The Kingdom

by Clive Cussler

  “The rest may be . . .” Sam jerked his head toward the crevasse.

  “That’s no way to go.”

  “We can speculate later. Let’s keep going.”

  After securing the rigging so it would hang off the end of the gondola and not get wedged against the crevasse wall, Sam and Remi took up stations on either end of the gondola and pushed in unison until the wicker bottom began sliding over the ice. As they neared the crevasse, they picked up speed, then gave the gondola a final shove. It slid the last few feet, bumped over the edge, and disappeared from view. Sam and Remi ran forward.

  “Always trust your instincts,” Remi said with a smile.

  The gondola sat wedged between the crevasse’s walls about a foot below the edge.

  Sam climbed in and, careful to avoid the mummies, walked the length of the gondola. He proclaimed it solid. Remi helped him back up.

  “Every home needs a roof,” she said.

  They walked the plateau together collecting pieces of the Bell’s aluminum exterior large enough to bridge the crevasse, then began layering them over the gondola until only a narrow slot remained.

  “You’ve got a flair for this,” Sam told her.

  “I know. One last touch: camouflage.”

  Using a bowl-like chunk of the Bell’s windshield, they collected about five gallons of water from the runnel, which they poured over the gondola’s aluminum roof, followed by several layers of snow.

  They stepped back to admire their handiwork.

  Sam said, “ “Once it freezes, it’ll look like part of the ice sheet.”

  “One question: why the water?”

  “So the snow would stick to the aluminum. If our hunch is correct and we’re visited by another Z-9 tonight, we don’t want the rotor downwash exposing our shingles.”

  “Sam Fargo, you’re a brilliant man.”

  “That’s the illusion I like to create.”

  Sam looked up at the sky. The sun’s lower rim was dropping behind a jagged line of peaks to the west.

  “Time to hunker down and see what the night brings.”

  With their supplies either stuffed into the duffel or buried in the snow, Sam and Remi retreated to their shelter. In the quickly dwindling twilight, they took inventory of the duffel’s contents.

  “What’s this?” Remi asked, pulling out the lumbar pack Sam had snagged just before leaping from the Z-9.

  “That’s a—” He stopped, frowned, then smiled. “That, my dear, is an emergency parachute. But to you and me, it’s about a hundred fifty square feet of blanket.”

  They extracted the chute from the pack and soon they were huddled tightly inside a white fabric cocoon. Relatively warm and so far safe, they chatted quietly, watching the light fade into complete darkness.

  They slowly drifted off to sleep.

  Some time later Sam’s eyes sprung open. The blackness around them was complete. Wrapped in his arms, Remi whispered, “Do you hear it?”

  “Yes.”

  In the distance came the chopping thud of helicopter rotors.

  “What are the chances it’s a rescue party?” Remi asked.

  “Virtually none.”

  “Thanks for playing along.”

  The sound of the rotors slowly increased until Sam and Remi were certain the helicopter had dropped into the valley. A few moments later a bright spotlight swept over the crevasse; blinding white slivers of light arced through the gaps in the roof.

  Then the light was gone, fading as it skimmed over the plateau. Twice more it returned and went away.

  Then, suddenly, the helicopter’s engine changed in pitch.

  “Coming in to hover,” Sam whispered.

  Sam grabbed the pistol from where he had tucked it beneath his leg and switched it to his right hand.

  The downwash came. Jets of icy air and swirling snow filled the gondola. Based on the shadows cast by the searchlight, the helicopter seemed to be crabbing sideways over the plateau, pivoting this way, then that way, either looking for them and/or survivors among their missing comrades.

  Sam and Remi had left the Z-9’s tail jutting from the runnel as a clue to the helicopter’s fate. Anyone lucky enough to survive a plunge to the lake would have certainly drowned soon after. It was a conclusion that Sam and Remi prayed this search party would make.

  Doggedly, their visitors made three more passes over the plateau. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the spotlight went dark, and the rotors faded into the distance.

