Then a thought occurred. She glanced out the window; he was still busy. So she opened her purse, took out her cell phone, and opened its back.
Its battery was missing.
She put the discarded one in. The phone still didn’t power on.
22
Toward the Kunlun Mountains, Tibet
September 30, 1938
T he Germans drove seven hundred miles north and west of Lhasa, first on a winding caravan track through a maze of mountains, and then on the trunk road that led across Asia toward Kashmir and the Karakoram. A hundred miles before Karakoram Pass, they turned north again into wilderness, so high and unpopulated that they no longer encountered any nomads. Animals watched them curiously and without fear, not understanding what the two-legs were. Raeder itched to kill some-they wandered near enough to try the submachine gun-but hunting would only slow them down. The distant peaks were getting whiter as autumn began, the snow line lower each morning.
The Kunlun Mountains, a two-thousand-mile-long range that parallels the Himalayas, forms the northern border of Tibet. It lay along the horizon like a white wall, remote as the moon. Keyuri Lin had combined her fragmentary clues from the old peches, or books, with ancient legends to turn Tibetan mystery into a tangible goal, a gamble like Columbus’s sailing west to go east. Now the roof of the world swallowed them as they drove into a geographic vacuum. Maps were blank here.
When the British motorcar broke down after thirty straight hours of dirt roads and steppe trails, its tires blown, Kurt Raeder’s party siphoned its gas tank and unceremoniously rolled it off a hillside. They whooped as it bounced and spun, pieces flying off like bright marbles.
The truck and trailer made it for three more days, some of the Germans riding like coolies on the towed cart.
Then they came to an impassable gorge.
It was as if God had taken the earth into two mighty hands and cracked it across its crust. This was not a canyon, it was a rock crevasse, a split in the plateau that extended as far as the eye could see in either direction. Water glinted at its depths, a thousand feet down. The lip of the other side was a tantalizing fifty yards away. The rift was effective as a moat.
“Now what?” asked Muller.
“We cross it,” said Raeder.
“Impossible,” said Diels. “We need a balloon.”
“Nothing is impossible for National Socialists. And your idea of a balloon is not a bad one, if we had means to make one.” Raeder inventoried the truck and trailer. “Unfortunately I don’t see how.”
“Maybe we can drive around it?”
“Through those boulder fields? How far, and what if the Tibetans are pursuing? Detour and delay could ruin everything.”
“We could throw a light line to someone on the other side,” Eckells said.
“Do you see anyone, Franz?” Muller asked. He sat on a rock.
“One of us climbs down and up the other cliff.” Eckells peered over the edge. “But we don’t have rope enough for the entire route. A single slip…” Their cameraman/political officer was the most eager of the group, and the most stupid.
Raeder paced the edge like an impatient animal. “Let me think.”
“Perhaps this is why no one has ever found Shambhala,” said Muller.
Raeder ignored him, scratching a design on the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What if we could shoot a line across? Eh, comrades? A rope to shimmy across?”
“Shoot with what?”
“Our truck. Look. I have an idea.”
The truck’s exhaust pipe became their cannon muzzle. The vertical stakes of the front grill were dismantled, crossed, and bent to make a grappling hook. The lightest line they dared trust a man’s weight to was tied to the hook’s cross and carefully coiled next to their makeshift launcher. Gunpowder became the charge, and a revolver was dismantled to provide a trigger and firing pin.
“We’re going to blow our eyes out,” Kranz said nervously.
Raeder grunted. “You sound like my mother.”
“I’m going to film it on camera,” promised Eckells. He backed away. He was not as stupid as the others thought.
A sloped trench had been dug and the butt of their launcher braced against the dirt. The muzzle of the exhaust pipe pointed across the canyon, the pole of the grappling hook inserted like a ramrod. Someone had to get down in the trench to pull the trigger.
“I’ll do it,” Diels finally said, “if someone else is first across.”
“That will be me,” Raeder said.
Diels closed his eyes and squeezed. There was a boom, the tube jerked, and the archaeologist yelled as hot metal lacerated his arm. The butt of the makeshift cannon had burst. But their hook was arcing like a rocket, line unreeling like a writhing snake. The grapnel struck ten yards beyond the far side and Raeder pulled until it caught on a boulder.
He swiftly tied their end to the truck. “Back enough to give it tension!”
Then he slung a heavier rope coil on his shoulder, grasped the line, wrapped his legs, and pulled himself out into thin air. It was like watching a spider bob in the wind, a thousand feet above a maw of rocks.
Foot by foot, he pulled himself across, the line sagging but not breaking.
“Heil Hitler!” he called from the far side.
In astonished acknowledgment, they raised their arms.
The heavier line was pulled back across the chasm. Flywheels from the truck were unbolted to make a crude pulley system for a rope cradle. By the end of the day even Keyuri had been conveyed across, along with all the food, water, and ammunition they could carry. The truck was left, bottomed on rubble and leaking oil. The remaining canisters of gasoline were left in the trailer.
Raeder turned to Keyuri. “Are we close enough to trek from here?”
“Somewhere on the far side of that.” She pointed to a horizon of snow-dusted hills ahead.
He nodded. “I know you could lead us into oblivion.”
“My people want Shambhala’s secret, too.” She shouldered a pack.
“Yes. And if you mislead us, you’ll never see Lhasa again.”
“If we find it, I may not see Lhasa, either. No one has ever returned, Kurt.”
Raeder didn’t tell Keyuri the Germans wouldn’t return to Lhasa either. Maybe they’d sneak through China to the Japanese. Or go north to the trans-Siberian railroad and take ship at Vladivostok on the Pacific to avoid Communist scrutiny in Moscow. But the safest route might actually be west, through the wilds of Afghanistan to Persia. A direction in which no power, including Tibet, was likely to stop them. A route that brought them and the secret of Shambhala safely home to Germany.
He’d no intention of sharing anything with the holy men of the Potala Palace, despite what he’d promised. The prize was to help conquer the world.
Nor would those holy men even hear what the Germans had found, until it was too late. Raeder had no intention of leaving Keyuri Lin alive.
The Nazi leader had reestablished his domination of her the first night, muttering to the other Germans not to come near. He’d pitched a British tent out of earshot of the others, ordered Keyuri inside, and pointed his Luger. “Take off your robes.” He was master, she was slave, a game that delighted him.
Shaven or not, she was ripe as a young peach under her religious cloaking. But Keyuri was annoyingly indifferent to his attentions. She didn’t respond to his caresses, didn’t protest, and didn’t fight. Her mind fled.
Raeder had been angry at her surrender and took her quickly, his rutting savage. All he felt afterward was disgust. She did curl and weep, but that only added to his dissatisfaction. Where was the fire they’d felt in Hood’s camp? Where was her fear? Where, even, was her hatred? She was nothing like his fantasies.
He hadn’t touched her since.
Worse, the other men had grumbled. Muller was disapproving. “What did you do to her, Kurt? Look at her, she’s a whipped dog.”