“Maoists,” Pradesh exclaimed. “My guess is, not a reception party for us though. There’s no way they could have known we were coming. This was an advance party for a larger group, probably a few hours away in the jungle. They usually do their recce in threes. They panicked when they saw we were about to land.”
“What do we do now?” Jack said, his heart still pounding with the adrenaline.
“We stick to the plan. You’ve seen what my two chaps can do. Chances are the rest of the Maoists are far enough away not to have heard the gunfire. Noise is quickly absorbed in the jungle. The pilot will drop us and then disappear south, so as not to arouse suspicion. The Maoists will be used to seeing this old bird flying to and from the villages with supplies.”
Pradesh nodded at the pilot, who made a quick descent this time, bouncing the skids on the hard surface of the clearing. The two sappers were out before the helicopter had settled, kicking the three bodies and checking the perimeter. Jack and Costas unbuckled themselves and stepped out, ducking and running from the whirling rotor. Pradesh followed them, carrying his bag, then the engine revved up to a whine and the Huey rose in a cloud of dust, tilting forward as soon as it cleared tree height and heading off to the south. A few moments later the noise was gone. Jack stood up, shouldering his khaki bag and checking Costas. They took off their helmets and piled them together. The dust was settling on the three dead bodies a few meters away, sopping up the blood. Jack was still coursing with adrenaline. He could see that Pradesh was wired up too, his Magnum revolver held out in front of him, tense and poised like a hunting animal. The whole action had taken only a few seconds, but was replaying in Jack’s mind in slow motion. It had happened to him before, when he had been inches from death. He glanced at Costas, who was walking toward a rock outcrop on the jungle fringe, about thirty meters from the entrance to the boulder shrine. The outcrop had evidently been used as a shelter, and the Maoists’ rucksacks were there. Costas squatted down, peering at the bags, then at the ground.
“Watch for snakes,” Pradesh called out. Costas held up a long, decaying skin, shed from a cobra. “Got you.” He let it drop, swatted a mosquito and then picked something else up. “Check this out. Those Maoists had Kalashnikovs, and there are plenty of casings around. In fact, too many for what we’ve just had. It looks like they’ve used this place as a shooting gallery before, fairly recently to judge from the state of the brass. And look at this. It’s a much older casing. Looks like it was from an elephant gun. Big-game hunters, maybe. There are quite a few of these casings lying around too, but trampled into the ground. Must have been a long time ago.”
Jack joined him. “Well I’ll be damned,” he said. “That’s a. 577, Snider-Enfield. The rifles the Madras Sappers had in 1879.”
“You’re kidding.” Costas picked up another, looked closely at the rim, then grunted. “Battlefield archaeology. They did it with cartridges from Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Bighorn. You can reconstruct fields of fire, the flow of the battle.” Costas got up, looking around. “Maybe this rock was where Bebbie met his end. Maybe this was where Howard and Wauchope found him. With the rock behind, it would have been the best shelter around, a defensive position against the rebels while Bebbie and the sappers waited for rescue.”
“I think I know what those three terrorists were doing when we surprised them,” Pradesh called out. “It wasn’t just a recce. They were cleaning up.” He had advanced around the back of the rock, his revolver at the ready. Costas and Jack cautiously followed. The jungle smell became stronger, mustier, different from the rusty smell of fresh blood around the bodies in the clearing. Jack knew what it was even before he rounded the corner. A mass of bones and ragged clothes had been pushed into a crevice in the rock. Some were bleached white, but there was still hair to be seen and the limbs were still articulated, with sinews between the joints. Pradesh peered closer, holding his nose, then stepped back, gasping for breath. “Well, that solves one mystery. These are our Chinese, the ones the Koya saw arriving three months ago. Look, you can see the word INTACON on their shirts. That’s the mining company. They must have been ambushed by the Maoists. That explains all the Kalashnikov cartridges.” He picked up a stick, and used it to lift a flap of clothing. “And look at this. Exactly as the Koya described.” It was a section of skin still intact on the arm of one of the skeletons. They could see the remains of a tattoo, probably what had preserved the skin. Jack felt a wave of apprehension. So far it had all been talk, speculation. This was real. The image staring out at them was smudged, half rotted away, but there was no doubt about it. A tiger tattoo.
