Bone Mountain (19 page)

“Wasn’t hard to figure,” he heard Winslow saying. “You were going north from the lake and suddenly veered east, to the road. If you had been intending all along to go east you would have taken the road from the lake to the east. So you were blocked unexpectedly from going further north. The pass you intended to take got blocked by a snow avalanche or rock slide, I figure. If you were on the road it was just to get to the next pass.” He gestured toward the high northern peaks. “Up there. The Tangula Mountains they call them, a spur from the Kunlun.”

“I don’t understand,” Shan said.

“My government will pay a transportation fee if you want,” Winslow said, and grinned as he saw Shan’s confusion. “I’m going with you.”

Lhandro stared woodenly at the American, then quietly asked the scout to make sure the caravan kept moving.

“You don’t know where we’re going,” Shan pointed out.

“Sure I do. North. Same direction I’m going.”

“To look for the missing woman,” Shan said.

“They say she’s dead,” Winslow said, and left the words hanging like an unfinished sentence.

The announcement silenced Shan and his friends. Shan took a step back, as though to better see the American. He glanced at Lhandro, who shrugged, as if to say he knew nothing of dead Americans.

“He saved us from that colonel,” Lhandro observed to Shan after a long silence.

“With a piece of paper,” Shan recalled. “Could I see it again?”

The American stared at Shan coolly for a moment, unzipped the breast pocket of his nylon coat and produced the passport. Shan studied the document, not knowing what he was looking for. Benjamin Shane Winslow, it said, with a home address in the state of Oklahoma. It had over twenty entry stamps for the People’s Republic of China, and many more for countries in South America and Africa.

Winslow took the mug, now empty, from Lhandro and refilled it from a pot on his tiny stove. “Just how would you go about identifying a fake diplomatic passport, tangzhou?”

Tangzhou.
It meant comrade. It was the American’s way of taunting Shan, he suspected, or perhaps any Chinese he met.

Shan handed the passport back to the American. “I’ve met several diplomats in my life, Mr. Winslow. None were remotely like you. And my name is Shan, not comrade.”

Winslow made a great show of looking into his pack and rummaging through its contents, then looked up. “Damn. Forgot my black tie and patent leather shoes,” he declared with exaggerated chagrin.

“Perhaps you would share with us what’s in the bag,” Shan said.

“You want my dirty underwear? Sure, welcome to it. Light on the starch please.” Then Winslow studied Shan’s stern countenance and his face hardened. “I’ve taken enough shit off Chinese today,” he said. “You don’t even have a uniform.”

“You’re the only one claiming to work for a government.” As Shan spoke the herd of sheep appeared around the outcropping and the caravan began marching past the rocks. Moments later Lokesh appeared, then Nyma and Anya. They stepped toward the American with uncertain expressions, sensing the tension in the air.

“You had a driver and a truck. Where are they?” Shan asked.

“Sent them back to Lhasa. I didn’t like him. When the embassy asks the Chinese government for drivers you can be sure they work for Public Security.”

Shan considered the American’s words and realized he was right, which meant the knobs would soon know all about the confrontation at the village, and the caravan.

“This man saved us at the village,” Nyma said to Shan in a low voice that had a hint of pleading. “You especially should know what it would have meant if that colonel had taken us back with him.”

The nun’s words caused Winslow to look at Shan with a sudden intense curiosity.

“I only asked him to show us what he is carrying in his bag,” Shan declared quietly.

“He’s American,” Lokesh said.

“He works for the American government. The government in Washington cultivates relations with Beijing, not with Tibetans.”

The American seemed pained by Shan’s words, but he offered no argument. He raised his open palms to his shoulder, then extracted an expensive-looking camera and a compact set of binoculars before turning his rucksack upside down, spilling its contents onto the ground. Shan squatted to study the items. A large plastic bag of raisins. A grey sweatshirt rolled into a ball. A box of sweet biscuits. A small blue metal cylinder that matched the one fueling the stove. Two pairs of underwear and two pairs of socks, knotted together. Half a dozen bars of chocolate. A one liter bottle of water. A tattered guide book on Tibet, in English. A tiny first-aid kit. And a small black two-way radio.

