The Messiah Secret - James Becker [107]
‘Right,’ Angela said, as they saw a scattering of buildings on either side of the road ahead of them. ‘That should be Pänämik up ahead. We need to check out the condition of the road at the north end of the village.’
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Roadblocks,’ Angela said simply. ‘Non-locals aren’t allowed to go any further north than Pänämik, and the place we need to get to is quite a way beyond it, so we’ll have to either try to talk our way through or drive back and then go cross-country to get around the patrols.’
‘And if we’re stopped out in the bundu?’ Bronson asked.
‘We’re stupid foreigners. We’ll say we got lost and didn’t realize where we were.’
‘OK,’ said Bronson, doubtfully. ‘As long as they don’t shoot us first.’
Pänämik was the same as almost every other village they’d seen since they’d arrived in Ladakh, but perhaps a little bigger than most. Bronson slowed right down as they approached the northern end, and they both looked ahead. They’d almost cleared the settlement before they saw the barrier across the road, and the handful of Indian Army soldiers standing casually beside it, weapons slung over their shoulders.
‘Time for Plan B, I suppose,’ Bronson said with a sigh. ‘I hope you’ve got a decent map there.’ He pulled the four-by-four into the side of the road and switched off the engine. Angela unfolded the map she’d been using and used a pen to point at a spot to the north-east of Leh.
‘There’s Pänämik,’ she said. ‘And this is where we need to get to.’
She indicated a right-hand junction in the road perhaps ten or twelve miles beyond the village.
‘And from there?’ Bronson asked.
‘From there we use our eyes and our imagination,’ she said, ‘because I think that junction is what the author of the text meant when he wrote that line, “Then turned to face the glory.” So once we get there, we’ll have to start looking for anything that could fit the expression “between the pillars”, which may be somewhere to the north of the road.’
‘Because of the phrase “beyond their shadows”?’ Bronson offered.
‘Exactly.’
Bronson studied the map, working out distances and checking the contour lines. If they were going to venture off the road and go cross-country, he needed to be sure their jeep could handle the terrain. If they got stuck, there would be nobody they could call for help, for obvious reasons.
That was one factor. The other was that they couldn’t just pick a nice level route and power along it, because the car would throw up a plume of dust that would be visible for miles, and that would be a pretty sure way of attracting the attention of an Indian Army patrol. So they needed to keep it slow, and ideally drive along valleys or gullies – providing they could climb out of them when they had to.
‘I think we need to go back down the road and head south,’ Bronson said. ‘When we leave the road we can’t go west, because we’d have to drive through this village called Arann to rejoin the road. So once we get clear of Pänämik, we’ll have to swing over to the east and go along the slopes of this mountain here – I think it’s called Saser – in the Karakoram Range. Then we can turn north and join the road that runs east out of Arann without having to go into the village itself.’
Angela nodded. ‘It’s a hell of a long way round,’ she said doubtfully, ‘but I don’t see any other options, unless we just drive up to the roadblock, wave the letter at the soldiers and tell them we’re an advance guard from the British Museum. That might work.’
‘Yeah,’ Bronson said, ‘and it might not. I’d rather hang on to the letter and use it if we’re stopped by a patrol out in the hills. If the soldiers at the roadblock don’t allow us through, we’ll have alerted them that we’re trying to get further north. They might radio any roving patrols they’ve got in the area to warn them to look out for this jeep, and that’s the last thing we want. The best bet is to just creep along the side of the mountain and hope nobody spots us. If we are stopped, we just