Read the book: «Ben Hope»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Chapter 63

Chapter 64

Chapter 65

Chapter 66

Chapter 67

Chapter 68

Chapter 69

Chapter 70

Chapter 71

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PROLOGUE

Kabir removed his pilot’s headset and began flipping switches on the Bell Ranger’s instrument panels to shut down the rotors. He turned to grin broadly at Sai in the co-pilot seat, then at Manish sitting behind.

‘Ready to make history, guys?’ he said over the falling pitch of the turbine.

Kabir’s two associates beamed back at him. Manish said, ‘Let’s rock and roll.’

As the helicopter’s rotors slowed to a whistling whip-whip-whip, the three companions clambered out and jumped down to the rocky ground. It had taken less than an hour from the urban hubbub of their base in New Delhi to reach the remoteness of Hisar District, Haryana, out in the middle of nowhere twenty miles north-west of a once barely-heard-of village called Rakhigarhi.

Kabir stood for a moment and gazed around him at the arid, semi-desert terrain that stretched as far as the eye could see in all directions. Far away beyond the barren escarpment of rocky hills behind him to the north-east lay Punjab, the Land of the Five Rivers; in front of him lay the wide-open semi-desertified plains, arid and rocky with just a few desiccated shrubs and wizened trees scattered here and there and offering no shade. It was mid-September, and the merciless heat of summer was past its worst, but the sun still beat fiercely down, baking the landscape.

Kabir was hardened to the heat, because of the outdoor demands of a job that often took him to difficult and inhospitable places all across the ancient Near East. Unlike his elder brothers, one of whom spent all his time in air-conditioned big-city boardrooms, and the other who, for reasons best known to him, had chosen to live in chilly, rain-sodden Britain. Very strange. Though if it was the life he shared with his beautiful new wife that kept him tied to London, Kabir couldn’t entirely blame the guy. She was something, all right. Maybe one day he, too, might be lucky enough to find a woman like her.

For now, though, Kabir’s sole devotion was to his work.

Kabir stepped back to the chopper, reached into a cool box behind the passenger seat and pulled out three cans of Coke, one for him and one each for Manish and Sai. His two bright, trusty graduate students were both in their early twenties, only a few years younger than Kabir, who happened to be the youngest professor ever to teach at the Institute of Archaeology in Delhi. With his warm personality and winning smile, he was widely held to be the most popular, too – though he was far too modest to admit it.

Sai rolled the cold can over his brow, then cracked the ring and look a long drink. ‘That hit the spot. Thanks, boss.’ Sai never called him ‘Professor’.

‘No littering, please,’ Kabir said. ‘This is a site of special archaeological interest, remember. Or soon to be.’

‘Doesn’t bloody look like it right now,’ Manish said.

Sai finished the can, crumpled it between his fingers and surveyed it with a thoughtful frown. ‘Just think. If I chuck this away among the rocks, four thousand years into the future some guy like us will dig it up and prize it as an ancient relic of our culture, wondering what the hell it can teach him about the long-lost civilisation of the twenty-first century.’

Kabir smiled. ‘That’s history in action for you. Now let’s go and see what we can figure out about the people who lived here four thousand years ago.’

‘I don’t think they drank Coke,’ Manish said.

‘Nah, something else killed them off,’ Sai joked. ‘Question is, what?’

It was one of the puzzles that Kabir had spent his whole career trying to answer, and it was no joke to him. Nor was he the only archaeologist who’d devoted endless hours to solving the mystery, to no avail. He tossed his own empty Coke can back into the cooler, then took out his iPhone and quickly accessed the precious set of password-protected documents stored inside.

Those documents were the single most important thing in his life right now. The originals from which they had been scanned were a set of three old leather-bound journals dating back to the nineteenth century. Not particularly ancient, as archaeological finds went – and yet their chance discovery had been the most significant he’d ever made. And he was hoping that it would lead to an even bigger one.

Outside of Manish and Sai, Kabir trusted virtually no one with his secret. The precious journals themselves were still back in the city, securely locked up in his personal safe while their new custodian travelled out to this arid wilderness, full of excitement and determined to find out if the amazing revelations of their long-dead author were indeed true.

