Authors: Eliot Pattison
The youth looked at Shan nervously, then Somo stepped forward and he relaxed. “Plenty of room for everyone, brother,” he offered with a roguish grin. But as the door slammed shut and Winslow appeared, the man’s expression tightened. He stared uncertainly at Shan, and shrugged, shifting his gaze to the American.
“I was looking for some clothes,” Shan said.
“No one’s touched your stuff.” The man gestured toward the bunk Shan had slept in.
“I had nothing,” Shan said. For the first time he noticed a ring of keys hanging from the man’s belt. Perhaps he was the attendant for the unit.
“So see a supply officer,” the man said. “At the—” He was cut off by the shrill sing-song squeal of a siren. “Ambulance to Golmud,” he said knowingly.
“Who was hurt?” Shan asked.
“Manager in the warehouse. Bad fall. Broke both arms.” The man eyed them suspiciously. “Sometimes people have bad joss. They say something wrong and bad things happen. I tell them, don’t act like it’s different here because of all the foreigners. It’s just like the rest of the world.”
Shan considered the man’s words a moment, then exchanged a worried glance with Winslow. Someone in a brown jacket had caught up with the supply manager, and interrogated him. Probably, Shan thought with a shudder, Zhu himself.
“There’re clothes here,” the youth said in a new, tentative voice, the voice of one accustomed to bargaining. He gestured toward the other bunks and the lockers that stood between each. “But I’m in charge of the unit. I would get criticized if, say, thieves broke in when I wasn’t here.” It had the sound of an offer.
Shan looked at his companions. He had no money, and his meager belongings had been left behind in the mountains above Yapchi. Winslow lowered the small knapsack he still carried and looked inside. He frowned, looked up, then studied its contents again. He had given his stove and fuel to Dremu, his food to the children at Yapchi. He pulled out the sleek pair of binoculars. The young man’s eyes widened as he accepted the glasses from the American. With the air of a diligent shopkeeper, he hung them around his neck and began unlocking the lockers with his set of keys.
When they left ten minutes later all three wore hard hats, and Shan a pair of brown, oil-stained coveralls over his own clothes. Somo and Winslow wore the green venture jackets, Somo a bulky sweater under hers that gave her the appearance of a thick-shouldered man.
“We still have no plan,” the purba complained. “I should go back to the office. I can create some kind of distraction with the computer perhaps.”
“No,” Winslow said in a conspiratorial tone. “We’re doing it cowboy style this time.”
The American led them through the maze of trailers to the far side of the compound where two large helicopters sat in front of a small hanger. One of the machines was being loaded with crates of supplies. They had waited only five minutes before the machine was loaded and a trim figure wearing a tight red nylon jacket and an American-style cap over dark glasses strode out of the building, flicking a cigarette over his shoulder as he approached the aircraft. Winslow pointed to a stack of small cardboard boxes. Each of them picked up one and walked toward the helicopter as the man opened the cockpit door.
“They said all cargo was stowed,” the man protested, studying them with an impatient gaze as they lowered the boxes onto the tarmac.
“They were right,” Winslow replied, then quickly opened the cargo door behind the cockpit and climbed inside, pulling Shan and Somo in behind him before slamming it shut. The cowboy way, Shan thought uneasily.
The pilot sighed, as though he was used to such antics. “Sorry, no riders scheduled today. I get too many headaches from Personnel when I move people around without paperwork.” He closed the cockpit door and began flipping switches on an overhead control panel.
“Where you headed?” Winslow asked.
“Camp Nine. Southwest. The British team.”
“Perfect,” Winslow said good-naturedly. “We’re going southwest, too. Near Yapchi.”
“Not Yapchi. Not today. Yapchi field drop is tomorrow.” The pilot seemed unruffled by the strangers in his craft, but Shan saw that his hand was hovering over the microphone on his control panel. At the side of the hanger were two men in the brown jackets of venture security, their backs turned to the aircraft. The engine was beginning to whine as it warmed up.
“Change in plans,” Winslow announced.
The pilot looked back and sighed, lifting the microphone as he did so. “Sorry. I have to get in the air. You want Yapchi, check with Personnel to get the paperwork done. I’ll lift off after breakfast.” He touched a switch on the microphone and it hissed with static.
