The Doomsday Testament

XLIV

‘Why are you wearing that crazy scarf?’

‘Because I thought it might be cold, and I was bloody right!’

Sarah studied the lurid purple and white striped monstrosity with distaste. ‘You might as well paint an archery target on your chest and wave a placard that says: I’m here.’

‘It’s my college scarf, and I’m rather proud of it.’

‘Well, be proud of it somewhere else, Don Quixote. I’d prefer not to get hit when they’re shooting at you. Ganesh thinks you must have altitude sickness.’

Jamie looked at their interpreter, who grinned uncertainly. He tucked the long scarf into his Gore-tex jacket and down into his trousers and the other man nodded vigorously before walking back to check on the few porters the film crew had persuaded to make the trek into occupied Tibet. Jamie had quickly formed an enormous respect for the wiry mountain men. Without them, he knew the expedition wouldn’t have lasted twenty-four hours. They were small men, but their slight frames were packed with incredible strength and endurance, and each of them carried a load that weighed as much as the porter himself.

For the first two days they had trekked through an almost alpine landscape of conical hills cloaked with oak, birch and rhododendron, twisting valleys that carried foaming, swift-flowing streams and across broad, flower-carpeted meadows. Rare red pandas, brown bears and even snow leopard roamed these Himalayan foothills, but the only thing they glimpsed was a small troop of squalid-looking monkeys which sat in a tree beside the road and threw rotting fruit at them as they passed. Jamie hoped it wasn’t an omen. Narrow, precipitous paths zigzagged up mountainsides making the steep inclines bearable and allowing them to acclimatize for the tougher terrain ahead.

It was only on the third day, as they climbed higher and their guide told them they had crossed the border into Tibet, that Sarah began to feel her lungs fighting to extract oxygen from the air. How could she have taken breathing for granted? What she normally breathed in London had the consistency of chicken soup compared to this. Altitude sickness was a real danger and Jamie insisted they take their Diamox tablets every day, but that still didn’t do anything for the splitting headache that had started on the second morning and never left her. Now, they were in the Himalayas proper, two miles and more above sea level, between the tree line and the snow line. The sharp-set, scenic grandeur with its ethereal light and fantastic colours overwhelmed and awed them, but Jamie found the terrain, a rock-strewn moonscape enlivened only by occasional strips of faded, wind-worn prayer flags, eroded his resilience with every step and the long climbs stretched him to the brink of endurance. Flimsy, double-skinned tents provided the only shelter and they slept on wolfish rocks that clawed their way through bedroll, sleeping bag and spine. Tibetan nights were long and chill; plenty of time for talking and thinking and wondering before exhaustion overcame the body’s hyperactivity. Each day was a never-ending Calvary of steep, scree-scattered scarps that set their calf muscles on fire and turned their feet into blistered, pain-filled sacs. Jamie marched in a dream, cocooned in his own breathless bubble of discomfort, knowing Sarah was less than twenty feet behind suffering just as much, but without the energy to communicate with her. It was only when the little caravan halted beside a small lake of the most astonishing, opaque, almost toxic blue that they had the chance to speak.

She lay with her back against a rock allowing the sun to warm her face, and he slumped beside her, accepting a bottle of water she retrieved from her rucksack.

He drank deeply before returning it. ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he wheezed.

‘Me too.’

‘I’m beginning to regret being quite so clever.’

‘Uhuh,’ she grunted. ‘But it’s a little too late to change your mind, seeing as we’ve signed the contract and all, and unless you happen to have a handy little helicopter in your pocket to get us out of here.’

Gervaise Pearson, the documentary producer and leader of the three-man film team, ambled over to sit down beside them. He was short and plump and looked out of place amongst the hard edges of the mountains, but the appearance was deceptive. Gerry had made his name filming persecuted Kurds in the no-go zone of northern Iran and documenting the massacre of indigenous tribespeople by Muslim extremists in the jungles of Indonesia. He was tougher than he looked.

‘Enjoying our little stroll, are we?’

Jamie smiled through gritted teeth. ‘Every moment, Gerry.’

‘Only I’m wondering what the hell you’re doing here? Not that I’m displeased to have your company.’ He gave Sarah an oily grin that reminded her he’d tried to seduce her on the first night and was still owed.

