Authors: Eliot Pattison
Then the birds exploded.
Gravel, plants, and birds burst into the air with a deafening blast. Chemi shouted and dropped to the ground. Tenzin grabbed Anya and pulled her behind a boulder as Shan pushed Lokesh in the same direction. The American did not move, but stood, cursing loudly in English as the rubble tumbled to the ground. As Winslow took a step forward, pulling out his binoculars, another patch of ground fifty feet beyond the first erupted with the same violence, blasting stones far into the sky. Winslow retreated to the rocks beside Shan, still cursing, and a third explosion ripped through the still afternoon air.
Abruptly, there was silence. Tiny bits of soil began to shower down on them, and three small columns of smoke drifted upward from small craters in the meadow. Three explosions, in a line, evenly spaced. Like the ones they had witnessed from the heights of the mountain that morning.
Chemi rose, terror in her eyes. Tenzin stepped to her side, his eyes upward, watching something white drift down toward them. It was a feather, and they all watched it in silence until it touched the ground in front of them. Lokesh began a mantra in a low, sorrowful tone.
“What would the army…” Chemi began, and rubbed her ears.
Shan realized his own ears were ringing. “Not the army,” he heard Winslow say, as if from a distance, and the American pointed toward the far end of the clearing.
Several figures were emerging from the outcropping at the far end of the field. They wore helmets, but not the helmets of soldiers. Their helmets were red and silver, the kind construction workers sometimes wore. Shan motioned the others back into the rocks. He stepped hesitantly into the clearing and waited.
The fury of the man in the lead was evident. Even though he was still out of earshot they could tell he was shouting and pointing at them, pointing at the small craters, even turning to wave his fist at the small party that followed him. As he reached the crater nearest them the man halted and examined Shan, then removed his silver helmet and marched quickly forward, his hands clenched, his mouth curled in anger. For a moment Shan thought the man was going to throw the helmet at him.
“Just walking across the ground could have ruined the test!” he shouted as he advanced.
The stranger replaced his helmet as he reached Shan, as though to say he was prepared for violence. He was a Han, slightly taller than Shan, square-shouldered, with knuckles that bore the scars of having been laid open many times. He wore a green nylon coat that bore the emblem of a golden oil derrick on the left breast.
“We could have been killed,” Shan said quietly.
“You could have ruined our test
and
been killed,” the man shot back loudly, his eyes still blazing.
“You did kill some birds.” Anya appeared a few feet behind Shan.
The words, or perhaps just the soft, disappointed way Anya spoke them, seemed to deflate the man. He frowned. “Walking in the test quadrant, so close to the charges, can distort the results,” he growled, his anger seeming to ebb into frustration.
“How could we know?” Shan asked.
“Know? All you need to know is that the whole area was off-limits. Don’t you read? Posters in every village below, with dates for testing in each quadrant. Only a fool would—”
As he spoke another man approached, a short man wearing dark glasses. His heavy cheeks and compact features had the look of a Mongolian. A number of instruments hung from his neck. A small, expensive camera. Binoculars. A compass, and a small black-cased device that may have been an altimeter. He wore a red nylon vest and, rather than a helmet, a red American-style cap with a broad front visor, that also bore the image of a golden derrick. The hair exposed below the cap was long, but trimmed and oiled. He looked surprisingly well-groomed for climbing the mountain trails.
“We didn’t come that way,” Anya announced.
Again her words seemed to take the strangers by surprise. The man in the sunglasses studied Anya, then Shan, and looked behind them. Chemi stood there, and Tenzin stepped out of the shadows. The man in sunglasses turned to the first man, who cocked his head as if suddenly very curious. He pulled a map from his pocket and studied it intensely.
“Which way then?” the man in the helmet asked.
“Sometimes sheep get lost in the hills,” Shan interjected, taking another step forward.
“You have no sheep,” the man observed.
“I said they were lost,” Shan shot back.
