The Doomsday Testament (32 page)

The word, in the faint, flickering light from the tiny fire, with the shadows dancing on the grey mud walls, sent a shiver through Jamie. Tenzin removed his heavy woollen jacket to expose the maroon robe of a Tibetan monk.

‘Yes, I am of the Gelug, Mr Saintclair. But I am also a patriot. Why should it surprise you? The tradition of the warrior priest has been part of your own culture since the dawn of Christianity. Did not an entire sect, the Knights of St John, fight in the Crusades?’

Jamie had placed Tenzin in his mid-forties, but now he could see the monk’s face properly he realized he was at least a decade younger, his features prematurely aged by the privations of the life he chose to live. ‘I had the impression that the only opposition to the Chinese in Tibet was of the non-violent variety.’

‘Aye, and it has been a spectacular success, has it not? More than a million Tibetans dead since the invasion in nineteen fifty, hundreds of thousands still being
tortured
in Chinese prisons, our people brutalized, our land plundered and polluted, our children taught lies, our religion drowned in the blood of our nuns and monks. Six thousand monasteries destroyed. What you see around you was once a great centre of learning, now it is home only to spiders, bats and vultures – and ghosts.’

The tone was flat and emotionless, but the words evoked images of whole lifetimes of pain and suffering. Jamie struggled for the right response and failed to find it. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know.’

Tenzin laughed. ‘Why should you? A dispute between neighbours in a faraway place. The strong overcome the weak, but Quomolonga is still open to your mountaineering tourists. Tibet was not the Falklands. The oppressed did not speak English, so why should you care about us?’

‘You speak English, and speak it very well,’ Jamie pointed out.

‘Of course. I was sent to school in England from Delhi, where my father was one of the fortunate few who grew rich in exile. At Winchester I proved to be intelligent, but exotic, and was treated the way exotic boys are in your public schools. That was where I learned the futility of passive resistance. When I went to Cambridge I did not stand out quite so much. I made many friends, some of whom now support my little Crusade here in the mountains. Kundun, the Dalai Lama, does not approve of what we do, but we do it all the same. A patrol or a convoy ambushed up in the passes. A
wujing
garrison
attacked
while they sleep in their fort. We try to protect those who wish to flee to India. Futile pinpricks, you might argue, but enough to remind the invaders that Tibet still has teeth and they are not welcome here. Then we drift away, like smoke, across the border. Tibet is a place where myth and legend and truth quickly become indistinguishable, Mr Saintclair. Word of our deeds is whispered among the oppressed and gives them hope. So we are the Ghosts of the Four Rivers, the Kamba guerrillas reborn, and proof that some Tibetans are still willing to fight and die for freedom.’

A young fighter entered the room with a rifle on his shoulder and while Tenzin gave him his orders Jamie pondered the reality behind the softly spoken statement.
We drift away like smoke
. He knew the truth must be brutally different. The Chinese would send whole divisions of specially trained mountain troops to hunt down men like these. The dead eyes of Tenzin’s followers told their own tale. Of men living on the edge, or perhaps beyond it. Men who knew their time was short and their end inevitable. For the Ghosts of the Four Rivers every new breath and every heartbeat was another battle won.

When the young man left, Jamie said, ‘I would have thought Beijing would put pressure on India to stop you from making these incursions?’

Tenzin leaned forward over the fire and allowed the flames to light the leaves of a twig, which immediately gave off fragrant, perfume-scented smoke. He handed Jamie another twig and invited him to do the same.

‘Now you have committed an act of defiance against the regime and are as liable to imprisonment and torture as I. The burning of juniper branches pleases Buddha, but displeases the oppressors. The Indians ignore us, because the Chinese do not acknowledge our existence. To do so would be an admission of failure, a loss of face. They wish the world to believe that after fifty years of their benign rule Tibet is a peaceful, ordered society. In their misplaced pride lies our strength.’ He raised his head to look directly into Jamie’s eyes. ‘When we talked earlier of the sacred place, it seemed to me that your story was not complete.’

Jamie studied him warily. He’d limited his tale of the expedition to what the documentary team had known and meant to keep it that way. ‘Why would you think that?’

