Bone Mountain is-3

by Eliot Pattison

  The colonel sighed impatiently, motioned to one of the nearby soldiers. The man roughly seized the pouch and tossed it on the ground, kicking it with the toe of his boot so that both of the side pockets lay flat. He produced a short bayonet from his belt and probed the contents of the open pocket, then looked up expectantly at Lin, who nodded. The soldier began stabbing the still-sealed second pocket, ripping apart its tight woolen weave, spilling the precious salt onto the ground.

  "It is special salt," a woman's voice interjected. Shan saw Nyma step past the door opening to stand by Lhandro. "It could heal you," she declared to Lin, looking straight into the colonel's eyes.

  "I'm not sick."

  Nyma stared back, as if she didn't agree, but would not argue.

  "You should be careful," Lin said icily. "Someone might mistake you for a nun. Yesterday Public Security arrested someone a few miles from here. Under his coat he wore a maroon band on his sleeve. He had a little piece of yellow cloth in his pocket."

  Even from a distance Shan could see Nyma swallow hard. Lin meant an outlawed monk had been caught nearby, one reckless enough to carry a Tibetan flag in his pocket.

  The tension became a tangible thing, like a frigid cloud in the air about them. Lin cast a gloating grin toward the American. "Even in America, Mr. Winslow," the colonel said, "those who commit treason are sent to prison." He gestured to the headman. "This man Lhandro knows about prisons. He had an old man with him, a former criminal who wore a lao gai registration." Lin's eyes squeezed into tight slits. "Where is that old man?" he barked abruptly. "And the one named Shan, the one who has no papers. They were not with you when you arrived with the sheep. If you are hiding them it will go worse for you when we catch them. And if any of you have something of mine," he said pointedly, "we will consider the entire village guilty of the crime."

  There was another long silence as Lin surveyed the village with smoldering eyes. His gaze finally drifted downward, and he pushed the pouch of salt with the toe of his well-polished boot. "I am a simple man," the colonel said in a strangely frustrated tone. "I keep my world simple. There are those who belong to the new order, and those who are trying to. Everyone else," he said in a tone of mock apology, "has no place, and is owed nothing."

  Winslow pulled the cover off his camera lens and Lin's face hardened. "The Qinghai Petroleum Venture," he said in a loud voice, as if he were making a proclamation to the entire village, "is prepared to give liberal compensation to all those who cooperate in building the new economy, in building the new valley. We are even honoring it with a new name. We have decided to call it Lujun Valley now," he said with a taunting expression. "I will be issuing orders for the maps to be changed."

  Lhandro's head shot up and he lurched forward as if about to attack the colonel, until Winslow restrained him with a hand on his arm. Lin was renaming the valley to honor the Chinese soldiers who had destroyed its people a century earlier.

  Lin paused, as if inviting Lhandro to attack, and seemed about to offer another taunt when he was interrupted by a booming noise, a distant, hollow repetitive thumping sound that echoed through the valley. Lin twisted about as though searching the derrick and the oil camp for the source of the noise. But it was not a mechanical sound. It was almost like a heartbeat, slow but steady. Shan found himself inching out the doorway, his eyes searching the outside wall. The deity drum was missing.

  Lin's thin lips folded into something like a snarl. He gestured to the soldier who had stabbed the salt pouch, who instantly whistled toward the village. As the soldiers sweeping through the village turned he raised his left arm and clenched his right hand around the left forearm, then pointed to the west side of the valley and made a spiraling motion with his fingers. They were to deploy west, Shan guessed, and climb toward the sound.

  "I will need to know about the men I saw with you," Lin said in a low voice to Lhandro. "There can be many ways to ask." He climbed into the nearest truck.

  The drumbeat continued. In the distance Shan saw workers on the derrick standing still, looking toward the upper slopes. The few Tibetans who were left in the village had also emerged from their houses and were also gazing at the slopes, some with expressions of hope, others of fear.

  The sound of the truck engines starting drew Shan's gaze away from the slopes, and he watched the vehicles drive away, not back down the path but directly to the west, across the fields of sprouting barley. A whimper rose from nearby and he turned to see a small figure huddled inside the earthen wall near where Lin had been standing. Anya had been hiding, listening to the colonel.

  She gazed at Shan with wide, afraid eyes, then leapt up and ran down the village path, disappearing into the rocks and trees of the slope.

  "Your drum," he asked Lepka as the old man stepped into the sunlight. "Where is it?"

  "Gone, disappeared in the night," Lepka said with a shrug, and he placed his hand over his heart and closed his eyes a moment, as if seeking a connection between the drumming and the beating of his own heart.

  "You mean someone from the village is up there?"

  "No," Lepka exclaimed happily, his eyes wide, as if that were his real point.

  Shan and Winslow exchanged worried glances and when Shan began jogging out of the village, in the direction Anya had taken, the American followed a step behind. They found Anya standing alone in the center of the canyon camp with only Lokesh and a handful of the Yapchi villagers. Tenzin and the purbas were gone. The sick strangers were gone.

