Powder Burn (Burn with Sam Blackett #1) (7 page)

“
So why couldn’t you write a separate article about Shibde?’ said Pete, suddenly. “It doesn’t have to mention Powder Burn. That’s all you’ve signed up to, right? It doesn’t say you can’t write about Shibde completely separately, does it?”

She looked at him, a little chill ran through her.
“No, no it doesn’t.”

“
So, is that worth the risk?”

She raised her head and shielded her eyes to stare at the rock-strewn slope towering above them.
“Yes,” she said, “that’s worth the risk.”

Pete grinned.
“Awesome, I’m so pleased you’re coming, this is going to be amazing, really.”

“
The other story will be our secret. Lens doesn’t need to know, right?”

“
Right, and you won’t mention
Altitude
? Your journalism?”

She shook her head.
“Don’t worry, that can wait till we get back. Now let’s get something to eat. We’re going to burn a few carbs getting up that mountain in the middle of the night,” she replied, starting towards the hut. There would be plenty of time to reveal that
Altitude
was the high point of her journalistic career, and that Lens might have brought her along for nothing – revenge was, after all, a dish best served cold.

The rock still felt cold, even through Sam’s over-trousers and thermal layers, not yet warmed by a sun that had barely peeped into the rim of a
cobalt-blue sky. It was perfect weather for the high-altitude passage over the border, but Sam had slept badly. She wasn’t good with early starts, waking up over and over again in a little panic that they’d somehow left her behind after all. And now she sat on the rock, high above the snow line and almost at the top, hauling in fast, rasping lungfuls of air.

“
How are you doing?” asked Pete, coming to a halt in front of her.

She nodded, tried for a smile, her head spinning.

“You’re drinking plenty? You need four liters a day at this altitude, remember.”

“
So you keep telling me,” she replied.

“
Sorry. It’s not much further,” he told her. She nodded again, as Pete held out a hand and pulled her to her feet. She dropped in behind him, following the trail that Vegas was breaking up the final few hundred yards, her head down – one step, two steps, three steps. Stop. Breathe, one, two, three ... heart thrashing through her blood, looking for the oxygen that wasn’t there.

The second she topped the rise out of the wind, she rolled her backpack off. Pete and Vegas were close by in a huddle, picking out the route they would ride their snowboards down to the valley. Lens was still plodding up behind her. She slumped onto the pack and sat, breathing hard. The slope fell away before her in a series of rocky outcrops, open sections and precipitous drops. Then she raised her gaze and the view took away what little breath she had regained.

The lost Kingdom of Shibde – a vast spread of mountains and snow – rolled out from the towering twenty-seven-thousand-foot peak beside her. She was really here, treading in the footsteps of the early explorers, lording it over the cool silence of the roof of the world. The place that many believed was home to the real Shangri-La.

There was no going back now. If she wanted to be a real journalist, if she wanted to write stories that had an impact, stories that told the truth about the world, stories that could change people’s lives, then this was where she should be. Whatever happened from here on in, this was what she wanted to do. She felt a mixed rush of fear and excitement. She knew her father would be proud of her.

“It’s looking good, plenty of snow to ride,” said Pete, almost bouncing towards her in his anticipation. He turned round to follow her gaze. “It’s awesome, isn’t it?”

She nodded, rubbing her cold nose against the raised collar of her jacket.
“So where next?” she croaked.

“
Getting your breath back?”

“
Slowly.”

“
OK, you know to watch out for that? It’s an altitude-sickness symptom if you don’t get your respiration back to normal after ten minutes or so.”

She nodded again, letting herself be mothered this time.
“So, where next?” she repeated.

“
First thing is to pick up the food we stashed by that rock last time we were here.” He pointed downhill to the spot.

“
You’ve already been up here?”

“
We climbed up to do a reccy and were going to leave it at the top, but when we got here we all felt great, so we figured it would be good to get into Shibde, even if it was just a few metres. And it’s just like Lens said, right? Nothing, no people, absolute wilderness.” He waved out at the vista.

