The Avatari (51 page)

At the Kyrgyz village, a less-than-warm welcome awaited them. They were surrounded almost immediately by a group of men who exclaimed loudly at each other in their language, matching their words with appropriately aggressive gestures. Much of their aggression changed to amazement, however, when their eyes fell on Susan. They crowded around her at once, the men at the back pushing and jostling to get a better view. The old guide from Zhawar quickly sensed their change of mood and managed to take advantage of it by getting someone to understand their requirement. This resulted in further yelling and shouting, the gestures of the locals suggesting this time that they considered Peter and his team nothing short of insane for even venturing towards their intended destination. The old man patiently explained to them that his group members were explorers. Then, in a bid to be more persuasive, he took out a bag full of cigarette packets which he distributed among the Kyrgyz men, who accepted them with some hesitation. He asked them again about the Rakhel-e-Shaitan. While no one admitted to actually knowing the place, from the furtive glances they exchanged with each other, Ashton suspected that they might know of it. The Kyrgyz squatted on the grass now and motioned for Ashton and the old man from Zhawar to join them. Ashton was relieved; they were ready to negotiate a deal.
That means someone knows the way
, he told himself.

‘They are saying that the man who knows the place has gone to graze his flock of sheep,’ the old man from Zhawar explained to Peter.

‘And when will he return?’ Ashton asked.

The old guide engaged in further conversation with the Kyrgyz. There were shrugs all around, before one man answered, without meeting the visitors’ eyes.

‘They say maybe a week,’ the old man translated.

Ashton took out a roll of money, from which he deliberately counted out two thousand dollars. Then he spread the bills out on the grass. He picked up a few and let them drop, allowing them to flutter in the light breeze.

All the Kyrgyz men looked at the money. Finally, one of them nodded. Licking his lips, he spoke the words pouring out of him. The other men shook their heads, rose to their feet and walked away.

‘He is willing to take us to the Rakhel-e-Shaitan, but he himself will not enter the valley,’ the guide translated. ‘He wants his payment as soon as the mountain is in sight and he has identified it for us; he must be allowed to leave for home immediately afterwards.’

‘Tell him it’s a deal,’ Ashton said with a relieved smile, then added, ‘why is he so scared of the mountain?’

‘Many people have gone there; none have come back,’ the old guide said gravely, spitting on the ground.

They started out the next day with their new Kyrgyz guide, Nek Bhakt. They left the trail almost immediately and crossed difficult, rocky terrain where they had to dismount and guide their animals. Their ankles and knees were sore by mid-afternoon, when they halted to catch their breaths on huge boulders by the banks of yet another milky-white fast-flowing mountain stream. Nek Bhakt turned out to be a pensive and uncommunicative man and this part of the team’s journey was a relatively silent one, in marked contrast to the one they had made through the Big Pamir. The
padaban
had seen them off in the morning. On an impulse, Ashton had tipped him an additional five hundred dollars. The man had salaamed extravagantly, but turned quickly and left for his village at a brisk pace. The team had also said good-bye to the old man and his son from Zhawar. The two were quite reluctant to let them go on their own and it took some persuasion on Ashton’s part to get them to agree. He asked them to convey their gratitude to the old chief. Before leaving, the old man and his son declined to accept payment for their services.

Peter now lay back on a boulder and turned on the radio.

‘I think I’m catching Chinese,’ he announced.

‘Or something like it,’ agreed Susan, drawing closer. ‘Can’t make out what it is, though. Too much static.’

‘We are heading south of the Wakhijir Pass,’ Duggy announced.

He had been looking at his compass and consulting an old climber’s map the guide from Zhawar had obtained from Ishkashim.

‘We should be in the Karakorams in a couple of days.’

He was referring to the range of mountains at the end of the Wakhan Corridor, which formed the border with Xinjiang in China.

CHAPTER 29

Islamabad

S
EPTEMBER 1986

It was on the flight to Islamabad that Jim Madison began having serious misgivings about the whole project. Sure, he acknowledged to himself, he had cleared it, but could it be that he had simply gone along with Hal Stevens who had made one helluva push? Whatever it was, the deputy director of operations was beginning to have a bad feeling about this one.
Cut your losses and run, buddy
, he urged himself.

