Five minutes later there was still no sign of the two figures.
‘They’ve found something,’ Killian said, standing up. ‘We must leave.’
Tembla leaned over to the serviceman who was piloting the UAV and issued a series of orders. Immediately, the image widened as the man switched from the telephoto lens to a wide-angle view that covered the valley walls as well as the floor. Then he began to zoom in on one particular area.
‘What are you doing?’ Killian asked.
‘Checking on the opposition.’ As the picture tightened, Tembla pointed at a number of slow-moving dots that were just coming into focus. ‘There are the men Donovan recruited. Including Donovan, there are six of them in the valley, the four you can see there and two others who are still watching from the valley wall. There are a couple of others we spotted driving a four-by-four, but they’re some distance away, and we don’t yet know if they’re also a part of the group. And you’re right – from the way they move, they are mercenaries. They’re also carrying assault rifles, which is good for us.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it gives us the perfect excuse to eliminate them. You know what we’re looking at here, but I’ll make sure that all the pictures from the Searcher will just show a group of heavily armed men who’ve almost certainly entered India illegally. We are entirely within our rights to engage them. Using the Hind might be considered to be overkill, but I’ll argue about that later.’
Tembla issued a further instruction and the image changed again, to the view of the rocks where Bronson and Lewis had vanished.
‘They’re inside the cave,’ Tembla said. ‘Mark that spot and pass the coordinates to the chopper pilots. Right, Father. It’s time we got airborne.’
* * *
Inside the cave Bronson was dragging away the rocks and bits of wood. In a few minutes he’d cleared away most of the debris from a small area, and all that was left underneath it was a thick layer of dust and dirt.
‘Look at this,’ he said to Angela. He took a knife from his belt – one of the various items of camping equipment he’d bought back in Leh – and pressed the blade into the soil. The tip penetrated no more than a quarter of an inch. Then he moved the blade a few inches away and repeated the operation. This time, the blade slid into the dirt for about six inches. He withdrew the knife blade, moved it even further, and again the tip hit solid rock within less than half an inch.
‘You see,’ he said. ‘There’s a groove that runs from the edge of the rock wall across towards the right-hand side of the cave. It’s directly below those two lines on the roof.’ He paused and looked at Angela. ‘In fact, what you’re looking at up there isn’t a pair of parallel lines at all – it’s actually a groove cut into the stone itself, and it’s mirrored by an identical groove cut in the floor of the cave.’
‘You don’t mean . . .’ Angela’s voice trailed away as she looked from the floor to the roof of the cave, then to the rock wall itself. She stepped forward and carefully felt the stone, running her hand up and down the edge of the wall.
Bronson nodded. ‘That isn’t a wall of rock. That’s a sliding door made of solid stone that somebody went to a lot of trouble to conceal. What we have to do now is find a way to open it.’
Nick Masters checked his watch once more – it was ten minutes and eighteen seconds since Bronson and Lewis had disappeared. He considered his options for a few more seconds then made a decision. Beckoning to Donovan, he moved back from the cliff-edge and made a call on the sat-phone to the small group of mercenaries who were waiting a short distance up the slope.
‘The targets have gone into a cave. There’s a small stone building on the valley floor – you’ll see it when you get down there. The cave entrance is maybe seventy yards east of that. Move forward now, slowly and quietly. Then hold position about thirty yards clear of the cave entrance.’
Next he made a call to the two men who’d been in the Land Rover – and issued orders to them as well.
Finally he checked his Kalashnikov was fully loaded, shouldered the sniper rifle and began a careful descent down into the valley, Donovan following cautiously behind him.
‘A stone door, Chris? In your dreams! How would they do it?’
‘You’re the one who’s always banging on about how technologically advanced the ancient races were,’ Bronson said, continuing to dig around in the earth with the sheath knife. ‘The pyramids have been standing for what – about five thousand years – and you’ve told me that even today nobody actually knows for sure how the ancient Egyptians managed to build them.’
Angela nodded, almost reluctantly. ‘True enough. And some of the passages in them were deliberately blocked by massive stone blocks to foil tomb-robbers, so the technology obviously existed – or at least it did in Egypt. It’s just that up here in these mountains, in this country – it’s not the kind of thing I expected to find.’
Bronson pointed at the floor, where he’d exposed a long straight-sided groove. ‘Once they’d slid the door closed, they jammed rocks under the base of it to stop it moving, filled the channel in the floor with earth and covered it, and the front of the stone door, with rocks and wood. But they couldn’t do anything to conceal the channel they’d had to cut in the ceiling.’
He looked up, then back down at the floor. ‘They must have used rollers of some kind,’ he said, almost talking to himself, ‘probably lubricated with animal fat or something like that. I just hope that they used stone instead of wood because of the weight of the door. No, in fact, they
‘Can we open it?’ Angela asked, her voice trembling with excitement.
‘We can have a bloody good try. First, we’ll have to shift all this stuff from in front of it, so there’s as little resistance as possible when we try to slide it.’
Together, they cleared all the rocks and bits of timber from the front of the rock wall. Once they’d done so, the edge of the groove the stone door sat in was clearly visible on the ground.
Bronson opened up his haversack and took out a hammer and chisel. Walking to the right-hand end of the stone door, he bent down and started bashing away at the rocks which had been jammed underneath it, and which were acting as wedges to stop the door being opened. In a couple of minutes, he’d chipped them all out and checked under the edge to make sure there was nothing else jamming it in position.
‘I can’t see anything else locking the door in place,’ he said. ‘Maybe they relied on those few stone wedges and its sheer weight.’
He stepped closer to the rock, looking for any sign of a hole or another wedge, but found nothing. It appeared that the stone door would slide to the right as long he could find some way of exerting enough leverage to start it moving – though that obviously wasn’t going to be easy.
He rummaged in his rucksack and pulled out a crowbar, fully aware that such a puny tool – and even his own strength – might prove inadequate. He looked at the left-hand side of the stone wall, trying to decide where he should try levering it. There were a few gaps that he could see that might be wide enough to let him drive the end of the crowbar into them, but he knew it all depended on how much the stone door weighed and the condition of the rollers that he was sure had to be underneath it, in the groove cut in the stone floor. Then he looked across at Angela, who, like him, was entirely absorbed in the task confronting them.
‘Are you ready for this?’ he asked.
‘She might not be, but I sure as hell am,’ JJ Donovan snapped as he walked into the cave, two armed men crowding in behind him.
61
‘How long?’ Killian demanded. He was strapped into the back seat of the Dhruv and the rubber strap of the