  34

  NORTHERN NEPAL

  Despite the extreme cold, their gondola cave served them well, the snow-covered roof not only protecting them from the wind but also trapping a precious fraction of their body heat. Ensconced in the parachute canopy, their parkas, caps, and gloves, they slept deeply, if sporadically, until the sun peeking through the aluminum shingles woke them.

  Though wary of another visit from the Chinese, Sam and Remi knew that to survive they would have to find a way out of the valley.

  They climbed out of the gondola and set about making breakfast. From the Bell’s wreckage, they’d also managed to scrounge nine tea bags and a half-torn bag of dehydrated stroganoff. From the Z-9, Sam had unknowingly picked up a packet of rice crackers and three cans of what looked like baked mung beans. They split one of these and shared a cup of tea, the water for which they boiled inside the empty can.

  They both agreed it was one of the best meals they’d ever had.

  Sam took his last sip of tea, then said, “I was thinking last night—”

  “And talking in your sleep,” Remi added. “You want to build something, don’t you?”

  “Our mummified friends in the gondola got here by hot-air balloon. Why don’t we leave the same way?” Remi opened her mouth to speak but Sam pushed on. “No, I’m not talking about resurrecting their balloon. I’m thinking more along the lines of a . . .” Sam searched for the right term. “Franken-Balloon.”

  Remi was nodding. “Some of their rigging, some of ours . . .” Her eyes brightened. “The parachute!”

  “You read my mind. If we can shape it and seal it up, I think I have a way of filling it. All we need is enough to lift us out of this valley and onto one of those meadows we saw to the south—four or five miles at most. From there we should be able to walk to a village.”

  “It’s still a long shot.”

  “Long shots are our specialty, Remi. Here’s the truth of it: in these temperatures, we won’t survive for more than five days. A rescue party might come before that, but I’ve never been a big fan of ‘might.’”

  “And there’s the Chinese to consider.”

  “And them. I don’t see any other option. We gamble on rescue or we get ourselves out of here—or die trying.”

  “No question: we try. Let’s build a dirigible.”

  The first order of business was inventory. While Remi took careful stock of what they had scrounged, Sam carefully reeled the old rigging up from the crevasse. He found only shreds of what had once been the balloon—or balloons, in this case.

  “There were at least three of them,” Sam guessed. “Probably four. You see all the curved pieces of wicker, the way they come to a point?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think those might have been enclosures for the balloons.”

  “This material is silk,” Remi added. “It’s very thick.”

  “Imagine it, Remi: a thirty-foot-long gondola suspended from four caged silk balloons . . . wicker-and-bamboo struts, sinew guy lines . . . I wonder how they kept it aloft. How did they funnel the heated air into the balloons? How would they—”

  Remi turned to Sam, clasped his face between her hands, and kissed him. “Daydream later, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Together, they began separating the tangled mess, setting guylines to one side, bamboo-and-wicker struts to the other. Once done, they carefully lifted the mummies from the gondola and began untangling them from the last bit of rigging.

  “
I’d love to know their story,” Remi said.

  “It’s obvious they’d been using the upturned gondola as a shelter,” Sam said. “Perhaps the crevasse split open suddenly, and only these two managed to hold on.”

  “Then why stay like that?”

  Sam shrugged. “Maybe they were too weak, by that point. They used the bamboo and rigging to build a small platform.”

  Kneeling beside the mummies, Remi said, “Weak and crippled. This one’s got a broken femur, a compound by the looks of it, and this one . . . See the indentation in the hip? That’s either dislocated or fractured. It’s awful. They just laid in there and waited to die.”

  “It won’t be our fate,” Sam replied. “A fiery balloon crash, maybe, but not this.”

  “Very funny.”

  Remi stooped over and picked up one of the bamboo tubes. It was as big around as a baseball bat and five feet long. “Sam, there’s writing on this. It’s scratched into the surface.”

