The Messiah Secret - James Becker [110]
The driver stared through his binoculars, then lowered them to his chest.
‘Looks like Masters could have been right, and maybe the end-game is near, because the Nissan’s just stopped again.’
Bronson pulled the jeep to a halt beside the road and looked over to his right, in the direction Angela was pointing.
‘Could that be it?’ she asked, her voice clouded with doubt.
On the north, uphill side of the road a fairly narrow gully opened up, a tumble of rocks partially blocking the entrance to it.
‘I don’t see anything much there that looks like a pair of pillars.’
‘Me neither. OK, just go on a little bit further, and see if there’s anything else closer to Arann that looks like a better candidate.’ Bronson slipped the jeep into gear and eased it back on to the road. But he’d only covered about ten yards when Angela suddenly grabbed his arm.
‘Stop,’ she said, pointing again.
Perhaps two hundred yards further up the mountainside, beyond the entrance to the gully, a vertical crack split the rock in two.
‘What?’ Bronson said.
‘Look – over there. It’s the closest thing I’ve seen so far.’ Angela’s voice was high with excitement. ‘The ancient languages didn’t have the huge vocabularies we’ve got today. “Pillars” might have been the most accurate word the author could find to describe what he was seeing. Anyway, I think it’s worth checking out. Can you get the jeep up there and into that gully?’
Bronson studied the rock-covered ground and nodded. ‘Probably,’ he said. ‘Though I’m not sure how far I’ll be able to take it off the road. I guess we’ll be walking for the last part, up to that cleft.’
He reversed the jeep about twenty yards then swung it over to the right and inched his way off the rutted surface of the road and into the entrance to the gully, weaving his way between the fallen rocks. Beyond the fairly narrow opening, the rocks opened up slightly, and there were fewer fallen boulders to negotiate. He was able to drive about a hundred yards towards the split in the rock, which was further than he thought they’d be able to manage.
But eventually the ground became too steep and the surface too broken up for him to drive any further. He reversed the jeep into a gap between two large boulders and switched off the engine.
‘That should be invisible from the road,’ he said. ‘Now we walk.’
57
In a level area just off the road about a mile outside Arann, Masters ended the call on his sat-phone and grabbed a topographical map of Kashmir. Spreading it out across the bonnet of the Land Cruiser, he studied it for a few minutes, Donovan right beside him. Then he gestured to the other men, who clustered around him.
‘OK,’ he began. ‘Bronson and Lewis have just stopped their vehicle and pulled off the road right here. According to the surveillance team, the jeep drove up this narrow gully about ten minutes ago and it hasn’t reappeared.
‘So what we can’t do is drive up the gully after them. That would be real stupid. We need to sneak up on them.’
The heavy-set man at the edge of the group shook his head. Right then John Cross’s surname fitted his mood pretty much like a glove. ‘This makes no sense, Nick. These two Brits don’t have anything more than maybe a penknife between them. We’ve got assault rifles and pistols. I don’t see why we don’t just drive straight up to them, stick a pistol down the woman’s throat and tell the guy we’ll pull the trigger unless he tells us what he knows.’
A couple of the other men nodded their agreement.
‘Oh, and by the way, Nick, we still have no clue what the hell we are supposed to be looking for in this god-forsaken hole.’ Cross added, ‘because, so far you’ve told us diddly-squat.’
Masters nodded. ‘I’m still not going to tell you why we’re here,’ he snapped, ‘because that guy over there’ – he gestured at Donovan, who had walked a short distance away from the group of merceneries – ‘is the man who’s paying your wages, and he wants it that way. The reason we’re not going to give Angela Lewis a nine-millimetre tonsillectomy is because she’s the person most