“You could call your driver on that?” Shan asked, pointing to the radio.

“The driver, or the office he is assigned to. It’s how I get back.”

“You said the driver works for the knobs.”

Winslow grimaced.

Shan realized that Nyma had stepped behind him now, with Lhandro. They were frightened of the little black box.

“It’s my lifeline for Christ’s sake,” the American protested. “You think I’m trying to interfere with your caravan, maybe steal your animals?” he said impatiently, then studied Shan and the others for a long moment. His eyes widened. “Christ. You’re illegal. That’s why you were so scared about Colonel Lin. You have no papers or—” the American looked back at the animals as they wound their way up the slope “—you’re carrying something illegal.”

No one spoke, which was answer enough. The wind moaned around the corner of the rocks. The little stove continued its low hiss. In the distance sheep bleated.

The American looked into his hands with a pained expression. “The missing woman is named Melissa Larkin,” he explained. “People seem to have given up on her. She is presumed dead. You’d be surprised how many Americans die in Tibet,” he added. “For tourists, it’s an expensive destination that takes a long time to see, which means many of the tourists are senior citizens. Then there’s the dropouts who don’t understand about bandits in remote places or the diseases they would never catch at home, or how altitude sickness can kill them overnight. You can die of things here that would never kill you in the States, because medical treatment can be so far away.” He looked up with a frown. “It’s the embassy that has to get the bodies home for burial.”

“But surely the Chinese authorities must help when foreign bodies have to be collected,” Shan stated with a pointed glance at the American.

Winslow bent to turn a knob on the stove. The hissing stopped. “This Larkin woman is different. Thirty-five years old. A scientist. Geologist, seismologist. Worked in the North Sea, Alaska, Patagonia. Someone who can handle herself.”

“You mean she was working in Tibet?”

“In old Amdo for the past year,” Winslow nodded. “Southern Qinghai Province, just across the border from the TAR,” he said, meaning the Tibet Autonomous Region, Beijing’s misleading name for what had been the central Tibetan provinces.

“A snow avalanche. Rockslide. Bandits,” Shan said. “Just because she was independent didn’t mean she could avoid bad luck.”

“Right. That’s what they all say. I had to argue with my boss just to get the right to look for her.” Winslow spoke with an odd note of challenge in his voice. “I have two weeks, then off to a conference in Shanghai.”

No one spoke. Shan and Lhandro exchanged sad glances, and Shan knew the Tibetan and he were sharing the same thought. They had been brought up in a world where people went missing all the time, where almost no family was exempt from the pain of losing someone. People might walk into the mountains and never come back. People were dragged off to prison without warning, without announcement. People might come back from prison and find that all those they had known had vanished. Shan himself was missing, although he doubted his former wife or even his son cared, and would prefer to assume him dead. Shan saw that his companions were all staring at the American. Winslow lived in a truly different world.

The entire caravan was visible above them now, climbing up a switchback trail on the slope above.

“I don’t know these mountains,” Winslow said in a softer, pleading tone. “I just need a way in, so I don’t waste my time finding the right trail.”

Still no one spoke. Suddenly the American sighed and handed Shan the radio. Shan held it in his hands a moment, then laid it on a flat rock, the American watching uncertainly. The Tibetans inched away. Shan grabbed a large stone, raised it over his head, and, as Nyma uttered a small surprised cry, slammed it down on the device. He hammered the radio once, twice, three times, until the case burst and bits of broken circuit board and wiring fell into the dirt.

“Dammit,” the American growled. “You could have just taken the battery.”

Shan ignored him, silently gathering the pieces of the radio and throwing them into a narrow cleft in the rock. “I still don’t understand something,” he said as he turned to face the American. “Why this pass? This woman could be anywhere in the mountains.”

Winslow stared at the hole where the shards of his radio had disappeared, shook his head, and turned to Shan. “I spent four days looking around her base camp to the north and found nothing. Her company had other field teams out searching for her body. I thought I would work from the south up. But I didn’t know where exactly. Then today after that yak and I met, I stopped to study the map with my driver, on the road below this spot.”

