The Kingdom Read online

  “In other words, no angry villagers with pitchforks.”

  “Rifles,” Sam corrected.

  Karna smiled reassuringly. “Neither. Shall we go?”

  Leaving Tarl Gompa in their rearview mirror, they continued heading generally east, following the gorge for two miles, before emerging on a dry riverbed. A quarter mile away, across a bridge, a collection of gompa-like structures sat at the foot of another anthill cliff, this one several hundred feet high and stretching to the north and south as far as the eye could see.

  Ajay guided the Land Cruiser over the river bottom to the bridge, then across. As they neared the village, the terrain changed from scree and boulders to a fine rusty brown sand. Ajay halted the vehicle beside a low stone wall on the village’s perimeter. They all climbed out into a brisk wind. Sand pelted their jackets.

  “It’s got a bite to it, doesn’t it?” Karna said.

  Sam and Remi, in the middle of pulling up their hoods, nodded back. Sam called over the rush, “We’re walking from here?”

  “Yes. Into those.” Karna pointed toward the anthills. “Come on.” Karna led them through a gap in the wall and started down a stone-lined path. At the end of this path they found a thick hedgerow of scrub brush. He followed the hedge to the left, then through a natural pergola. They emerged in a small cobblestoned square centered around a bubbling fountain. Around the perimeter, planter boxes overflowed with red and purple flowers.

  “They divert a bit of the river for irrigation, plumbing, and fountains,” Karna explained. “They love fountains.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Remi said.

  It took little imagination to see how Shangri-La legends began here, she thought. In the middle of some of the bleakest terrain she and Sam had ever encountered, they’d found a tiny oasis. The juxtaposition was pleasantly jarring.

  Seated nearby on a wooden bench was a short middle-aged man in a plaid sweater-jacket and a baseball cap emblazoned with the Chicago Bears logo.

  He raised a hand toward them and walked over. Karna and the man embraced and spoke for a bit before Karna turned to introduce Sam and Remi.

  “Namaste . . . namaste,” the man said with smile.

  Karna said, “This is Pushpa.” Before they could ask, Karna added, “Yes, it’s more or less the same as the man at the gompa. To us, it sounds the exactly the same; to them, the inflection makes all the difference. Pushpa will lead us to the caves. We’ll take some tea with Pushpa, and then we’ll get down to business.”

  29

  JOMSOM, NEPAL

  Packs settled on their backs, they retraced their footsteps past the Land Cruiser, then followed Pushpa along the wall, first south, then east, around the village to the foot of the anthill cliffs.

  “I suddenly feel very small,” Remi said over her shoulder to Sam.

  “Very.”

  Upon their first seeing the cliffs, both distance and the fantastical geology had combined to make them seem less than real, as though it were a backdrop from a science-fiction movie. Now, with Sam and Remi standing in the anthills’ shadow, they were simply awe-inspiring.

  At the head of the line, Pushpa had stopped, waiting patiently until Sam and Remi finished gawking and taking pictures before setting out again. Ten more minutes of hiking brought them to a fissure in the rock that was barely taller than Sam. One by one, they slipped through the opening and onto a tunnel-like path. Over their heads, the smooth rusty brown walls curved inward, almost touching, leaving only a sliver of distant blue sky above.

  Ever eastward the path zigzagged and spiraled until Sam and Remi had lost track of how far they’d traveled. Pushpa called a halt with a barked word. Behind them at the rear of the line Ajay said, “Now we climb.”

  “How?” Remi asked. “I don’t see any handholds. And we don’t have any gear.”

  “Pushpa and his friends have made a way. The sandstone here is very fragile; standard pitons and rock screws cause too much damage.”

  Ahead, they could see Pushpa and Karna talking. Pushpa disappeared into an alcove on the left side of the cliff, and Karna picked his way back down the path to where Sam and Remi were standing.

  “Pushpa is going up first,” he said, “followed by Ajay. Then you, Remi, followed by you, Sam. I’ll bring up the rear. The steps look daunting, but they’re quite sturdy, I assure you. Just go slow.”

  Sam and Remi nodded, and then Karna and Ajay changed positions.