  “Are you sure?” Sam looked over her shoulder. He was the first to recognize the language. “That’s Italian.”

  “You’re right.” Remi ran her fingertips over the etched words while rotating the bamboo in her opposite hand. “This isn’t, though.” She pointed to a spot near the tip.

  No taller than a half inch, a square grid framed four Asian symbols. “This can’t be,” Remi murmured. “Don’t you recognize them?”

  “No, should I?”

  “Sam, they’re the same four characters engraved on the lid of the Theurang chest.”

  35

  NORTHERN NEPAL

  Sam opened his mouth to speak, then clamped it shut. Remi said, “I know what you’re thinking. But I’m sure, Sam. I remember drinking tea and staring at these characters on Jack’s laptop screen.”

  “I believe you. I just don’t see how—” Sam stopped and furrowed his eyebrows. “Unless . . . When we landed here, how far were we from the last set of coordinates?”

  “Hosni said less than a kilometer.”

  “Maybe a half mile from the path Dhakal would have taken on his journey. What if he died near here, or ran into trouble and lost the Theurang chest?”

  Remi was nodding. “And then our balloonist friends come along centuries later. They crash-land here and find the box. When was the earliest manned balloon flight?”

  “Just guessing . . . late sixteenth–early seventeenth century. But I’ve never heard of a dirigible from that period as advanced as this one. This would have been way ahead of its time.”

  “Then at the earliest, it crashed here almost three hundred years after Dhakal left Mustang.”

  “It’s plausible,” Sam admitted, “but hard to swallow.”

  “Then explain these markings.”

  “I can’t. You say they’re the Theurang curse, and I believe you. I’m just having trouble wrapping my brain around it all.”

  “Join the club, Sam.”

  “How’s your Italian?”

  “A bit rusty, but I can give it a try later. Right now let’s concentrate on getting out of here.”

  They devoted the morning to checking the guylines, setting aside those that looked too frayed or decayed; these Sam cut away with his Swiss Army knife. They repeated the process with the wicker-and-bamboo struts (all of which Remi checked for engravings but found none), then turned their attention to the silk. The biggest piece they found was only a few inches wide, so they decided to braid the usable fabric into cordage, should it be needed. By lunchtime, they had a respectable pile of construction materials.

  For added stability, they decided to fasten eight of the dirigible’s balloon-cage struts to the interior of the dome. This job they accomplished in assembly-line fashion: Sam, using his knife’s awl, poked double holes in the canopy where each strut was to go followed by Remi inserting twelve-inch lengths of sinew thongs into the holes. Once done, they had three hundred twenty holes and one hundred sixty thongs.

  By late afternoon Sam began cinching the thongs closed using a boom hitch. He’d secured almost a quarter of the thongs when they decided to call it a night.

  They were up with the sun the next day and returned to the dirigible’s construction.

  During the five hours of usable afternoon light they turned their attention to sewing closed the mouth of the parachute/balloon with strips of silk knotted around a barrel-sized ring Sam had fashioned from curved pieces of wicker.

  After savoring a few crackers each, they retired to the gondola cave and settled down for what they knew would be a long night.

  “How long until we’re ready?” Remi asked.

  “With luck, we’ll have our basket ready by late morning tomorrow.”

  As they labored, Sam had been working and reworking the engineering problem in the back of his mind. They had slowly been cannibalizing the gondola for firewood, which they used not only to cook but to occasionally warm themselves throughout the day and before going to bed at night.

  As it stood, they had ten feet of gondola left. Based on Sam’s calculations, the remaining wicker combined with the chemical concoction he had in mind would be enough to get them aloft. Much less certain was whether they could ascend high enough to clear the ridgeline.

  The one factor Sam was not worried about was wind. So far, what little they’d gotten had come from the north.

  Remi voiced yet another concern, one that had also been nagging at Sam: “What about our landing?”

  “I’m not going to lie. That could be our bridge too far. There’s no way to tell how well we’ll be able to control the descent. And we’ll have virtually no steering.”