He looked out of the porthole and glimpsed land below. The captain came on air and announced that they would be landing in twenty minutes. Madison turned away and noticed that Dr Hal Stevens, seated across him, had woken up from his doze and was looking at him.

‘You don’t think we’re going to find anything, do you?’ Stevens asked.

The deputy director was startled by the man’s perception, but tried not to show it.
What was he, a damn mind reader?

‘You tell me,’ he replied non-committally.

‘I don’t have a track record of going after flyers. You know that, Jim.’

Madison managed a grudging nod. Hal Stevens was an icon. People in research claimed that had he continued at Berkeley, he could have gone on to win the Nobel. In the past five years, he had turned his department around from one that analysed inputs to one that provided them. Their latest achievement had been to break into the Soviet satellite links which gave them access to their missile silos. That, in fact, was the trump card US diplomats had used to browbeat the Soviets at the SALT talks. Taken completely unawares, the Soviets had just backed down and asked for a recess. If there was one quality that set Stevens apart from other brilliant academics and administrators, it was the man’s Founding-Father patriotism; he appeared driven, almost fanatically so, when it came to protecting US interests.

Can’t hold that against him
, Madison thought,
but a cynical bureaucrat does less damage than an idealistic zealot
.

‘Just hope you’re not having Uncle Sam fund a very expensive archaeological dig, Hal,’ he said lightly, the smile on his lips devoid of humour.

‘No, that’s not it.’ Stevens laughed. ‘There’s something out there; I’m sure of that. And it’s worth checking out.’

‘QuickBird didn’t pick up anything,’ Madison countered, referring to the satellite they had rerouted to the coordinates fed by the Falcon Air Base.

‘It would have been very surprising if it had. You can’t expect to pick up anything from thirty miles high in the sky, that too while covering a small strip. Not in the mountains, you can’t.’ He leaned forward and tapped the deputy director’s knee. ‘We have boots on the ground; we’ll follow them.’

‘Don’t tell me you expect to find a kingdom or a monastery in the mountains, Hal?’

Stevens looked at him thoughtfully for a while, then replied, ‘No, maybe not. My guess is, it’s going to be some ruins. But I do hope we find the complete Kalchakra scrolls buried in them.’

The C-141 Starlifter transport aircraft touched down awkwardly at the military air base south of Islamabad after its three-hour run from the US Naval support facility in Diego Garcia, east of Tanzania in the Indian Ocean. As it taxied down the two-mile-long runway, Jim Madison noticed that other than the truck-mounted air stairs approaching from the Air Traffic Control area, there was only one car heading in their direction. The sight gave him a sense of grim satisfaction; they were following his orders and keeping his visit low key. That he was coming here would not under normal circumstances have invited much comment; it was part of his job. Even the director had come here six months ago. It was just that he, Jim Madison, hadn’t given his staff any advance notice; nor was any staff member accompanying him. No meetings had been scheduled. Even the Embassy had been kept in the dark. To an aide, information about the boss’s movements was oxygen; how much you were in the know determined your position in the pecking order. Madison knew that his reticence made his personal staff, some of whom had been with him for years, uneasy and unsure of themselves. But then, he had done it to them before. He was as big a son of a bitch as the thirteen deputy directors who had preceded him.

They stepped off the military aircraft and were greeted by the blinding mid-morning sunshine and shimmering heat of the tarmac. The man who had driven up in the car and was standing outside it now walked up to meet them as they came down the stairs. He was the station chief of Islamabad, a small, balding fellow who shook hands and introduced himself as Gregory Krakowski. He hastily ushered them into the car which had Pakistani number plates and drove them to the restricted area occupied by the CIA within the perimeter of the base.

‘It’s still fairly hot, sir,’ Krakowski observed in an obvious attempt at making light conversation, ‘though it normally begins cooling off by September. You might want to take off your jackets.’

‘Are the people I wanted to meet there?’ the deputy director asked gruffly, ignoring the man’s suggestion.

Mentally, he pegged the station chief as a brown-noser and took an instant dislike to him. He hated brown-nosers, but they were like cockroaches; you found them everywhere.