Only time would tell. Sooner rather than later, he hoped. His eagerness to know the truth sometimes bordered on desperation. Yes, it was an obsession. He knew that. But sometimes, he reminded himself, that’s what it takes to get the job done.

Shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare, Kabir slowly scanned the horizon. The chopper was parked on a rocky plateau from where the ground fell away into a rubble-strewn valley. Heat ripples disturbed the air like tendrils rising from the ground, but he was able to make out the curve of the ancient dry river bed that wound for miles into the far distance. Millennia ago, a mighty waterway had flowed through here, nourishing the land and raising lush vegetation all along its banks. Now it was so parched and dusty that even looking at it made Kabir thirsty for another cold drink.

He looked back at the iPhone and scrolled through the selection of documents until he came to the scan of the hand-drawn map from one of the journals. The hundred and eighty-plus years it had lain undiscovered had done considerable damage. A lot of the pages had been nibbled around the edges by mildew and rodents. Others were so badly faded and water-stained as to be barely legible. Kabir had used specialised computer software to enhance the details, and a UV camera to photograph the worst-affected sections. He’d been pleased with the results. The digitised map now looked as sharp and clear as the day the journal’s author had sketched it. The only modification Kabir had made was to insert modern GPS coordinates in place of the original latitude and longitude figures that the author had calculated using the tools of his day, stars and compass.

The map’s key feature was the undulating, meandering curve of a river whose line, as Kabir stood there comparing the two, closely resembled that of the dry bed that stretched out in front of him.

‘What do you reckon, boss?’ Sai, at his shoulder, was gazing at the screen of the iPhone.

‘I think we might have found it, boys,’ Kabir replied. His voice was calm but his heart felt ready to leap out of his chest. He took a couple of deep breaths, then started leading the way down the rocky slope towards the river valley. He ran five miles every day and was as nimble as a mountain goat over the rough terrain. Sai was markedly less so, being overly partial to calorie-laden Delhi street food, and Manish was a city kid too used to level pavements. Slipping and stumbling and causing little rock slides under their feet, they manfully followed their leader down the hillside. By the time they reached the bottom, Kabir was already tracking along the river bed, walking slowly and scanning left and right as though searching for clues.

It was hard to believe that such an arid and inhospitable area could have once been a major centre of one of the largest and most advanced cultures of the ancient world. But that was exactly what it was.

To say that the lost Harappan or Indus Valley Civilisation was Kabir’s overriding interest in life would have been a crashing understatement. Long, long ago, over a stretch of time spanning one and a half thousand years during the second and third millennia BCE, the culture had thrived throughout the north-western parts of South Asia. Their empire had been larger than that of Mesopotamia; greater even than that of ancient Egypt or China. It had covered a vast area comprising parts of what were today Afghanistan, Pakistan and north-west India. At its peak, it was thought to support a population of five million inhabitants, which by ancient standards was enormous.

And yet, virtually nothing was known about these people. Nobody even knew what they called themselves, let alone how they organised their society. The most baffling enigma of all was the question of what had finally caused their whole civilisation to crumble and disappear in an astonishingly short time.

For years, it had been widely assumed in the archaeology world that the main centres of the Indus Valley Civilisation had been the excavated cities at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, both in Pakistan. This had been a major frustration for archaeologists from India, since tensions between the two nations made it hard for them to travel freely in their neighbouring country. More recently, important finds made at Rakhigarhi in India’s Haryana region had radically changed that view. Many historians and archaeologists now believed that the sheer size of the site excavated at Rakhigarhi, and the wealth of incredible, priceless artefacts found under its dusty, rocky ground, pointed to its having once been the capital of the entire civilisation. If that was true, as Kabir fervently wished it was, then it might offer scholars the opportunity to finally start figuring out the secrets of the ancient lost culture.

Exactly what he hoped to find here, all this way from the main Rakhigarhi site, Kabir couldn’t say for certain. All his hopes were pinned on the remarkable journals, which described ‘a vast treasure most precious to all men on earth’. The man who’d penned those words had been one of the most important explorers of his generation. If his claims were right, Kabir could be standing, literally, on top of the biggest and most valuable archaeological find ever.

Treasure. The excitement he felt at the sound of that word took his breath away.

