The eyes were dimming quickly and though her next words were only the slightest whisper, he understood them.
‘Trust him.’
Chiru glared at him. ‘Tshur log pa.’
‘What?’
The Tibetan gestured back the way they’d come.
‘Tshur log pa!’
‘You mean back?’
‘Tshur log pa.’
Jamie closed his eyes. ‘There must be easier ways of getting killed.’
It took them another few minutes to find the opening. It wasn’t a cave, or a tunnel. It was a fissure. A simple crack in the rock caused by God only knew what geological combination. Even Chiru’s sharp eyes had missed it, because the entrance, if the narrow cleft could be graced with the word entrance, was dappled with shadows that were as good as a coat of camouflage paint against the bare stone of the hill. The opening was barely wide enough to accommodate one person at a time and to Jamie it appeared like the entrance to Hell. After the tunnels of the Hartz bunker complex he could hardly be accused of claustrophobia, but this was pushing luck to the limit. The crack split the hill in two, but no light reached its jagged depths and he had a horrible feeling that just the slightest tremor in the mountains would be enough to close it again. That feeling was reinforced as he pushed Sarah after Chiru. A few feet into the rock the young man turned to him and made a calming motion with his right hand. Or maybe he wanted them to get to their knees? No it was definitely a calming motion, which he reinforced by raising his eyes upwards. Jamie followed Chiru’s gaze – and froze. Above them, like a pile of money in one of those fairground games that looks as if it needs just one more penny to make it fall, were tons, maybe hundreds of tons, of loose rock and scree. Jamie’s eyes met Chiru’s and they exchanged a sickly smile. He nodded, slowly, so as not to disturb the air, to show he understood.
‘Where the hell are we?’
Sarah’s shout sounded like a bomb blast in the enclosed space and Jamie automatically wrapped a hand across her mouth.
‘MMM mm MMMMmmm mm.’
He turned her head towards him and looked into her eyes. With his free hand he put a finger to his mouth. ‘Shhh.’
‘Mmmm?’
He nodded and pointed upwards, allowing her to ease her mouth free.
‘Jesus, Saintclair,’ she breathed, ‘you sure do know how to show a girl a good time.’
Chiru led them on, one painstaking step at a time. They moved silently, because they understood they were a knife-edge from destruction. Sometimes the crack narrowed so that they were forced to turn side-on to continue and Jamie had to drag the assault rifle behind him, but, gradually, they made their way through the hill until it widened and they could see daylight ahead.
Chiru halted at the exit, and slipped out of sight to one side. Jamie managed to squeeze past Sarah into the gap.
‘Fuuuuck!’
He tried to merge with the rock as he teetered above one of those towering, limitless voids only the Himalayas can produce. The vertiginous nothingness below drew him like a magnet, altering his centre of gravity and dragging him towards oblivion. All of India seemed to be laid out in front of him, the vibrant green of the foothills finally giving way to the hazy ochre of the faraway plains. The only thing between Jamie and the rocks a thousand feet below was air, and air had never seemed so insubstantial. He turned to go back, but Chiru, who perched comfortably on a foot-wide ledge to one side of the entrance, grabbed his arm. They stared into each other’s eyes and Jamie was ready to rage at the younger man for leading them into this trap, but the look on the young Tibetan’s face froze the words in his mouth. The desperate appeal required no translation. There was no other way. Jamie looked again into the depths below. Behind him, Sarah stirred restlessly.
Chiru pointed to a second, wider ledge that must have been a hundred feet below them, and signed to Jamie to follow his finger across the cliff. He had to look twice, but it was there, not even solid enough to be called insubstantial. A path. A fractured formation of stone perches fit only for mountain goats, but a path just the same. If they could get there, the Tibetan appeared to be saying, he could lead them to safety down that path. But how to get there?
Chiru read the look on his face and nodded. He slipped past Jamie on the sheer face and edged his way another six feet along the ledge to where a thin seam of scree split the cliff face. A dusty stream of frost-shattered rock and small rounded stones that led directly to the second ledge. At first glance, it looked vertical. Look again and there might be five or six degrees in it. But close enough to vertical to make it part of the cliff.
Chiru pointed down, grinned and stepped straight off the ledge.