“Cave-in,” Rominy said. “This place feels very unsafe.”
“You’ve got all the instincts of an investigative reporter.” He played his light on the blockage and then on the ceiling. Back and forth he shone the beam, like a paint roller. “Look at those streaks. Soot radiating from an explosion.”
“Which means?”
“That maybe this mine didn’t cave in, but was sealed. Dynamite, and boom. That closes the front door. We fell through the back.”
“So no way out.”
“Maybe there was a rope or ladder at one time. Would have rotted since the end of the war, of course.” He kept staring at the ceiling. “Looks pretty firm to me, but I’m not a mining engineer. Probably best to go back to where we fell in while we figure out what to do. But, you know, I don’t get it.” He sounded more puzzled than worried. “What did Hood expect us to find here?”
“My guess is an old gold claim,” Rominy said. “Maybe he thought his heirs could make something of this, but no way today. Too many environmental restrictions. I think we’re on federal land in the exact middle of nowhere.”
“Which means he definitely thought he had children, or a child. That’s interesting, isn’t it, because there’s nothing in the records about one living up here. So where was Great-grandma? Mystery upon mystery.”
“Jake, the mystery is how we’re going to get out of here.”
“Maybe I can lift you up until you can get a grip in that shaft.”
“I’m not much of a climber.”
“Consider the alternative.”
And then Rominy stumbled on something that gave way with an audible crack, an object softer than rubble on the floor. “Oh, Geez! What’s that? There’s something creepy, Jake.”
He shone the light. “Yuck. A shoe.”
A man’s dress shoe had been kicked out from the rubble by her stumble. There was a gleam inside. Barrow bent to peer.
“With a foot attached. You broke the bone.”
“Oh, my God. I’m going to be throw up.”
“It’s just a corpse, Rominy. Dust to dust.”
“Jake, let’s go. I’ll climb, I promise.”
“No, this is important. Great-grandpa led us to a body. The ankle bone is attached to the shin bone…” He sing-songed, playing the light. “There.” A bone projected from the loose rock, and near it was another shoe. “Hello. Looks like we really found someone.”
“This is so sick!”
“What if this is your illustrious ancestor?”
“Dunnigan said they found him in the cabin.”
“That’s right. So, in that case, who’s this?”
“I don’t think I want to know. I can’t take looking at bones, not when we’re trapped like this.”
“We can’t just walk away, girl.” He squatted and calmly began throwing aside rock. “Yep, there’s a whole dude in here.” What was wrong with him that he could just dig up the dead like that?
“Isn’t this desecration?”
“My guess is he’s been here since 1945 and either the explosion or subsequent rockfall covered him up. The poor guy has never had a decent burial. Maybe we can arrange one.”
“But what’s he doing here?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Here, shine the light, can you?”
The flesh had long since rotted away, thank goodness, but the skeleton was still enclosed in shreds of decayed clothing. There was no obvious injury to the skull, and no indication of how the man had died. It was a man, because the other shoe was male as well. The clothing looked like… the ruin of a business suit. Out here?
“Not really outfitted for mining, was he?” Jake asked.
“What was he doing in the woods dressed like that?”
“We need identification.” The flashlight danced. “Eureka!” He crouched again and threw aside more rocks to uncover a pack. “Look. Old oilskins to keep out the weather.” He pulled it out, ignoring the mold and grime. Bones fell aside, fabric deflated. “And inside… Ah. A leather satchel. Maybe this is what your calendar map was directing us to, Rominy.”
Despite herself, she was getting excited again. She played the light over what Jake held. “What’s inside?”
He opened the satchel carefully. There were papers, documents with script in a foreign alphabet, curious diagrams, and maps. He carefully unfolded one. Central Asia. They could still read it clearly in the flashlight beam: Tibet. “Hallelujah,” said Jake.
“So it is my great-grandfather?”
“In a business suit. A burial suit.” He rocked back on his heels. “Was he a suicide? He makes obscure clues, hikes in his funeral best to an old mine, and uses dynamite to seal himself in? Man, that’s grim. I don’t get it.”
“But they said they found him in the spring of ’46. Dead of natural causes.”
“Yeah. And this happy camper… has all ten fingers. Look.”
“So it’s not Benjamin Hood.”
“Or that’s not Grandpa’s finger.”
She shook her head. “I’m more confused than ever.”
“Me, too. But I think this is some other guy, who maybe Grandpa sealed in. So who is it?” He began digging through the leather satchel, looking for a clue.
Rominy had spied something else, caught among the tendrils of decayed fabric and old ribs. It was a much smaller bundle. She didn’t want to touch, but curiosity animated her arm. Besides, once they identified the body maybe they could concentrate on escape. Squeamishly she reached in, snagged the packet from the bones, and pulled it out.
Jake looked up from his papers. “What you got?”
“His wallet or something.”
“Open it up.”
It was a leather folder of the kind that carried official identification, stuck shut with moisture, grime, and time. Gingerly, the old leather cracking, she spread it apart. “It’s some kind of government credentials,” she read slowly in the beam of the flashlight. “A badge. Office of Strategic Services.”
“OSS? That’s the war’s predecessor to the CIA.” He frowned. “What was an overseas operative doing here?”
“There’s a name, too, I’ve never heard of. Have you?” She held it out.
He looked, his head next to hers.
Special Agent Duncan Hale.
28
Shambhala, Tibet
October 3, 1938
K urt Raeder’s mother had taught him that life is a series of disappointments, where reality falls short of hope. She’d been widowed by the Great War and impoverished by that widowhood. She’d almost starved in the chaos of the Weimar Republic that followed Germany’s defeat and become bitter because of it, a shrew for whom even the good was never good enough. She’d spent Kurt’s youth recoiling from any suitors and railing against fate. In reaction, Raeder had retreated into adventure stories. His childhood strategy was to believe that if he just hiked hard enough, or climbed high enough, or won prizes enough, he could reach the end of the rainbow and flee his family gloom. His thick-necked, mustached father, who disappeared at Verdun, had glared balefully at him from a photograph fading in a tarnished frame; he’d sought to please the brutal ghost who had beaten him in his earliest years by fighting bullies, until he became one himself. Always, though, Kurt felt destined for something nobler than his mother’s religion of pessimism and his father’s eternal dissatisfaction. He would scale Valhalla.
Well, he had hiked and climbed now. He’d come to the very end of the earth, a place of thin cold air and epic vastness, a Hyperborea of ice and rock, seeking the victory of the hero stories he’d escaped in as a child. And here, finally, was the rainbow’s end, the El Dorado he’d dreamed of all his life.
He’d found Shambhala. He was sure of it.
The survivors of their party had fallen silent when they emerged from the gorge into the valley. Even Keyuri, who had somehow betrayed him to Hood, had gone quiet in awe and trepidation. The valley into which they’d emerged was surrounded by cliffs so precipitous that it was craterlike, glaciers hanging above like half-descended curtains. A dozen waterfalls that cascaded down from those ice fields were drawn like wavering lines of chalk, feeding the river they’d just inched along. The river, gray and cold, bisected the valley. There was no pass at the upper end, just towering mountains. The effect was claustrophobic but sheltering.