The Messiah Secret

54

‘We’re still pretty high, aren’t we?’ Bronson asked.

They’d descended all the way to the bottom of the Khardung La pass, and crossed the bridge over the Shyok, the river that ran along the bottom of the valley. At the T-junction on the other side of the fast-flowing waters, they turned left and again began descending, but this time more gently.

‘Yes,’ Angela replied. ‘This whole area’s at an elevation of about ten thousand feet.’ She glanced at her map. ‘Pretty soon we’ll come to another junction, and one fork of the road will go south, back across to the other side of the Shyok. We need to stay on this side, the east side, of the river, and we’ll keep on heading more or less northwest until we reach the town of Panamik.’

In a few minutes they reached the junction.

‘Just pull over for a second, could you?’ Angela asked.

‘What is it? Something wrong?’

‘No, nothing,’ Angela said. ‘Just hop out and follow me.’

She climbed down from the passenger seat of the Nissan and waited in front of the vehicle as two other four-by-fours — a Land Rover and a Toyota — drove past them heading north-west, trailing clouds of dust behind them. She crossed to the other side of the road, Bronson following, and pointed over to the south-west, towards the river.

‘Over there,’ she said, indicating a wide stretch of the river, ‘is where the river Nubra — which is also known as the Siachen, the same name as the glacier that feeds it — and the river Shyok meet.’

Bronson looked across the rocky ground towards the bottom of the valley. Even from the distance he was looking, he could see the tumbling and disturbed water where the two rivers converged.

‘And you think that’s “the meeting point where waters tumble”?’

Angela nodded.

‘Amazing, isn’t it?’ Bronson said. ‘You know, I don’t suppose the landscape here looks a hell of a lot different now to how it did two thousand years ago.’

They got back into the jeep. ‘If we’re right, the road we’re following now would have been roughly the same route Isaac and his companions walked,’ Angela said, also struck by the enormity of it all. ‘It would have taken them at least a whole day to reach the major fork in the road, but we should be there in about an hour. And then we start looking.’

As Bronson drove on, he passed several four-by-four vehicles parked on the rough ground that bordered the road. Most of them were surrounded by tourists dressed in warm clothing — Puffa jackets, parkas and brightly coloured anoraks were much in evidence — looking at maps or taking pictures of the scenery.

But one, a dusty grey Land Rover, stood out slightly, simply because there were only two people in it — both men — and because they were still inside it, sitting with the engine running, parked a few yards off the metalled road. Bronson knew he’d never seen either man before, but he took a mental note of the registration number as he drove the Nissan past the vehicle — just in case.

‘If that isn’t a bad joke,’ Masters said, ‘you’d better explain exactly what you mean.’

Rodini smiled at him. ‘Think it through. You’re driving Indian-registered four-by-fours. You all have India visas in your passports — forged India visas, I know, but they’re pretty good quality — and you’re carrying Inner Line permits plus about a dozen photocopies each. The simplest way to get you into India is to claim that you were already in it, but somehow you got lost and crossed into Pakistani territory.

‘When we get to the border I’ll berate the Indians for allowing a bunch of Americans to cross into Pakistan so easily. I will also tell them that we’ve interrogated you, so if one or two of you can rough each other up a bit — fake some bruises and maybe a cut or two — that would add realism. My guess is that they’ll be so embarrassed that they’ll just check your papers, shout at you, and then let you go. And if they decide not to, for some reason, then I can claim that I’ve just received instructions to re-arrest you all for further questioning.’

Masters nodded slowly. There was a kind of simple genius about Rodini’s suggestion that he had to applaud. He’d known all along that trying to sneak across the border was going to be difficult and dangerous, but simply driving to a checkpoint and claiming to have crossed into Pakistan in error eliminated that problem. And Rodini was quite correct — they had all the papers and documentation they needed to be in the Nubra Valley area so, as long as Rodini’s forgers had done their work, the Indians should have no reason to detain them.

‘You have good relations with the Indian troops?’ he asked.

‘Good enough,’ Rodini replied. ‘There are occasional skirmishes, but most of the time nothing happens in the border area, so we do talk to each other, that kind of thing. Before we actually attempt to cross the border I’ll call one of the senior Indian Army officers and explain that we’ve arrested a group of trespassers, just to gauge his reaction.’

‘Won’t he want to report it, tell his superiors what’s going on?’

‘I doubt it. If he admits that two jeep-loads of American tourists managed to sneak across the border in his sector, and on his watch, only to be captured and returned by Pakistani troops, it’s going to look as if he and his men have been negligent. The last thing he’ll want to do is tell anyone about it.’

Rodini smiled at Masters. ‘Time to get going,’ he said. ‘Next stop, the Indian border.’