by Sean Ellis
Two small lights, like the glowing eyes of a nocturnal creature, appeared in the gloom beyond the windows of the smoky inn where Mira was now lodged. She squinted, fixing her gaze on the lights, and spied a second pair close behind and drawing near. With a tight-lip expression that almost passed for a smile, she moved toward the door and stepped out into the punishing downpour.
Despite the heavy raindrops, she welcomed the chance to breathe something other than the wretched fumes of burning yak dung. Though the fuel source was in abundant supply and used extensively by the Sherpas to heat their homes and cook their food, the acrid smell could not by any stretch of the imagination be mistaken for wood smoke.
Two mud-caked Range Rovers gradually came into view and pulled up in front of the inn. There were no other automobiles to be seen. No one who lived in the village owned a car, and the regional bus had not made an appearance since the start of the monsoon. Mira hastened toward the vehicles, eager to greet the drivers. Although swathed in layers of brightly colored, cold-weather gear, she had no difficulty identifying an old friend.
“Andy!” she cried, her voice cracking with unexpected emotion as she threw her arms around him.
Andrew Banks, a gruff former Special Forces shooter and small arms trainer, and one of the few people from her days at the Farm whom she recalled with fondness—and whose cell phone number she still remembered—stood in shocked paralysis at the intensity of the embrace. When she finally relaxed her grip, he managed an uncomfortable smile. “You’re looking a bit worse for wear, kid.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Banks’ forehead creased in an unspoken, concerned inquiry, but she offered nothing more. One explanation would surely lead to another and another, and there simply wasn’t time for that.
She had contacted him directly from South America, begging a favor for old time’s sake. Banks had continued to work as a trainer and armorer for the Agency even after Mira’s division had closed its doors, and he still had the wherewithal to equip her for the task ahead. What he did not have, however, was sufficient motivation. For that, Mira would have to ask a favor from someone she did not count as a friend, someone who would demand those explanations.
The second driver stepped forward with hand extended. He neither expected nor received an embrace. “Hello again, Mira.”
“Jack.” She accepted his handclasp deferentially, unable to completely forget their last face-to-face meeting, or his ultimatum. With the closing of her section, all Agency assets had been redistributed, and Mira Raiden was an asset that had fallen into Jack Carlson’s lap. Though skeptical of the paranormal nature of the projects in which Mira had worked, he nevertheless recognized her talents. “You’ve been forged for one purpose,” he had told her. “You belong in the field. So either get these quaint notions of good guys and bad guys out of your head right now and go back to doing what you do best . . . or you’re out.”
Back then, it had been an easy choice. Carlson and the Agency had nothing to offer but a means of livelihood, and once the strings were cut, she had proven herself more than adequate to that task.
When she had called Banks from Chile, begging for help, he had promised only to try. On her second call from Miami, he had told her what the price of that assistance would be. The kind of help Mira needed could only come from the Agency—from Jack Carlson, and his terms had not changed.
But hers had. It wasn’t just about Mira Raiden anymore. She was now prepared to make any sacrifice to prevent her former benefactor from unleashing hell on earth.
She had not expressed her needs in those exact terms, however. Yet, Carlson understood that Walter Aimes had gone rogue and tried to kill his former pupil and he was left to believe that her intentions were merely to exact revenge. Mira did not elaborate on the greater peril; Carlson would not have believed her anyway. It was enough for him that the former Agency behaviorist was on his way to China, and that Mira was willing to silence him by any means necessary.
“Well,” she said, breaking the uncomfortable silence of the reunion. “Let’s have a look at the Christmas presents.”
Banks turned and opened the rear hatch of one of the Range Rovers. The cargo space was half-filled with sundry items, spare clothes for Mira and foodstuffs. He looked around, needlessly checking for spying eyes, and then raised the key fob, hitting the buttons in a sequence that triggered musical tones reminiscent of “Yankee Doodle.” The carpeted floor of the cargo area abruptly began moving, lifting up on telescoping posts, to reveal a small arsenal of weapons and ammunition packed in foam.