“But it’s an emergency,” Winslow said, still smiling at the man.
“I don’t think so,” the pilot shot back, impatient now, and raised the microphone to his lips.
“In the name of the U.S. government I requisition this aircraft,” Winslow announced in a new, sterner voice. He raised his passport out of his bag.
The pilot lowered the microphone. “Good joke,” he said with a shrug. “I like Americans. Just go now and no one knows anything. If I call security it will go badly. Reports have to get filed. Security,” he said slowly, examining them more carefully now, “is already really pissed about something.”
Winslow pulled out his map and pointed out the coordinates, holding his passport with his fingers against one corner of the map. “A fast chopper like this, wouldn’t take much longer for you to slightly change course.”
The pilot looked at the passport, frowned, and lifted the mike again.
Winslow pushed it down. “Listen to me,” he said in English. “Someone’s going to get killed.”
“That’s it,” the pilot said, and pulled away from the American, his hand now on the cockpit door handle.
Winslow sighed and looked at his backpack, sitting at his feet. With a chill Shan remembered that the American had Lin’s gun. He glanced at Shan, then extended his passport toward the pilot. “I am an American diplomat—look.” He opened the passport to the information page on the inside. “In Beijing, at the embassy, we get memos from security warning us to watch out for pickpockets, because American diplomatic passports are so valuable on the black market in China. Smugglers pay a fortune for them. A good embassy passport, one with five or six years left, can go for ten thousand U.S.”
The pilot’s hand drifted away from the door, and he accepted the passport for closer inspection. “Seven years left on mine,” Winslow said. “I just go back to the office, say it was stolen, and they give me a new one.”
“Then they invalidate this one,” the pilot rejoined.
“Doesn’t affect the value. Black market buyers know they can still use it anywhere that doesn’t have automated clearance systems, any border station without a computer uplink to the centralized files. Meaning eighty percent of the world.”
The pilot stared at each of them a moment, then grinned, put the passport in his pocket, and engaged the rotors.
* * *
You will sense a great rushing like a strong wind when you die, with a floating sensation, and the world will soar around you.
The words of the death rite echoed in Shan’s mind as they shot over the rough, dry landscape. Wearing the earphones that hung on the back of the seat in front of him, leaning on the small window, Shan found a distant place within and simply experienced the rushing of the land beneath. Riding in a helicopter could be a meditation exercise, he mused, to understand how vast, and transitory, the world was.
The pilot did not argue when Winslow asked him to bypass Yapchi’s main camp, coming in low from the west so as not to be seen. He would not, Shan realized, want anyone to know he had departed from his assigned route, which would have been west of Yapchi in any event. As they approached the site Winslow had marked on the map the pilot guided the helicopter low over the mountains, hugging the contours of the ridge, until suddenly Shan realized they were hovering. Winslow and the pilot were pointing to a clearing near the top of the ridge and glancing at the map. Then abruptly, the machine tilted forward a hundred yards, straightened and sank. They touched down hard, Winslow flung open the door and they leapt out. The pilot offered a mock salute, hesitated, looking around the bleak terrain, then examined the three figures beside his machine. He unbuckled his harness and rummaged around the cargo compartment. Moments later he began tossing things out of the open door. Two blankets. A first aid kit. A down vest and, finally, a bag of American potato chips.
Seconds later the machine was gone and they stood alone in the wind on the high ridgetop clearing. Winslow handed the vest to Somo, as Shan gathered up the other items in one of the blankets and slung it over his shoulder, then trotted to the nearest outcropping. He felt strangely uneasy being in the clearing.
“You want to find Miss Larkin,” Shan said to the American when Winslow had caught up with him. Somo and I want to find the purbas. I think they may be at the same spot.”
“You don’t know that,” the American asserted. “Christ, everything is a conspiracy with you.”
Shan sighed. “In the helicopter I realized something. When Somo told me what Larkin had done with the computer I asked why would anyone speak with Somo about what Larkin did. That was the wrong question. I should have asked why would Somo’s contact know what Larkin did, if she had gone so far to preserve her secrecy. There can be only one answer. Because she was with purbas, because purbas are working with her for some reason. That explains why Zhu is so interested in her. A foreigner helping the resistance, the government would—” Shan stopped in mid-sentence. Winslow grinned back at him.
