Night Moves

Начало книги

The middle of the night, and still the temperature hovered near ninety. The humidity was so high that sweat did not evaporate and, having nowhere else to go, sour perspiration soaked the men's black uniforms. Only April, and already a new record high for this date in the Punjab, almost a hundred and fifteen, with more of the same predicted for tomorrow. Pah.

Three of the men in sodden black camouflage clothes lay in the darker shadow of a row of stunted bushes a few dozen yards from the railroad tracks, waiting.

In the distance, the sound of the train's whistle announced that it was on its way.

"It won't be long now," Bhattacharya said. Fat as he was, the others sometimes called him Ganesha, after the elephant god, though they did not say this to his face. However corpulent he might be, Bhattacharya was quick to anger, equally quick to move, and once moving, a formidable opponent. Until two years ago, Bhattacharya had been an officer, a colonel. Then, at a garden party in Panipat, he had stabbed another colonel who had insulted him, and it was only the lucky presence of a doctor that had saved the fat man from a murder charge. As it was, what he'd done was enough to have him stripped of his rank and arrested — and offered jail or a transfer to the Special Unit.

Читать дальше →