The Prisoner's Gold (The Hunters 3) (29 page)

Based on these instructions and his observations from Xinjiang, he had a pretty good idea of what was going on. The Americans were seeking a treasure but were still looking for clues. Chen couldn’t imagine what treasure might connect Lhasa with distant Loulan, but he was hardly a student of history. His specialty was beating up people who disobeyed the Fists or failed to pay their bills on time. When he wasn’t doing that, he was running security at the potash mine.

He had come from humble beginnings in Xi’an, working his way up in the street gangs of that humid city until his father revealed that their family had been members of the Fists for decades and they had a higher purpose for him. Since then, he’d felt a kinship and a belonging – even after his father had passed away. He knew he was little more than a thug for the organization, but he was treated well, and that was what mattered most.

Today he was hoping his unusual orders would lead to an opportunity for revenge. His bosses had been lenient with his failure in the desert, but mostly because of the death of his friend, Zhang. Also, no one had expected the foreigners to be ex-military, and Feng He, the charismatic man who led the Fists, sounded intrigued by their incursion.

Chen noted with dismay the absence of the American sniper. The team, including the freshly shorn Marine, had been spotted entering a guesthouse the previous night. One of Chen’s men had kept an eye on the place until dawn, when Chen’s entire crew had dispersed through the neighborhood to wait for the foreigners to depart their guesthouse. But only Cobb, the American woman, and Liu had exited in the morning. The others had all stayed behind. Chen had a man there to keep an eye on them, but who knew if they were still inside?

Chen was suddenly haunted by a thought.

What if the sniper slipped out the back?

The man was responsible for Zhang’s death from over a mile away. He was clearly one of the best snipers on Earth. The notion that he could be out there, perched in the surrounding mountains, made Chen’s skin crawl. He imagined himself in the crosshairs of a scope, the barrel of a powerful rifle pointed at his back.

A cold shiver ran down his spine.

From his position on the whitewashed stairway, Chen started examining all the outlying structures around the base of the palace. He scrutinized every building, wall, and shed. Every bump and slope in the rocky ground. Every tree and scraggly bush on the hillside.

Was one of those a cleverly disguised American sniper?

It was only because of his paranoid search for an American boogeyman that he even noticed the convoy in the distance on Beijing East Road. The soldiers were still far off in the morning mist, but in his heart Chen knew the vehicles were coming to the Potala.

Probably for the same thing his men were supposed to find.

The same thing the intruders were after.

Treasure.

If the men in the convoy had heard about it – if they had even gotten a whiff of its scent – they would come crawling over everything like ants.

Suddenly patience was a luxury he no longer possessed.

Chen pulled out his phone and quickly dialed Hong Kong.

Lim Bao picked it up on the second ring. ‘Yes?’

‘The army is coming. They will be here soon. What should I do?’

Kunchen led them through a complex maze of twisting stairways down to the lower levels of the Potala. The original Tibetan art and décor had been replaced with plain concrete walls and dozens of cubicles with army cots in them. It was clear that the bulk of these floors had recently housed large numbers of Chinese troops.

‘Are these still manned?’ Cobb asked as the older man nimbly led them over raised doorframes and ducked under lowered lintels, sweeping aside tapestries covering each passageway as he went. His limp from earlier was no longer present.

‘For the most part, no,’ Kunchen answered, the breeziness in his voice absent when he spoke of the intrusion of Chinese troops into a religious structure. ‘There are still over fifty soldiers stationed in the building at any given time, but I am leading you on a circuitous route that will help us to avoid them at this time of day. Some of the men are quite lazy, and therefore unpredictable, but most of them rigidly adhere to their rules and schedules, with the hopes of one day being promoted and relocated back to China proper.’

They fell silent as they entered a more traditional section of the building, where whitewashed walls gave way to brilliant colors, kaleidoscopic paintings of nature, and thousands of images of the Buddha. The passages grew tighter and lower, to the point where Cobb had to stoop and often turn sideways to make it through the tiny doorways, which were now protected by locked doors instead of just being covered by tapestries.

