The Doomsday Testament(94)

‘Perhaps not,’ Tenzin said. ‘Like most special forces, they operate in small units, perhaps only four or five strong. If they originally accompanied a wujing patrol they will have left them behind during the night. It’s possible they may look at us and decide we are too strong for them. Then again, they are the best trained troops in the People’s Liberation Army – the equivalent of your Special Air Service – and they have pride. That pride may keep them coming. One thing is in our favour: we are less than two miles from the border. If we can stay ahead of them we will reach Indian territory.’

‘Will they stop at the border?’

Tenzin shrugged. ‘We will see. It depends on what orders they have and how important to them we are. If they came across our trail by chance and decided to track us, they will not cross. If they know we were at the crater . . .’

He shouted a command and the column moved off, with two scouts in the lead and two guarding the rear. The man on Jamie’s left grinned at him, but the grin didn’t reach his eyes. Above the usual aroma of yak butter and unwashed body Jamie could smell something else, rank and strong. Fear. He knew the other man would have the same scent in his nostrils.

He turned to encourage Sarah, but she was beyond encouragement, hanging between the two Tibetans like a rag doll. He gritted his teeth and ran.

The first shot came when they had covered less than a mile, a whipcrack in the thin air that echoed like a volley from the mountains around them. Jamie staggered to a halt and looked backwards along the track. He could see them now, six tiny figures dogging their trail the way a stoat follows a rabbit.

‘Come.’ Tenzin shook his shoulder. ‘That was just a warning shot. They will be in range soon. Keep going.’

Jamie willed his legs to move and took up the mental refrain of the military route march. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. Another shot cracked out and he heard the distinctive zzzip-zzzzing of a bullet ricocheting from a boulder to their left.

Tenzin barked a new order and two of the Tibetans peeled off and moved into the rocks by the side of the trail. Jamie felt sick. The two men were the price of his life, and Sarah’s. No matter how determined the pursuit, the Chinese soldiers would have to deal with the threat to their flank. It would delay them. Not for long. Two barely trained guerrillas against the élite of the Chinese army. But long enough for Tenzin to get them to the border.

With the knowledge that they were going to survive, his legs found new strength and he shrugged off the man beside him, staggering along under his own power. More shots followed but none came close. They had reached a broad escarpment fringed by jagged, boulder-strewn hills that first rose then plummeted away almost vertically to the south. The only way out was ahead where two peaks were split by a pass that Jamie assumed must mark the border.

He risked a glance back just as a rattle of automatic fire confirmed the first contact between the pursuers and the two men left behind. Jamie knew it would only be a matter of minutes, but the pass was closer now and—

A muted thunder turned into a paralysing, gut-shaking roar. For a split second a monstrous shadow blotted out the sky, then it was gone. He looked up to see a turbo-prop plane similar to an RAF Hercules sailing towards the pass. As he watched the pilot banked across their route and a string of white dots left the big plane. Within seconds they had blossomed into fifteen or twenty massive parachutes. At first he thought it must be some sort of supply drop, then he realized that the size of the parachutes was to compensate for the thin air in the mountains and what hung below them was not canisters, but more of the special forces troops who pursued them. They were trapped.





XLVII


TENZIN REACTED INSTANTLY. He broke right towards the hills a quarter of a mile away where the boulders offered more cover than the open trail. Chiru, the youngest of the guerrillas, attached himself to Jamie’s shoulder and shepherded him away from danger, all the time darting wary glances back to where the paratroops were now deploying in loose formation. The Tibetans formed a protective circle round the two outsiders, but Jamie knew it was only a matter of time before they were overwhelmed. Against six, even six of the Chinese élite special forces, they would have had a chance, but not against four times that number. They were hopelessly outgunned.

A rock formation in front of Jamie shattered and a heartbeat later he heard the distinctive ripsaw clatter of a burst of automatic weapons fire. As a storm of lead savaged the air around them the man to his left gave a sharp cry and fell to the ground. Without thinking, Jamie picked up the fighter’s rifle and stripped him of his ammunition while Chiru checked the fallen man for signs of life. The boy shook his head and they ran together to the base of the hills where Tenzin had set up a defensive perimeter among the rocks, with Sarah, who looked dazed and sick, at its centre.