The 3rd Survivor: A Unit 22 Thriller by Dhar Mainak

Author:Dhar, Mainak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-17T00:00:00+00:00

EPISODE SIX: THE WRATH OF MAHAKALA

“What did you tell the boy before we let him go?”

Amala smiled at me, her teeth glinting in the moonlight.

“I told him that you were demons who would eat the hearts of your enemies.”

We had let the boy go when we realized the Chinese were coming in force, looking for us. They had taken some losses for sure in the battle with Tenzin and the boys at the farm and their blood would be up, perhaps thinking we were another group of Tibetan rebels. There had been no point in holding on to the boy. If anything, he would slow us down, and there was no point in killing him out of spite. Before we’d let him go, Amala had pulled him aside and spoken to him for a few minutes. He had run down the hill faster than any kid I’d ever seen, terror in his eyes.

We were now lodged on a hilltop overlooking the path we had taken. We had not followed the well-worn, winding path which must have been created by patrols or shepherds, but had moved from ledge to ledge, zigzagging along the cliff face, with Amala holding on to my back, till we were at least three hundred meters to the right of the path. Given the odds against us, any element of surprise we got was welcome. There was no real chance of us running for the border and hoping the Chinese force wouldn’t catch up. Once they had a fix on us and realized just how small a force we were, they would call in reinforcements, likely from posts along the border ahead of us and we’d be trapped between them and be annihilated. Our only hope was to keep working our way towards our rendezvous point, keeping the Chinese at bay, and ideally avoid getting caught in a static battle which we would inevitably lose given the balance of numbers. Our best-case scenario was that we’d lose our pursuers in the hills and not have to fight our way out at all. I checked the display on my wrist. We were just a couple of klicks from our extraction point, but given the terrain we were in, and with Amala along, that could take us an hour or more. I’d already sent in a modified extraction plan for Salil and Sharma to help coordinate. There was no way we could hope to creep past Chinese posts in the dark with a kid along. Too many things could go wrong. She had been remarkably strong so far, but she wasn’t trained for this. So, add in the time for the changed extraction plan to actually kick in and we were looking at having to hold out for at least a couple of hours, maybe three.

Three hours in which the Chinese could discover who we really were and what we were really up to.

Then the shit would hit the fan.

We had paused, both for us to catch our breath and to get a better read on what our pursuers were up to before we continued.

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