Pradesh waved to the two sappers and pointed so they could see where the bodies were, and then put up six fingers and drew his hand across his throat. He got up, and Jack and Costas followed him back out into the clearing past the three fresh bodies. Suddenly there was an earsplitting crack. Flecks of blood flew off Costas’ shoulder, and Jack just had time to see one of the bodies with a pistol raised before Pradesh aimed and fired. The first round took off the top of the man’s head, sending brain and bone spattering behind. The man’s legs drummed against the ground, but he was already dead. Pradesh fired round after round, slowly and methodically, letting the big revolver return from the recoil and aiming carefully, reducing the man’s head to a bloody pulp. Jack reached out and held Pradesh’s arm in an iron grip, pulling it away. He fired once more, the last chamber, the bullet ricocheting off the rock behind. “Enough,” Jack said. Pradesh turned and stared at him, wide-eyed, enraged. Jack could smell the fresh sweat, the adrenaline. He eased his grip and stared Pradesh straight in the eyes. “You got him,” Jack said quietly. “For your father.” Jack quickly turned to check Costas, who was dabbing blood from a graze on his shoulder. He looked as imperturbable as ever. “You okay?”
Costas nodded, then turned to Pradesh. “Yeah. And thanks.”
Pradesh took a deep breath, nodded then went over and kicked the other two bodies, reloading his revolver as he did so. The two sappers kept their rifles trained on the bodies until he signaled them, and then they returned to the edge of the clearing where they had taken up position before, concealed beside the path entrance. Pradesh snapped his fingers, pointed two fingers at his eyes, tapped his watch and waved toward the jungle. One of the sappers held his rifle at the ready and disappeared down the path. “He’s doing a recce,” Pradesh said. “If those three Maoists were an advance party, the main group will be following them. They only ever use the existing paths. They’re not jungle people at all. The path comes from Chodavaram, past another of the Maoist hangouts. They move between places, a few nights here, a few there. They think they’re like Bollywood heroes, like Robin Hood. But they’re cowards and murderers and their ideology stinks. I loathe them.”
“So we see.” Costas grunted, fishing out a bandage shell dressing from Jack’s bag and plastering it on his wound.
Jack put his hand on Pradesh’s shoulder. “You okay?”
“Couldn’t be better.”
“You just killed a man.”
“That wasn’t a man. And it wasn’t the first time. I’ve been in Kashmir. I shot a Pakistani army engineer who was trying to blow up a mountain bridge we’d just built. They shot at us, we shot at them. I did it for my men. I could have chosen to miss him, but I didn’t. That time, I threw up. Not this time.”
Jack nodded. He had made the same rationalizations himself, and he knew what Pradesh was doing. His ears were ringing, from the adrenaline and the gunfire. They needed to focus on their objective, to keep tight. He gestured toward the boulders where the water was cascading down into the stream. Pradesh took a deep breath, glanced at the corpses, then handed Jack his revolver. He opened his bag and took out a small slab of C-4 explosive wrapped in plastic, and the coil of detonator cord he had shown them in the helicopter. “The obstruction’s one small boulder, lodged in the entrance passage,” he said. “If I can split it, we may be able to get in.” He led them over the clearing to the entrance. The tumble of boulders extended at least fifteen meters out from the face of the waterfall. It looked like an ancient megalithic tomb, yet it was completely natural, the result of a massive landslide far back in history that had eroded away and left the tumble of rock exposed. It was taller and wider than it had seemed from the helicopter, at least twice Jack’s height at the entrance. The two massive upright boulders and the lintel formed a passage beneath, blocked up with the boulder Pradesh had described. Rock fragments were strewn on the ground in front. Pradesh knelt down and picked one up. “This is fresh,” he said. “Someone’s had a go at that boulder with a pick, pretty recently.”
Costas knelt down beside him. “The Maoists?” Pradesh shook his head. “More likely the prospectors. The Maoists may have caught them in the act and gunned them down, or maybe the prospectors gave up here and tried to find another way in.”
“Or it could have been Katya’s uncle,” Jack murmured.
“Whoever it was, it makes the job easier for us.” Pradesh crawled in a few meters to the wedged boulder, and packed the explosive in a space underneath. He pressed in the detonator cord, then wound off the spool and backed out of the entrance, carrying on across the clearing about ten meters to another large rock protruding from the jungle fringe. Jack and Costas followed him, and squatted behind the rock. Pradesh clipped on a small electronic detonator, then raised his arm in warning to the sapper who had been glancing at him from his position on the far