“Very clever.”
“Child’s play,” scoffed Banks with false modesty. “It’s completely invisible to customs inspectors, and the foam is treated with a chemical that masks the scent of nitrates from the security dogs. Had to cut the gas tank down by half to make room, and all that weight plays havoc with the mileage, so you have to fuel the beast up every time you pass a gas station.”
Mira let her eyes wander over the selection. Banks had, it seemed, left nothing behind. She bypassed the larger weapons. She didn’t doubt that she might need the firepower, but firepower would have to be sacrificed for the sake of mobility. She skipped over the M4 carbine and the long tube of a Stinger missile launcher, but took one of the relatively portable single-use M-72 LAW (light anti-armor weapon) rockets. She slipped the stubby, compact weapon in her backpack and went back to looking. Almost without thinking, she stuffed in a grenade launcher, which both looked and functioned like a fat-barreled sawed-off shotgun, and ten forty-millimeter grenades, and then picked up a Desert Eagle. The chrome-plated handgun, manufactured by Magnum Research, was the undisputed king of automatic pistols; the largest semi-automatic handgun in existence. Depending on the load, it could reputedly tear a human target in half. Mira extended her arm, sighting down the barrel, and found the foresight lined up on Carlson.
The department director swallowed nervously. “Don’t screw this up, Mira. Nothing leads back to us, understand?”
“I remember how the game works, Jack.” She donned a new shoulder holster, into which she stuffed the Desert Eagle, now loaded, along with several spare magazines.
“Good. I’m looking forward to putting you back to work.”
“I wish I could say I was looking forward to working for you, but we both know what a lousy liar I am.” She hefted the backpack onto one shoulder and turned to Banks, her tone and demeanor softening. “I appreciate this, Andy. It means more than you’ll ever know.”
The gruff old soldier returned an earnest smile, then tapped a button on the key fob, activating the mechanism to return the smuggling compartment to a secure position.
“Keys, please.”
Carlson tossed her an identical fob with the key to the second Rover, and she caught it in the air, striding toward the driver’s side door.
Banks’ voice was uncharacteristically emotional as he offered his final exhortation. “Be careful, kid.”
She shook her head gravely. “‘Careful’ won’t get the job done.”
The rain remained her companion through most of the night, but the massive Range Rover plowed through the treacherous mud bogs with little difficulty. In the heated luxurious interior, it was easy to forget that she was traveling through a harsh, dangerous environment.
Four days without dodging bullets, to say nothing of the relentless undead, had afforded her a chance to make a partial physical recovery from the injuries sustained in her harrowing escape, but somehow sleep had eluded her. There was simply too much to do and the clock was ticking.
She knew that Tarrant—the name Walter Aimes reminded her too much of his betrayal—was nearby. She could sense the presence of the Trinity at an instinctual level. More than that, she had heard a rumor—spoken almost like a ghost story—about a strange group of foreigners that had entered the country on a chartered aircraft, passed like wraiths through customs without so much as opening a passport, and helped themselves to trucks and equi
pment. There was little question in her mind about the identity of these strangers.
By her best guess, she was more than half a day behind them, but there were several factors in her favor. Unlike Tarrant, who would have to rely on second-hand directions from a conceivably uncooperative DiLorenzo, she would be following a course burned into her memory.
The Trinity might have imbued Tarrant with god-like powers, but it could not convey upon him divine wisdom. His inexperience and limited knowledge about the region through which he now blazed a swath of destruction, perhaps coupled with the belief that nothing could stand in his way, had caused him to forsake the path of least resistance in favor of a more direct, if less accessible, route. Rather than crossing into Tibet at the open border town of Kodari and making the circuitous journey on well traveled and somewhat maintained surface roads, at elevations low enough to be free of snow, Tarrant had betrayed his ignorance by moving his group overland through Namche Bazaar and then commenced an arduous off-road trek along the Sherpa trail to Lobuche, where he turned northeast following the path of the Khumbu glacier.
