“Then why did he say ‘This is all your fault’?” I muttered. It wasn’t fair. I shook my head hard but couldn’t seem to clear it. I’d been underground for most of several days, and every time I emerged from Yongten’s shop it turned out to be nighttime, and the Dasain celebrations were in full swing, with fireworks going off overhead and underfoot, and masked nightmare figures crashing blindly through the streets, drinking and yelling in the intermittent light. Dodging them and the fireworks I came to feel that it was more normal underground than on the surface, and I decided to just stay below for the duration. Sarah and Nathan brought down meals, and we ate in the gold-lined chamber, which was only a short distance from one of our filling operations. A single candle could light that chamber like a naked 150-watt bulb. We slept in one of the bronze chambers nearby, catching only a few hours at a time.
The fill was coming along, although it proved difficult to ram dirt right up to the ceiling. Colonel John solved that by erecting a wall at one end and then shoving dirt up to it. He went all out, re-creating what he thought the earth under an old city like Kathmandu should look like—shards of old pottery, rotted beams, a lost silver spoon—a whole archeological fantasia of false strata and old finds, until it got so bad we had to drag him out of there and let the Khampas and Bahadim’s Congress Party rebels fill the space up to the ceiling, and then wall off the other side.
Just after they’d finished the first of those, we heard a low rumble, and the tunnels quivered around us, and we got our first test; they had reached our new fill, and were digging through it. Nathan kept running up to street level to see that they were keeping on track, but I was confident they would; they’d have to burrow under buildings to leave it. The only question was, had I surveyed the tunnel correctly, so that we had filled the area underneath the street? I was worried that they might excavate right into one of the new retaining walls, and burst right through the whole plan. What Colonel John would say to me then! But they didn’t, at least not at that first intersection.
The next one was only a couple of blocks away, and so we had no rest. And this was more than a tunnel; it was one of the big circular chambers, and to be safe we were going to have to fill it entirely, and at the same time build a new passageway deep beneath it, because otherwise we would be blocked off from one whole section. So we ran down narrow tunnels extending to the west, toward Shambhala, and hacked madly at the walls while making sure we didn’t bring the roof down on us; then carted the dirt back into this chamber, which seemed like a bottomless pit. Bahadim’s crew did this while simultaneously celebrating Dasain, so that they were draped in streamers and confetti and their foreheads and the parts of their hair were dotted and streaked with red dye and colored grains of rice, and they were drunk most of the time. Freds considered this a good plan and joined them in it. Meanwhile the sewer builders were churning on above us with unusual efficiency, dropping lengths of concrete pipe like they were in a race. They were about to reach the chamber, and so we went into overdrive, everyone working round the clock to get it filled. Colonel John was furious. Freds was ecstatic. “Isn’t this a blast?” he kept saying during our breaks. I gobbled down the sandwiches Sarah and Nathan had brought down and declined to respond. The truth was I was feeling weird; I hadn’t yet recovered from my weight loss of the summer, and besides my Shambhalan dysentery was coming back a bit, leaving me light-headed and sometimes a touch delirious.
When we were done with one meal Freds popped a bottle of chang and lit up his pipe. “Here,” he choked, puffing away, “have a hit of this, digging’s a lot more fun with a little buzz on.” Unfortunately I took him up on the offer and sucked down a lungful when he added, “I just scored this from a guy on Freak Street, supposed to be cut with opium,” at which point I coughed till I almost broke ribs. Then immediately on leaving the chamber I ran into one of the low beams in the tunnel, smacking my forehead, and between that and Freds’s opiated hash I found myself deep in the dreamtime. Like, were the miners hauling those overfull carts of dirt rather short, and hairy, with long arms, and peculiar heads? Did I see one of them wearing a Dodgers cap? Were there in fact a whole lot of them zooming around in the dark like gnomes, and saving the day as far as filling the big chamber goes? I can’t really tell you for sure. I only know that I felt extremely strange, and that we were working like fiends, with the rumble of bulldozers overhead, and even if we did get the chamber filled in time we still had another tunnel to fill farther to the west, and I was staggering around doing all this when Bahadim passed me and said “We have just overheard your friend Mister A. Rana telling the South Asian Development Agency that the sewer project is running behind schedule, and asking them for another million dollars to help with that. And then he telephoned those Chinese traders to make arrangements to supply them with what he called a permanent source in Chitwan, so that they can run their factory reliably. A Chinese aphrodisiac factory no doubt! Isn’t that funny!”
