The Messiah Secret

About half a mile away, the driver of the grey Land Rover pulled the vehicle to a halt behind some rocks that completely hid it from the road ahead. Both men climbed out and stepped forward, pulling compact binoculars from their jacket pockets. In the distance, Bronson’s Nissan Patrol was heading slowly eastwards.

‘You reckon they’ve found anything?’ the driver asked.

‘Don’t look like it,’ the passenger replied. ‘He’s going real slow. I’ll go get the sat-phone, check in with Masters.’

He dialled a number and held a brief conversation.

‘What’s he want us to do?’

‘We stay here and keep eyes on the jeep. If it turns off the road, we tell Masters, then drive over there, stash the Rover and follow on foot, keepin’ out of sight. Masters is going to hole up with the other guys near Arann until he knows where Bronson and the woman are going. He doesn’t want them spooked, not when we’re this close.’

They watched the jeep continue down the road, moving at little more than a crawl, until it was only a distant speck at the limit of their vision.

‘You think we should maybe follow them now?’

‘No need. The tracker’ll tell us where they are if we have to move. Masters seemed to think that whatever they’re lookin’ for is most likely somewhere at this end of the valley.’

Both men focused their binoculars on the distant vehicle.

‘Looks like they’ve stopped.’

And moments later they watched as the Nissan four-by-four turned round in the road and began heading back in their direction.

In ten minutes, the jeep had covered most of the distance back to the point where they’d watched it join the road.

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.’