“It was a more heroic, military age,” said Kranz, their archaeologist. “Now all they do is pray.”
The valleys were planted in mustard and barley because wheat would not grow at this altitude. Chang, the odd beer, was made from barley. Incised into cliffs above the farms were red-daubed Buddha statues, or painted black and white ladders symbolic of the long prayerful climb toward nirvana.
Tibetan technology was primitive-there were virtually no wheeled carts-but the Germans did occasionally encounter a waterwheel. One, near Gyantse, was used to mill barley. Another used the waterpower only to turn prayer wheels outside of a monastery, each revolution a radio beam aimed at God.
Lakes were turquoise or cobalt, vivid against the treeless hills, and birds hung over them like kites, rotating in the wind. The Germans’ porter Akeh, one of several Tibetans they’d hired, pointed out sites for sky burials, where the dead were dismembered and left for vultures to hasten the cycle of returning to the earth. The carrion birds were holy.
“Poverty, superstition, ignorance, prayer, and barbarism,” Raeder summed up one night as they camped by Lake Yamdok Tso, enjoying the luxury of a wood campfire fed by a nearby copse of stunted trees. “Reichsfuhrer Himmler might begin to doubt that these Tibetans are or ever were Aryans, or that they could have left anything worth rediscovering.”
“We certainly haven’t found ruins of a nobler race,” said Muller. “Just crude forts.”
“Or any food beyond yak meat and barley cakes,” moaned cameraman Eckells. The tsampa cakes were as tasteless as they were commonplace.
“And yet we’re closer to heaven,” said Raeder. “The stars tight as a ceiling, the air sharp as a shard of ice. I think I know why they’re obsessed with religion. It’s the only occupation that makes sense here, a way to make use of this weird clarity. In such a case, might a civilization not make discoveries obscured to empires in lower, murkier places? Could the legends of Vril be true?”
“I don’t know, Kurt,” said Muller. “My God, they labor like peasants.”
“But they may have lost our secret wisdom,” said Kranz. “We need the help of the Tibetans, and for that we have to convince them that Germany and National Socialism are their natural allies.”
“With our runes and our swastikas,” said Diels.
“Our machines and our modernism,” said Eckells. “Our guns and our magnetometers.”
“Yes, and with our mysticism and belief in the past,” said Raeder. “Tibetans are a people lost in the past, and we seek it, too. They believe in lives beyond this one, and so does our Reichsfuhrer. We’re the new druids, my companions, the black knights who will lead the world to the purity of ice. Come, let’s build up our fire and sing for our porters.”
Their fire blazed higher, light reflected on the lake, and red sparks climbed to mingle with cold stars overhead. The Germans began singing a Reich military anthem, voices carrying across the water.
Flame upraise!
Rise in blazing light.
From the mountains along the Rhine.
Rise shining!
See, we are standing
Faithful in a blessed circle,
To see you, flame,
And so praise the Fatherland!
Holy Fire,
Call the Young together
So that next to your blazing flames,
Courage grows…
They seized burning brands and began marching, circling their camp as the mules shifted nervously. Then they paraded down to the dark lakeshore and, at Raeder’s command, hurled the brands high over the water. The torches fell like meteors, hissing into the frigid water. Fire and ice, World Ice Theory. Everything a struggle between light and dark, white and black, hot and cold, the immaculate and the corrupt.
Then they toasted one another with schnapps, howling at the moon like German werewolves.
The Tibetan porters watched silently from the shadows.
14
Hankow, China
September 29, 1938
T he shadow of the Nakajima fighter flickered across the train just before the bullets did, the soldiers aboard as startled as squirrels beneath a hawk. Hood was riding atop a boxcar to escape the crowding and the heat, and watched the havoc stitch toward him as men yelled and instinctively ducked.
The carnage was transfixing. There was only time for a shout of warning at the rising snarl of the engine and then the fighter’s machine guns chewed down the length of the lumbering cars, wood flying and the wounded yelping. Newly recruited Chinese infantrymen were blown from rooftop perches like chaff. The painted twin meatballs of the rising sun were clearly visible on the wings as the fighter banked overhead, and then it was coming for them again, hundreds of excited soldiers shooting a fusillade into the sky as the train engine’s whistle screamed warning.
It felt like they were crawling.
Hood pulled out the. 45 that Duncan Hale had issued him and balanced on his knees as the plane came toward them again. The gun was slick and heavy. He wanted to hide but inside was no better protection; each strafing bullet was the size of a forefinger and could punch all the way to the roadbed. Their tormentor seemed to swell in size until it filled the whole sky. Hood’s pistol bucked as he fired, jarring his wrist and making it hard to aim. He vowed to take more practice. His rifle and shotgun were stored in his duffel below, and he suddenly incongruously worried that his belongings might take a bullet.
The tops of the freight cars ahead seemed to heave upward as the machine-gun fire struck, men jerking and tumbling, a catastrophic rupture that tore from car to car.
Hood braced himself for the explosion of his own flesh.
But then the machine guns stopped flashing, the Nakajima roared by, and the excited Chinese were left to fire their rifles at an empty sky. Hood actually felt the suck of the propeller. Then, as abruptly as it came, the plane was gone. Their train whistle kept shrilly blowing at nothing.
Maybe they wounded the pilot. Maybe the fighter ran out of bullets. Maybe it was low on fuel. But Hood knew that the only thing that saved his life during his harrowing journey to the chaotic new Chinese capital was that the plane aborted its second strafing run just moments before the stuttering spray reached him. Splinters rose in a fountain, a mesmerizing eruption, and then the fountain abruptly ceased one car ahead.
Born with a silver spoon in your mouth and dumb luck to cover your ass, Hood thought. Must have done something right in a previous life. Or you’re supposed to do something in this one to earn it.
The attack left chaos in its wake. Cars were splashed with blood, men moaned from the impact of the slugs, and whole boards had been knocked askew. But the train, its engine unmarked, didn’t slow. They chugged doggedly on, while the dead were rolled off to make more room for the shaken living.
Hood reloaded his. 45 and tucked it back in its holster. The big pistol was less accurate than hurling rocks, but if it ever hit a target, it tended to stop it. This was his first combat, and he was relieved he’d had the presence of mind to shoot back.
They reached Hankow that night, the rail yard light a combination of kerosene lamps, paper lanterns, and bonfires steaming in light rain. Soldiers, coolies, nurses, nuns, and generals milled in the chaos of the depot. Blood was still dripping from the floorboards of Hood’s troop train when he stepped down, the leakage diluted by the wet. Fog and smoke mixed with the hissing steam of locomotives. A distant rumble was not thunder, but Japanese and Chinese artillery. Their reflected flashes were like sheet lightning.
The remaining dead were stacked like cordwood. Soldiers kept beggar children away from looting the bodies, so they swarmed Hood instead until he swatted them off. Old women pressed close to sell tea and steamed buns.