Angela proved to be trail tough and had no trouble keeping up and carrying her share of the load. When they pulled off the trail for a lunch of candy bars and hot tea, Jack showed Angela his map and asked her to identify any checkpoints, villages or other places of possible trouble. He also asked her how long she thought it would take them to reach Kathmandu. To put her mind at ease, he told her they had no quarrel with her organization. They were only interested in the Arab connection.
She looked at him and said, “I don’t like them either. They have no proper appreciation or respect for women.”
Jack thought, maybe so, but I really don’t trust this woman. She’s been trained somewhere by professionals. Living under cover to check on drug thieves is not a job for beginners.
During a rest break, Jack pulled Anita and Kathy aside, and went over the information Angela had given him. “The good news is only one checkpoint and she knows a way around it. Only a few villages are along the trail, but when the villagers see people with guns approaching, they get everyone inside. They have no radios, so they can’t tell anyone about our passing. Angela believes, if we keep up this pace, we’ll be in Kathmandu mid-morning the day after tomorrow. The bad news for her is that she knows she’ll be tied at night.”
Later Anita told Kathy, “Angela is no stranger to killing. You saw her help us move and hide the bodies. She is tough and very fit. Jack is right to tie her each night. I just don’t trust her. At the slightest opening, she will make a break. On the trail she watches me at every opportunity and is constantly pushing the envelope.”
At the end of the fourth day, the four trekkers were still an estimated four hours southwest of Kathmandu. Anita picked a camp site, and they bedded down for the night. Their packs were now down to about 30 pounds. Tomorrow, if they could cover five-plus miles before breakfast, they would be within a few hours of Kathmandu via the Mahesh Gola. The main trail through the Mahesh Gola enters the Valley south and west of the city. Jack thought if the weather held up and they continued to avoid injury on the poor footing sections of the trail, they would be in Kathmandu just in time for a late lunch. So far they were holding up. Water sources, except for one long stretch high on a ridge line, were adequate.
The next day at dawn they were in a twelve-minute-mile pace. The terrain had flattened out noticeably, so they had picked up their pace. They all were running easily in spite of the hard travel over the last four days. Getting started in the morning was slow, but once their bodies warmed up, the miles fell behind them at a steady rate. That morning they cached their blankets, sleeping bags, air mattresses and all the food except for a half dozen chocolate energy bars. Once they reached the Mahesh Gola and the trail became more populated, they planned to cache their packs, the AK-47, shotgun, rifle and ammunition. Jack had tossed everything else taken from Bahadur or his boat.
Two hours later they were in the Mahesh Gola. Here the going was a bit tougher. The rock-strewn trail wandered all over. Once, they actually lost the trail and had to swim across a few rivulets before recovering the main trail. Angela said she had been through the gorge once on her way to the tent site, but it had been at night with a guide.
They stopped for a quick lunch of energy bars and hot tea in an isolated small side gorge and decided to cache the weapons and packs right there. It only took a few minutes to wrap the dismantled weapons in loose plastic ground sheets and to cover the site with rocks and sand-filled gravel. Jack and Anita carefully wiped out any trace of the stones being moved, and when they left the gorge, he brushed out their back trail.
Once back on the trail Jack said, “We should be coming out of this gorge in no more than another hour.”
Kathy said, “You know, I’m not sure I would like to repeat this trip on the way out. Look! A grove of banana trees about a half mile ahead of us. It must mean we are getting close to a cultivated land, and that would be Kathmandu.”
“Yeah, I see them. I believe you’re right. A hot shower and a cold beer are way overdue.”
Without their packs and weapons, it seemed as though they were flying along. People were on the trail now, carrying what looked like impossible loads in large deep baskets high on their backs with a heavy woven strap across their foreheads that made the porters lean into their loads. The trail turned sharply upwards, and after 30 minutes of climbing, they came out of the gorge and into the southwestern edge of the Kathmandu Valley.
Pausing to look around, Jack said, “I’ll wait right here.”
He took Anita aside and said, “You go find Bernadette’s bungalow and come back and get us. I don’t want Angela to know Bernadette’s name or the location of our bungalow.”
As Anita prepared to leave, Angela said, “What about me?”
Jack looked at Kathy, who said to Angela, “As far as I’m concerned, you haven’t told us all you could have. You must have friends in town to help you. We can give you some money to check into a hotel for a while.”
When Kathy came over to get some money, Jack walked her a bit away from the group. When he thought they were out of earshot, he told Kathy, “I still don’t trust Angela. Make sure she doesn’t get a clue about the whereabouts of Bernadette’s bungalow.
“Give her enough money for her to live in a hotel for several days and to get some decent clothes, but she cannot be with our group staying with Bernadette. She has very fast moves and is very fit. It takes training and practice to get that fast and fit. She is trail hard with a high level of conditioning. Her hands, forearms and leg muscles show serious conditioning. She could have run away from us, except for Anita. Also, she’s a skilled radio operator. And did you notice how easily she led us around the checkpoint? How would she know the route? She told us it was a Maoist checkpoint. She would have had no reason to learn a complicated route around her own organization’s checkpoint.
“Too many skills for a little abused Catholic girl with an education from Delhi University. No way those three clods could have abused her. She could take them all at the same time. Lastly, it is more like the narcos to have someone checking drug shipments and using radios to monitor the movement of heroin. More like al-Qaeda than our friendly Maoist peasant movement.”
Kathy thought over Jack’s words and maybe, just maybe, she had grown to trust Angela too much. When she was really honest with herself, she felt Angela had manipulated her from the start, not a very nice position for a skilled interrogator to be in. With no downside in following Jack’s lead, as he was the operational boss, Kathy told Jack to give her the money and she would take care of Angela Pandey. She planned to give Angela the money, put her in taxi and ask her to check into the Soaltee Hotel for a week. Then she could go wherever she wanted.
Facts and Fictions 