“And in the process, buy more time for the other Sentinels,” said Sam.
“Exactly so. Similarly, the Sentinels had no family, no friends an enemy could use against them. They were also trained since youth to withstand the worst kinds of torture.”
“Amazing dedication,” Remi remarked.
“Indeed.”
“Can you describe the Theurang?” asked Sam.
Dharel nodded. “As I mentioned, it is said to have man-like features but an overall . . . beastly appearance. His bones were made of the purest gold, his eyes made of some kind of gem—rubies or emeralds, or the like.”
“The Golden Man,” Remi said.
“Yes. Here . . . I have an artist’s rendering.” Dharel stood up, walked around to his desk, and rummaged through the drawers for half a minute before returning to them with a leather-bound book. He flipped through pages before stopping. He turned the book around and handed it to Sam and Remi.
After a few seconds, Remi murmured, “Hello, handsome.”
Though highly stylized, the book’s rendering of the Theurang was nearly identical to the etching on the shield they had found in the cave.
An hour later, back at the hotel, Sam and Remi called Selma. Sam recounted their visit to the university.
“Amazing,” Selma said. “This is the find of a lifetime.”
“We can’t take credit for it,” Remi replied. “I suspect Lewis King beat us to it, and rightly so. If he had, in fact, spent decades hunting for this, it’s all his—posthumously, of course.”
“You’re assuming he’s dead, then?”
“A hunch,” Sam replied. “If anyone else had found that tomb before us, it would have been announced. An archaeological site would have been set up and the contents removed.”
Remi continued: “King must have explored the cave system, set those railroad spikes, discovered the tomb, then fell while trying to recross the pit. If that’s what happened, Lewis King’s bones are scattered along some underground tributary of the Bagmati River. It’s a shame. He was so close.”
“But we’re getting ahead of ourselves,” Sam said. “For all we know, the chest we found was one of the decoys. It would still be a significant find, but not the grand prize.”
Selma said, “We’ll know if—when—we get it open.”
They chatted with Selma for a few more minutes, then disconnected.
“What now?” asked Remi.
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough of the creepy King twins.”
“You even have to ask?”
“They’ve been nipping at our heels since we got here. I say it’s time we turn the tables on them—and on King Senior himself.”
“Covert surveillance?” Remi said with a gleam in her eye.
Sam stared at her a moment, then smiled thinly. “Sometimes, your eagerness scares me.”
“I love covert surveillance.”
“I know you do, dear. We may or may not have what King is after. Let’s see if we can convince him we do. We’ll shake the tree a little bit and see what falls out.”
12
KATHMANDU, NEPAL
Knowing the King twins were in Nepal minding one of their father’s mining concerns, Selma took but a few hours to ferret out the details. Working under the banner of one of King’s many subsidiaries, the exploratory dig camp was located north of Kathmandu in the Langtang Valley.
After another trip to the surplus store, Sam and Remi packed their gear into the back of their newly rented Range Rover and set out. Though it was nearly five o’clock and nightfall less than two hours away, they wanted to get far away from the King twins, who Sam and Remi felt certain weren’t about to leave them alone.
As the crow flies, the mining camp was not quite thirty miles north of the city. By road, it was over three times that distance—a short drive in any Western country but a daylong odyssey in Nepal.
“Judging by this map,” Remi said in the passenger’s seat, “what they call a highway is actually a dirt road that’s a bit wider and slightly better maintained than a cow path. Once we pass Trisuli Bazar, we’ll be on secondary roads. God knows what that means, though.”
“How far to Trisuli?”
“With luck, we’ll be there before nightfall. Sam . . . goat!”
Sam looked up to see a teenage girl escorting a goat across the road seemingly oblivious to the vehicle bearing down on them. The Range Rover skidded to a stop in a cloud of brown dust. The girl looked up and smiled, unfazed. She waved. Sam and Remi waved back.
“Lesson relearned,” Sam said. “No crosswalks in Nepal.”
“And goats have the right-of-way,” Remi added.