She waved a slim hand to push the dark hair from her eyes. ‘We’re making a documentary, Gerry,’ she said sweetly, ‘unless that little guy who keeps pointing the camera at me is some kind of pervert.’

‘I’m aware of that, dear heart. But old Gerry likes to be in the know and old Gerry thinks we are going to a hell of a lot of trouble to film what is only going to be a tiny part of it. This documentary is principally about your friend Walter Brohm and the Raphael, the mysterious Tibetan crater will only get two minutes at the start, with a voiceover that could just as easily have gone with a stock picture of the SS and a panning shot across Everest.’

The film-maker produced a schedule, a map and a satellite image from his pack. He opened the map.

‘Instead, we are here.’ He pointed to a spot just inside the Tibetan border. ‘Or so the guide tells me. Personally I haven’t a bloody clue. Our destination is here. Another two days’ march away.’ He placed the satellite image on the map. ‘The crater that Brohm and his SS Ahnenerbe chums explored in nineteen thirty-seven and which our lords and masters are so interested in. When we get there we give the crater the once-over, film you and your piece of tottie with anything of particular interest and then you do your “Once more into the breach” piece to camera. As I say, a great deal of effort for little return in a place that gives me the willies. My bosses were most insistent that we filmed in the crater, and I gather the reason they were most insistent is that Vanderbilt Media whistled, and when Vanderbilt whistles my lords and masters roll over and beg. Not that I’m complaining, I’m getting a rather large fee and enough danger money to make a couple of nights cuddling the bedbugs in a Chinese jail just about bearable. I only thought that, perhaps, you had a little more information on the whys and wherefores that would put my troubled mind to rest?’

Jamie gave him his most reassuring grin. ‘’Fraid, we can’t help you there, Gerry. The only thing they told us was that this would be like taking a stroll down Piccadilly with you in charge, and I must say they’ve been spot on so far.’

Back in London, Simon studied Jamie’s tropical fish with the care of a surgeon about to make his first cut, a cardboard cylinder held steady in his hand above the tank. For the second or third time in a week he wished to God he’d never agreed to feed the bloody things. How much? That was the question. Too much and he’d kill them. Too little and they might starve to death before Jamie came back. A knock on the door saved him from having to make a decision..

The man who filled the frame looked as broad as he was tall and the bruises on his face seemed to suggest he’d been in some kind of accident. Simon wasn’t the kind of person to start at shadows, but he found his presence intimidating.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked.

‘Can you hear anything?’

‘No,’ Jamie yawned, blinking against the brightness barely filtered by the thin material of the tent.

‘That might not be good.’

‘Why?’

‘Because every other morning we’ve woken on this trip the porters have been making breakfast and being darned noisy about it.’

‘Stay here,’ he ordered, struggling out of his sleeping bag and putting on his trousers. He wrapped his scarf around his neck, pulled on his hiking boots and his jacket. He was reaching for the tent flap when something occurred to him. ‘Aren’t you going to argue with me?’

She had her arms behind her head outside the sleeping bag, like a butterfly waiting for the right moment to leave the chrysalis.

‘I reckon you can handle things until I’m ready.’

He shook his head, then crept back and kissed her on the lips. ‘Thanks.’

‘For what?’

‘For nothing.’

He pulled back the flaps and emerged into air the texture of raw silk and stark morning sunshine that created razor-edged shadows among the rocks and hollows. They’d made camp in a stony, sheltered bowl close to a stream of cloudy green meltwater. In that first second he knew Sarah had been right. Everyone else was sitting in a circle in the centre of the tents with their hands on the back of their heads. The lip of the bowl seemed to have sprouted trees, or maybe, since they hadn’t seen a tree for two days, that should be statues. Their stillness reminded him of the saints on St Peter’s Basilica as they stood overlooking the circle of tents. Only saints didn’t carry AK-47 assault rifles.

‘I think you’d better join us,’ he called back over his shoulder.

A rifle barrel twitched a silent command, but, despite an empty feeling in his guts that had nothing to do with missing breakfast, Jamie stood his ground and waited until Sarah came out of the tent.

‘Trouble, huh?’ She surveyed the armed men on the rocks around them. ‘Who are—’

They didn’t need an interpreter to tell them that the barked command meant shut up and join the rest, and they took their places at the edge of the little group of porters and film-makers and assumed the same hands-on-head position of surrender.