And I flew into a rage and dropped the pick from my blistered palms and took off running through the tunnels, north to the palace. I had lost my mind.
XV
THIS WAS THE PLAN: I would skinny up the ladder into the little space they had cut behind the King’s quarters, and break open the narrow crack in his closet’s back wall that we had been listening through, and crawl through into the closet and from there into the King’s private chambers. Threatening the King with something (I hadn’t quite worked out what), I would force him down into the tunnels below and turn him over to Bahadim and the other members of the Congress Party splinter down there with him. With the King in hand they would be able to take over in a quick bloodless coup, the same kind of coup King Mahendra had laid on the country back in 1960. The Congress Party would take over and the Ranas would be kicked out on their asses, and everything would be better.
It worked like a charm. A crowbar snatched from one of the work sites sufficed to break open the crack in the King’s closet. Below me some of Bahadim’s crew of observers were whispering up at me fiercely, “What are you doing!” and the like, but I ignored them and wedged my way through the crack and into a black closet, which was lined on both sides by impressive royal or military jackets. It was not an Imelda Marcos–type closet, you understand, but big enough to walk in, which I did, to a door that I opened just a little.
And there he was, standing with his back to me. I threw open the door and grabbed him around the neck and held the crowbar out before him so he could see what he would get hit with if he struggled. He didn’t resist, and I hauled him back into the closet and spun him around, growling “Don’t make a sound!” in a low murderous voice. “Here—through this hole—go!” And I shoved him ahead of me through the break I had made in the wall. “Down a ladder!” I added quickly, but apparently not quickly enough, as there was a thump thump thump sound descending our little manhole.
I hurried through and dropped down the ladder and found the King just getting to his feet. He was straightening his jacket and looking around at the circle of Bahadim’s associates, who now ringed us. I caught sight of his face for the first time and for a second I reeled, thinking How in the hell did they get Jerry Lewis into the palace? But no—he only looked like Jerry Lewis, or at least as much like Jerry Lewis as the Dalai Lama looked like Phil Silvers; in other words not much, but enough to give you a start if you ran into him at the bottom of a poorly lit cavern.
So there we were; we had him: His Majesty King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah Dev, standing right there, blinking at us. The Congress Party guys, most of whom had been working themselves ragged to plug the tunnels, stood there speechless. The King was speechless. I was speechless.
Bahadim broke through the circle. “What is this, what is going on oh my!” He had caught sight of the King and stopped, frozen like Lot’s wife. His mouth was a perfect O.
Then he broke the tableau and rushed to my side. “What are you doing?” he gabbled. “What is this?”
“This is the King,” I said, gest
uring with my crowbar.
“Yes I know this but what is he doing down here, what have you done?”
“Coup,” I said. “This is a coup. We’re taking over.”
“Aggh!” he said loudly. He grimaced. He hopped up and down in place, he slapped me wildly back and forth on my upper arm, he wrung his hands till I thought his fingers would break off. He sucked in a breath, and then shuffled over to face the King, who had watched the whole performance with a dazed expression. His tinted glasses couldn’t have helped him any down there in that gloom.
“Your Majesty,” Bahadim said, “we are most sorry, this man here has made a most horrible error in trying to help us, you must forgive him, he is an American.”
“Ah,” the King said.
