They spilled down into darkness.
25
Shambhala Canyon, Tibet
October 3, 1938
I f Shambhala Canyon was a gate to paradise, it was designed to discourage all but the boldest. No sun penetrated the rift from which the disappearing river exploded. The canyon walls were coated with great tapestries of icicles as dramatic as the limestone drapery of a cave. Its end was hidden.
Raeder’s party had to climb the waterfall cliff first. This precipice actually leaned out, the curtain of water allowing an icy backstage behind, and the climb was impossible for all but the most experienced mountaineers. The Germans were alpinists, however, survivors of the Eiger. They had to leave their scientific instruments behind-too bad, because Muller couldn’t measure for underground cavities-but among the goods they’d carted since abandoning the truck were pitons and rope. They also shouldered their rifles and the submachine gun and crammed their pockets with bullets.
“If you have to choose between food and ammunition, take ammunition,” Raeder instructed. “Food we can seize from the Shambhalans on the other side.”
They strung a route next to the roaring cataract, the climbing line taut enough so that even Keyuri could haul herself up the cliff. Her small booted feet scrabbled for purchase on the slippery face.
Raeder, Muller, and Diels went first and pulled themselves up to a ledge above the brow of the falls, their perch not much bigger than Himmler’s old desk in Berlin. The shelf was slick with frost and tilted outward, as precarious as greased glass, but it connected with the trail Raeder had spied with his binoculars. This path was hewn into the western cliff in a seven-foot-high groove that led into the darkness of the canyon. The roof of the groove leaned out over the trail, its eave draped with ice. The overhang had the advantage of keeping the worst moisture off the path. The cliff trail itself was just two feet wide. Below was the river, white and roaring, a mad slurry of racing foam. If they fell in they’d be hurled into space by the force of the waterfall, and then drop a hundred feet to their deaths.
The canyon bent slightly so they still had no idea what lay on its far side. Raeder, however, was exultant. He put his hand to his chest, where a vial of blood from the legendary Frederick Barbarossa stayed warm near his beating heart.
“Someone built this!” he shouted above the roar of the river to Muller.
“Madmen,” the geophysicist muttered. “We can’t get through that, Kurt. We can’t haul our supplies. We’ll slip into the river.”
“We can carry what we need. Get Keyuri up here.”
The woman was dragged up, her hair streaming, a coat of frost on her clothes.
“This canyon,” Raeder demanded. “What’s on the other side?”
“Supposedly, Shambhala,” she said. “Open to the chosen.”
He frowned. Chosen reminded him of the tribal Jews, but also the SS, the master race. “Like men who brave this trail?”
“It’s all legend, metaphor, and symbol. I can’t promise there’s anything on the other side.” She looked at the forbidding trail. “Maybe this is a natural fault. Maybe this used to be a road thirteen feet wide and the rest of it has caved into the river and it’s now impassable. Maybe the tale-tellers all stopped here without going on and invented everything we think we know.”
“And maybe no one has dared this since ancient times.” His eye gleamed. “You wouldn’t be here, Keyuri, if you didn’t believe that yourself. You wouldn’t have tried to betray me to the British if you didn’t think there was something to find.”
She blinked, looking into the canyon. “Do you believe in destiny, Kurt?”
“You mean fate?”
“Fate that you met me.”
“Yes. Things happen for a reason. Opportunity comes for a reason.”
Her eyes were solemn. “Pain happens for a reason?”
He nodded. “Yes. Yes!”
“I’m going into Shambhala with you. But never think I’m truly with you. This is for my country, not yours.”
“Of course. Each of us has our loyalties. But destiny has brought us this far together.” He held her shoulders. “Let’s see where else she takes us.” Until I don’t need you anymore, he thought.
The climbing rope was reeled in and a fresh piton driven above the ledge where they crowded. Kranz looked excited, Muller doubtful, Diels like a fatalistic infantryman resigned to making a charge. Eckells, who’d come up last because he’d insisted on bringing his cameras, was muttering Heil Hitler to summon Nazi courage. They squeezed like a single organism.
Then Raeder went first, his face to the cliff, sidling sideways, his Mauser hunting rifle slung across his back. The cataract roared and sucked at the cliff face twenty feet below his boots. It was like mincing on a frozen pond. Rope spooled out behind him. At a hundred feet he drove in a second piton. When the rope was secured, the second German sidled forward. Each member of the party followed in turn, until they were strung like beads on a string.
“Now, stay still and hold on while I advance,” he ordered them. Again he extended like a spider, fastening a line the others could follow. When the last German advanced, a slipknot let the first line come loose so it could be reeled in and used again. It was like the creep of a caterpillar.
Raeder always went first, with nothing to hold on to. The leader takes the most risk.
The canyon grew darker and colder as they penetrated.
What if they ran out of pitons?
Keyuri was shivering, but said nothing. She was sandwiched between Muller and Eckells and shuffled forward with them as her turn came.
Hour followed hour. They’d no idea what the sun was doing; it was eternal shadow in this crack in the mountains. They crept a hundred feet at a time, Raeder refusing the offers of the others to pioneer the route.
“I led us here, and I will lead us out,” he said. “The Fatherland calls us to courage, my friends.”
Muller rolled his eyes. Diels shared a sly smile.
After an eternity, the canyon seemed to be lightening. Raeder had Diels grip his pack while he leaned out over the rushing river to peer ahead. Then he gestured and was pulled back.
“I see the canyon ending,” he said. “There’s a wider valley beyond, and distant snow. I think we’re coming to Shambhala, comrades.”
“What does it look like, Kurt?”
He winked. “Paradise.”
All he had glimpsed was the white of ice. But his men began shuffling faster.
They could see where the trail broadened at the end of the canyon, two hundred yards ahead, when the pitons at last ran out.
“What if we need them for this Shambhala?” Muller asked moodily.
“I’ll send you crawling back to get them,” Raeder snapped. Then, even though he couldn’t possibly know, “Don’t worry, we’re past the worst.” He addressed the others. “We’re almost there. From here we balance. You’ve seen me do it. We’re almost off this hellish path.”
They’d made another thirty yards, legs trembling from the strain of mincing along the icy ledge, when there was the flicker of a shadow above. The others might have missed it, but Raeder’s senses were honed by the concentration required when hunting. His head jerked upward. A vulture?
No, a plane! It flashed a moment in the narrow ribbon of sky above the canyon and then disappeared behind the other rim. An airplane here? The Tibetans had none. Was this some British trick?
He could hear the craft circling. “God in heaven,” he muttered.
“Not God, Kurt,” Keyuri said. “Benjamin Hood.”
“What?” For just a second his practiced composure was gone. He looked back to where she clung on the canyon wall.
“He’s pursuing you,” she said. “You’ve led him to what he’s looking for.”
“You’re lying.”
She looked at him evenly, and he knew she wasn’t.
“How do you know this?”
“I planned it. As did the Reting.”
“Damn you!”