The Doomsday Testament

XLVIII

Tenzin passed the body of the slain Chinese commando and his sharp eyes caught the fissure that Chiru had missed on the first pass. He coughed sharply as another knife thrust of pain speared his chest and drove blood into his mouth. Every minute increased his exhaustion and dulled his senses. He realized that his wounds and the effect of the explosion were combining to sap his energy and blunt the power of his mind. Somewhere inside him the blood was pooling. When the amount of blood that escaped into his body was outweighed by the amount in his veins, he knew he would lapse into unconsciousness. He studied the crack in the grey wall and checked the first few yards of the narrow rock channel. He could hold them from inside, but only for a few minutes at most, probably less. There was a better way.

He began to climb the sheer outer slope, his hands and feet unerringly finding the tiny scuffs and crevices another man might miss. His blood stained the rocks and they would see it, but that could not be helped. Perhaps it even suited his purposes.

When he reached the point where the surface sloped away towards the crack in the rock, he crabbed his way towards the massive pile of stones and scree that loomed above the fissure like a giant cairn. Carefully, he placed the contents of his pockets among the stones at the base of the pyramid before settling down in its lee where he had a view down into the cleft. He tucked the stock of the assault rifle below his right shoulder and waited.

His mind drifted back to his days in England, the gentle countryside and the gentle climate, and the hard-eyed little rich boys who had made his life there such a hell. He had learned to love England at Trinity, where he had been surrounded by men of learning with a passion to pass it on, but he would never be able to call it home. No, this was his home, this towering citadel of stone that treated the unwary with such brutal impartiality. In no other place on earth could a man feel closer to his ancestors, or to himself. The Himalaya begrudged her people their every breath, but her savage beauty drew them to her and bewitched them so that neither harshness nor want would ever part them from her. Even when they were forced from her embrace, they stayed within sight of the high peaks, their hearts and souls forever among the mountains, even if their bodies would never be again.

It was only good fortune that he heard the sound, the clatter of a rifle barrel on rock, and woke from something more permanent than sleep. He raised his head. The noise hadn’t come from the two men who were moving stealthily through the cleft below. He had company, but whoever it was couldn’t see him because of the mound of rock that separated them.

The rifle sight drifted over the two soldiers. It was an execution really, but he felt no shame, which made him a poor Buddhist and a poorer monk. They had murdered so many of his people that he looked upon it as a mere balancing of the scales. His finger caressed the trigger and the short burst shredded the two Chinese, the bullets ricocheting from the narrow walls to cause multiple wounds. His ears were still ringing from the discharge of the weapon, but he identified a soft grunt as one man or more fell on his stomach on the far side of the rocks. A fusillade of automatic fire sliced through the air on both sides of the cairn, but he was safe enough for now. Eventually they would find a way to reach him, but it would take time and time was all he wanted. He changed the magazine for a fresh one and waited for the next attempt to force the cleft.

The lieutenant of the four commandos who had followed Tenzin’s blood trail was forced to admire his enemy’s choice of position. He had been exterminating these vermin, and religious fanatics like them in China’s autonomous provinces, for more than a decade, but he had never come across an adversary as formidable as the leader of the Ghosts of the Four Rivers. Well, now they truly were ghosts, apart from this one, whom he had no doubt was their commander, a man hailed as a legend among the peasants who populated this wilderness. But he had made a mistake. He was trying to buy time for the westerners who were the commandos’ prime objective, but when his time ran out, as it inevitably would, there was no escape. They were trapped. Unless they could fly.

One of his men pulled a fragmentation grenade from his belt, but the lieutenant signalled him to replace it. That was a measure of the rebel’s guile. He had deliberately drawn them here to a place where one grenade would do his work for him. In addition, the rock-strewn slope that swept down to the mound was almost impossible to cross at speed or by stealth, the two elements which, along with their ruthlessness, gave the commandos their feared reputation. Still, the lieutenant knew he would have to take a decision. Every one of these men was an élite specialist who had taken years to train. He had lost too many already. He was prepared to sacrifice more. But only if it gave him final victory. He waved two more forward into the cleft and signalled the soldiers around him to get ready to rush the mound.

Tenzin was weakening fast. The Chinese were back in the cleft, but he’d been too slow to fire a telling shot. Time was running out. Movement beyond the cairn indicated that his enemies were manoeuvring to attack. If there was a time for regret, now was it. According to the teaching he lived by, his actions in this life would deny him an elevated position in the next, but he would have done nothing differently. No man should stand aside and watch his country die and people suffer. Kundun taught that one should prepare for death by doing only good and keeping the heart and mind pure. But what if one could only achieve purity of heart and mind by acts which might be defined as evil? Was it evil to kill men who were evil-doers and were even now coming to kill him?

He took a calming breath and reached for his last grenade. Partially removing the pin, he placed it among the little nest of its egg-shaped companions he had made in the rocks.

A burst of fire from the passage below shattered the rocks to his left. He ignored the threat and moved to the far side of the mound just in time to greet the four commandos clambering across the rocks towards him with a volley of shots. One man was thrown backwards with a shriek of pain, but Tenzin had exposed himself to the guns of the others and he felt the stallion’s kick of bullets hitting his shoulder, chest and stomach. He felt no pain, only a gentle fading towards what came next. Still, he had one more task. From somewhere, he found the strength to roll over and his fingers closed on the pin of the last grenade and pulled it the final few millimetres.

The Chinese commander warily approached the prone body on the rocks and turned it with his boot. Strange that a man could approach death with such a look of serenity on his face. His final thought before the world exploded was that it was what made these people so dangerous.