Bone Mountain (41 page)

The table was brown plastic, with simulated wood grain, as were the chairs. On the wall hung maps, many kinds of maps. Shan pulled a chair out, then found himself being drawn toward the walls. The oil venture needed precision in its geography. Three maps clearly depicted Yapchi, in sharply different scales, including one large one with a highlighted yellow line that wandered along the base of the nearby mountains to connect Yapchi to a red circle just west of Golmud, the large city more than two hundred miles to the north, the nearest airport and railhead. On a small metal side table there was a stack of single-page sheets that bore a reduced map outlining the route from Golmud to Yapchi, with landmarks highlighted. Shan took one, quickly folded it and stuffed it into his pocket.

“She’s dead, Winslow,” a gruff voice suddenly announced. “I’m goddamned sorry, but she’s dead.” The Westerner who spoke filled the doorframe. His hair, though close-cropped, was speckled brown and grey, as was the stubble of whiskers on his face, untouched by a razor for several days. His blue denim pants were held up by bright red suspenders. A cigar in a plastic wrapper protruded from the pocket of his light blue workshirt. The steaming liquid in the mug he set on the table was black coffee.

“My name is Jenkins,” he said to Shan, extending a beefy hand.

Shan took the hand and the man squeezed his own, hard. “I am called Shan.”

“Shan is helping me,” Winslow interjected quickly, as though Shan had already said too much. “Do you know for certain, Jenkins? A man in the mountains said she fell. Said he saw it.”

“Right off the edge of the world,” Jenkins said, touching the map behind him at the same spot Zhu had shown them. “A thousand feet, she could have fallen.” He turned back with surprise in his deep set eyes. “You saw Zhu? Here?”

Shan looked at the American manager in surprise. Had the Special Projects Director not informed Jenkins of his presence?

Winslow stared at the map intensely. “Did anyone try to find the body?” he demanded in a new, sterner tone.

Jenkins sighed. “You have any idea of the work we have to deal with here? I have deadlines. The goddamned banks are coming for inspection. Thieves stole half my garage tools last night. And I’ve got a horde of bureaucrats ready to descend in less than two weeks to celebrate our oil, even though I haven’t struck it yet.”

“Did you try to find her?” Winslow repeated.

Jenkins sighed once more and sat down heavily as the woman arrived with two oversized mugs of black tea. “The supply helicopter from Golmud. I asked them to do a flyover as soon as I got the details from Zhu. They saw nothing, and got called back to base. I’ll send a team in on foot. I will. I promise I will. But not in the next two weeks. She’s not going anywhere. Unless she went into the river, in which case she’s gone already.”

The big American looked from Shan to Winslow. “I’m sorry, Winslow. But plain talk is the only kind I know. I knew her before. This was our second project together. She was a star. My mother said the brightest stars always burn out early. I’ve lain awake nights trying to think if I did something wrong. I’ve written three letters to her family and torn each up. What do I say? Your daughter the trained field geologist, who had led field teams in Siberia, the Andes, and Africa, took a wrong step and fell? One of my Tibetan foremen said maybe she was called by the deities in the mountains,” he added in an exasperated tone, and for a moment his head cocked at an angle, looking toward the wall.

“But even before she fell, she was missing,” Shan interjected. He studied the room again. On a low shelf in the metal table was a stack of newspapers, the weekly paper published in Lhasa.

Jenkins drank deeply from his mug. “Sort of,” he said, addressing his coffee mug. “I learned early on to give her slack. A strong head requires a loose rein. And if she had an excuse to be out of a city and in a camp she’d take it in a second, and likewise for being out of the camp to stay out in exploration. She got close to the Tibetans, started giving them English lessons. Once in a staff meeting she said America needed Tibet, whatever the hell that meant. She loved what she did, said she felt like an early explorer. She loved it here especially, even skipped days off to go back up on the mountain. Making new maps. The Chinese maps are rotten. Deliberate misplacement of locations, for security reasons, they say. Entire regions have never been surveyed. Who the hell knows what’s out there?” He drank again. “There’s another joint venture camp, a British one, two ranges north of here, about fifty miles away. I thought maybe her radio went dead, and she set out for the other camp. Or maybe one of her team got hurt and it was easier to take him out on the other side of the mountains. Could be a hundred reasons for no contact, I kept telling myself. Trapped in a blind canyon by an avalanche, maybe. When she left here the last time she left a whole pack of food behind, half her rations. Maybe she went to a village for food.