Looking like a high school janitor, Kunchen carried a huge brass ring filled with keys that unlocked most of the doors in the palace, but twice they stopped in front of hidden passageways that required the pressure of Kunchen’s hands on the wall followed by a complex ballet of tiny movements. Cobb wondered if the old monk was being deliberately showy in order to hide the actual placement of his fingers needed to open the recessed doors.

‘The Communists started ripping down walls that they felt were not load-bearing back in the 1950s.’ Kunchen turned to them and grinned. ‘They also took out a few that were, by mistake. Eventually they realized they should stop before the entire palace collapsed. Thankfully, many parts of these lower levels are still intact.’

They moved into a section with long narrow hallways that were lined with ancient codices. The dusty ends of the long wooden slats jutted out of the recesses in the walls. Maggie tried to ask how old the documents were, but the tiny monk was moving too fast for her to keep up.

As the passageway continued to narrow, another monk joined them from behind. He was obviously younger than Kunchen, but Cobb couldn’t have guessed by how much. He smiled far less than their genial host and his skin was not nearly as weathered. The only thing that stood out about him was the ridiculous amount of prayer beads wrapped around his neck. If they had been made of gold, he would have looked like a Tibetan Mr T.

Finally, Kunchen unlocked a tiny doorway that was barely four feet in height. Even he had to contort his body to fit through the narrow frame. Despite the tiny door, the room was filled with bookcases that stretched from the floor to the twenty-foot-high ceiling, the upper levels of which were accessed by a narrow balcony. The shelves were designed as display cases, tilted at a forty-five-degree angle and covered over with glass. Each codex was splayed out slightly like a Chinese fan, so the monks could see the text of the first leaf between the wooden boards that bound it. As he continued to walk, Cobb could see varying scripts on the codices. Although he could read none of them, he knew they were not all written in the blocky Tibetan language.

The massive room stretched on for forty feet before another hall branched to the left. Cobb could see more shelves in that corridor and another room at the end of the hallway. For all he knew, there were more halls and rooms beyond that. The glass over the shelves was clearly a recent addition, but the rest of the library appeared as if its current configuration might have been intact for hundreds of years. Surprisingly, the room did not have the thick cloying scent of incense that he had smelled upstairs. Then he realized why: to protect the fragile old books.

Kunchen was thrilled to see the look of amazement in Cobb’s eyes. ‘Mister Jack, do you know the volumes you are seeking?’

‘I’m afraid not, but Maggie does,’ he said.

Kunchen nodded. ‘Then I will leave you for a while. I have other duties to attend to. Young Sonam here is the caretaker of this collection. The librarian, I suppose you would call him. Once you find a title you wish to inspect, inform him, and he will remove it from its case.’

‘Kunchen,’ Cobb said before the monk departed, ‘you never asked for anything in return for allowing us access to your exquisite library. Is there something we can do for you?’

The monk looked at him, confused. ‘Why should I require anything? You came with a smile on your face and several beautiful
khata
that you purchased in the market this morning. That was very thoughtful of you. Then you proved your humility by choosing the more arduous path to the doors of this palace when you could have easily taken the tour bus later in the day or driven your own vehicle here. You also showed patience with the tea.’ Kunchen smiled. ‘You have sought only knowledge, and you have asked politely. I require no further reward.’

‘Nonetheless,’ Cobb said with a bow. ‘You strike me as a very intelligent man. I suspect you know what we are after ultimately involves more than simple knowledge.’

‘Thank you for your appraisal. And yes, this is true.’ His face was suddenly serious, showing no hint of his cheerfulness from earlier. ‘However, I also know that whatever riches you seek, they are not Tibetan. I would ask only that you weigh the value of the journey against the value of the reward that you hope to obtain.’

Cobb pondered the advice before responding. ‘Thank you for your wisdom. I promise we will. And whether we are successful or not, I will do whatever I can to help you and your brethren – even if that is nothing more than a shipment of black tea from abroad.’

Kunchen’s grin returned in a flash, and Cobb knew it was genuine. The old monk smiled warmly at him, bowed once, then departed in silence.

