"What kind of bastard would do this?" a deep voice near Shan asked. "A harmless monk." Winslow was aiming his compact binoculars in the direction Shan had been looking.
"I thought I saw smoke," Shan said.
"Smoke?"
"The monk has soot on his hands and robe."
Shan turned back to the caravan. A pan was being unpacked, with a kettle and churn. Lhandro had decided to make their midday camp early, to cook tsampa and check the bindings on the sheep packs. Shan caught Winslow's eye and motioned toward the two empty packhorses that now stood grazing on the sparse spring growth.
"If the monk does not strengthen we will stay here tonight," the rongpa headman said when he saw Shan and the American leading the horses away. "But if we are not here when you return, ride to the grove of junipers at the far side." Lhandro pointed to the high ridge that defined the northeast side of the plain, perhaps ten miles away. "On the other side is a ruined gompa where there is better shelter."
Shan and Winslow trotted side by side over the rough terrain, stopping to follow a flash of movement on the side of the high ridge they had passed through that morning. After a moment they saw in their glasses that it was a family of goats. As they started again Winslow raised his hand. The sound of pounding hooves made them turn. Dremu was bearing down on them.
"You have to stay with it," Dremu growled in a scolding tone to Shan as he pulled his horse to a sudden halt.
"It?" Winslow asked.
The Golok replied with a frown. "You're looking for that fire?" he asked.
"Did you see a fire?" Shan asked.
"No, but I smell it. Not yak dung. Not wood," he said, and kicked his horse into a trot toward the northwest corner of the plateau.
A quarter hour later Shan and Winslow dismounted behind Dremu, who stood at the edge of a shallow bowl perhaps fifty yards wide, marked by a two-foot-high cairn covered with lichen. The bowl differed from the rest of the landscape because it was lined with a uniform growth of a short grey-green plant, ten inches high, that Shan had not seen growing elsewhere on the plain. But half of the small hollow was blackened, the spring growth burned to the ground. A pungent smell, at once sweet and acrid, filled the air.
"Why a fire here?" Winslow wondered. "Lightning?"
"A campfire," Dremu interjected, and pointed to a low, dark six-foot-long mound on the far side of the bowl, adjacent to the scorched earth, ten feet from the cairn of rocks.
They walked their mounts slowly around to the mound, their pace slackening the closer they approached, each man glancing warily toward the slope above. Shan could not escape the sense that they were being watched, but he saw no sign of life on it other than a family of pikas scurrying over the rock talus.
The three men halted half a dozen paces from the mound. It was covered in black nylon cloth, and beside it was a yellow nylon vest. A red wool cap nearby was singed black by the fire. Shan and Winslow exchanged a grim glance. The black mound was in the shape of a body.
Dremu tossed a pebble onto the black cloth, with no effect. Then the Golok spun about and studied the slope intensely. His hand closed around the hilt of his knife.
Shan stepped forward reluctantly and lifted one end of the black nylon. It was a sack of some kind, a long bulky sack, and extremely light. He lifted the end to his waist with a sigh of relief. There was no body, only the sack, stuffed like a quilt.
"Sleeping bag," Winslow said with a confused tone, and bent to pull the yellow vest from the ground. It was large enough to fit Shan and looked new. Under it, in a pile at the head of the bag, was a pair of blue denim pants with an American label. In a small nylon pouch were a black metal compass with a red cross and a dozen bars of something called high energy protein, labeled in English and Chinese.
"There's no campfire." Shan gestured toward the scorched bowl. There was no ring of rocks, no cleared circle, no stones stacked for cooking. No campfire that had gone out of control. "And if lightning struck there would be a gash in the earth, some sign of a violent burst of heat."
Winslow nodded slowly. The brush had been set on fire deliberately. "To burn the whole damn plain, you think? To keep someone away, maybe scare off pursuers? But air doesn't circulate in the bowl. The flames crept down and smoldered away."
Shan bent and broke off one of the grey-green plants from a patch at the edge of the bowl and held it to his nose, detecting the same smell that hung in the air. As he pushed the sprig into his pocket Winslow bent over the bag and vest. "Expensive stuff," the American observed. "And all the labels are American, not just the jeans."
"Your geologist?"
"That's what I'm thinking," Winslow said as he examined the pockets of the jeans and vest. In the vest pocket was a government issued map of the region. The jeans yielded a plastic cigarette lighter, a pencil stub, a metal whistle on a lanyard- a device field teams might use to stay in contact when radios were not available. The American stuffed the vest, jeans, and singed hat into the sleeping bag, rolled it all into a tight bundle and tied it to his horse.
They rode halfway up the slope, along a trail that arced along the ridge into a maze of huge boulders that soon became impassable for the horses. Dremu produced short lengths of rope and hobbled their mounts, letting them forage in the thin growth, then pointed out a goat path leading up the mountainside he would scout while Shan and Winslow explored the field of rocks.
They searched futilely for half an hour, then climbed onto one of the boulders to scan the long plain again with their glasses. In the middle of the rolling green landscape was a blurred line of color. The caravan was moving northeast, as Lhandro had suggested, toward the grove of trees on the opposite side of the plain.
"Sometimes in Tibet," Winslow said, "when it gets really quiet, in a place like this, I hear things. Like a groan or a shudder. Only bigger. My grandfather would have said it was giants talking in the mountains."
Shan said nothing, but studied the landscape; first the plain again, then the slope around them. He couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.
After a long silence the American sighed. "You don't trust me, do you, Shan?"
"I don't believe you are what you say."
"Call the embassy. Call Washington. I'll loan you my passport for verification."
"I know something about working for governments. The Foreign Service is a career job. You should be halfway through your career."
"Right."
"And you are sent to collect the bodies of dead Americans? It's the job of a very junior officer at best."
Winslow offered no reply.
"And looking for the missing woman, that's a law enforcement job. Your government would ask the authorities in Beijing to find her. You say you came for that woman's body, but there is no body."
Winslow silently stared over the plain. "I guess you could say I've been reincarnated into a lower life form by Foreign Service standards." He lifted a pebble and tossed it from one hand to the other, then glanced back at Shan with a frown. "Two years ago I was Deputy Commercial Attachein Beijing, engaged to be married to another Foreign Service officer, a cultural attache in Beijing. I had always been a high achiever, collected languages like some people collect coins. Marked for fast advancement because I was the only one who spoke all the major languages of China. I had an apartment outside the embassy compound.