In the worsening weather, moving through some of the roughest terrain on the planet, it should have been an impossible journey, but somehow a path had been opened. Mira could almost taste the memory of the Trinity’s power reaching out to reshape stone and ice to the whim of its new master. Her own affinity with the relic confirmed her suspicion that Tarrant was now traveling in a virtually straight line toward his goal.
As she gained elevation, the rain became snow, threatening to choke the road ahead. In the rutted drifts, however, she could read the tale of her foe’s progress. The accumulation in the treads revealed that a pair of large vehicles had pushed through the treacherous pass less than two hours before. The tires of the Range Rover had little trouble digging down to the packed snow to find traction, leaving her to wonder if she might actually catch up to her rival before he reached his destination.
She did not overtake the other party by the time sunlight from beyond the Himalayas gradually illuminated the world to the east. The storm front passed during the night, making progress easier. Late that afternoon, the trail led to the heavily secured border with Tibet.
The tire tracks of the preceding vehicles were barely dusted with fresh snow, forming parallel lines leading without interruption to the border fence and beyond. Mira stopped the Range Rover, just out of view of the high gun tower overlooking the pass, and stepped out into the winter landscape. She would make no less of a target approaching the frontier on foot, but perhaps the watchful eyes of the sentries would be fooled into thinking that she was merely a curious Sherpa, investigating the damage to the fence. Sherpas rarely jaunted about in Range Rovers.
As she hiked closer to the barrier, staying in the hard pack where Tarrant’s trucks had passed, she got her first good look at the fence itself. A huge section of the chain-link metal weave had been cleanly excised, leaving the remnants to either side supported only by the snowdrift. She was now in full view of both the guard tower and a larger shack erected just beyond the fence, but there was no sign of activity. It was only upon reaching the physical border that she began to understand the eerie stillness.
There were two dark shapes in the snow to either side of the parallel tire tracks. Each step closer reinforced her certainty that the unmoving forms were bodies. The uniform-style, cold-weather gear worn by the dead men confirmed that they were soldiers in the army of the People’s Republic of China, but there was no sign of a struggle or of any attempt at resistance. The Chinese-made Type 56 rifles remained slung over the shoulders of the corpses.
Mira could almost picture the men approaching Tarrant’s truck, curious but not particularly concerned, and then simply dropping dead from a mere whisper of a thought amplified to fatal proportions by the ancient artifacts the old grave robber wielded.
She let the mental image slip away to lie beside the fallen soldiers, and turned back toward the Range Rover.
Tarrant’s trail continued northeast under the shadow of the great mountain, gradually climbing to an altitude of more than 5,000 meters. Even if she had not already known his ultimate destination, it became glaringly evident as the track blazed by both his trucks and the irresistible might of the Trinity curved toward the Rongbuk glacier.
For millennia, the glacier had carved across the face of the mountain, scouring its stony visage to plow a valley more than ten miles long and a mile wide. It was in the midst of this severe, yet strangely beautiful, place that Buddhist monks had established a place of meditation.
For more than four hundred years, hermits had come to contemplate the austere majesty of the Himalayas, residing in caves and building small huts. In 1902, the Rongbuk monastery had been established, and while it possessed neither the size nor grandeur of the palatial religious complexes in the capital city of Lhasa, it remained a noteworthy destinations for pilgrims, as well as for a new breed of ascetic travelers: the mountaineers. The North Face route to the summit, along which famed climber George Mallory had disappeared after successfully reaching the highest place on earth, could only be reached after passing through the Lhakhang of Rongbuk.
The annexation of Tibet by the communist Chinese government, and the subsequent persecution of the native residents and their religion, had spelled the end of Rongbuk’s notoriety, and the monastery was all but destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. Over the years, however, the Chinese government had learned the value of tacitly permitting a degree of religious freedom in order to keep tabs on the adherents, and a program of reconstruction had been instituted at Rongbuk. At the same time, a desire to capitalize on the interest of Western travelers had prompted the communist leaders to make both the monastery and the North Face route into a tourist destination.