“Please,” Bahadim said. He reached a hand toward the King, withdrew it, then reached out again and took the King gently by the forearm. He shifted into Nepalese and they had a quick conversation as he led the King back to the bottom of the ladder and started him up it.
Noises from up the shaft. Shouts. Bahadim sucked in air again and explained something to the King in the most rapid Nepalese I had ever heard. The King nodded at him and continued climbing.
Then the shouts began to descend the ladder, and Bahadim turned and said something fierce to his cohorts, who immediately disappeared in the blackness, and then he ran at me and gave me a tremendous whack on the arm. “Fool! Fool! Aggh! Fly, come follow—we must fly—”
And suddenly there were big black boots hanging down out of the hole, scrabbling for the ladder rungs and kicking the King in the head, and Bahadim yanked me by the arm and we were off into the dark.
XVI
WHEN WE LOCATED THE rest of our companions, still working like dervishes in a mad dance, Bahadim shouted for their attention and told them quickly what had happened, in English and Nepalese. Everyone stopped and stared at me in disbelief. Then Freds and Colonel John stepped forward, and after a quick conference everyone was running around, some apparently to try to block off tunnels in hopes of concealing the extent of the system from the King’s soldiers; others, including the platoon of yetis, simply to get out of the way. Freds led us to an obscure side tunnel entrance, one I had never been down. “Stay here,” he told me and Bahadim, and then he and the colonel were off.
We stood in the dark listening. There was an eerie silence in the tunnels, punctuated by shouts from the direction of the palace—the King’s security people, no doubt. Every once in a while Bahadim punched me in the arm, muttering under his breath. Then Freds rejoined us, breathing hard. He cupped his hands and yelled back the way he had come. “Oh! No! Here they are coming! Run!” We heard shouts and took off running down the narrow side tunnel.
“What are we doing?” I asked Freds as we jogged along.
“We’re the decoy,” he said. “This is the tunnel that goes down to Chitwan, you know, the one we found. The colonel’s gotten the bodyguards who came down from the King’s palace to follow us, and he figures he can block off a lot of the system while they’re doing that, hide some of what’s down here.” We came to a fork and Freds led us left. A few minutes down this hole and he yelled back the way we had come: “Oh! No! Here they are coming!”
“This will not be necessary once I get a chance to speak with these people,” Bahadim said. “It will only take a conversation.”
“That may be so,” Freds said, “but meanwhile they appear to have their guns out, and I don’t think you want to try talking to them just yet.”
“No,” Bahadim agreed, and whacked me on the arm again.
“Freds,” I said. “Isn’t it like a hundred miles to Chitwan?”
“I think so.”
“Are we going to run all the way there?”
“No, there’s more of them little rail carts up here. Ah! Here they are.”
By the light of our flashlight beams we saw them; we were in a circular widening in the tunnel, and against one wall was a line of the small wooden carts, their iron wheels gleaming. Freds ran to the one at the far end and pushed it; it squealed over the tracks set in the floor of the tunnel. “Come on climb on hurry,” he said, and so we jumped on and were off into the dark. Freds pumped up and down on something like an old railroad handcar pump, and we rolled faster and faster. “Pull up on that lever there when we turn,” he instructed me. “That’s the brake.”
I pointed my flashlight forward into the rushing dark, but it made a poor headlight. “How will I know when we’re turning?”
“You’ll feel it.”
“Are you going to pump us all the way to Chitwan?”
“This is the downhill trip. We drop about three thousand feet, so it’s more a matter of braking than pumping. Coming back up must be hard work. Here, don’t brake as much as that, we’re on rails and those soldiers’ll be coming after us.”
“You think so?”
“Look.”
Behind us, a brief gleam of light. Our car’s wheels were too loud to let us hear anything but ourselves, and then only if we shouted in each other’s faces; but obviously there was another car following us. Freds moved me aside and took over the brake.
“Let’s see how fast we can get this old bucket rolling.”