Jamie kept his face down, but his eyes checked out their captors’ equipment and weaponry. They didn’t appear to be regular soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, but that wasn’t necessarily reassuring. The Chinese authorities had created a paramilitary police force of immigrants, the wujing, to patrol the frontier, and no doubt there were plenty of men among the impoverished tribes of the plateau ready to accept Peking’s bounty for fugitives or interlopers attempting to breach the porous border between the Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s northern provinces. They were armed with what looked like Soviet SKS carbines and AK-47s, but he guessed they would be the Chinese variant, the Type 56, which was virtually indistinguishable from the Moscow version. The only difference was the folding bayonet attached to the barrel, but he hoped he wouldn’t get close enough to make the comparison. He had handled the AK during his time preparing for Sandhurst and he remembered it for the vicious kick and the awfully large hole the 7.62mm bullets made in anything unfortunate enough to get in their way. The weapons appeared clean and well cared for, unlike their owners, who were uniformly hatchet-faced, filthy and wrapped in a variety of layered outer clothing that would be well-suited to the ever-changing climate of the mountains. Low over heavy brows, they wore the type of long-eared, knitted caps that young men in Britain sometimes put on for a joke during wintry weather and their footwear was an incongruous mix of battered climbing boots and branded track shoes. He felt Sarah move beside him and he willed her not to draw attention to herself. One thing was certain, they had to wait this out and deal with the cards as they fell. No chance of fighting. No chance of running. These men would hunt them down within minutes. It was much more sensible to cooperate. If they were lucky it would mean a couple of days trekking and a couple more in a Lhasa jail before they were booted out. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if they weren’t lucky.

Two men scrambled down from the rim of the bowl and snapped an order before hustling Ganesh away from the rest of the group. One gunman sat cross-legged in front of the terrified Tibetan, while the other kept his Kalashnikov conspicuously sighted on the captive’s middle.

From Ganesh’s near hysterical replies, Jamie guessed that he was being questioned about the identity of the westerners. Eventually, the interrogator nodded and his companion shouted a command. Four more men descended into the bowl, ordered the porters to pick up their loads and herded them off down the trail along with the terrified interpreter.

Despite the intense cold, Jamie could feel rivulets of sweat running down his spine. The scenario reminded him of stories he’d read about Vietnam and Cambodia. No witnesses to testify to the fate of the filthy western capitalists or CIA stooges. From the desperate glances Gerry was darting at him, he guessed the film-maker had read them too. He shook his head. Making a run for it would only make things worse. At least this way he’d get a chance to plead for Sarah’s life before someone put a bullet in him.

By now the remaining militia men were going through the tents and removing anything of value. Gerry winced as they fumbled with the expensive camera equipment, but Jamie only had eyes for the interrogator who walked towards the remaining captives with a high-stepping mountain man’s stride. The gunman had tawny, leopard’s eyes and unsmiling, mongoloid features. The eyes surveyed them, deliberately going over each man in turn, then, with a slight frown, turning to Sarah. What did the frown mean? Maybe she reminded him of someone. Maybe killing women was against his rules. Then again, this man didn’t look as if he had any rules.

The Tibetan rapped out a string of orders. Immediately, half of the remaining men pushed the film team towards the entrance of the hollow, gesturing at them to pick up the camera equipment on the way. Gerry shot Jamie a helpless glance as they were led off with a pair of gunmen on either flank, but he had worries of his own. One of the remaining captors attempted to usher Sarah away, and as she was led off protesting loudly, he moved to go with her. The result was a rifle butt in the belly that doubled him over and left him dry-retching into the earth.

‘My wife,’ he choked. ‘I have to stay with my wife.’ Christ, he felt as if he’d been kicked by a donkey. His spleen was somewhere in there and a ruptured spleen was going to be bloody inconvenient in the middle of the Himalayas. He let out a long gasp and fell forward on his knees with his face to the ground. A pair of scuffed leather boots appeared in front of his nose. He noticed that one was laced up with packaging string.

He raised his head and looked up into a pair of merciless amber eyes. The barrel of the Kalashnikov hooked on to his scarf and drew him upwards.

‘King’s, isn’t it?’ the interrogator said in perfect public-school English. ‘I went to Trinity myself and we thought you chaps were nothing but a bunch of smelly, beer-swilling Reds.’