Meanwhile the young librarian had wandered to the other end of the room, content to not peer over their shoulders like a hawk. If they were good enough for Kunchen’s trust, they were good enough for his.

‘So,’ Sarah said as she glanced around the room, ‘where do we start?’

Maggie explained. ‘We are looking for the writing, not the shape of the book. All of the books from the time period we seek will be codices like these. If any of them were by Polo’s hand, it will be written in a handful of languages: Mongolian, Turkish, Arabic, and, most importantly, Venetian.’

‘That doesn’t help much,’ Sarah admitted. ‘I can probably tell the difference between Arabic and East Asian scripts, but I have no idea what the others look like.’

‘The Ottoman Turkish will look just like Arabic to you. Large, horizontally curvy letters, all written from right to left. The Mongolian will be easy to spot, too, because it will look like large dragons and jagged-edged knives, all written vertically. If you spot any of those, let me know. Those will most likely be written by Mongol invaders – men loyal to the Khan. There’s a chance they would know something about Polo.’

‘What about Venetian?’ Cobb asked.

‘Venetian used the Latin alphabet, the same letters as English.’

Cobb nodded. ‘That’s more in my wheelhouse.’

Maggie continued. ‘But like I said this morning, it’s unlikely we’ll find anything written in Polo’s hand. My guess is that I’ll have to read several of these volumes to find a single mention of a white foreigner traveling in Lhasa.’

‘What do you want us to look for first?’ Sarah asked.

‘Any books written in a language besides Tibetan script. If you find anything like that, let me know. And if we don’t find anything useful, we’ll ask the librarian for assistance. He might be able to help us with the Tibetan volumes that I can’t read.’

Cobb and Sarah took opposite sides of the room from Maggie, working their way halfway down the hall and glancing at the scripts on the wide variety of pages, all contained in nearly identical wooden boards as covers. When they reached the end, they ascended a simple staircase and began searching the upper ten feet, walking back the way they had come, essentially segmenting the long hall into ‘rooms’ based on distance and the placement of the staircases to the upper balcony.

Nothing came close to the description Maggie had given.

They had been at it for nearly an hour when they reached the end of the collection with nothing to show for it. They had discovered a third hall after the second, but it contained more of the same. None of the documents were written in the characters they were hoping to find.

Sarah and Cobb met in the middle of the balcony, practically bumping into each other while their eyes rapidly scanned the hundreds of titles on shelves under glass.

‘Nothing but Tibetan,’ Sarah said.

‘Same for me,’ Cobb agreed.

‘I was certain we’d find something here.’

‘So was I,’ Cobb said.

McNutt’s voice suddenly squawked in his ear. ‘Chief?’

Cobb was thankful for the interruption. ‘Yeah, Josh. What is it?’

‘Your search might have turned up empty, but someone found us.’

‘What do you mean?’ Cobb demanded.

McNutt stared at the approaching forces. ‘I think someone tipped off the goddamned army. We’ve got an entire platoon headed our way.’

McNutt stared in horror as a line of Chinese ZBL-09s advanced toward the Potala Palace through a light mist. He knew the kind of damage that could be done by such vehicles, and he knew the peaceful monks in their red robes had no way of stopping it.

With four oversized wheels on each side, the 21-ton armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) were offensively minded personnel carriers. The AFVs could move at sixty mph on a flat road, were fully amphibious, and their heavy exterior was capable of repelling 7.62 mm armor-piercing rounds. In typical Chinese fashion, these four were painted in a high-gloss black, forest green, and white camouflage pattern that failed miserably to blend with the local terrain.

The AFVs had room for three crew members and an additional seven passengers. McNutt knew that they typically had a 30 mm cannon mounted on the front of the gun turret, but for reasons he couldn’t explain the weapon had been removed from the first AFV in the four-vehicle convoy. The defanged turret was still menacing though, with a heavy machine gun mounted on a post and a gunner at the ready.

To McNutt, the AFVs resembled sharks on wheels. He quickly noted that while the first vehicle was missing its main gun, the other three sharks had their cannons intact. Worse still, their top hatches were battened down for business.