The Hunt for Shambhala

38

Diana regained consciousness to find someone was carrying her at speed. She opened her eyes and realized Riley Carr was rushing her away from the carnage of the market place. He had blood and soot on his face and he was breathing hard as he jogged.

She breathed a sigh of relief and tried to thank the Australian for saving her life but then she realized someone was still shooting at them. Bullets pinged off the concrete around his boots as he powered toward the cover of the temple. It was then that Diana heard Vedika Jha and her men returning fire from behind a low wall to provide cover for them as Riley raced for both their lives.

Her entire life had been spent between the covers of a thousand books and never taking risks. She had hidden from danger whenever it came her way, but now she felt oddly alive for the first time and she couldn’t understand it. It was a stupid thing to think, and she shook it from her mind as the Australian lowered her down and sat her in the cover of a wall at the front of the enormous temple.

“Are you okay?” he said.

She nodded. “I think so…”

He held up his forefinger, and when he spoke his voice was low and serious. “How many fingers am I holding up Diana?”

“One.”

He smiled and then flipped her the bird. “What about now?”

“Idiota.”

“That’s me.”

She turned to see Jha jogging back from the action. “We’ve taken Madan’s unit out and one of my men has just reported a sighting of Kuan and Vòng. Apparently they are retreating with the bomb down Vishwanatha Galli. They’re pushing the damn thing on a trolley.”

“Where?” Riley said, his face all business as he reloaded his weapon.

“It’s a lane running down the side of the temple beside the river. There are lots of small shrines in that area. I think he’s going to try and lose us in those shrines.”

“Not on my watch,” Riley said.

After checking Diana was good to go, they ran alongside the temple and entered a small maze of shrines. They were painted in bright scarlet and covered in ancient frescoes depicting various scenes from sacred Hindu texts. “There they go!” Riley shouted. He pointed at the men as they disappeared into a warehouse door on the other side of the street from the temple.

“It’s a saree warehouse,” Jha called back, lifting her gun and readying to shoot. “Let’s get in there!”

They sprinted for the warehouse doors with Riley and Diana going to the left while Vedika and her remaining men went to the right. They hit the wall either side of the doors and raised their weapons in preparation for the final assault.

Riley waited for Jha’s order to attack, and looked over at her for the signal. She was listening to someone talking into her earpiece. Like him she was waiting for the order to go. When she turned to him and gave a shallow, businesslike nod he knew what it meant. She gave some orders in Hindi to her men and then spun around and fired into the open doorway.

Kuan and Vòng were ready and using a forklift for cover as they returned a savage volley of fire from their submachine guns.

“You cannot stop us!” Kuan said. “I have just activated an automatic timer of three minutes — you have no chance to stop this weapon!”

“So much for his blackmail,” Diana said.

“Bastard knows he’s cornered,” said Riley. “Wants to go out in a blaze of glory in a nanosecond rather than over fifty years in an Indian jail cell.”

Kuan and Vòng fired again, but blasting chunks from the sides of the doors they made a mistake both Vedika and Riley recognized immediately. They were firing their weapons together, and that meant they would empty their magazines at the same time.

“Amateurs,” Riley said, and waved Diana back behind the safety of the wall. “Give these two clowns a second to unload. Thought Kuan said that dude was the best…”

They lived up to Riley’s expectations and a few seconds later both guns fell silent. He looked over to the Indian woman and they shared a brief smile before spinning around and firing into the warehouse.

Both men were now sprinting for the safety of the enormous shelving units behind them, rolling the death-laden gurney between them as they fled. Packed with stock in large cardboard boxes, the units made good cover, and Riley knew they would have to enter the maze if they wanted to smoke the men out.

Moving forward now in formation and with their guns raised, they all heard the sound of an external fire door being kicked open. Sprinting to the far wall they saw a terrible scene unfolding across the other side of a wide, busy street.

The dead body of a rickshaw driver was slumped on the asphalt and Riley watched the Chinese Triad boss and his goon heave the twenty kilo bomb up onto the back seat of the dead man’s Sazgar rickshaw. He fired up the 200 cc four-stroke engine and swerved out into the street, knocking a woman over as he sped away.

“Jesus,” he said, shaking his head. “Not another fuckin’ rickshaw, please!”

“I’m sorry?” Jha said.

“Forget it,” said Diana.

Vòng leaned out the back and sprayed them with submachine gunfire. They dived for cover but the bullets took out Jha’s surviving men and ripped into her right leg. She howled in pain and collapse to the tarmac, gripping her leg for comfort.

Diana reached for the sergeant’s radio and began calling for back-up and medical assistance, and Riley knew it was all down to him.

He sprinted behind the Sazgar with all his might. He knew Diana wasn’t fast enough, and with the last of the soldiers down and Vedika shot in the leg it was up to him to stop Kuan detonating the neutron bomb. Just like Vedika had foretold — the Triad man was cornered and felt like a trapped animal. He was capable of anything, and Riley Carr didn’t much want the lives of over a million innocent people on his conscience.

