The next morning Arjun’s van appeared right on schedule. Arjun had waited until he had a chance to see the law enforcement response to last night’s killings in the Tibetan shop. His assistant drove down the road part way to Birganj and reported no checkpoints. The van proceeded south down the winding mountain road to Birganj, a thriving Nepalese border town. After dropping Kathy and Jack at the Hotel Makalia, Arjun and Bernadette left for India late in the afternoon. Jack and Kathy would have to retrace their illegal border crossing after dark to rendezvous with Arjun and Bernadette along the border road on the Indian side.
Both Arjun and Jack felt avoiding air travel at this point was a good practice. Once across the border, they would drive all night to New Delhi and check back into the rooms Jack was holding in the Oberoi Hotel. Arjun didn’t think the Delhi police would want to see them, but if they did, the story was that after Bahadur put them ashore, it had taken a long time to find their own way back to Raxaul Bazaar where they’d paid a series of drivers to take them to New Delhi. They didn’t know the license numbers or names of the drivers and did not want to press charges against Bahadur. They were going back to the States just as soon as they recovered from their ordeal.
It seemed to Jack that time really dragged. He wanted to get across the border into India. Finally Arjun’s assistant, in a rented car, arrived to pick them up. Fifteen minutes later he dropped them on the dirt road running west along the border from Birganj. Jack sat up front with the driver and told him where to stop. He didn’t have Anita’s memory for terrain and direction, but he could get them across the border. Kathy had made incredible strides. She was now a true warrior. You could see the change in the way she moved and carried herself. Peter Brandon and Frank would be proud of her.
Jack took the lead, as his night vision and hearing were better than Kathy’s. He almost subconsciously retraced the cross border route while being hypersensitive to any sounds in the deep dust. Anita had told him to open his mind and to trust his instincts, to focus but not force the concentration. It was pretty simple to cover the distance between the towns with the lights in Birganj to guide by. At the midpoint of the crossing, he found the short flight of cement block steps Bahadur had used. He thought not bad, a pretty good piece of dead reckoning. Anita must still be with them.
Once, when he heard some faint clinking sounds in the distant dark, he halted the group until the sounds faded away. He thought some sergeant in the police or army needs to get his men with clanking gear squared away. In the still darkness, he almost stumbled into the embankment of the raised road. They climbed the steep embankment and, following Arjun’s instructions, began to walk east toward Raxaul Bazaar. He reckoned they had only moved about a hundred meters when the outline of a vehicle appeared, and Kathy saw the distant flare of a match. Arjun and Bernadette were waiting beside the van for them. Arjun hurried them inside. He wanted to move away from the border zone before a patrol car came along.
When she took her seat in the van, Kathy told Arjun the plan had worked beautifully. If he tired of the detective business, he could always be a smuggler. Arjun laughed and said, “No thanks, I’ve been on the side of the good guys too long. It’s a long trip to New Delhi, but I’d rather not have any paper trail from staying in a hotel between here and there. If you can, try to get some sleep. I will need someone to relieve me in three or four hours. After it gets light, we can stop for breakfast and buy a tank of petrol with cash.”
Kathy volunteered to take over when Arjun needed a break. She also had an idea she wanted to try on them. While the van rolled along the Grand Trunk Road, Kathy outlined her idea. They discussed it for nearly an hour before Kathy asked Arjun if he thought it would work. Arjun said he and his people could carry off their part of the plan, but they would have to get it done in the next 24 hours.
Kathy, sitting up front with Arjun, asked if good radio reception was in this area. Arjun thought they could hear a few of the more powerful stations. He reached over and tuned in a Hindi broadcast from Lucknow.
They had all read the English language Nepali and Indian newspapers covering the shotgun massacre in Kathmandu as a front-page story. The fact al-Qaeda was involved gave the story legs. After fiddling with the dial, Arjun was satisfied the reception was as good as it was going to get. He said he would translate any news about the killings in Kathmandu. For ten minutes or so, Arjun listened intently and provided a running commentary of the important points. The Nepalese police are looking hard for the three westerners who were with Bahadur Thapa. They now have all their names except Bernadette’s, but can find no record any had ever been in Kathmandu. The identities of some of the victims have been released. Of the six men and two women found shot, only four have been identified. Three were Arabs and some were on a terrorist watch list. The one woman identified was a Nepali, named Angela Pandey, a notorious terrorist assassin, who was wanted by the police of several countries. The other woman is unidentified. She may have been one of the attackers, a woman warrior with the Bahadur Thapa Battalion. The owner of the rug shop and his night guard are being held for questioning.
Jack said, “They will never figure out the identity of the woman warrior. Anita carried no I.D, no jewelry, and all her clothes were local, including her boots, and she wore a Maoist headband. She had no significant western dental work or other medical identifiers.”
Facts and Fictions 