  Ajay stood at the head of the line, neck craned backward for several minutes before he too stepped into the alcove and disappeared from view. Sam and Remi stepped forward and looked up.

  “Oh, boy,” Remi murmured.

  “Yep,” Sam agreed.

  The steps Karna had mentioned were in fact wooden stakes that had been pounded into the limestone to form a series of staggered hand- and footholds. The ladder rose a hundred feet up a chimney-like slot before curving out of sight behind a hanging wall of rock.

  They watched Ajay scramble over the rungs until they could no longer see him. Remi hesitated for only a moment, then turned to Sam, smiled, kissed him on the cheek, and offered a cheerful, “See you at the top!”

  With that, she mounted the first rung and started climbing.

  When she was halfway up, Karna said over Sam’s shoulder, “She’s a dynamo, that one.”

  Sam smiled. “You’re preaching to the choir, Jack.”

  “Much like Selma, then, right?”

  “Right. Selma is . . . unique.”

  Once Remi had rounded the bend, Sam started upward. Immediately he could feel the solidity of the rungs, and after a few test movements to compensate for his pack’s weight, he settled into a steady rhythm. Soon the walls of the chimney closed in around him. What little sunlight had filtered its way to the path below dimmed to twilight. Sam reached the hanging wall and paused to peek around the bend. Twenty feet away, above and to his left, the rungs ended at a horizontal wooden plank nailed to a row of stakes. At the end of this plank was a second, this one angling behind another hanging wall. Remi was standing at the junction; she gave him a wave and thumbs-up.

  When Sam reached the plank, he found it not nearly as narrow as it had looked from below. He boosted himself onto the platform, found his footing, and walked toe to heel down the plank, then around the corner. Four more planks brought him to a rocky shelf and an oval-shaped cave. Inside, he found Pushpa, Ajay, and Remi seated around a Jetboil stove supporting a miniature teakettle.

  The water had just started boiling when Karna slipped into the cave entrance. He sat down. “Oh, good, tea!”

  Wordlessly, Pushpa dug five red enamelware mugs out of his pack, passed them out, then poured the tea. The group sat huddled together, sipping the brew and enjoying the silence. Outside, a gust of wind occasionally whistled past the entrance.

  Once everyone was finished, Pushpa deftly packed away the mugs, and then they set off again, this time with their headlamps on. Once again, Pushpa was in the lead while Ajay brought up the rear.

  The tunnel curved to the left, then the right, then stopped suddenly at a vertical wall. Straight ahead, a chest-high archway was carved out of the limestone. Pushpa turned and spoke with Karna for a few seconds, then Karna told Sam and Remi:

  “Pushpa understands that you are not Buddhists, and he understands that our work here may be a bit complicated, so he won’t ask us to observe all Buddhist customs. He only asks that when you first enter the main chamber, you circle the perimeter once, in a clockwise direction. Once you’ve done this, you can move about as you please. Understood?”

  Sam and Remi nodded.

  Pushpa ducked through the archway and stepped to the left, followed by Remi, Sam, and Ajay. They found themselves in a corridor. Painted on the wall before them were faded red-and-yellow symbols unfamiliar to Sam and Remi, along with hundreds of lines of text in what they assumed was a dialect of Lowa.

  Whispering, Karna told them, “This is a greeting of sorts, essentially a historical introduction to
the cave system. Nothing specific to the Theurang or Shangri-La.”

  “Is all this natural or man-made?” Remi asked, gesturing to the walls and ceiling.

  “A bit of both, actually. At the time these caves were constructed—about nine hundred years ago—the Loba in this area believed that sacred caves were revealed by nature in their embryonic stage. Once the caves were found, the Loba could excavate them according to their spiritual will.”

  Following Pushpa, the group continued down the corridor, walking stooped over until they reached another arched entrance, this one a few inches taller than Sam.

  Over his shoulder Karna said with a smile, “We’re here.”

  At first glance, the main chamber seemed to be a perfect dome, ten paces in diameter and eight feet high, with the ceiling tapering to a rounded point. The wall opposite the entrance was dominated by a mural that stretched around the chamber and from the floor to the domed ceiling. Unlike on the mural in the corridor, the symbols, text, and drawings here were painted in vibrant shades of red and yellow. The contrast against the mocha-colored walls was startling.