Once clear of the city limits and into the foothills, they found the road bracketed by terraced farm fields, lush and green against the otherwise barren and brown slopes. To their immediate left, the Trisuli River, swollen with spring runoff, churned over boulders, the water a leaden gray color from scree and silt. Here and there, they could see clusters of shacks nestled against the distant tree line. Far to the north and west stood the higher Himalayan peaks, jagged black towers against the sky.
Two hours later, just as the sun was dipping behind the mountains, they pulled into Trisuli Bazar. Tempted as they were to stay in one of the hostels, Sam and Remi had decided to err on the side of slight paranoia and rough it. However unlikely it was that the Kings would think to look for them here, Sam and Remi decided to assume the worst.
Following Remi’s directions, Sam followed the Range Rover’s headlights out of the village, then turned left down a narrow service road to what the map described as a “trekker’s waypoint.” They pulled into a roughly oval clearing lined with yurt-like huts and rolled to a stop. He doused the headlights and turned off the ignition.
“See anyone?” Sam said, looking around.
“No. It looks like we have the run of the place.”
“Hut or tent?”
“Seems a shame to waste the ugly patchwork pup tent we paid so much money for,” Remi said.
“That’s my girl.”
Fifteen minutes later, under the glow of their headlamps, they had their camp set up a few hundred yards behind the huts in a copse of pine. As Remi finished rolling out their sleeping bags, Sam got a fire going.
Sorting through their food supply, Sam asked, “Dehydrated chicken teriyaki or . . . dehydrated chicken teriyaki?”
“Whichever one I can eat the fastest,” Remi replied. “I’m ready for bed. Got a terrible headache.”
“It’s the thin air. We’re around nine thousand feet. It’ll be better tomorrow.”
Sam had both food packets ready in minutes. Once they finished eating, Sam brewed a couple cups of oolong tea. They sat before the fire and watched the flames dance. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted.
“If the Theurang is what King is after, I wonder about his motivation,” Remi said.
“There’s no telling,” Sam replied. “Why all the subterfuge? Why the heavy-handedness with his children?”
“He’s a powerful man, with an ego the size of Alaska—”
“And a domineering control freak.”
“That too. Maybe this is how he operates. Trust no one and keep an iron thumb on everything.”
“You may be right,” Sam replied. “But whatever is driving him, I’m not inclined to hand over something as historically significant as the Theurang.”
Remi nodded. “And, unless we’ve misjudged his character, I think Lewis King would agree—alive or dead. He’d want it handed over to Nepal’s National Museum or a university.”
“Just as important,” Sam added, “if for whatever twisted reason King had Frank kidnapped, I say we do our level best to make sure he pays for it.”
“He won’t go down without a fight, Sam.”
“And neither will we.”
“Spoken like the man I love,” Remi replied.
She held up her mug, and Sam put his arm around her waist and drew her close.
They were up before dawn the next day, fed and packed and back on the road by seven. As they gained altitude and passed through hamlet after hamlet with names like Betrawati, Manigaun, Ramche, and Thare, the landscape changed from green stair-step fields and monochromatic hills to triple-canopied forest and narrow gorges. After a brief lunch at a scenic overlook, they continued on and reached their turnoff, an unmarked road just north of Boka Jhunda, an hour later. Sam stopped the Rover at the intersection, and they eyeballed the dirt road before them. Barely wider than the Rover itself and hemmed in by thick foliage, it looked more like a tunnel than a road.
“I’m having a bit of déjà vu,” Sam said. “Weren’t we on this road a few months ago, but in Madagascar?”
“It bears an eerie resemblance,” Remi agreed. “Double-checking.”
She traced her index finger along the map, occasionally checking her notes as she went. “This is the place. According to Selma, the mining camp is twelve miles to the east. There’s a larger road a few miles north of here, but it’s used for camp traffic.”
“Best to sneak in the back window, then. Do you have a signal?”
Remi grabbed the satellite phone from between her feet and checked for voice messages. After a moment she nodded, held up a finger, and listened. She hung up. “Professor Dharel from the university. He made some calls. Evidently there’s a local historian in Lo Monthang who is considered the national expert on Mustang history. He’s agreed to see us.”
