’
Shara’s hands rose to her face and she covered her eyes. Her lips began moving in prayer, the words flowing in a constant stream. Luca watched her for a moment, then his expression began to change. The terrible grief seemed to crystallise, replaced by something bitter and cold. He reached down to the ground, violently jamming the contents of his rucksack back inside.
‘There’s no time for this,’ he said, without looking at her. ‘We’ve got to get to Geltang before they do.’
He waved one hand, signalling for Babu to come to him, but the boy hesitated. A dark swelling disfigured Luca’s face, and his eyes shone with a savage anger. Babu gripped tighter on to Shara’s leg before Luca reached forward and ripped him from her, swinging the child up and across his shoulder. Babu struggled under his rigid arm until Shara put her hand on his head, smoothing back his tousled hair.
‘It’ll be OK,’ she said, her voice laced with grief and tears. ‘Just trust him.’
Luca set off with his rucksack slung over one shoulder and Babu across the other. He moved fluidly, jogging across the broken terrain with Shara trailing behind him. The tongues of his boots flapped as he ran, the severed laces dragging under the soles, but he didn’t once break his stride.
‘What do we do?’ Shara panted, struggling to keep up. ‘Evacuate the monastery?’
Luca didn’t seem to hear. Sweat ran down his face as he stared out at the far edge of the cliff, to where the snow gulley rose up to meet it.
‘Luca?’ Shara shouted, lunging forward to grab on to his arm. Luca’s eyes briefly took in the sight of her hand resting on him before he turned away.
‘There’s no time,’ he said, the words punched out in rhythm with his breath.
As they came round the last section of the cliff, Luca drew to a halt. Letting Babu slide from under his arm, he crawled forward across the snow, his bare hands sinking into it, then climbed up the back of the snow cornice. Staring down into the gulley, he could see the lamp. The Chinese were still there. There was the sound of distant shouting and a soldier emerged from his tent, standing in the middle of the campsite. A few seconds later more men bundled out, buttoning up their jackets.
This was it. They were on their way.
‘Take Babu and get back to the monastery,’ Luca said, turning back towards Shara. ‘Warn as many monks as you can. Then, for Christ’s sake, get the boy out and deeper into the mountains. Get him as far away from here as you can.’
‘No. We’ve got to stick together. We’ll make it back and get the monks out together.’
Luca shook his head. ‘There’s no time. Now do as I say!’
He got to his feet, pushing them towards the path on the far side of the gulley.
‘But what are you going to do?’ Shara asked.
‘Try and buy you some time. Now, please, Shara, go!’
‘Luca, you must come . . .’
As she spoke, they heard more shouts and both turned to see the soldiers running out of the campsite and up the snow gulley. They had been seen.
‘Go!’ Luca shouted and Shara staggered forward, pulling Babu by the arm. A moment later she had dropped out of sight, following the path back towards the monastery. Luca glanced up to see Geltang perched on the distant rocks, its buildings washed red by the glow of the morning sun. He had to do something.
Turning back towards the gulley, he craned his neck over the top of the snow cornice to see three figures ploughing up through the snow towards him. They held their rifles above their heads, surging forward in single file. There were more shouts then others appeared, leaving their tents and following in their comrades’ tracks up the steep slope.
Why hadn’t they taken a shot at him? Why weren’t they firing?
Luca’s head turned slowly towards the ground as the answer came to him. The soldiers were scared of triggering an avalanche. The entire gulley was filled with heavy powder, melted into unstable layers by the heat of the midday sun.
An avalanche.
Tearing open his rucksack, Luca pulled out his MSR stove and the reinforced metal fuel bottle. He’d done it as a schoolboy once before, but would this single bottle really have the power to collapse the cornice? He looked at it, the metal cold in his hands, praying it would be enough.
Reaching back into his rucksack, he pulled out his old Nalgene water bottle, unscrewing the top and flinging the water on to the snow. Decanting the contents of the fuel bottle into it, he raised it to the light, watching the Coleman’s white fuel slosh from side to side. Then, with a sharp jab of his pocket-knife, he stabbed a tiny hole through the plastic lid and carefully placed the bottle upright in the snow beside him.
Luca turned, looking down into the gulley. The soldiers were already a third of the way up and moving fast. He could hear their shouts filtering up the mountainside.
Wrenching open his jacket, he tore a long strip from the bottom of his T-shirt, cutting the last of the cotton free with his knife. He poured a little more fuel over the cotton, using the blade of the knife to poke it through the hole in the lid of the water bottle. With a sharp twist of his hands, he sealed tight the lid.
He’d been sixteen when, with a few friends, he’d first managed to make a Molotov cocktail from an old whisky bottle and some fuel siphoned from his dad’s lawnmower. On the third attempt it had blown the park swings from their foundations, charring the entire metal frame. Pressure . . . that was the secret to making a Molotov cocktail actually explode. He needed to seal the water bottle tight.
Luca stared down at his own shaking hands, the spilled fuel shimmering on his skin. He twisted the lid as tight as he could, then, on his hands and knees, began digging in the snow, stabbing at it with the blade of his pocket-knife. He kept digging, scraping the loose snow away with his bare hands and flinging it in a pile behind him. Soon he was up to his elbow, then his shoulder.
Still he kept digging at the narrow hole. The knuckles of his hands started bleeding, rubbed raw from the snow, and he could feel his chest heaving up and down. Eventually he stopped, sitting back on his knees. He grabbed the water bottle, sloshing the very last dregs of fuel over the wick, and pulled his lighter from his pocket.
The flint caught, sending sparks across his hand, but there was no flame. Desperately he pressed his thumb down, spinning the wheel again and again. At last a tiny blue flame flickered up, no bigger than the nail of his thumb. Luca quickly ran it under the fabric until the fire spread slowly, moving with an almost invisible flame. Then, sliding the bottle down into the hole, he packed handfuls of snow over the opening and stepped back quickly.
Seconds passed. Nothing happened. Luca stood with his hands clutched in front of his chest, willing the fuel to catch. He heard more shouts and moved to one side, staring down into the gulley.
The first of the line of soldiers was nearing the summit. Luca could see his face clearly now, his cheeks flushed with colour from the effort of wading up through the deep snow. His jacket was unbuttoned, flapping out behind him, and his bare hands were clamped round the grip of his rifle, the finger already resting against the trigger.
The soldier looked up, straight into Luca’s eyes. The muzzle of his rifle instinctively swivelled towards him, but then the soldier’s eyes flicked towards the huge overhanging snow cornice just to his left. He lowered the rifle, but surged forward with renewed energy. He was almost at the top.
‘Shit!’ Luca screamed, looking down at the pile of snow. It hadn’t worked.
For a moment he glanced towards Geltang, every instinct telling him to follow Shara and run for it. Then, diving forward, he clawed back the snow and reached inside. He pulled the water bottle to the surface, staring down at the improvised wick.
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