  “It’s magnificent,” Sam said.

  Remi, nodding, stared at the mural. “The detail . . . Jack, why is the color so different here?”

  “Pushpa and his people have been restoring it. The pigment they use is a long-held secret. They won’t even share it with me, but Pushpa assures me it’s the same recipe that was used nine centuries ago.”

  Standing at the center of the chamber, Pushpa was gesturing toward them. Karna said to Sam and Remi, “Let’s make our circuit. No talking. Head bowed.”

  Karna led them clockwise around the space, stopping again at the archway. Pushpa nodded to them and smiled, then knelt by his pack. He pulled out a pair of kerosene lanterns and hung one from a peg in each side wall. Soon the chamber was filled with an amber glow.

  “What can we do to help?” Remi asked.

  “I’ll need the disks and some quiet. The rest I must do myself.”

  Sam dug the Lexan case containing the Theurang disks from his pack and handed it to Karna. Armed with the disks, a spool of string, a tape measure, a parallel rule, an architect’s compass, and a directional compass, Karna stepped up to the mural. Pushpa hurried forward carrying a rough-hewn wooden step stool, which he placed beside Karna.

  Sam, Remi, and Ajay took off their packs and sat down, their backs against the entrance wall.

  For almost an hour, Karna worked without pause, silently measuring symbols on the mural and jotting in his notebook. Occasionally he would step back, stare at the wall while muttering to himself, and pace back and forth.

  Finally he said something to Pushpa, who had been standing to one side, hands clasped before him. Pushpa and Karna knelt down, opened the Lexan case, and spent a few minutes examining the Theurang disks, fitting them together with the flanged outer ring in various patterns before finding an apparently satisfactory configuration.

  Next, Pushpa and Karna placed the disks over certain symbols, measured distances with the tape measure, and murmured to each other.

  Finally Karna stepped back, hands on hips, and gave the mural a final once-over. He turned to Sam and Remi.

  “Selma tells me you two are fond of good news/bad news scenarios.”

  Sam and Remi smiled at each other. Sam replied, “Selma’s having a little fun at your expense. She enjoys those; us, not so much.”

  “Go ahead anyway, Jack,” said Remi.

  “The good news is, we need go no further. My hunch was correct: this is the cave we needed.”

  “Fantastic,” said Sam. “And . . . ?”

  “Actually it’s good/good/bad news. The second bit of good news is we now have a description of Shangri-La—or at least some signs that will tell us if we’re close.”

  “Now the bad news,” Remi prompted.

  “The bad news is, the map offers only the path that the Sentinel Dhakal would have taken with the Theurang. As I suspected, it leads east through the Himalayas, but in all there are twenty-seven points marking the path.”

  “Translation, please,” said Sam.

  “Shangri-La could be at any one of twenty-seven locations stretching from here all the way to eastern Myanmar.”

  30

  KATHMANDU, NEPAL

  “Are you sure you won’t change your mind, Jack?” asked Remi. Behind her, on the dirt tarmac, was a blue-on-white Bell 206b Long-Ranger III helicopter, its engine whining as the rotors spun up for takeoff.

  “No, my dear, I’m sorry. And apologies for abandoning you. I have a hate-hate affair with all flying contrivances. The last time I flew back to Britain, I was under extreme sedation.”

  After leaving the cave complex the day before, the group had returned to Lo Monthang to regroup and brainstorm their next move. There was only one, they knew: follow Dhakal the Sentinel’s path east across Nepal, eliminating the locations Karna had gleaned from the mural map.

  The altitude and remoteness of the target areas left them only one transport option—a charter helicopter service—which in turn brought them back to Kathmandu and into the lion’s den, as it were. With luck, Sam and Remi would find what they needed within a few days, before King could discover their route.

  “And if the Kings follow our trail?” asked Sam.

  “Goodness, didn’t I tell you? Ajay here is ex–Indian Army—and a Gurkha, in fact. Quite the tough bloke. He’ll look after me.”

  Standing behind Karna’s shoulder, Ajay gave them a shark-like smile.

