Downtime - Marc Platt [23]
‘Jill?’ asked Victoria.
‘My wife. She helps catalogue my plant specimens.’ For the first time, Victoria noticed a wedding ring on his left hand.
She was certain it hadn’t been there before. She sat silently watching the traffic until they reached the airport. Once they had booked in her luggage, she gave him a long hug.
He laughed and hugged her back. ‘We’ll be in London soon. I’ll give you a call.’
All she could think to say was, ‘Yes.’
2
Bug Alert
he mountainous terrain scrolled below like the graphics on T a computer game. UNIT helicopter Valkyrie 74D dropped to one thousand feet so that the pilot could follow the track.
From the passenger seat, Second Lieutenant Douglas Cavendish watched the landscape from inside the perspex security cockpit. ‘Pretty wild out there,’ he opined suavely.
‘Yeti country,’ said the pilot.
‘Right.’ Cavendish scrutinized the ground below more carefully. ‘Don’t most sightings turn out to be lost backpackers or leftovers from the Hippy Trail?’ He laughed out loud at his joke.
Pilot Per Londqvist, a hulking flight lieutenant drafted in from the Swedish Air Force, smiled politely. He had about as many flying hours as his passenger was old.
‘What’s that?’ shouted Cavendish, pointing at two grey shapes scuttling across rocks below the snowline.
‘Goats.’
‘Ah.’ Cavendish sat still for a while. On his lap was a file marked ‘UNIT Operations – Gargarin Tracking Station’ and dated 84/18/08. It consisted of enhanced satellite images of Section China 9G: Tingri Plains, Tibet, timed 23.08 hours GMT. There was also a monitored report from Reuters and two transcription reports from CNN and the BBC’s Delhi office.
In fact, Cavendish decided, he was on a bit of a mercy mission. The file had sat on a desk at Geneva HQ for four days while the relevant duty officer was away on leave in St Moritz or somewhere equally recherché, and it wasn’t until New York came down the blower breathing fire that anyone had noticed.
The enhanced satellite images showed the mountains north of Nangpa La. On the contours between the white snow peaks, there was a brilliant splash of gold and red.
The reports referred to a mystery explosion in the Himalayas. A remote Buddhist monastery had apparently been totally destroyed.
The Valkyrie was flying along the length of a valley that twisted sinuously between two white-capped mountains.
Another peak rose ahead, its summit snapped off to reveal a dead crater, blackened and free from snow.
‘It’s an extinct volcano,’ said Cavendish incredulously. ‘I didn’t think the Himalayas had any seismic activity.’ From the far side, there was a veil of dark smoke rising against the clear sky.
They rounded the mountain and saw, in the pit of the next valley, a dark smoking lesion burned into the slope. Londqvist circled the helicopter while Cavendish took photographs.
‘What in hell caused that?’ he murmured.
Where the Det-sen monastery should have stood there was a huge black hole as if something had burst up through the mountainside catching the buildings in its path. The hole still smoked. Mounds of rubble lay scattered around it and right up the slopes.
Londqvist put the helicopter down and Cavendish clambered through the detritus wishing he had worn more practical shoes.
There was no sign of a living soul – or any sign of the emergency services for that matter. Lying among the broken stone and wood was the sheered-off head of a huge Buddha, its blank eyes staring at the sky. The head was still hot. Here and there, tatters of something like web clung to the rubble, rippling in the wind as if they were alive.
Cavendish set up a tripod and took the standard reading for radiation. The geiger-meter registered nothing. He bagged up a few samples from the soil round the crater – important evidence for establishing any trace of UFO landings.
‘Lieutenant!’ He was just going to relieve himself behind a lump of tossed-aside masonry the size of a small bungalow, when he heard Londqvist shouting.
The pilot was leaning out of the Valkyrie