Nothing.
Where were the yetis? Where was Boyd? Was he here at all?
A powerful smell, similar to a stableful of horses, only stronger and more pungent, permeated the vegetation ahead of her. Inside her helmet she felt her nose wrinkle with disgust. It was the same stink she had smelled on Jack after the sirdar had brought him out of the crevasse, and she wondered how much stronger it would have been had she not been partly shielded from it by her suit.
Swift looked around for dung deposits, having no wish to find herself crawling through the stuff, and was surprised that there were none to be seen. It was a moment or two before she guessed the reason for the bad odour.
Fear. It was the smell of fear.
If yeti anatomy was anything like a gorilla’s, then the creature’s axillary parts would have contained several layers of apocrine glands, which were responsible for making this simple but highly effective means of olfactory communication. One yeti following the trail of another would have come across the scent and recognized the message: danger close by.
Was Boyd the danger?
With a growing sense of urgency. Swift kept on crawling until, from somewhere in the distance ahead of her, she heard the unmistakable sounds of a yeti hoot series followed by a gunshot.
Swift got to her feet and started to run in the direction of the sound.
Thirty
‘Tread softly, for this is holy ground.
It may be, could we look with seeing eyes,
This spot we stand upon is paradise.’
Annapurna Base Camp was still. The air was the colour of sapphires, as if the gods had already purified the Sanctuary of the stain of human blood that still lay upon the snow outside the clamshell. Mac was long gone and Jack paced the campsite with frustration, cursing the injuries that stopped him from pursuing Swift. Time passed slowly, and sounds became the events of his day: Ang Tsering groaning inside the clamshell; the hum of the power cell; a growl like a chainsaw in a distant forest that disappeared with the wind, but coming back again, grew louder. Hands above his narrowing eyes. Jack stared into the sky.
It was a helicopter. But how? It was impossible that Mac could have made it down to Chomrong already. It was only a couple of hours since he had gone and Chomrong was sixteen kilometres. Jack made two metronomes of his arms and walked toward the previous landing site.
Beating the air and the snow like the white of an egg, the chopper spiralled down into the Sanctuary’s bowl, hovered above the camp for a minute or two as if inspecting something, and then lunged toward the ground, whipping snow into Jack’s face as he ran to it. The markings were clear enough. It was the Royal Nepal Police.
A couple of uniformed officers, both armed, jumped out of the fuselage as the rotor blades began to slow. ‘Is everything all right here?’ yelled one of the policemen, a sergeant.
‘There’s been a murder,’ shouted Jack. ‘And there may well be another if we don’t get after the man who did it.’ He pointed down the glacier, toward Machhapuchhare. ‘He went that way.’
Jack tried to lead him back to the helicopter, but the sergeant remained where he was, his eyes taking in the severed hand that still lay on the bloodstained snow.
‘First we must see the body,’ said the sergeant.
‘You don’t understand,’ said Jack. ‘He’ll kill again unless we can stop him. There’s no time to lose now.’
‘Perhaps so,’ said the sergeant. ‘But either way we must wait to refuel before going any farther. It is two hundred and forty kilometres from Khatmandu.’
Even as the police sergeant spoke, the pilot was hauling jerry-cans out of the helicopter.
‘This way,’ said Jack. ‘But please... Chito garnuhos. Please hurry.’
Boyd entered the forest in classic combat style, running to a tree, taking up a kneeling firing position, crawling on his belly toward better cover, and kneeling again. He jerked the short barrel of his carbine one way and then another, searching for a target and wishing that he’d thought to attach a forty-millimetre grenade launcher, just in case one of the yetis proved to be hard to kill with the standard nine-millimetre round.
After a couple of minutes, he felt sufficiently relaxed to lower the gun barrel and take a reading with the handheld radiowave detector. The bird’s onboard computers and data transmitters utilized a local oscillator, operating around a specific signal frequency and emitting detectable electromagnetic radiation — this could be identified by the detector in Boyd’s hand; and once the waveform pattern of the operating signal was found and compared with a calibrated memory within the unit, the data displayed on a small screen could be analyzed by a small microchip to produce a bearing on the satellite that was accurate to within half a metre. For finding a needle in a haystack it was the nearest thing to having a giant magnet. Even so, with a working range of only fifty metres, Boyd estimated that since his arrival in the Sanctuary, a search area of some one hundred square kilometres, he had taken as many as a thousand separate readings with the little detector device, all of which had been negative. But on this occasion he found a positive reading and a bearing almost instantly. The bird lay straight ahead of him.
‘Bingo,’ he chuckled. ‘Give that man a prize.’
He put away the detector and raised his weapon again.
‘We’re on our way.’ He started forward between two rhododendron bushes. ‘Couple of hours and you’ll be out of this icebox and back at the embassy in Khat. Go find me a couple of gals in Thamel and then party.’
Another fifteen minutes of running and crawling brought Boyd to the edge of a long clearing. It looked like someone had been engaged in some serious deforestation. There were scorched bushes and broken trees.
‘Something crashed here, all right,’ he assured himself. Then he saw it.
The satellite looked more like the wreck of a small van than anything that had once orbited the Earth. But for the stars and stripes that were painted on the dirty white fuselage he could easily have mistaken it for some kind of ambulance. And now he could understand exactly why the spy planes had missed it. The bird had crashed through fifty or sixty metres of trees and bushes upon impact, flattening them; but then it had rolled a distance, before coming to rest among some giant-sized bushes and beneath some trees. The Keyhole-Eleven bird couldn’t have looked better hidden from the air if he had tried to camouflage it himself.
Instinctively avoiding the clearing, Boyd started along the tree line toward his objective. Somehow he’d expected a little more opposition. After Jack’s description of a whole group of yetis living in this hidden forest he’d thought he might have to squeeze off a few rounds to defend himself. But so far he hadn’t even heard one of the creatures, let alone seen one. Maybe this was going to take less time than he had thought.
When he reached the bird, Boyd opened the fuselage and looked inside. Upon landing, the satellite computer should have started broadcasting a small signal enabling a remote recovery team to go into action, but this had not happened. It was easy to see why. Two lights on the warning panel, labelled MAIN BUS A UNDERVOLT and MAIN BUS B UNDERVOLT, glowed red. Something had disrupted the flow of power from both the satellite’s small thermonuclear generator and the solar cell panels to all the operation and guidance systems. Bus A was easily accounted for: The solar cells had ripped off upon impact. But the thermonuclear generator feeding through Bus B should have continued functioning. Boyd checked the voltage on the junction and found the needle indicating that it was still producing current. There was a bad connection somewhere. He searched the Bus B junction and found that one of the wires had melted, probably the result of a small fire inside the satellite when Bus A short-circuited. Restoring power was simply a matter of flicking the Bus B switch off for a moment, reconnecting the burned wire, and switching it back on. Bus B was now glowing green.