‘Perhaps it is a coincidence that a special unit of Chinese engineers have also been taking an interest in it for the past month?’

‘Tell him, Jamie. Tell him it all.’

He looked up to see Sarah standing at the top of the stairs. ‘All right.’ He nodded. And told Tenzin about Walter Brohm and the discovery that would change the world.

The crater was enormous and as Jamie watched through binoculars from a sheltered hide on the rim a mile away, he realized Tenzin had been right and there had never been any chance they would get close to the shaft, never mind inside it. Chinese soldiers swarmed round the
entrance
while bulldozers and earth-moving equipment stripped the earth for hundreds of yards around and loaded it on to lorries that shuttled back and forth up a roadway of crushed rock that had been dug into the crater side.

‘Let me see.’ Reluctantly, he gave the binoculars up to Sarah who had been twitching impatiently at his side.

‘Make sure the sun doesn’t catch the lens,’ he warned.

‘I’m not an idiot, Saintclair.’ She focused on the digging operation. ‘This has to be costing them millions. Most of the equipment would have been flown in by helicopter. Whatever they’re mining here must be incredibly valuable.’

‘It is not a mine, it is a shrine,’ Tenzin said patiently. ‘A sacred place for a thousand years. And they are digging up nothing but worthless earth and rock. They seek the Sun Stone, or traces of its passing, but you cannot steal what has already been stolen.’

Sun Stone
. The hair stood up on the back of Jamie’s neck as he heard the phrase for the first time.

‘Long before Buddha’s time, a meteorite landed here.’ Tenzin saw Jamie’s look. ‘Yes, Mr Saintclair, I’m something of an amateur geologist – I picked it up at Cambridge when I was studying applied physics, and a monk has plenty of time for reading. As you can see, it must have been very large to cause a crater of this size. Ninety per cent of the object would have burned up in the atmosphere and when it struck it would have disintegrated on impact, creating a huge dust cloud. This
is
an area rich in such craters, though most are much smaller. Once, a man could become rich collecting the residue of fallen meteorites, glassified minerals known as tektites. But this was a meteorite like no other. It contained a substance so indestructible that it drove a tunnel eight feet in diameter a mile and a half into the living rock. If you move a little to the left, Miss Grant, you will see the entrance to the shaft.’

‘How do you know so much about all this?’ Sarah asked.

‘It has been passed down through the generations,’ Tenzin said simply, as if no further explanation was required. ‘The Holy Men of that time believed the devastation the meteorite caused was the wrath of the Sun god. They came here to carry out a ritual that would appease the god.’

‘A sacrifice?’

Tenzin nodded sadly. ‘They were less enlightened times. Seven prisoners were led down the shaft the meteor had driven into the earth, but as they prepared the victims for the sacrifice they discovered something astonishing.’

Jamie found he was holding his breath and when he looked at Sarah, he saw her eyes were wide, like a little girl listening to a frightening bedtime story.

‘The Sun Stone. It was like nothing they had ever seen before – dark, perfectly spherical – and it had a quality that amazed them. It was not subject to the laws of gravity. Or more correctly it was gravity neutral. It floated. The ancients believed that the Sun god had sent
them
the seed of the earth’s destruction and they feared it. They decided that it must never again be touched by the light of its creator. For two hundred generations the Sun Stone was kept in its lead-lined casket, never again to pollute the earth or the water or the air. Then the Germans came.’

BACK IN THE
relative sanctuary of the monastery, Sarah stared into the flickering, oxygen-starved flames of a tiny fire. Thick cloth squares covered the windows of this lower room to ensure no light could escape, and the smoke filtered up through a hole in the roof to dissipate through openings in the upper storeys. She could hear the soft snicker and rustle as the building’s population of bats prepared for their nightly hunt. The contrast between now and the immense focusing of technology they had witnessed earlier made her head swim. It was as if she had been sucked into some kind of time warp that had swept her back to the fourteenth century. Yet the reality of the crater had accompanied them like some vengeful spectre and was here all around them in the room.

‘So the Sun Stone is the key? Walter Brohm discovered a substance from another world and was determined to exploit it?’