What neither the secular policy makers in Beijing nor the devout monks of the Tibetan plateau realized was that the Rongbuk valley had been a focal point far longer than anyone realized, and for reasons that were scarcely imaginable.
The fortress-like Lhakhang stood out from the face of a cliff overlooking the valley almost as if it had been carved from the very rock of the mountain, not unlike the ruins of Petra in Jordan. Mira found Tarrant’s trucks abandoned near the foot of the path leading up to the ruins of the monastery. The vehicles had been haphazardly discarded, as if their previous occupants believed they would no longer have need for wheeled transportation. Mira parked the Range Rover alongside, and after savoring a final moment of artificial warmth, exited into the bitter cold of the Rongbuk Valley.
The steps leading up to the main entrance were surprisingly clear of accumulated snow, but tiny chips of glacier ice born on the wind like grains of sand pelted her face as she made the ascent. She hugged the Yak hair garment close to her face, staying near the cliff wall, and hastened toward the relative shelter of the buildings.
But for the air, nothing moved in the monastery. Frayed and faded prayer flags snapped in the gale that roared down from the summit, but there was no indication that anyone now lived in the complex. Mira did not know if the stillness was Tarrant’s doing—if he had massacred the residents of Rongbuk as mercilessly as he had dealt with the soldiers at the border crossing—or if there was a less macabre explanation, but the stillness remained ominous.
It was not her limited grasp of Tibetan Buddhism that guided her through the maze of terraces, rooftops and courtyards that formed the monastery complex, but rather the scent of something far more ancient.
High above the residences, on the path that continued up the valley toward the north face of Everest, was the chorten of Rongbuk—the circular reliquary adorned with emblems of the sun and moon to symbolize the enlightenment of Buddha’s teachings. Nearby, adorning a sheer wall of metamorphic schist, the painted eyes of the deified Siddhartha Gautama gazed from a background of yellow ochre, as if to scrutinize all those who ascended the heights to gain such illumination. It was this latter feature that commanded Mira’s attention. Centering herself betwee
n the stony gaze, she studied the cliff face, probing the unyielding surface with her fingers.
The wall was solid.
Mira frowned. She knew that she had reached the threshold of Agartha, and that this was the doorway through which Tarrant had passed. She had visited this place in her mind’s eye—seen it as it was in the prehistory of the world, unrefined by monks and craftsmen—and knew that the only portal into the ancient city was sealed behind this slab of native rock. Yet the wall showed no sign of disturbance. Tarrant had indeed opened the door, but he had used a key—the Trinity—and locked it up tight afterward.
Recognizing that there would be no subtle means of breaching the portal, Mira turned away and put some distance between herself and the painted cliff. Given enough time, she might have been able to figuratively pick the lock, but time was something she didn’t have. She elected to employ a more straightforward approach.
A spring-loaded catch allowed the hinged barrel of the M-79 grenade launcher to fall open, after which Mira loaded in a single stubby, bullet-shaped cartridge. She snapped it shut and without further consideration sighted on the round dot between the decorative eyes—the ajna chakra, symbol of the metaphysical third eye that can see into the spirit realm and glimpse the future—and pulled the trigger.
The spherical, forty-millimeter grenade armed itself as it flew toward the target. As soon as it struck the rock face, the armor-piercing charge released a jet of fiery metal plasma that burned into the schist, rendering it molten in the instant before the high explosive payload detonated.
A blast of smoke and thunder rocked the monastery and echoed between the valley walls, triggering a series of crushing avalanches across the face of the mountain. Fragments of stone pelted the chorten and crashed down onto the roofs of the buildings in the complex. In the moments following the explosion, Mira could hear the shrill siren of the Range Rover’s alarm system on the valley floor, triggered by the severity of the concussion. These secondary effects of the grenade, however, were of little interest. An eager smile touched her lips as the smoke cleared to reveal a ragged vertical seam torn open in the sheer rock face, and beyond it, a shadowy void. It would be a tight fit, but the doorway to Agartha was open once more.