But even once he found it, getting it out of the ground would be no easy task. Kabir had already made some private, tentative enquiries among his contacts in the Indian government. They were unlikely to agree to fund a new excavation project, but as long as they agreed in principle, Kabir was more than willing to pay for it out of his own pocket. His very own private dig, fully under his own supervision. He calculated that to bring in sufficient manpower and equipment to get things rolling would cost him at least a hundred million rupees, equivalent to about one and a half million American dollars.

Kabir didn’t blink at those figures. The benefits of being born into wealth.

Manish and Sai caught up with him and the three of them walked on, following the river bed. Each man was silent, gazing at the rocky ground underfoot and imagining what wonders might be hidden below. It was a heady feeling. Finally, Manish said, ‘Wow, boss, you really think it’s here somewhere?’

Kabir said nothing. He was gazing into the distance as he walked. His step slowed, then slowed again, and he halted, his eyes still fixed on some faraway point on the rocky horizon to the south-west of the river valley. He frowned. Looked again at the iPhone screen, then studied the horizon once more. Manish and Sai exchanged glances, wondering what the professor had seen. Manish asked, ‘What’s up?’

Kabir remained quiet for a moment longer, then pointed in the direction he’d been gazing. ‘See that range of hills over there?’

Manish and Sai looked. ‘Yeah, I see it,’ Sai replied. Manish asked, ‘What about it?’

Kabir lowered his pointing finger and tapped the iPhone screen with it. He frowned harder. ‘It’s not here.’

Manish shrugged and said, ‘So? Everything else is the same. We must be in the right place.’

Kabir shook his head. ‘Those hills have been there since prehistoric times, Manish. They didn’t just sprout up in the last two hundred years. Trafford would have drawn them on the map, like he drew everything else. He didn’t. Something’s wrong.’ He was suddenly anxious. He bit his lip and compared the map and the landscape once more.

‘But the coordinates led us here,’ Sai said. ‘They must be right.’

Kabir sighed. ‘The coordinates are based on one guy’s skill with compass and stars, long before we had pinpoint-accurate navigational technology. There’s little margin for error. One tiny slip on Trafford’s part and the GPS could take us half a mile off course, or more.’

‘So what are you saying?’ Manish asked, staring at him.

‘I’m saying there’s a disparity between the map and this location that I hadn’t noticed before.’

Sai said, ‘In other words, we’re in the wrong bloody place.’

Manish was about to say something when he suddenly froze. ‘Hear that?’

Sai said, ‘What?’

Now Kabir heard it, too, and turned to look in the direction of the sound.

The approaching vehicle appeared on the ridge above the river valley, some ninety or a hundred yards to the west, the direction of the parked helicopter. Kabir instinctively didn’t like the look of it. As he watched, it tipped over the edge of the slope and started bouncing and pattering its way down the hillside towards them, throwing up a dust plume in its wake. It was moving fast. Some kind of rugged four-wheel-drive, like the Nissan Jonga jeeps the Indian Army used to use.

‘Who are they, boss?’ Sai asked apprehensively.

‘No idea. But I think we’re about to find out.’

The jeep reached the bottom of the hillside and kept coming straight towards them, lurching and dipping over the rubble. Then it stopped, still a long way off. The terrain on the approach to the river bed was too rough even for an off-roader. The doors opened. Two men climbed out of the front. Three more climbed out of the back. All of them were clutching automatic rifles, but they definitely weren’t the Indian Army.

‘Dacoits!’ Manish yelped.

Sai’s jaw dropped open. An expression of pure horror plastered his face. ‘Oh, shit.’

Dacoits were bandits, of which there were many gangs across north-west India. They were growing bolder each year, despite the increasingly militarised and notoriously brutal efforts of the police to round them all up. Kabir had read a few days earlier that an armed gang of them had robbed a bank in Haryana. Their sudden appearance was the last thing he’d have expected out here, in the middle of the wilderness. But all the same he now cursed himself for having left his self-defence pistol at home in Delhi. His mouth went dry.

‘They must have seen us landing,’ Sai said in a hoarse, panicky whisper. ‘What are we going to do, boss?’ Both he and Manish were looking to their professor as though he could magically get them out of this.

The five men were striding purposefully towards them. Spreading out now. Raising their weapons. Taking aim. Looking like they meant it.

‘Run,’ Kabir said. ‘Just run!’

And then the gunshots began to crack out across the valley.