Somo gave a reluctant shrug, but nodded slowly as the two men studied her. “I don’t know any details. It’s a different project, a different team. Bad security, for everyone to know what the others are doing.”
Shan nodded agreement. “Rivers,” he said. “We know she is marking rivers. We know Tibetans are collecting water from rivers.” He asked Winslow for the map, and traced with his finger each of the blue lines that radiated out of the mountains. He climbed to the top of the outcropping. They could see two of the small rivers, emerging from narrow canyons to flow to the west and south.
“She’s expected to be here tomorrow,” Winslow said. “She’s not here now. And she wouldn’t be likely to travel all night in the mountains. So say she’s no more than half a day’s walk from here.” He made a wide circle with his finger on the map. “But to the west she would be out of the Yapchi oil concession,” he added.
“Sky birthing,” Winslow said. “That man taking the bottle to the Green Tara, he said something about going to the sky birthing.” He frowned and searched the horizon.
Suddenly Shan looked up and pointed to the main peak of Yapchi Mountain. “We know where the sky is born,” he declared with a grin.
* * *
They had been walking for three hours, feeling increasingly uncertain that they could find the place they sought, when suddenly a Tibetan youth appeared, jogging along a trail that ran laterally below them on the slope they were descending. He had no pack, not even a heavy coat, but he clutched something in his hands. Shan looked at Winslow, who was rubbing his temples with a grimace, then at Somo. She grinned, tightened the laces of her shoes, grabbed the bag of potato chips and leapt down the slope.
They watched, Winslow taking two more of his pills, as the purba runner advanced on the youth, but when Somo was still two hundred yards from him, the boy dropped out of sight below a ridge. When Shan and Winslow crested the ridge the American gave a shout of glee, one of his strange cowboy hoots. Somo was sitting with the boy three hundred yards away. As they approached they could see the boy was stuffing the chips into his mouth, speaking in a relaxed fashion with Somo. But before they were within earshot the youth stood, waved at the two men good-naturedly, and began running again.
“He had a bottle of water,” Somo said in a meaningful tone. “Only a small bottle of water, for the Green Tara.”
They followed the path the boy had taken until, with an hour of light left, Somo raised her hand in alarm. A noise like thunder was echoing off the mountain in front of them. Shan gestured her forward, and five minutes later they stepped onto an open ledge that revealed the source of the thunder far below. Shan pointed toward a tiny line of shadow on the towering rock monolith above them.
“That damned goat trail,” Winslow said. “The one Chemi led us on into Yapchi.” They stood at the edge of a broad U-shaped chasm filled with mist, the place Chemi had shown them the week before from far above, the place where clouds were born.
Somo pointed downward. On the other side of the gorge, far below, they could see the boy again, following a trail that spiraled down into the mist. Half an hour later, daylight almost gone, they were on the trail, at the edge of the mist, descending toward the thunder sound, warily hugging the wall as they sought footing on the slippery path. What had Chemi said of the place? Some people believed a demon lived there.
“We can’t climb back up in the dark,” Winslow warned, rubbing his temple again.
Shan eyed the treacherous path uncertainly. “The boy didn’t come back,” he said, and stepped forward into the mist.
In another few minutes the mist began to clear, and they looked out over a roiling mass of water, a narrow, powerful river that tumbled into the chasm and then, in a violent maelstrom, seemed to boil itself away. There was no outlet. Water was not leaving the gorge, except in the small clouds they had seen drifting skywards.
Somo stared at the strange sight with wide, frightened eyes. “It could be what they said,” she offered in a near whisper, meaning, Shan knew, that the strange, powerful place could indeed be home to a demon. He fought a temptation to step back into the mist, to hide in the clouds.
Suddenly a sharp cracking sound joined the thunder, and a piece of the rock wall beside him burst into fragments. An instant later a patch of wall on the other side, by Winslow, split open followed by the sharp whine of a ricochet. Someone was shooting at them.