  Karna handed them the laminated map he’d spent the previous night annotating. “I’ve managed to eliminate two points from today’s search grid that are improbable, both from summits that would have been covered in ice and snow at the time of Dhakal’s journey . . .”

  Karna’s research into the “real” Shangri-La had led him to believe it was in a comparatively temperate location with regular seasons. Unfortunately, the Himalayan range was rife with such hidden valleys, little slivers of near-tropical paradise nestled amid the forbidding peaks and glaciers.

  “That leaves six targets to search,” Karna finished. “Ajay’s given your pilot the coordinates.” On the tarmac, the Bell’s rotors were accelerating. Karna shook their hands and shouted, “Good luck! We’ll meet you back here this evening!”

  He and Ajay trotted off to Ajay’s Land Cruiser.

  Sam and Remi turned and headed for the helicopter.

  Their first target lay thirty-two miles northeast of Kathmandu, in the Hutabrang Pass. Their pilot, a former Pakistani Air Force flier named Hosni, took them directly north for ten minutes, pointing out peaks and valleys and letting Sam and Remi get the lay of the land, before veering east toward the coordinates.

  Hosni’s voice came over their headsets: “Entering the area now. I’ll circle it clockwise and try to get as low as possible. The wind shear can be treacherous here.”

  In the cabin behind Hosni, Sam and Remi each scooted sideways for a better view out the window. Remi said to Sam, “Eyes open for mushrooms.”

  “Aye, Captain.”

  Karna’s translation of the cave mural had offered a vague but hopefully useful description of Shangri-La’s most prominent feature: a mushroom-like rock formation. As the mural predated flight, the shape would likely only be recognizable from the ground. Exactly how large the formation was, or whether Shangri-La was supposed to be on it, in it, or simply nearby, the mural didn’t specify. Sam and Remi hoped/assumed that the planners of the Golden Man’s evacuation had chosen a formation large enough to stand out from its neighbors.

  In anticipation of numerous landings and takeoffs, they were paying Hosni almost double his usual fee, and had booked him for five days, with a nonrefundable deposit for five more.

  The Bell passed over a forested ridge, and Hosni nosed over, descending into the valley below. Three hundred feet over the treetops, he leveled off and decreased his airspeed.

  “In the zone now,” he called.

  Binocul
ars raised, Sam and Remi began their scan of the valley. Remi radioed, “Remind me: how accurate did Jack say the coordinates were?”

  “Half a kilometer. About a third of a mile.”

  “That doesn’t help me.” Though adept at it, Remi was not a fan of math; gauging distances especially vexed her.

  “About four hundred fifty yards. Imagine a standard running track.”

  “Got it. Imagine it, Sam: that Sentinel was required to hit each of these coordinates almost dead-on.”

  “A remarkable bit of orienteering,” Sam agreed. “Karna said it, though: these guys were the equivalent of today’s Green Berets or Navy SEALs. They trained for this their whole lives.”

  Hosni flew on, dropping as close to the trees as he dared. The valley, which the Bell traversed from end to end in less than two minutes, yielded nothing. Sam ordered Hosni to proceed to the next set of coordinates.

  The morning wore on as the Bell continued ever westward. The going was slow. Though many of the coordinates were but a few miles apart, the Bell’s ceiling constraints forced Hosni to skirt some of the higher peaks, flying through alpine cols and passes that lay below sixteen thousand feet.

  Shortly after one in the afternoon, as they were flying northwest to avoid a peak in the Ganesh Himal range, Hosni called, “We have company. Helo at our two o’clock.”

  Remi scooted over to Sam’s side, and they peered out the window at the aircraft.

  “Who is it?” Remi asked.

  Hosni called back, “PLA Air Force. A Z-9.”

  “Where’s the Tibetan border?”

  “About two miles on the other side of them. No worries, they always send up eyes to watch helicopters out of Kathmandu. They are simply flexing their muscles.”

  “Anywhere else and that would be called an invasion,” Sam observed.

  “Welcome to Nepal.”

  After a few minutes of paralleling the Bell, the Chinese helicopter peeled away and headed north toward the border. They soon lost sight of it in the clouds.