“But there was no doubt after an eyewitness report. Zhu took over, called headquarters from here. Filled out the report, in triplicate. The venture has forms for deaths. With ten thousand workers, people have accidents. Never had an expatriate die though.” Jenkins stared into his mug again. “He sent in the form. Got me to countersign and sent it in. Just a damned bureaucratic exercise for them,” he grunted. “Only acknowledgment I got was a memo from the company that said they will pay for a memorial stone for her back home.”

“Did you speak with Zhu about the details, like how far exactly he was when he saw her fall, what he did to try to recover the body?”

“By radiotelephone. I was in Golmud when he came in. Faxed his report to me. Lucky there was any witness at all. Otherwise her family would be worrying for years. Now they can move on.”

“Only Zhu though?” Winslow asked. “I mean didn’t others on his crew see something, weren’t they listed as witnesses?”

A low rumble erupted from Jenkins’s throat. “He’s the Director for Special Projects, for chrissakes.”

“How long has he been with the venture?” Shan asked.

Jenkins frowned and stared at Winslow before answering. “Not long. Only met him on this project.”

“And what exactly do Special Projects consist of?” Winslow asked.

“Whatever the company says.” Jenkins shrugged. “He works for someone two or three levels above my pay grade. Someone in the Ministry, I think. Maybe his main job is investor relations.”

“Investor relations?” Winslow asked.

“Watching over the foreigners in the venture,” Jenkins said in a contemplative tone as he rubbed his grizzled jaw. “Probably wears grey underwear,” he observed in a matter-of-fact tone. Meaning, Shan realized, that Jenkins thought Zhu worked for Public Security.

“Zhu brought in these Public Security troops?” Shan asked abruptly, in English. “To look for her?”

The beefy American manager studied him a moment before answering, and shot a peeved glance at Winslow. “Those troops are from Golmud. Sure, maybe Zhu called them. Public Security helps the ventures sometimes, mostly to enforce discipline among the Chinese workers. They never helped us look for Larkin.”

“At the other camp,” Winslow said, “how many foreigners are there? Would there be other Americans at that second camp?”

Jenkins shook his head. “British. The venture is very regimented. My American employer holds a ten-percent interest in the venture, and the venture has ten exploration camps. So we get to manage one camp. Same for each of the other foreign investors.”

“Why here?” Shan asked. “What was it about Yapchi Mountain that got her so interested?”

“She was just a perfectionist,” Jenkins said, “and the maps for this area were worthless, lots of holes to be filled in. When she worked a site she made a catalog of everything, wanted to know the surrounding geology for ten miles around and two miles deep. It’s a compulsion for oil geologists. In our company they record it all, eventually feed the data into a big computer back home which models the data. Looking for new tracers, similar characteristics, indicators of the presence and type of oil. Geology repeats itself in strange ways. Information about a site in Pakistan might explain a site we’re working in Alaska.”

“What happened to the others on Miss Larkin’s crew?” Shan asked.

“We change field crews all the time. Those who were with her that day, they were shipped back to the main base near Golmud, the operations center. Our hell on wheels.”

“Sorry?” Shan said in confusion.

“An old railroad term. Temporary cities spring up around big construction projects. Attract all levels of the food chain, you might say. Booming for a few months, a year, then the whole thing packs up and moves on to be more central to the next set of big projects. We’re in an exploration frenzy. Someone came from Beijing and gave a speech in Golmud to all the managers. We’re opening China’s west, we’re the bringers of prosperity. Heroes of the proletariat and all,” Jenkins said in a hollow tone. “First the exploration teams, then the drilling camps. Once we finish, pipe fitters move in and the camps move on.” Jenkins pulled the cigar out of his pocket. “Mind?”

Winslow and Shan shook their heads, and Jenkins opened the wrapper and ran the cigar under his nose with a small sound of contentment.

“But Miss Larkin’s crew,” Shan suggested. “You could find them in Golmud, to speak with.”