She muttered an affirmation.

He pointed down to their left. “Once we get down to the bottom, there’s a nice campsite, bit like Scotland.”

“
Isn’t that in England?”

“
Not really ... it’s ... doesn’t matter. Anyway, we’ll camp there tonight, and then we follow this valley to the west, until it joins another one that runs off towards the northeast. We turn down that, and walk until we can see a notch, a gap in the crest of the northern side of the valley. We climb up to the notch, and Powder Burn is just over the other side. It’s an easy three days, maybe one more to find a film spot and get organized for the descent.”

“
We’re getting close,” she said.

Pete sat down beside her.
“And only one more big climb for you.”

“
Thank god for that,” she said, heartfelt. “The patch is coming off your jacket, by the way, the one on the back.” She tapped the offending material.

“
Oh, thanks, I’ve got some more duct tape. I’ll sort it tonight, kit’s getting pretty tired.” He smiled. “I had a quick look with the binoculars and there’s a really nice spot by a stream down there.”

“
Thinking ahead again.”

“
All care, no responsibility, that’s me.”

She smiled.

“I’m going to see where Lens has got to.”

“
You don’t mind if I stay here?”

“
No, ma’am ...” He started to stand up.

Then she remembered
: “Oh, do you have any sunblock to spare? I’m getting pretty low,” she said.

“
Yeah, right here.” He pulled a small tube out of his pocket as he spoke, and handed it to her.

“
Thanks,” she said, but he was already gone. She pulled her camera out of her pack and flicked the switch to turn it on.
This,
she thought,
is going to make the front page of
National Geographic
, or maybe even the
New York Times
.
It was going to be a first step to finally righting the wrong of ten years ago. The unexplained death of her father in action in Iraq.

Sam chucked her spoon into her empty bowl and leaned against her pack – she was so sick of powdered tomato soup. She arched and stretched her back, soaking up the scenery around their lunch stop. The pleasant, supposedly Scottish campsite of two days previously had faded to rocky wilderness as they toiled up the valley. But now they had reached the corner and were headed northeast, and there were the first signs of a watercourse that marked the start of this new valley’s descent.

“
Hey, Pete, have you got the binoculars?” she asked.

“
Sure.” Pete put down his soup bowl and rummaged in his pack.

She had noticed something on the valley side above them, and as it came into focus through the binoculars she let out a low whistle.
“There’s some kind of ruined building up there,” she said. They all followed her gaze upwards.

“
Let’s have a look,” said Lens, holding out his hand.

Sam held on to the binoculars until she could feel Lens
’s impatience. Then she passed them to Pete, who in turn passed them on. “We should go and have a poke around,” she said.

Vegas was first to speak.
“Like, why?”

“
Because it could be interesting,” she replied.

“
You’re gonna have to come up with a better reason than that to get me to climb an extra five hundred feet or so,” retorted Vegas.

“
Looks like an old monastery,” said Lens, lowering the binoculars. “Probably worth a look.” He waved down the valley. “We can see the notch we’re looking for, so it can’t be more than an hour or two’s walking from here before we camp. We’ve got loads of time.”

Pete nodded, Vegas slurped at his soup.

“OK, let’s do it,” said Lens. “You want to stay here with the gear, Vegas?”

Vegas looked around the three of them, then up at the building. He frowned.
“Kind of lame sitting here on my own ...”

With time on their hands and no packs
, it felt like a Sunday-afternoon stroll – albeit a stroll up a very steep hill at high altitude – but for once, the four of them ascended the final rise almost together. They all stopped. The building was set back a little way on a flat section, a steep rock cliff rising beyond it.

“
Bloody hell,” said Pete.