“How soon?”
“Whenever we get there.”
Sam considered this and shrugged. “No problem. Providing we don’t get caught invading King’s mining camp, we should make Lo Monthang in three or four weeks.”
He shifted the Rover into drive and pressed the accelerator.
Almost immediately the grade steepened and the road began zigzagging, and soon, despite an average speed of ten miles per hour, they felt like they were on a roller-coaster ride. Occasionally through the passing foliage they caught glimpses of gorges, surging rivers, and jagged rock outcroppings, soon gone, absorbed by the forest.
After nearly ninety minutes of driving, Sam came around a particularly tight bend. Remi shouted. “Big trees!”
“I see them,” Sam replied, already slamming on the brakes.
Looming before the windshield was a wall of green.
“Tell me it isn’t so,” Sam said. “Selma made a mistake?”
“No chance.”
They both climbed out, ducking and weaving their way through the foliage surrounding the Rover until they reached the front bumper.
“And no valet, either,” Sam muttered.
To the right, Remi said, “I’ve got a path.”
Sam walked over. As promised, a narrow, rutted trail disappeared into the trees. Sam dug out his compass, and Remi checked their bearing against the map.
“Two miles down that trail,” she said.
“So, translated to Nepalese distances . . . ten days, give or take.”
“Give or take,” Remi agreed.
The trail took them through a series of down-sloping switchbacks before bottoming out beside a river. Flowing from north to south, the water crashed over a series of moss-covered boulders, sending up plumes of spray that left Sam and Remi dripping wet in a matter of seconds.
They followed the path south along the river to a relatively calm section, where they found a wooden suspension bridge barely wider than their shoulders. The canopy from both banks spanned the water; vines and branches draped over the bridge and obscured the other side.
Sam shed his pack and, with both hands clenched on the rope side rails, crept onto the bridge’s head, probing with his foot for cracks or loose planks before transferring his weight. When he reached the bridge’s midpoint, he tried a test hop.
“Sam!”
“Seems sturdy enough.”
“Don’t do that again.” She saw the half smile on his face, and her eyes narrowed. “If I have to jump in after you . . .”
He laughed, then turned and walked back to where she was standing. “Come on, it’ll hold us.”
He donned his pack and led the way back on the bridge. After two brief pauses to let the bridge’s swaying slow, they reached the other side.
For the next hour they followed the trail as it weaved up and down forested slopes and across gorges until finally the trees began to thin ahead. They topped a crest and almost immediately heard the rumble of diesel engines and the beep-beep-beep of trucks backing up.
“Down!” Sam rasped, and dropped to his belly, dragging Remi with him.
“What?” she said. “I didn’t see anything—”
“Directly below us.”
He gestured for her to follow, then turned his body left and crawled off the trail into the underbrush. After twenty feet he stopped, glanced back, and curled his finger at Remi. She crawled up beside him. Using his fingertips, Sam parted the foliage.
Directly below them was a football-shaped earthen pit, forty feet deep, two hundred yards wide, and nearly a quarter mile long. The sides of the pit were perfectly vertical, an escarpment of black soil dropping away from the surrounding forest as though a giant had slammed a cookie cutter into the earth and scooped out the center. In the center of the pit itself, yellow bulldozers, dump trucks, and forklifts moved to and fro on well-worn paths, while along the edges teams of men worked with shovels and picks around what looked like horizontal shafts that disappeared into the ground. At the far end of the pit, an earthen ramp led up to a clearing and, Sam and Remi assumed, the main service road. Construction trailers and Quonset-style huts lined the sides of the clearing.
Sam continued to look around the site. “I’ve got guards,” he muttered. “Stationed in the trees along the rim and in the clearing.”
“Armed?”
“Yes. Assault rifles. Not your run-of-the-mill AK-47s, though. I don’t recognize the model. Whatever it is, it’s modern. This isn’t like any exploratory mine site I’ve ever seen,” Sam said. “Outside of a banana republic, that is.”