Target nine, p.8
Target Nine, page 8
Spacing themselves widely apart, they sprinted for the front door.
They got to the door without any reaction coming from inside the house. No security camera in sight. As Tamang provided cover and glanced all around to make sure they weren't seen, Jacob got to work on the lock with a set of lockpicks. The lock was a simple one, and he got it in less than thirty seconds. Stowing his lockpicks, he readied his submachine gun, turned on the pen flashlight clipped beneath the barrel, and grabbed the door handle, hoping there wasn’t a bolt on the inside. Kicking the door down would wake everyone up.
He eased the door open.
No bolt, but there was a burglar alarm.
No visible wires, no stickers to warn potential burglars, but a hidden burglar alarm for just such an occasion as this.
A shrill beeping daggered his eardrums.
Shouting a curse he could barely hear, they rushed inside.
The bottom floor, they knew from the schematic, was given over to a living room, kitchen, and bathroom. Agent Tamang positioned himself at the bottom of the stairs, aiming upstairs. Jacob rushed through the living room, scanning with his flashlight, kicked the door open on the bathroom, saw no one, and moved into the kitchen.
Just as he did, the thud of a stun grenade shook the building. Tamang must have thrown one upstairs at someone responding to the alarm.
No one on the ground floor. He hadn’t expected there to be but there was no way he was going upstairs and putting his back to any potential danger.
He rushed back to find Tamang still at the bottom of the stairs waiting for him. Once he rejoined him, the Nepalese-American headed up, taking the lead. Through ringing ears, Jacob could hear shouts and running feet.
They took the stairs three at a time. At the top lay a man in pajamas flat out unconscious. His appearance was probably what prompted Tamang to toss the grenade.
Past the landing was a short hall and four doors. Two were open. In the doorway lay a man who was just trying to get to his hands and knees. A swift blow to the head with the butt of Tamang’s assault rifle put him back down.
Jacob kicked in the nearest closed door and blinked as the light in the room suddenly came on.
A man stood there with a snarl on his face and a pistol in his hand.
A pistol aimed right at Jacob.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jacob and the Communists fired at the same moment. Jacob felt an impact that felt like a sledgehammer to his chest, and he flew back into the hallway, banging against the far wall. The Communist, arms cartwheeling, flew back as well, hit the bedside table, and toppled sideways to the ground.
Jacob staggered for a moment, managed to keep on his feet, and raised his MP5 again. The wounded man, a bloodstain spreading on the side of his shirt, fumbled and picked up his weapon from where he had dropped it.
A short burst took care of him.
Arjun Tamang was already kicking in the other closed door. Finding nothing, he turned to the stairway leading up to the third and final floor. The lights were on up there.
At least I didn’t freeze this time, Jacob thought, following him as a dull pain grew in his chest. Jacob forced himself to ignore it.
Tamang peeked around the corner and ducked back immediately as a burst of fire missed him by a hair’s breadth and stitched a line of holes in the back wall.
The Nepalese-American CIA agent pulled out another flash-bang grenade. Jacob got on his knees, making the pain in his chest double in intensity, and edged toward the corner of the stairway.
Tamang silently enunciated, “One … two … THREE … ”
At the same moment, the two men peeked around the corner, Jacob to fire a long burst that tore up the upper landing, and Tamang to toss a grenade up there.
They ducked back an instant before the grenade went off.
Jacob was on his feet and running while the house was still shaking from the detonation.
He hadn’t made it halfway up before he had to duck. A hand reached around with a pistol and unloaded blindly down the stairwell.
Jacob fired a burst as he fell, missed, and the hand withdrew.
He glanced over his shoulder and saw Tamang lying prone back at the bottom of the stairs. He wasn’t moving.
Jacob flew down the stairs, turned and fired a burst back up to keep the terrorists out of sight, then grabbed Tamang by an equipment strap and hauled him out of the line of fire.
Worried that the Nepalese Communists might start tossing grenades of their own, he dragged Tamang further away and into one of the bedrooms.
For a moment, he paused as a wave of pain and nausea threatened to engulf him. Damn. Had he cracked a rib?
Quit whining. Arjun is way worse off than you.
He gave his colleague a quick look over and didn’t see any wounds or blood, then he noticed the dent in the front of his helmet. Jacob glanced out the doorway to make sure he was still alone—the ringing in his ears from two stun grenades had basically made him deaf—and then gently unstrapped Tamang’s helmet and eased it off.
A bump the size of a golf ball, oozing blood, was right in the center of his forehead.
Concussion? Worse? At least he was still breathing.
Nothing more he could do for him now. Jacob snapped a new magazine into his MP5 and peeked out of the room. Nothing. The guy Tamang had clubbed with his weapon was still out cold.
That’s one prisoner, Jacob thought with grim determination. That means I don’t have to get another if these guys keep acting ornery.
He stepped over to the landing and swung around the corner, leading with his gun …
… just as a terrorist did the same thing.
Jacob swung his barrel up to hit the longer barrel of the man's Kalashnikov, and a three-round burst chewed up the ceiling. As powdered concrete rained on them, they both lowered their guns to fire.