  “You have a Plan B, I’m guessing?”

  “I do. Do you want to hear it?”

  Remi was silent for a few moments. “No. Surprise me.”

  Sam’s timetable estimate was close. It wasn’t until noon that they had the basket and risers completed. While “basket” was an overly optimistic word for their construction, they were nevertheless proud of it: a two-foot-wide bamboo platform bound together and secured to the risers by the last of the sinew.

  They sat and ate lunch in silence, admiring their creation. The craft was rough-hewn, misshapen, and ugly—and they loved every inch of it.

  “It needs a name,” Remi said.

  Sam of course suggested The Remi, but she dismissed the idea. He tried again, “I had a kite when I was a kid called High Flier.”

  “I like it.”

  The afternoon was spent implementing Sam’s scheme for a fuel source. Except for a three-foot section in which they would huddle that night, Sam used the wire saw to dismantle the remainder of the gondola, cutting away as he stood inside it and handing up chunks to Remi. They managed to lose only three pieces to the bowels of the crevasse.

  Using a stone, Remi began grinding the wicker and the remaining sinew into a rough pulp, the first palmful of which Sam dropped into a bowl-shaped section of the Bell’s aluminum skin. To the pulp he added lichen they’d scraped from every stone and clear patch of granite they could find on the plateau. Next came dribbles of aviation fuel followed by dashes of gunpowder Sam had extracted from the pistol’s bullets. After thirty minutes of trial and error, Sam presented Remi with a crude briquette wrapped inside a swatch of silk.

  “Do the honors,” he said, and handed Remi the lighter.

  “Are you sure it won’t explode?”

  “No, not at all sure.”

  Remi gave him a withering stare.

  He said, “It would have to be packed inside something solid.”

  At arm’s length, Remi touched the lighter’s flame to the brick; with a barely perceptible whoosh, it ignited.

  Grinning broadly, Remi leapt up and hugged Sam. Together, they sat crouched around the brick and watched it burn. The heat was surprisingly intense. When the flames finally sputtered out, Sam checked his watch: “Six minutes. Not bad. Now we need as many as we can make but bigger—say, about the size of a filet mignon.”

  “Did you have to use that
analogy?”

  “Sorry. The moment we get back to Kathmandu we’ll head for the nearest steakhouse.”

  Buoyed by the success of their ignition test, they made rapid progress. By bedtime, they had nineteen bricks.

  As the sun began to set, Sam finished the brazier by notching into its base three short legs, which he then attached to a double-thick aluminum bowl by crude flanges. As a final step, he cut a hole into the side of the cone.

  “What’s that for?” asked Remi.

  “Ventilation and fuel port. Once we get the first brick going, airflow and the shape of the cone will create a vortex of sorts. The heat will gush through the top of the cone and into the balloon.”

  “That’s ingenious.”

  “That’s a stove.”

  “Pardon?”

  “It’s an old-fashioned backpacking stove on steroids. They’ve been around for a century. At last my love of obscure knowledge pays off.”

  “In spades. Let’s retreat to our bunker and try to rest up for the maiden—and final—flight of the High Flier.”

  They slept fitfully for a total of two hours, kept awake by exhaustion, lack of food, and excitement. As soon as there was enough light to work by, they climbed out of the gondola and ate the last of their food.

  Sam dismembered the remainder of the gondola save the last corner, which they pried free with the piton and knotted rope. Once the sawing was done, they had a pile of fuel that was as tall as Sam.

  Having already chosen a spot on the plateau that was virtually free of ice, they carefully dragged the balloon to the launchpad. Onto the platform they stacked ballast rocks. In the center they placed the brazier, then secured it to the platform with sinew thongs.

  “Let’s get cooking,” Remi said.

  They used wads of paper and lichen as tinder, on top of which they placed a tripod of wicker chunks. Once they had a solid bed of coals, they continued to feed wicker into the brazier, and slowly flames began licking upward.