She had her arms behind her head outside the sleeping bag, like a butterfly waiting for the right moment to leave the chrysalis.
‘I reckon you can handle things until I’m ready.’
He shook his head, then crept back and kissed her on the lips. ‘Thanks.’
‘For what?’
‘For nothing.’
He pulled back the flaps and emerged into air the texture of raw silk and stark morning sunshine that created razor-edged shadows among the rocks and hollows. They’d made camp in a stony, sheltered bowl close to a stream of cloudy green meltwater. In that first second he knew Sarah had been right. Everyone else was sitting in a circle in the centre of the tents with their hands on the back of their heads. The lip of the bowl seemed to have sprouted trees, or maybe, since they hadn’t seen a tree for two days, that should be statues. Their stillness reminded him of the saints on St Peter’s Basilica as they stood overlooking the circle of tents. Only saints didn’t carry AK-47 assault rifles.
‘I think you’d better join us,’ he called back over his shoulder.
A rifle barrel twitched a silent command, but, despite an empty feeling in his guts that had nothing to do with missing breakfast, Jamie stood his ground and waited until Sarah came out of the tent.
‘Trouble, huh?’ She surveyed the armed men on the rocks around them. ‘Who are—’
They didn’t need an interpreter to tell them that the barked command meant shut up and join the rest, and they took their places at the edge of the little group of porters and film-makers and assumed the same hands-on-head position of surrender.
Jamie kept his face down, but his eyes checked out their captors’ equipment and weaponry. They didn’t appear to be regular soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army, but that wasn’t necessarily reassuring. The Chinese authorities had created a paramilitary police force of immigrants, the wujing, to patrol the frontier, and no doubt there were plenty of men among the impoverished tribes of the plateau ready to accept Peking’s bounty for fugitives or interlopers attempting to breach the porous border between the Tibet Autonomous Region and India’s northern provinces. They were armed with what looked like Soviet SKS carbines and AK-47s, but he guessed they would be the Chinese variant, the Type 56, which was virtually indistinguishable from the Moscow version. The only difference was the folding bayonet attached to the barrel, but he hoped he wouldn’t get close enough to make the comparison. He had handled the AK during his time preparing for Sandhurst and he remembered it for the vicious kick and the awfully large hole the 7.62mm bullets made in anything unfortunate enough to get in their way. The weapons appeared clean and well cared for, unlike their owners, who were uniformly hatchet-faced, filthy and wrapped in a variety of layered outer clothing that would be well-suited to the ever-changing climate of the mountains. Low over heavy brows, they wore the type of long-eared, knitted caps that young men in Britain sometimes put on for a joke during wintry weather and their footwear was an incongruous mix of battered climbing boots and branded track shoes. He felt Sarah move beside him and he willed her not to draw attention to herself. One thing was certain, they had to wait this out and deal with the cards as they fell. No chance of fighting. No chance of running. These men would hunt them down within minutes. It was much more sensible to cooperate. If they were lucky it would mean a couple of days trekking and a couple more in a Lhasa jail before they were booted out. He didn’t like to think about what would happen if they weren’t lucky.
Two men scrambled down from the rim of the bowl and snapped an order before hustling Ganesh away from the rest of the group. One gunman sat cross-legged in front of the terrified Tibetan, while the other kept his Kalashnikov conspicuously sighted on the captive’s middle.
From Ganesh’s near hysterical replies, Jamie guessed that he was being questioned about the identity of the westerners. Eventually, the interrogator nodded and his companion shouted a command. Four more men descended into the bowl, ordered the porters to pick up their loads and herded them off down the trail along with the terrified interpreter.
Despite the intense cold, Jamie could feel rivulets of sweat running down his spine. The scenario reminded him of stories he’d read about Vietnam and Cambodia. No witnesses to testify to the fate of the filthy western capitalists or CIA stooges. From the desperate glances Gerry was darting at him, he guessed the film-maker had read them too. He shook his head. Making a run for it would only make things worse. At least this way he’d get a chance to plead for Sarah’s life before someone put a bullet in him.