“Me? Hell no. Needle in a haystack. At any one time they have two to three hundred workers rotating through the base. Those men from her team, they could be in four different places now, hundreds of miles away, even shipped off to other provinces. Our Chinese partner has operations all over China.”

“Do you have their names?” Shan pressed.

Jenkins lit the cigar, blowing smoke over his shoulder, out the door. He studied Winslow with a disbelieving frown. “You sure you didn’t know her? A man might think you and she had—”

“I told you before,” Winslow interjected peevishly. “Just doing my job.”

Jenkins inhaled deeply on the cigar. “Okay. Some damned computer disc must have some names on it.” He rose and stepped to the door, calling out in Chinese to the woman who had brought the tea. They conversed a moment, then he stepped back to the table. He wrinkled his brow and stared into his mug once more, then looked up at Winslow. “A lot of crazy shit goes on here. It’s the wild west. It’s the end of the world. Everyone is far from home. We’re paid to go to some godforsaken place and pump money out of the ground, and we make it happen. Some things I don’t totally understand. Not my business. Soldiers come and go. I hear things about people from Beijing coming in for midnight meetings. They tell me not to get involved in politics. So I don’t get involved in politics. Nothing criminal about all this, just politics.”

It was Winslow’s turn to stare into his cup. “Why, Jenkins,” he said at last, “would the word criminal come to mind?”

The manager’s mouth twisted, as if he had bit something sour. “Just the way you talk. No other reason,” he added emphatically.

“But how could you do this to the land when you have no connection to it?” Shan heard himself ask. The words leapt off his tongue before they crossed his mind. As though a deity was speaking through him. It is not your land, the Tibetans would say, and therefore you may ask nothing of it.

“Connection?” Jenkins asked, as if he didn’t understand. But then he winced and his eyes drifted downward. “It’s my job,” he said in a voice that sounded suddenly weary, and Shan knew the American manager understood his question perfectly. “I heard that sound,” Jenkins added, almost in a whisper. “It was like a heartbeat.” He looked up at Winslow. “You heard it, too, right?”

They sat in silence for what seemed a long time.

“There are two people outside your camp,” Shan said, “working on their knees in the earth.”

Jenkins snorted and grinned at Shan, as though grateful for the change in subject. “One of the development banks is providing some big dollars for the project. Which means volumes of rules and criteria that have been dreamed up by bureaucrats. One is that we do an archaeological assessment. Someone kicked up an artifact and made the mistake of telling Golmud. Next thing we know two experts arrive with a letter saying we have to cooperate. They will catalog the site, write a report, and move on. Just more red tape.”

“What kind of artifact?” Shan asked.

“An old piece of bronze with writing on it. Kind of thing any Tibetan farmer turns up twice a day.” As he spoke his secretary appeared with a single sheet of paper with a short list of names. She looked at each of the three men in turn, and handed the paper to Winslow. Then she turned to Jenkins. “Don’t tell that Zhu,” she said and hurried away.

Jenkins took another puff and looked after the woman with worry in his eyes.

“If Public Security is here, why would you need the army too?” Winslow asked offhandedly.

“PLA often helps with relocations,” Jenkins grunted. “They say it is good training for the soldiers.”

A shiver ran down Shan’s spine. Training for the soldiers. It was one thing the army did better than anyone else in Tibet. Relocate Tibetans. Rip apart the roots people had to their land, and to each other. Proclaim people to be refugees and move them to make room for soldiers or Han immigrants. Tibetans seldom complained. They remembered that the army had once relocated them with cannons and aerial bombs.

“You mean moving towns?”

“Sometimes. I heard about some village up in the mountains. Damned shame. No one said destroy it. Some hot dog in a tank started shooting it from half a mile away. Said he thought it was abandoned, said his crews practice that way.”

“Practice?” Winslow snapped. “You mean find an old Tibetan building and blow it up?”

Jenkins inhaled on his cigar and studied Winslow closely, but made no reply.

A phone rang, with a sound more like a buzzer than a ring. A radio telephone, the manager had said. Jenkins’s secretary called out his name. Jenkins stood and shrugged. “The venture will compensate,” he said, and stepped out of the room.

Shan leapt to the metal table and lifted the top half of the newspaper stack.

“We have to go,” Winslow said nervously.