‘They are, sir,’ Krakowski replied. ‘A Ms Donovant and two men I don’t know.’ Feeling nervous, he added eagerly, ‘Ms Donovant had come here earlier in August, only under a different name. You had called me up about her then. The two men have been here for a week. She came back in yesterday.’ He cleared his throat. ‘She had taken another team from Garcia into the mountains. They didn’t stop here, just got off the aircraft and were into the helicopters right away.’

‘Have you arranged for helicopters for the meeting at Khost?’ Madison asked, his mind on Claire.

Yes, she was reliable all right
, he thought.

In fact, she was one of the best and, till very recently, had been working for the KGB. She was a natural with languages and had worked on clandestine operations around the world. Her last assignment had been in Dublin where the KGB were looking after an investment of one million pounds that the Central Committee had donated to the Irish Workers Party. The CIA had moved in, following the KGB – a routine matter. But the scent of a possible defection had prompted them to up the ante.

Turning Claire was seen as something of a coup for the Agency. But when she finally did make the bid, the deputy director hadn’t snapped her up immediately; she had to give them something really good before he would do that. The woman had finally handed over one of the CIA’s own agents, someone they had never suspected of being a double. The woman and the agent had been lovers at the time, but that hadn’t apparently come in the way of setting him up. They had trapped him easily. In a twisted way, she had established her loyalty.

‘Ms Donovant has tied that up, Mr Deputy Director,’ Krakowski said in reply to Madison’s question. ‘I’ve given them the necessary clearances – without informing the Embassy, of course, just as you had instructed me. Are you sure you don’t want me to keep Yousaf informed?’

He was eager to display his knowledge of the current situation and the personal contacts he had made. Brigadier Mohammed Yousaf was the Pakistani ISI link they had with the mujahideen.

‘I do not,’ Madison said shortly, turning away and looking out of the window.

Stevens remained silent, busy making notes in a small diary. They drove through another gate where they were stopped by a uniformed and armed military police who, after checking the ID that hung around Gregory Krakowski’s neck, raised the barricade and waved them on. Krakowski parked the car and they stepped out and passed through the glass-and-steel doors – opened for them by another uniformed MP – of a small single-storey building which, apart from a huge communications mast sitting atop it, bore no signs or markings designating its purpose. The visitors stepped into a space where the chill of air conditioning, turned down low, welcomed them. They proceeded to another room where Krakowski used a key to unlock the door. He held it open for them and allowed Stevens and Madison to enter. Without a word, the deputy director closed the door behind him, leaving Krakowski outside.

Seated around a table in the room were Josh Wando, Claire Donovant and an Oriental man in combat fatigues and a Jap cap whom they had never seen before. At Madison and Stevens’s appearance, all of them stood up.

Josh walked up to the visitors, his hand extended in greeting.
It’s my expedition, after all
, he thought.
I’m in charge!

‘Good to see you,’ he said sincerely, addressing his visitors. ‘I’m Josh Wando and…’ he paused, turning back to give Claire a glance, then said, ‘this seems as good a place as any to introduce ourselves and get to know each other.’

‘This is your contact from Laos?’ the deputy director asked, ignoring Josh’s greeting and looking intently at the Oriental.

‘Yes, he is,’ Josh said eagerly.

‘Well, let’s just hope his entire cock-and-bull story has some truth to it.’

‘We are on a sacred quest,’ the Oriental man said softly to no one in particular. ‘Let us pray to the gods that our journey is successful.’

A little taken aback, the deputy director looked at the man before retorting, ‘You do the praying, my friend.’

He refrained from adding that if these fruitcakes didn’t find this much-talked-about monastery, he planned on leaving them at the mercy of the Pashtuns.

Stevens, who had been watching Madison’s interactions with the others, now came up and shook Josh’s hand.

‘Hal Stevens,’ he said, by way of introduction. ‘We’ll catch up later. I think he,’ he said, gesturing vaguely at the deputy director, ‘wants to get a move on now.’

Josh began to say something further, but Claire motioned for him to sit down. There were many questions he wanted to ask, but decided to be patient. Claire had informed him that it wasn’t the Chinese, the winner of the bid at the auction, who was funding them now, but someone high up in government. He could have guessed that himself; you didn’t get into a US airbase in Pakistan without being in government.
So now the search for Shambhala is being run by Uncle Sam! God knows why they are interested!
There would be time enough for explanations. His dream was finally coming true; that was important.