“I learned some things in ’34 with Hood in Tibet,” Raeder replied.
“Demolition?”
“No. Not to give your enemies any chance at all.”
Let the British try to follow them now.
They traded the mules for yaks at a border village, reloaded their luggage on fewer animals, and trudged on. The trail’s surroundings were treeless now, brown where barren rock prevailed and green in watered swales. The Kangra La itself was a barren saddle marked with a cairn of stone and fluttering prayer flags.
“Each flap of the flag sends a prayer to their gods,” Raeder told his companions.
“What’s our prayer, Kurt?” asked Eckells.
“Power.”
They were at seventeen thousand feet. Around them, peaks shot ten thousand feet higher, draped with glaciers blue as fine diamonds. The sky was cobalt, the sun burned heatless. Wind whipped over the pass, snapping their clothes and pennants.
“Tibet,” the German announced, pointing at a horizon of endless mountains. “This is what Cortes felt when he gazed on Tenochtitlan, or Moses at the Promised Land.”
“Cortes had gold to entice him,” Kranz said.
“Tibet has gold, too. Tons of it, in Buddhist temples. They are rich, and oddly weak.”
“Ah, so that’s your secret motive, Kurt? We plunder? I’ve been wondering as we’ve panted.”
“Of course not. Mere treasure hunting is a relic of history. In modern times, the gold comes from the real prize, scientific discovery.” He smiled. “But if we come away with gold as well, it will be just compensation, no?”
“Power in this oxygen-starved, arid, medieval backwater?” Muller said skeptically, gazing at the emptiness.
“The world’s greatest secret.” Raeder’s eyes shone, as if he might pry a revelation from the slopes of the mountains ahead. “We are looking for the force, my SS brethren, that animates the world.”
11
Hong Kong, China
September 28, 1938
B enjamin Grayson Hood traveled more miles in nine days than Raeder’s expedition had sailed and marched in nine weeks. Hood’s first three thousand miles were by train from New York to San Francisco by way of Chicago, aboard the gleaming California Zephyr. Then by seaplane more than eight thousand miles across the Pacific. The Martin 130 China Clipper flown by Pan American averaged an astonishing 163 mph, hopping to Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Guam, Manila, and Hong Kong. Each was an oasis of calm and safety, far removed from the aggression of the Japanese Empire in China.
Hood’s ticket for this race against the Germans had cost a staggering $1,600, or as much as two new cars. But then he’d had a private cabin with bunk, washstand, and the finest cuisine the airline could conjure. He relished the shrimp and steak while he could, and didn’t turn down the company of one Edith Warnecke, either. She was a pretty and bored thirty-five-year-old double divorcee traveling to meet her newest husband in Singapore. Edith smelled Hood’s money and pedigree; Hood, opportunity. She liked red wine, chocolate, and sex, and rode the American adventurer ragged three miles above the Pacific, moaning like another propeller.
He was willing to oblige since the days ahead would be privation enough. And yet the amusement was oddly unsatisfying. Edith was an unhappy woman, looking for distraction. Ben realized (somewhat to his own surprise) that he was increasingly dissatisfied with distraction. Life should mean something, and not just society outings, specimen expeditions, and museum tolerance of his stooping to be a scientist. Sex should mean something, someday. After the Clipper skidded down on its pontoons into Hong Kong harbor, he stepped out on the dock, annoyed with his own conduct. Since the Tibet scandal he’d been embroiled in four years before, he’d been marking time. Now, he thought, his time had come.
Mrs. Warnecke, sensing his mood, stalked off without a good-bye to drink by herself until the next flight to Singapore.
What am I doing here? Hood said to himself as he watched the minuet of the junks traversing the harbor. It certainly wasn’t to fulfill some secret mission for Duncan Hale as errand boy for Uncle Sam. It was to complete what he’d long suspected was unfinished, his business with Kurt Raeder and Keyuri Lin.
Astonishing that Raeder had dared return.
Somewhere, in central Asia, was what he’d backed away from before: the test of being a man.
Hood had arrived at the edge of chaos. One couldn’t tell that in Hong Kong itself, with its stately British warships, regal banks and ministries, and bustling streets where coolies pulled rickshaws at a steady trot and Chinese women of high fashion minced in narrow silk dresses slit just high enough, to the knee, to make maneuverability possible. Sampans choked the quay and liners gleamed like mammoth wedding cakes, their stacks pumping out energetic streams of smoke. All this played out against a beautiful backdrop of steep green hills as extravagant and improbable as an opera set.
Beyond, however, was the mainland. Shanghai and Nanking had fallen to the Japanese the year before. Nipponese warplanes had sunk the American gunboat Panay in the Yangtze River in December, creating a diplomatic uproar. While the beleaguered Chinese army had won an impressive victory at Shantung this spring, now the Imperial Army was counterattacking toward Hankow. Their warplanes, rising sun on the wing, ranged like raptors. Munitions destined for Chiang Kai-shek were safely stacked on Hong Kong wharves under British protection. But once they were on railroads to the mainland, they ran a gauntlet of air raids.
The British trader Sir Arthur Readings explained all this when Hood called on him in the imperial oasis of Hong Kong called Happy Valley, site of the colony’s racetrack. Since British Intelligence had been alerted of Hood’s mission and agreed to help, Hood had been instructed by Duncan Hale to go to Readings for advice. Sir Arthur knew finance, good liquor, and China.
“Ordinarily, old chap, you’d pull up here and call the journey done,” Readings said when the two met for whiskey and dinner at his club. Apparently Sir Arthur did secret work for his empire beyond his shipping and sweatshops, and that work included liaison with mysterious agencies from the United States.
“It’s not like ’34 when you were here before,” Sir Arthur went on. “I know China was a bit of a scrimmage then, but it’s full-scale war now, millions killed, and the Japs are bombing the Kowloon-Canton Railway. I’m not sure whoever sent you entirely realizes what the situation is. Can’t blame Washington, tucked as it is on the other side of the world.”
I can, Hood thought to himself. “You said, ‘Ordinarily’?”
“Quite. The truth is, we live in perilous times and I’m told your mission could have real importance. You’re in for a bit of a romp. Accordingly, I have an idea. Just enough to get you killed, I suspect.”
“I’m not sure that will rattle my employers. Though I am cheap labor; paid my own way, mostly. A patriotic cog to counter the deficits of the New Deal.”
“By God, you won’t see a British lord doing that. That’s bloody marvelous, or bloody insane. So you’re English in one way; a bit balmy, are you?”
“My country is counting on it. So I’ve got to get to Tibet, and crossing China is the quickest way.”
“That’s like saying crossing the battlefield of Waterloo is the quickest way to Brussels. It’s sheer havoc out there, man. Chiang’s generals are at each other’s throats, the Nips have seized most of the coast and industry, and the Communists have created a bandit state of some sort up in the northwest. This Mao character won’t stand and fight, but he yaps and snaps like a little terrier. The only way Chiang has slowed the Japanese is to break the dikes on the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, flooding a thousand towns. Might as well go to the moon.”
“Arthur, if it was up to me I’d take your ‘ordinarily’ advice and board the Clipper back to Hawaii, finding another high-class tart to while away the monotony.”