As he ran behind the auto rickshaw he realized he was starting to fall behind. The Sazgar had a top speed of thirty-five miles per hour, and Riley’s top sprinting speed was barely over twenty miles per hour.

Salvation came in the form of the dense Varanasi traffic. Heaps of taxis, rickshaws, buses and pedestrians drifted in and out of each other’s paths along Tripura Bhairwi Road and slowed Kuan’s escape enough for the former Australian commando to close the gap and draw closer to the fleeing Sazgar.

Closer now, Riley unloaded a few more rounds from the Glock 17 Vedika had given him back at the airport. The nine mil bullets pinged off the hubcap of the spare wheel on the back of the rickshaw and snaked their way higher until they shredded through the plastic window above it.

As the gun fired, the crowd of people around him scattered and people burst into spontaneous screams as they tried to get away from the madman with the gun. If only they knew what the real danger was, Riley thought as he fired again.

The Sazgar swerved violently to the left and right for a few seconds before coming back under control and Riley thought there was a good chance one of the bullets must have wounded Vòng — and he was right. The Vietnamese soldier tumbled out the back of the rickshaw and rolled violently along the street with a gunshot wound in his shoulder.

Riley was pounding along the hot asphalt harder than ever. As he drew closer to Vòng he knew what he had to do. Sliding a round into the chamber he fired it into the man’s forehead as he leaped over him, never even stopping to see the man die.

“That’s for Ko Chalam,” Riley said bitterly.

“Are you all right?” It was Diana talking to him though the earpiece. “I heard shots.”

“I’m fine, but the same cannot be said for Mr Vòng.”

“We’re running out of time, Riley,” she said. “If Kuan wasn’t bluffing about the automatic timer then the bomb only has ninety seconds before it detonates.”

The words struck him like a hammer. He’d had no time to think about the timer as he powered after Kuan and the rickshaw, and he had badly underestimated how much time had passed since leaving the warehouse. Now, Diana Silva was telling him they all had ninety seconds to live if he didn’t kill Kuan and stop the bomb.

And he was running out of energy. He’d been chasing the Sazgar for a while now, weaving in and out of the busiest traffic he’d ever seen and he could feel his lungs burn and his heart pound as he reached his maximum velocity.

Visions of his outback childhood rose up to greet him like a warm smile. He saw his parents and siblings playing in the sun out the back of the house, the scent of the eucalyptus in the gum trees after a rainstorm, the sound of the kookaburras in the morning… he wanted to have kids and give them the same chances, not die here tonight at the hands of maniac like Lee Kuan. When he snapped back to reality he realized he was almost at the back of the Sazgar — his memories had powered him with extra adrenalin and now he had just once chance to end this nightmare.

Grabbing the steel crash bar running along the back of the Sazgar, Riley leaped onto the back of the rickshaw and ripped his way through the little plastic window to see Kuan no more than five feet ahead of him at the wheel of the vehicle. The bomb was still in the back, nestling on the rear seat as innocent as a basket of peaches.

And then his blood turned to ice as he realized Kuan hadn’t been bluffing — the timer was real. It said sixty seconds and was counting down right in front of him.

Kuan saw him and steered a hard right. The three-wheeled rickshaw tipped up on its right rear wheel for a second and Riley crashed to his knees in the rear footwell, his face now only inches from Madan’s prototype doomsday weapon.

Fifty seconds.

He heard Kuan laugh and looked up to see the Chinese Triad boss steering the rickshaw straight for the river. At Varanasi, the Ganges was wide and filthy. Human waste in the river was hundreds of times above the Indian Government’s safety laws, and if the bomb when into the water he would never find it.

Using the crash bar above his head, the Australian swung into the cab and launched his left fist into the side of Kuan’s face. The impact was hard enough to knock the Chinese drug baron clean out of the Sazgar, and Riley stomped on the brakes with his left boot and brought the tiny vehicle to a skidding halt just a few yards from the river.

A crowd had gathered now, but Riley had no time to waste. He looked at the unconscious heap of Lee Kuan on the road behind the Sazgar and wanted to finish him off for good, but he knew there were only seconds left before the entire city of Varanasi and everyone in it was blasted to pieces.

Rushing around to the back of the rickshaw he stared with wide, disbelieving eyes at the readout on the Yama prototype: forty seconds. Beside it was a small button marked: ABORT.

“I hope this abort button isn’t a massive piss-take, my friends…”

He pushed the abort button, but nothing happened. Had he made some sort of mistake? He hit it again but the clock continued to run down — tiny red numerals counting down in a digital blur to the destruction of millions.

“What the..?”

Twenty seconds.

He pushed his finger down again, but the timer continued.

Ten seconds.

Then he shook his head and sighed a breath of relief. “Riley, you fuckin’ idiot!”

He brought his finger up and hit the enter button, and the digital timer beeped and stopped dead: three seconds.

“Fuckin’ computers!” he said, and turned to see half a dozen armed policemen encircling Lee Kuan.

“Guess what, Diana?” he said through the headset.

“What?”

“Am I the best or am I the best?”

“You did it?”

“What do you reckon, mate?”