The others just looked in silence. The building had originally been bigger than it looked from the valley floor, but over half the walls had been flattened down to the foundations. What was still standing appeared to bear centuries of wear, but some wooden window frames and brown-grey cement indicated a more recent pedigree. Someone had strung a raggedy curl of barbed wire between rough posts, from which filthy, ragged prayer flags hung sadly.

“I wonder what happened here,” said Pete, moving through the door into the one remaining complete room.

“
There isn’t much left is there,” said Sam, as she stepped gingerly over the wire to follow him.

“
I think Demagistan happened here,” said Lens, kneeling down to line up a shot of the building through the barbed wire.

Sam stepped into the room. There was nothing, just crumbling brick and dust, a dirt floor. She stood for a moment and tried to imagine the place occupied, but the wind and the isolation had exorcised any ghosts
; the place was a ruin, a shell, nothing remained to tell of the lives lived in this desolate spot.

“
Hey, look at this,” called Pete from behind the building.

Lens started over the wire with Vegas, and they were close behind Sam as she rounded the corner.

“Cool,” said Lens, pulling up in front of the painting on the rock face.

“
Not bad, huh,” said Pete.

“
Huh ...” said Vegas.

Sam ignored him, running her hands over an ochre stain that had spread across the rock below the painting.
“I wonder who it is,” she said.

“
It looks a bit like pictures I’ve seen of Drolma, or Tara in Sanskrit. She’s the female version of Chenresig, Bodhisattva of Compassion,” replied Lens.

“
There wasn’t much compassion shown round here,” said Pete.

“
I think if you look in the dictionary under
ruthless
, you’ll find Demagistan,” said Lens.

“
What do they want with the place anyway?” asked Pete.

“
Minerals probably, who knows what’s locked under these mountains. That and a military buffer zone – once you control the uplands, no one is coming in that way.”

“
I don’t understand why the West doesn’t do something about this,” said Pete, kicking a toe into the dirt. “Your lot must know what’s going on – they have the satellite images you used.”

Lens shrugged.
“I guess they figure it isn’t in their interests to advertise the fact. If we bring it to people’s attention there will just be public pressure to act, and they’ve got plenty to worry about right now.”

“
But it’s weird that no one even knows what’s going on – that the Shibdeese haven’t asked for help, that there are no refugees or anything,” said Sam.

“
They’ve isolated themselves in these mountains for over a hundred and fifty years – all very well until you need friends. Or maybe they just believe in solving their own problems,” said Lens.

“
But how did they do that in the first place?” asked Pete.

“
It was one of yours, that Brit that got in here in 1854, Harry Spedding, he brokered a deal,” explained Lens. “The British Empire guaranteed Shibde’s closed borders in exchange for all the lowland territory. That’s why the place doesn’t have a single border below fifteen thousand feet. When India gained her independence, there was some sort of follow-on treaty negotiated, and that was the last anyone heard of Shibde, until these stories started surfacing about the invasion a few years ago. Spedding wrote a book about the place as he found it in the nineteenth century though.
Island of Altitude
– you should check it out when we get back, it’s quite a story.”

“
Well, isolation ain’t working for them now by the looks of this place ...” replied Pete.

“
Maybe not, but then look at Afghanistan, or any number of places laid to waste by the superpowers fighting their proxy wars. I wouldn’t wish that fate on Shibde,” said Lens. “Would you mind just pulling to one side, there won’t be sunlight on it for much longer,” he added.

“
Sorry,” said Pete, stepping back. “It might give the game away if you use that in the film,” he added.

“
It’s just for me,” said Lens, starting his shot, panning round to take in the ruined buildings and barbed wire.

“
There’s nothing to see here,” said Vegas. “I’m gonna head back down, maybe move on up the road and see if I can find us a camp spot.”

“
Grab the stove out of my pack, then you can get a brew on when you get there,” said Pete.

Vegas grimaced and left.

“Nothing to see here?” said Sam, spreading her arms wide to take in both the foreground of ruined culture and the background of high Himalayas. “I’m worried about him.”