There was a sudden mechanical clicking. The second man, with the sunglasses, was shooting photographs of them, rapidly pressing the shutter and winding as he aimed the device at each of them. An instant later a similar clicking and whirling answered the first, and Shan turned to see Winslow photographing the oil crew, answering each of the man’s shots with one of his own. The man with the dark glasses lowered his camera and glared at Winslow; Winslow lowered his camera and the man saw the American’s face. He straightened and stepped closer, then twisted about and ordered the rest of the work crew back, leaving only the man in the green jacket by his side.
“I am the foreman,” the man in green hesitantly announced, looking to the second man as though for a cue. “Team leader for this field study. For the Qinghai Petroleum Venture.” He looked from Shan to Winslow and back again, obviously uncertain which to address. “There must have been a misunderstanding.” He studied Shan’s frayed clothes and decided to look at Winslow as he spoke. “You should have been warned about the blasting zone.”
“Why would you look for oil so high in the mountains?” Winslow asked in an offhand tone, taking off his hat and pushing back his hair.
“Not oil, not here. The blasting is monitored by seismometers positioned in the mountains and in the valley where the exploration is focused. These are very complex geologic formations. We need to record the way the vibrations travel through the rock to define the geologic structure, so we can understand how large the deposit of oil is, how economic it would be to extract.”
“And?” Winslow asked, still in his disinterested tone.
“So far the results are inconclusive. It will depend on what the drilling strikes in the valley,” the geologist said with a thin smile. “Our models suggest a strike big enough to justify at least a ten-year project here.”
“Were you blasting three days ago, on the south side of the mountain? Or this morning?” Winslow demanded. “Have you been on the ridge on the far side of that big plain?”
The foreman glanced at his companion again. “No. We do not operate outside our concession area.”
Winslow studied the two men. “Qinghai Petroleum,” he observed, “has American partners.”
“Italian,” the foreman replied, “French, British. And American. We work with Americans on this project.”
“So you know Melissa Larkin.”
The geologist’s expression froze, and he threw a pleading glance toward the man in the sunglasses.
“A horrible thing,” the short man observed in an earnest tone. “Tragic, so far from home. So sudden.” He removed his glasses and fixed Winslow with a steady gaze. There was sympathy in his words, but not in his eyes.
“You knew her?” the American asked. “I was at Yapchi. I didn’t see you.”
“Zhu Ji is Director of Special Projects for the entire company,” the foreman said. “He works with the foreign experts.”
The short, sleek man called Zhu nodded slowly. “But I haven’t met you before,” he said pointedly. “You are not with the venture. I would know.”
Winslow sighed, then pulled out his wallet and handed a business card to Zhu.
It was printed in Chinese on one side and English on the other. Shan saw the image of an American eagle, in blue ink, and gold stars. Zhu stared at it a long time, before handing it to the geologist, who repeatedly turned the card over in his hand, seeming to read it each time, as though the lettering might change when he turned it. “I heard someone from your government came,” Zhu said dryly.
“Are you suggesting Miss Larkin suffered an accident?” Winslow asked.
“Miss Larkin is dead,” Zhu said abruptly. “She fell off the mountain into a river. I saw it happen.”
Shan heard a sharp intake of breath from Winslow. “You were there?”
“I saw it, but not close. You know she had stayed out in the field without properly clearing it—supposed to be on a three day mission but never returned. We had been watching for her, because her superiors were quite angry about it. Her team had expensive equipment and was gathering important data. Only two of her team came back, only the Chinese, who said they had become lost. The others with her were Tibetans,” he observed in an accusing tone. “I said maybe she was just lost as well. It is so easy to become disoriented in these ranges. We watched for her when we were traveling in the mountains, and saw her through binoculars on a ledge high above us. I think she was delirious from hunger. Or maybe the altitude. Foreigners often have trouble with the altitude.”
“Why wasn’t I told this when I visited the camp?”
“I was in the mountains. When I returned I reported it. Forms have been sent to Beijing. And to her American employer.”
It was Winslow’s turn to fall silent. He sat on a flat rock and surveyed the barren landscape. “Is her body at the camp?” he asked after a long moment. “I need to take the body.”
“No body,” Zhu said soberly. “Into the river, washed away. It happens. Sometimes people are found floating hundreds of miles away.”
“You mean the Yangtze?”