‘Whatever we happen to think of Brohm, he was a
brilliant
physicist,’ Jamie agreed. ‘Right up there with Oppenheimer, maybe even Einstein. It wouldn’t have taken him long to work out that this was something completely outside his experience.’

‘And he spent the next eight years working to divine its secrets.’

‘Yes, and if he’d had the chance to work on it exclusively he might have done it, except the war got in the way. When he was recruited to the project to build Hitler’s nuclear bomb nobody would have given a damn about his obsession. From what my grandfather said in the journal he was forced to work in secret. That would have been at best disloyalty, maybe even treason. Walter Brohm was the original misunderstood genius.’

‘But he never gave up.’

‘Not Brohm. He was ruthless and ambitious and he saw in the Sun Stone an opportunity to carve his place in history. Ethical or moral dilemmas would never have entered his mind. Somehow he discovered what the material was and what it could be used for. It was his misfortune that by the time he had proof of its true potential Adolf Hitler had lost faith in his nuclear scientists.’

‘He also feared it. What does that tell us?’

Tenzin’s voice cut across the conversation. ‘It tells us the ancient priests were correct, Miss Grant. The Sun Stone has the potential to destroy the world.’

They stared at him.

‘Don’t you understand?’ the Tibetan went on. ‘In the Sun Stone lies the power of the sun. It is the material
that
fuels the stars. A source of infinite energy but also a source of infinite destruction. What has more potential than nuclear fission? What is the Holy Grail of science?’

Still they didn’t grasp what he was telling them.

‘Nuclear fusion. Controlled, limitless power from the joining of two atomic nuclei to form a heavier single nucleus. Fusion was first achieved in the nineteen thirties, but it has never been harnessed as a reliable source of nuclear energy. Whoever discovers a way to control it will have the economic power to hold the world to ransom. And the military power. Because with controlled nuclear fusion, comes the fusion bomb. Potentially a hundred times more powerful than a conventional nuclear bomb.’

‘If they know so much about nuclear fusion and have been working on it for so long why can’t they control it?’ Jamie asked.

‘Because they have never been able to discover the necessary catalyst that would give them both the high energy output they need and the control to contain it in a fusion reactor. I think this Walter Brohm believed he had discovered that catalyst.’

‘The Sun Stone?’

Tenzin nodded and his unsmiling face darkened, but Sarah interrupted before he could continue.

‘You said a fusion bomb could be a hundred times more powerful than anything we have now? That would be hugely destructive but it still wouldn’t destroy the world.’

‘That is correct, but it assumes that whoever builds
the
bomb understands what they are dealing with. A fusion bomb is basically uncontrolled nuclear fusion, a chain reaction that results in a thermonuclear explosion. What if there is no limit to that chain reaction? If the stone is truly the material that fuels the stars, it could be the catalyst not for an unlimited source of energy, but one that turns the earth into an inferno that burns for a hundred million years.’

For a few moments, they were each lost in their own vision of the end of the world. Eventually, Jamie said quietly, ‘Why did you bring us here?’

Tenzin’s eyes narrowed and his voice became solemn. ‘It seems to me that some force has linked you irrevocably to the Sun Stone. You were given the journal, which in turn provided you with Walter Brohm’s name. Now it has brought you here. You were sent to me for a reason. I think every step of your journey has been guided towards one outcome.’

‘And what is that outcome?’

‘You must return to Europe and continue your quest. I believe that only you can ensure the Sun Stone never falls into the hands of those whose greed or ambition or foolishness will destroy us all.’

Sarah stared at him, confusion plain in her eyes – along with something else that Jamie couldn’t read.

‘But how are we supposed to do that? You can’t place this responsibility on us. We’re just . . . just two ordinary people. We don’t have the strength, or the resources.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s too big. This is something for governments to deal with.’

‘On the contrary, Miss Grant.’ Tenzin’s face was grave. ‘It is governments you must beware. Governments like the one that has invaded and oppressed my country would give anything and do anything to lay their hands on the Sun Stone and release its power. Communism has no soul, just as fascism had none, but what about capitalism? Do you think the Americans would be different? In nineteen seventy-one Richard Nixon betrayed my people for a handshake and a smile from Mao Zedong; are we to expect any better from the current president?’