Jacob won. His was the shorter weapon, he stood below the man, and the terrorist’s AK-47 had been knocked up a bit further than Jacob had raised his own weapon.
Sometimes j, just half a second, a tiny little variable, meant the difference between life and death.
A burst from Jacob’s weapon took off the top of the man’s head. Jacob continued firing to ravage the chest of the man coming down the stairs behind him. A third Communist at the top of the stairs leapt out of sight before Jacob could hit him.
Jacob struggled past the two falling bodies and then hesitated at the top of the stairs. Smoke was filling the upper landing, backlit by flames licking at the carpeting at the top of the stairs. Flash bang grenades had a bad habit of setting fires when used indoors.
Did he dare go around the corner? The guy was probably there. He stared down the barrel of his gun, waiting for the man to show himself. Maybe he should stay put.
But if he stayed put, that smoke and fire would get worse, obscuring his vision and perhaps making him cough or blink at a critical moment. His lungs and eyes already stung.
And there was the possibility of a grenade getting lobbed around that corner.
He could lob one of his own, but the layout of the upper floor gave the guy plenty of shelter. Plus, it would mean unreadying his weapon for a full two seconds. Firefights had hinged on far less time than that.
Weighing all these factors took less than a second in Jacob's mind, and he came to a decision.
If in doubt, go forward. Good life advice no matter what you’re facing.
He swung low around the corner, firing as he went, and ended up shooting nothing but air.
The light was on in the hallway, and two doors facing each other on either side of the hallway were closed, no light coming from within. A glass door led to a porch at the far end of the hallway. No one was visible beyond but with no light on out there it was hard to tell, plus there were blind spots to either side of the glass door.
Wonderful.
He saw the trap immediately. The guy was either lying in wait in one of the rooms, watching for Jacob’s shadow to darken the slit of light shining beneath the door, or he was out on the porch, waiting for Jacob’s shadow to become visible on the hallway floor.
Jacob decided the best way to handle this was to get back onto the landing and toss another stun grenade. The force would crack that glass door and with luck fling the other two doors open.
Just as Jacob decided this, the light to his right grew bright. The flames on the carpet had whooshed up and now blocked the entire landing. Smoke, already curling along the ceiling, began to thicken and lower.
Why me?
Jacob got prone, the smoke already tickling his nostrils and stinging his eyes. The thin air and the hyperventilation brought on by combat made him dizzy with too little oxygen, and him breathing too much was only sucking more smoke into his lungs. He coughed loudly, felt a jab of pain like a knife piercing him, suppressed another cough, and then coughed some more. That phantom knife got really stabbed.
I should have waited downstairs and smoked the bastard out.
Looks like the only way is forward now.
He leopard crawled, knees and elbows, to just ahead of the doors, taking care that his shadow would not be visible through the bottom cracks. Then he rose, reached over, and sent a burst through the lefthand one, arcing down to hit anyone lying on the floor.
Nice idea, but the guy turned out to be behind the righthand door.
Jacob’s MP5 flew from his hands as a bullet struck it.
He was backpedaling and drawing his sidearm as the door opened and the Communist came out gripping his AK-47.
Jacob had just enough time to flick off the safety and take him out, then advance and keep firing, because no one with both his hands on an assault rifle could open a door.
He winged the second man just as he flew out of sight and kept on passing along the hall to get a better view.
Jacob caught his target as he tried to hide in the far corner of the darkened room. A bullet to the chest and another to the head as he fell took out that threat.
Jacob cleared the room, grabbed the man’s AK-47 and, coughing and blinking, fired a burst through the glass door. Once he had made a hole, he ducked back inside the room, readied a flash bang, and tossed it through the opening into the porch.
He had just enough time to get out of the way before the flash bang sent a hailstorm of glass down the corridor.
Jacob rushed out on to the porch and found he had wasted a grenade. There was no one out here.
Faces stared out of windows all around the neighborhood. The flashing lights of a distance police car drew closer.
Jacob went back inside and saw the flames had spread.
He went back onto the porch and looked down. Too far to jump without risking his ankles. He had to get down there, though, and pull Tamang out before the flames spread downstairs.
Hurrying back to the bedroom, he tore the sheets off the bed and twisted them up into a cord, tying off both ends to keep it tight.
By the time Jacob emerged into the hallway, coughing his lungs out and getting eviscerated by that phantom knife-wielding maniac, he was surprised to see the flames had gone down a bit. After a moment, the glow went down even further, accompanied by a puff of smoke.
Curious, he moved over to the landing, squatting low and holding his breath, to find most of the flames gone.
Through a haze of smoke, he saw Tamang run up the stairs with a bucket of water in his hands.
“You all right?” Jacob asked, then coughed.
“Got knocked out for a bit,” Tamang said, coughing too. “I got a hell of a headache and I’m pretty unsteady on my feet, but I’ll be fine. Are you always this much of a disaster?”