  "Up the trails," Anya said with a puzzled expression. "But these trails are for goats," she said, gesturing toward the end of the short canyon, where the slope was nearly vertical. "So many sick people…" she added, her voice drifting off. "They are fleeing. They saw the soldiers. They heard there are knobs at the camp. There is no healing in this valley any longer." The girl's voice faded again as she began staring intensely at a small hole near the base of a large boulder. She limped to the rock, then dropped to her knees and pressed her eye near the hole, as though she expected to see something inside it.

  "He's so interested in Lokesh," Winslow said at Shan's shoulder as they both watched the girl in confusion. "Why?"

  "When he found travelers from Yapchi coming from the south a former lao gai prisoner was among them," Shan said, his voice heavy with worry. "I think what he really means is that Lokesh could be a convenient suspect, could be arrested if no one else produces whatever Lin wants."

  "You mean the eye."

  "I don't think it's the eye anymore. Lin wouldn't trouble himself so over a piece of stone. I think what he wants is the one who stole the eye. Because whoever stole it committed a security breach."

  "Dremu was going to steal the stone but the purbas stopped him," Winslow recalled.

  Shan nodded. "They had other plans. They could have placed someone on the inside. Lin couldn't afford to let such a person escape. There would have been things more important than the chenyi stone in Lin's office."

  "You mean Lin thinks the thief stole secrets. You mean they're looking for some kind of spy?"

  Spy. The word had not occurred to Shan. But it had doubtlessly occurred to Lin. It would make sense. It would explain why the mountain commandos had come all the way from Lhasa, following a piece of a deity.

  A figure rushed past them and bent towards Anya. It was Lhandro, and as he gently pulled the girl up he cast an apologetic glance toward Shan and Winslow. "Sometimes she forgets things," he said, as though the girl could not hear him. When Anya straightened her eyes were hooded, and she searched the landscape restlessly, without any sign that she saw them. "Sometimes all she can do is look for deities. I think it is another way they speak with her," he said awkwardly. "Sometimes we have to go out and search for Anya, with the dogs, like an old monk," he added, referring to the way some old monks might wander away in a spiritual reverie, or lose themselves while meditating on their feet.

  Lhandro showed relief for a moment as Lokesh put his arm around the girl and guided her to a pa
llet. Then his eyes hardened and he surveyed the canyon. "Where is he? Horsetracks led into the valley."

  "Dremu?" Shan asked. He had not thought of the Golok since seeing him ride away the day before.

  "No sign of the bastard," Lhandro said. "He could be negotiating to sell it back to the soldiers right now."

  "The eye?" Shan asked.

  "Of course the eye. He knew exactly where it was. He ran away the morning after it was stolen. He knew the mountain trails. And he has helpers. We saw the tracks of three horses, not one." Lhandro looked back at Anya and Lokesh. "He will sell all of us if the price is right."

  Shan walked one step behind Winslow as they approached the oil camp an hour later. The American had protested when Shan had said he was going with him to meet the camp manager, but Shan had insisted he would just go alone if the American did not want to accompany him. "Lin will pounce on you," Winslow protested. "He wants you in manacles."

  "Lin is in the army camp, in those tents past the oil camp," Shan said in a thin voice. "He doesn't expect me to walk into the camp. And no one else will suspect me if they think I am connected with you."

  Winslow had reluctantly agreed, but only if Shan stayed with him, and spoke only English, playing the part of an assistant. For thirty minutes they had worked on making Shan's clothes presentable, finding a nearly new shirt in the village for Shan to wear, over which the American had put his own red nylon coat. Finally, Winslow hung his expensive binoculars around Shan's neck.

  The American began to whistle as they approached the derrick, and took several photographs as the workers waved, as though he were a tourist. They were broad shouldered, beefy men, Chinese and Tibetans, who smiled with pride and paused to pose for Winslow, their huge wrenches and hammers raised.

  Two hundred yards before the camp was an open square of earth, the size of a large vegetable garden, where two figures knelt. They wore aprons, and one held a large magnifying lens as he studied something in the soil.

  "Wasn't there last time," Winslow observed in a voice tinged with curiosity as they walked past the bent figures. "Guess the colonel lost a button."

  No one at the camp seemed surprised to see the American. The workers who scurried about the complex of trailers and tents nodded briefly as Shan and Winslow slowly circuited the compound, or made no eye contact at all. Tall stacks of logs lay at the base of the slope where the logging was being conducted, a heavy gas-powered saw on a metal frame whirled and groaned as it cut the logs into long planks.

  Shan was watching a huge diesel truck being unloaded of its cargo of heavy pipe, its engine idling loudly, when Winslow pulled him away. A young Han woman, looking out of place in a bright white blouse and neatly pressed blue skirt, had appeared at the door of one of the center trailers. She greeted them with a solicitous nod, then gestured them inside, into the fastidious world of the venture's management. Passing through a short hallway lined with dirt-caked boots and jackets they stepped onto a clean tile floor in a room furnished with two metal desks and a long sofa. Shan might have forgotten he was inside one of the metal boxes, except that all the furniture was bolted to the floor. Black framed, color photographs of famous Chinese landscapes- the Great Wall, the natural limestone towers of Guilin, the Shanghai waterfront- were screwed on the wall above the sofa. The woman opened the door to a small conference room. "I will bring tea," she announced, and left them to sit at the table.

  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 door-frame. 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 contac
t, 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?"