“No. We were on the crest of the long ridge, on the provincial border. She fell on the southern side. The Tibetan side.”
“I have to have a body,” Winslow declared quietly, to a cloud over the northern horizon. “It’s my job. The U.S. government must account for all of its taxpayers.” He sighed and unfolded his map. “Show me where.”
Zhu pulled a pencil from his pocket, studied the American’s map for a long time, then pointed to an area of rugged terrain nearly fifteen miles to the west, where the topographical map showed the sharply compressed lines of a steep wall. Below was a thin blue line that drifted south on the map, into Tibet. Zhu followed the blue line with his pencil tip to a larger blue spot over a hundred miles away. “To a lake,” he said in a victorious tone, as if it proved his point. “Probably one of those sacred places.”
Winslow’s gaze moved slowly up and down the man. “I’ll need those papers you filed,” he said in a cool voice.
“At Yapchi. Ask for the manager.”
“Jenkins. I met him.”
“Right,” Zhu agreed in his slow, oily voice. “Mr. Jenkins was very upset, too. We all liked Miss Larkin. Very pretty. She told jokes. Spoke Tibetan. Not Chinese,” he said pointedly, “but Tibetan.” The foreman turned away, as if Zhu’s words were a cue to leave.
“Stay on the main tracks,” Zhu advised as he took a step backwards. “Safer for everyone.” He studied the steep slope behind them as though trying to discern how they might have descended. “Otherwise we can’t guarantee your safety.” As he spoke the Special Projects Director stepped past Shan to the rocks behind them, walking warily along the edge of the field as though he suspected others might be hiding. He circled back and stood behind the foreman again. “You have no dogs,” Zhu said, looking at Shan suspiciously. “Shepherds have dogs.”
Shan returned his steady gaze. “Sometimes dogs have to choose when sheep stray. Go to the shepherd or stay with the sheep. This time they must have stayed with the sheep.”
Zhu replied with another narrow smile. “A Han shepherd with Tibetan sheep. Difficult,” he said, and nothing more. He spun about and the two men marched away to join their crew, back on the far side of the long rock-strewn clearing which now resembled a battlefield. Shan recalled another crater, the one he had seen at Rapjung. The land took long to heal from such wounds.
Shan watched the Special Director until he was out of sight, trying to persuade himself Zhu was only what he had said he was. But he had known too many men like Zhu, as colleagues in Beijing, and later as his handlers in the gulag, for him to dismiss Zhu so easily. Zhu was more than what he had claimed to be. A Party member, almost certainly. The political commissar of the oil project, most likely. Perhaps a special watcher from Public Security.
He weighed Zhu’s words, trying to make them fit with what they had seen earlier that day. No oil crew had been authorized to work on the other side of the mountain but the explosions they had heard that morning had been seismic charges, identical to those they had just experienced. The helicopter Chemi had seen had been civilian, and the only civilian helicopters in the region probably belonged to the oil venture. Zhu had said a helicopter had searched for Larkin. But why would it search on the far side of the mountain? And if Zhu had already reported Larkin dead, what was it searching for?
As the oil crew disappeared from sight, Winslow kept staring at his map. “Jesus,” he said as Shan approached. “Over a cliff.” He was remembering, Shan suspected, that he had almost fallen the same way the day before.
“I always get a body,” the American said absently, staring at the map.
“Maybe later we could find the river,” Shan suggested, “and say some words.”
“I didn’t know her,” Winslow said, in a tone that sounded like protest.
“A rebellious American,” Shan observed, “who leaves her normal duties, her normal life, to wander about Tibetan mountains, perhaps to look for something bigger.”
Winslow grunted. The small grin that rose on his face slowly angled downward into a frown. “You make it sound like she and I have been looking for the same thing.”
Shan did not reply, but kept staring at the American. Winslow returned his gaze for a moment, grimaced and looked away.
The landscape greened as they descended into Qinghai Province. The hills were still largely the same rugged, gravelly slopes they had encountered on the south side of the range, but the gullies where the spring melt ran contained more vegetation. Juniper and poplar trees could be seen in the lower elevations. There even seemed to be more pikas running in and out of the tumbles of rock scree that covered many of the slopes.