The Messiah Secret - James Becker [101]
‘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.’
52
‘Are you sure you’ve deciphered the paragraph?’ Bronson asked.
The faintest shadow of uncertainty clouded Angela’s face, and just as quickly vanished. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I tried to analyse what the writer was describing, and then match his description with the geographical features that I know still exist in the Nubra Valley.’
‘And it worked?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ she repeated. ‘Let’s see if you agree.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of her bag and unfolded it. ‘Right. The first line is, “With their shadows ever before them”. Any idea what that might mean?’
Bronson thought for a few moments. ‘I suppose it means they were walking north, with the sun behind them, because that would cast their shadows forward, so they would always be visible to them.’
‘Very good.’ Angela applauded silently. ‘That was exactly what I thought as well. The second line is slightly easier, I think. It reads, “from the rising to the setting”.’
‘That has to mean the rising and setting of the sun, so what the writer is saying in those two lines is that they walked north for a full day, which means they probably covered about twenty or thirty miles, no more. But to make any sense of that, you obviously need to know the starting point – the place they set out from.’
‘And that,’ Angela said, ‘is given in the third line. It says, “beyond the meeting point where waters tumble”. I took that to mean either a crossroads near a waterfall or, probably more likely, a place where two streams or rivers merge to become one. The problem is that the whole of this area, including the Nubra Valley, is punctuated by rivers and streams. That could have meant almost any location around here.’
‘And?’ Bronson asked.
‘I figured that the same thought must have occurred to the author of this text, so I looked at the next line to see what else he told us. This reads, “towards the mighty river that flows never”, and that marks the end of the first sentence, so that’s the entire description.’
‘Maybe he meant a dried-up river?’ Bronson suggested. ‘Did you check to see if there are any in the area?’
Angela shook her head. ‘I thought the same thing as you at first, but then I quickly realized it didn’t make sense. If he really was describing a dried-up river, why would he use a word like “mighty” to describe it? Actually there is a huge river near the Nubra Valley that never flows. Or, to be exact, it flows incredibly slowly.’
Bronson took his eyes off the road for a second or two to look where she was pointing on the map. Beside the end of her finger was a small patch of white.
‘What is that?’ he asked.
‘That’s the Siachen Glacier up on the Saltoro Ridge. It feeds the River Nubra, and from the dimensions given on the topographical chart, it looks as if it’s about a mile wide in some places. I reckon that fits the description quite nicely. It’s certainly “mighty”, and it flows so slowly it’s almost as if it doesn’t flow at all.
‘If we put that lot together, what we end up with