Judging by the squeaking of the wheels and the air rushing over us, and the sight of the walls flying by in the cone of flashlight illumination, we could go pretty fast. Really fast. Occasionally we passed statues of the Buddha, or long murals of Bönpa demons, looking like vivid nightmares as we zoomed by them. In places the tunnel dropped more steeply, and we must have got up to about eighty or ninety miles an hour. Freds became used to this speed, and when the tunnel’s pitch laid back a little he would pump away to try to get us back to it. He put Bahadim on the brake because he didn’t like the way I overused it.
I don’t know how long we fired down the tunnel like that; sometimes it felt like we had been doing it for days, other times it seemed only minutes had passed since the King and I had stood surrounded by Bahadim’s gang. One problem I never would have anticipated was the cold. The air down there was probably forty or fifty degrees—not too bad—but at the rate we were moving there was the equivalent of a sixty- to eighty-mile-an-hour wind rushing over us, and I believe you are supposed to subtract one degree for every mile per hour to get a windchill factor, meaning that for us it was about twenty below zero. And it felt every bit of that. Even Freds declared it was a bit uncomfortable, and I caught him trying to warm a hand by holding it over the side just above one of the brake pads. “It doesn’t really work all that good,” he admitted, teeth clattering. Eventually we all ended up on the floor of the cart hiding behind the front wall, traveling blind and literally freezing to death.
Finally Freds pushed up to look forward into the dark, then leaped to the brake and hauled up on it, causing a deafening screech. When we came to a halt and shined the flashlights around, we found ourselves in another circular chamber filled with cars. We hopped out as stiff as frozen pork chops, and followed Freds down a tunnel on the other side. “I cannot feel my hands,” Bahadim said. I couldn’t feel my hands or my feet.
“It’s only a couple hundred yards,” Freds said, teeth hammering together in great shivers. “God, wasn’t that great? Like a monster roller coaster—I wanna do it again.”
Far up the tunnel we heard the faint low roar of iron wheels on iron rails. “Hey, those guys went for it pretty hard. Come on, let’s hurry.”
We staggered along, slapping our arms at our sides to warm up. Bahadim warmed up by slapping me. Soon we came to a long rough set of stone steps; we had to swing up them like Frankenstein, as our knees hadn’t quite thawed. But the air was getting warmer, and then we were colliding together as Freds had stopped and extinguished his flashlight.
“Okay,” he said. “This is the entry.”
“Where?”
“Right here.”
“Where?”
“It’s still night, George.” He flicked his flashlight on and off, and I caught a
brief glimpse of saal trees.
“Oh, no,” I said. I didn’t want to go into the jungle at night, on foot; I absolutely refused. But behind us, down the tunnel, there came a distant screech, and some faint screams, and then a short sequence of crashes. The King’s bodyguards had arrived.
“Come on,” Freds said, and took off.
XVII
BAD AS IT IS to be on the back of a rogue elephant in the jungle at night, it is infinitely worse to be there on foot. We snuck between trees and through bushes and tried to be as quiet as we could, and the quieter we were the more we could hear: creaks, rustles, quick scurrying sounds; the occasional bird cry, brief and to the point. And then there would be the sound of a branch snapping, and every other sound out there in the blackness would go away, leaving a heavy vegetable silence in which you could tell any number of living things were hunkered down waiting for something big to go away, sniffing the air and listening with noses and ears much sharper than ours. It would have made better sense to go crashing along singing at the top of our lungs or making martial arts sound effects, but with the King’s soldiers out of the tunnel and moving around in a group, flashlights lancing through the trees and sometimes illuminating spots very close to us, we couldn’t do that. Like all the rest of the hunted, we had to keep low and scurry along as quietly as we could.
Luckily it is impossible for humans to trail anyone or anything in the jungle at night, and the bodyguards seemed to be decoyed by the lights of Tiger View. They were moving in that direction when Freds stomped a bush several times and yelled out “Ah!”
Escape From Kathmandu Page 29
