The Indians weren’t without tricks of their own. For a while they’d been cut off, since the Chinese salient completely surrounded the building. All resupply had been through drones. There’d been no way to send in or to evacuate personnel. But on the west or Indian side of the barracks, the valley wall was extremely steep: virtually a cliff rising to slightly above the height of the building before laying back to a more moderate slope that ran up to where Laks was looking down on it. During the last couple of weeks, the slot between the building and that cliff had become about half filled in with snow. Volunteers higher up the slope had encouraged more snow to avalanche down. In this way they had managed to fill it in entirely. The roof of the barracks, previously an island, was now connected to the slope just above and west of it by a snow bridge: a narrow tamped path that could be crossed by volunteers, one at a time, on makeshift snowshoes. To either side of that path the snow angled down like a rampart to the valley floor around the barracks.