The American hesitated a moment, pushing his hair back with a self-conscious expression. “A large bird, like a grouse, with white in its plumage, landed on a boulder nearby while I was working with the map. It kept staring at me. I walked over and it kept staring until it flew to another boulder a little way up the trail.” Winslow shrugged and looked up sheepishly. “Like something was waiting for me up the trail.”

Lokesh nodded solemnly. Shan studied the man. When speaking of the day’s events, he had not mentioned meeting Colonel Lin, only meeting the yak.

“A bird,” Nyma whispered soberly, to no one in particular.

“Where is this base camp exactly?” Shan asked. “How far north?”

“In one of the valleys where they are drilling. There’s a mountain called Geladaintong, which holds the headwaters for the Yangtze. This place is twenty miles west of there, inside the ridges of another huge mountain. It’s called Yapchi Valley.”

Lhandro let out a gasp of surprise. Lokesh began nodding his head, as if it all made perfect sense.

Winslow stared in confusion as Shan replayed what had happened at the village. The American had emerged from the rocks to confront Lin after the colonel and Lhandro had spoken of Yapchi. He had not heard them speak of the distant valley.

“The Yapchi oil project,” Shan said.

“Right. She works there.”

Shan sighed, looking into his friends’ expectant faces. There would be no denying the American now. The Tibetans would say it was predestined that the American travel with them. He knelt and helped the American repack his bag.

They camped that night below the pass in a field of boulders where the wind blew incessantly and they could light a fire only after building a small wall of rocks to shield the flame. The American offered to cook on his little stove but Nyma simply pointed to a figure climbing along the slope above them. It was Tenzin, who still seemed unable to complete a day without gathering dung.

“It must have been a bad thing he did,” Lhandro had observed when he had first seen Tenzin with his sack, exchanging a knowing glance with Shan. The rongpa, like Shan, had guessed that Tenzin was performing penance. Shan remembered Tenzin’s strange behavior in the hailstorm, and later at the lake. Drakte had freed him from prison and he was going north because someone had died.

Winslow studied the silent, stooped figure with a bewildered expression. “I don’t think a cowboy could be a cowboy,” he said slowly, in English, to himself, “if he had to collect cow shit every night.”

“Keeps you close to the earth,” Shan offered in the same tongue.

The American looked up in surprise. “You speak American well.”

“My father taught me English before he died.”

Winslow contemplated Shan, as if sensing a story in Shan’s words, but did not press. “Don’t see my bird,” he said, switching to Tibetan as he gazed back over the slope. “I never believed in signs, until I started coming to Tibet. First couple trips, no big deal. Flew into the airport to meet the coffin of a former governor who had a heart attack climbing the Potola steps. Second time, I just went into Lhasa for a mountain climber who had died of altitude sickness. But the third time I was on the road to Shigatse and told the driver to stop for a monk who was looking for a ride.” He paused, seeing the others had closed around the fire and were listening. “An hour later I told him to stop again,” Winslow continued. “I got out without knowing why and stared at this high hill. Not really a mountain but big and steep, all rock and heather. I had to climb it. I still don’t know why, it was like a dream. Afterwards, I thought maybe it was the medicine I was taking. But I started walking. Took almost an hour to get to the top.”

“What was there?” Nyma asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing. Except an old piece of cloth jammed under a rock. An old square of silk with Tibetan writing on it. At the time I didn’t even know it was one of those wind horses, a prayer flag. But I freed it so it flapped in the wind. Then I picked up a rock, a small red rock, and I threw it far down the slope without knowing why. It just struck me that the rock didn’t belong there, that it needed to be thrown. Afterwards, when I got to the truck I told the two Tibetans. The monk nodded with this wise expression and said that clearly it had to be done, and thanked me for coming to Tibet to do it.”

The Tibetans at the fire nodded knowingly.

Nyma filled her bowl with buttered tea, then shaped three butter balls and set them on the edge of the bowl. Shan had often seen dropka do the same thing, reserving the morsels for the deities. “I’m sorry,” the American said. “I know I don’t make any sense.”

But Nyma and Lhandro seemed not to be listening. Lhandro was pointing. There, thirty yards up the slope, a grey shape rested on a boulder. A large bird, watching over the camp.