The Messiah Secret

51

Killian woke before dawn and paced his small room as he waited anxiously for some word from Tembla’s watchers a few miles up the road in Leh. Finally, when he could take the strain no longer, he walked down to the briefing room he’d been in the previous evening and helped himself to coffee.

Tembla strolled in about thirty minutes later, nodded to Killian and poured himself a mug.

‘Well?’ Killian asked.

‘They’re on the road already,’ Tembla said.

‘What?’ Killian jumped to his feet. ‘I need to get up there.’

‘Patience, Father. We launched a Searcher at dawn. That’s a UAV — an unmanned aerial vehicle — and it was programmed to loiter overhead Leh. It picked up Bronson and Lewis as soon as they left the guest house, and it’s been following their vehicle ever since. It’s tracking them visually using a high-definition camera, and it’s receiving the electronic signal from the tracker, so we know exactly where they are. I got the last update just before I came here, and at the moment they’re climbing up the road towards the Khardung La pass.’

Tembla unfolded a map of the area and spread it out on one of the desks.

‘We’re here,’ he said, pointing at the settlement marked ‘Karu’ on the map. ‘Leh is just here, and Khardung La is almost due north of the town. At the other end of the pass is the River Shyok and the towns of Khalsar and Diskit. This area, the Nubra Valley, was originally called “Ldumra” and that’s the best match for the “Valley of Flowers”, as you called it. Now I know this valley, and there’s nothing much there, just a handful of old buildings at one end of it, so how sure are you that your information is correct?’

‘As sure as I can be; and in any case I need to get there as soon as possible. Can you arrange a jeep or something for me?’

Tembla shook his head. ‘There’s no point in leaving until Bronson and Lewis stop, and they’ve still got a long way to go before they even reach Khalsar. At best they’ll be making perhaps fifty kilometres an hour. When they stop, we’ll use helicopters which can reach them in a matter of minutes.’

‘What about weapons? Donovan will be following them too, you know, and he will be armed.’

Tembla smiled thinly. ‘That won’t be a problem. You can fly to the Nubra Valley in the Dhruv, but I have a couple of Hinds as well, and I’ll send one of those up with you.’

‘Hind?’

‘A Russian-built helicopter gunship. It can take on a main battle tank, so no matter how many mercenaries or what type of weapons Donovan might have assembled, I can promise you that he’ll be outgunned by the Hind.’