“Sometimes I’m worse,” he replied. “Just ask Jana.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The next morning, Jana sat in Professor Mahesh Bishwakarma’s cluttered office while the professor and Prakash Rai had a loud argument in Nepali. They had been having it for a while, ever since Jana had brought up the cyar mey symbol and Prakash had shared his theories.
Jana didn’t understand a word but she understood everything, because she had witnessed or been involved in this kind of argument dozens of times before.
Prakash was unloading his theories with all the enthusiasm of a true believer while Professor Bishwakarma got increasingly frustrated when the antiques dealer discounted every established academic fact he used as a counterargument.
They were, to put it briefly, getting nowhere. And they would continue getting nowhere all day unless Jana put a stop to it.
Jana raised her hands and cried out, “Enough! Whoever stole the Royal Vajra and whoever slaughtered the archaeological field crew obviously thinks the cyar mey is important. Can we just focus on that, please?”
The two Nepalese stared at her, struggling between traditional Asian hospitality and the typical male dislike of being shouted down by a woman.
Jana pointed to the photo on the dead archaeologist’s phone, a photo that showed the missing stone from the temple wall.
On it was painted the car mey above a colorfully painted landscape of mountains and a valley filled with a village. Some writing was next to it, but an Anglo woman crouched in front of it, smiling at the camera while pointing at the symbol.
The two men calmed down and examined the photo once again, either out of Asian hospitality or scholarly interest she wasn’t sure.
It didn't matter. The mission mattered, and she had to keep these two guys focused.
“It is a most peculiar drawing,” Professor Bishwakarma said as if he was conceding a point.
“It’s as clear as day,” Prakash Rai declared. “It’s the cyar mey powering a city.”
“That’s not a city, that’s a village.”
“Villages don’t fill entire valleys.”
“That’s just artistic license. There were no cities in the uplands of the Himalayas until the nineteenth century.”
“Can you puzzle out what the writing is?” Jana asked, heading off another argument.
Both men shook their heads.
“We can’t see enough,” the professor said.
“What about these other images?” Jana asked.
She switched from the dead archaeologist’s phone to her own. The dead person’s phone, while it had many images of the dig, didn’t have an entire catalog of every painted image on the interior of the monastery walls. Jana had gone around and made sure she captured them all.
Jana slowly went through them. Some were blocks of texts, mostly incomplete because of the missing upper courses of stone. Others were images of Buddhas and various symbols she didn’t recognize.
Jana and the two Nepalese scholars winced as she came to a photo of a beautifully painted Buddha. Lying in the dirt in the background was a Nepalese worker, his clothes soaked in blood.
“These are remarkable paintings,” the professor said at last. “They remind me of the style of the Order of the Sacred Lotus.”
Prakash Rai nodded in agreement and explained, “The Order of the Sacred Lotus is a monastic order stretching back centuries. They have a long artistic tradition of painting on the walls of their monasteries in this very style. Most monastic orders decorate their monasteries with silk wall hangings or tapestries. This order is one of ascetics. They feel such things are too worldly and distract from the pursuit of enlightenment.”
“Then why the paintings? Aren’t those worldly?”
Both Nepalese laughed. “This is Tibetan Buddhism, not Zen Buddhism. The symbolism is sacred and instructive. It’s the silk and gold that’s worldly.”
“Oh, of course,” Jana said, blushing. She felt very much out of her depth. This wasn’t her area of specialty at all.
Tyler Wallace had fallen for the typical assumption of the public that any archaeologist knew about all periods and all regions. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most archaeologists were hyperspecialized. Many of her colleagues had criticized her as being a “generalist” for studying the Roman Empire as a whole, refusing to get bogged down in the minutiae of pottery seriation or regional trade routes like so many specialists.
She preferred being a generalist. While she couldn’t claim to be the world’s number one authority on some obscure aspect of the past, she did get to see the larger picture.
But she wasn’t enough of a generalist to know about this stuff.
“The texts are typical prayers and extracts from various sacred books,” the professor explained. “The symbol of the car key is the only thing that’s truly unusual.”
“That and the fact that it’s powering a city,” Prakash added.
Professor Bishwakarma muttered something under his breath.
“Would the Order of the Sacred Lotus know what the accompanying text was?” Jana asked. “I know this particular monastery was abandoned several hundred years ago, but you said they had a long and enduring tradition. Perhaps they used this particular arrangement of text and image regularly.”
The professor scratched his head. “Well, the order is a shadow of its former self. Like all human institutions, it waxes and then wanes. I believe there is only one functioning monastery left.”
He looked to Prakash for affirmation, and the antiquities dealer nodded. Jana felt reassured that these two were cooperating despite their differences. The series of crimes must have made them fear for their country’s future.
It sure made Jana worry.
“So where is this monastery?”
“In the far northwest of the country,” the professor answered, “in a little valley between the peaks near the border with both India and China.”
“Wonderful,” Jana said with a sigh. “The whole region is going to be crawling with troops. I’m not sure we’ll be able to get up there.”
"You must try if you're going to solve this," the professor said. Once again, Prakash nodded in agreement.
“And you should keep an open mind when they give you their answer,” the antiquities dealer added.
***
