Illuminated against the bolt was the figure of a man. Tall-too tall to be a Tibetan or a Chinese. The lightning struck thick and hot, and it lasted long enough to show the man clearly as he came down off the plateau.
He came bareheaded, Kelsang saw, and his clothes were thin and insufficient for the chill Tibetan night. His hands were fists and the wrists were very thick, like lengths of wood.
Kelsang looked down. Two Chinese soldiers, their faces hard under their green helmets, were pointing their assault rifles up at him.
They yelled at Kelsang to keep his head high, so the lightning would know where to strike. Unless he wished to tell the truth now.
There was no truth in Kelsang Darlo, so he lifted his head and looked to the south.
Another thunderbolt came and picked out the thick wristed shadow. Perhaps he was some hermit come down off the mountains to seek shelter from the storm. A monk, possibly. He would be a very sorry monk when the Chinese caught him, Kelsang thought.
Yet the man was coming undaunted, purposeful and proud. The way his grandfather had walked down the valley in the days when Tibetans were masters of their own land. It was good to see a man walk as if there was no fear in his heart. Tibet had been so long bereft of such men.
Who was this unafraid one? Kelsang wondered.
The next bolt struck to the west. Something exploded, and Kelsang turned. A roof smoldered. And in the pile, a black shape that had been human a moment before gave off smoke and a sweetish charcoal odor that soon came to Kelsang's nose.
Kelsang recognized the roof. It belonged to Paljor Norbu, a simple barley farmer. A good man. Perhaps his next life would be happier, Kelsang thought sadly. He had not been the same since his only daughter, a nurse, had walked off the mountain before the eyes of the entire village.
A wailing coming from under the burning roof reminded Kelsang that there were those who had still to contend with this life.
The next peal of thunder came from very far away. As did the next. East. And then north. Then east again. It seemed that the storm was changing direction. Perhaps, Kelsang thought, only one would catch the lightning this bitter night. Perhaps he would live.
The soldiers of Beijing thought so, too. They began to mutter to themselves. They still had no answers. The captain would punish them if the truth was not uncovered, and if the captain did not, surely the lost grenades themselves would inflict their own punishment at a later, unexpected time.
Then, just as Kelsang began to breathe more easily, he felt the hair at the back of his neck rise and the unmistakable warning tang of ozone filled his nostrils.
The lightning! It had found him. It was coming.
There was no time to think and no possibility of escape. In the millionth of a second it took for his senses to react to the knowledge of impending lightning, Kelsang's brain could only process the certainty of death.
He had no time feel fear or remorse or any emotion. There was only time to die.
A brilliant blue-white light stabbed through Kelsang's closed eyelids as if they were red-tinted glass. The thunderbolt struck with the force of a thousand blows. It seemed to strike his chest like a stone fist that exploded the air from his lungs and knocked him off his feet.
The thunder smote his ears. He was surprised he could hear the thunder. He should be dead. Was he dead? Sometimes men survived lightning. Sometimes it did not kill at once.
Kelsang thought his eyes were open. But all the world was blue-white. Was he dead or just blind? He felt a pain in his lungs, and the quick, sharp intake of his next breath brought pain. He breathed!
Blinking the harsh lightning light from his eyes, Kelsang tried to feel his body.
"Give me your hand, pal," an alien voice said. It was a man's voice, speaking English, a language Kelsang knew imperfectly.
Blindly Kelsang lifted one hand and felt a wrist. Hard, thick, as solid as a yak's horn. The hand grasped his with firm strength, and Kelsang was yanked to his feet.
The blue-white had gone from his eyes, and in the darkness a hard, humorless face looked at him. It was white and strong like a skull sheathed in porcelain flesh. The man wore simple black clothes. His eyes were deep and dark and without human warmth.
Behind him a fork of lightning seared the night sky, throwing the white man wearing black into relief.
The thunder, when it came seconds later, reminded Kelsang of the man's voice-low, threatening, awful in its muted power.
"Who-who are you?" Kelsang stuttered.
"Doesn't matter. Go home. Protect your family."
And the man stepped back into the darkness. Kelsang watched him go. He shifted from man to shadow to something that seemed to be there and then wasn't.
Kelsang did not go inside his home. He tried to follow the strange white man. In the darkness he tripped over the bodies of the PLA soldiers who had forced him to stand on his roof and brave the elements.
At first Kelsang thought that the soldiers had been relieved of their heads and their helmets had been placed on the stumps of their necks to hide the gory wounds.
But when he looked more closely, Kelsang saw that something had come down with great force on the tops of the helmets, driving them down with a dread force that squeezed their soft human heads into the ridiculously small confines of their helmets.
Kelsang looked for the footprints of the man who had done this awesome thing-the same one he now realized who had struck him with preserving force, carrying him out of the path of the lightning bolt.
There were no footprints. The ground was soft and muddy from the rain. But there were no footprints save for his own and those of the dead soldiers.
Still, Kelsang searched the village for the being who had done these miraculous things.
He found more soldiers. Dead. Dead in horrible, impersonal ways. Heads twisted around backward. Arms torn and flung aside.
Yet none had screamed out as death overtook him.
Even as he thought this, Kelsang heard a man scream. Loud and long. He ran toward the sound.
And there he found Captain Ran Guohua on his knees.
The white man stood over him. It was a joyous sight. The captain on his knees, his head bowed, mouth open in anguish. The white man was simply holding the captain by the back of his neck, somehow exerting enough pressure that the captain's legs refused to move and his arms hung limp in his lap.
As he watched, the white man gave the captain a final wrench, and the captain simply gurgled.
A hand snapped down edge-on and sheared the captain's twisted face off as cleanly as if a broad blade had dropped. The implacable one released the captain's dead carcass, and it fell forward into the mess of its detached face.
Gingerly Kelsang approached the white man. "Jigme."
The white man turned his expressionless face. "What's that?"
"I call you Jigme. In my language, it means 'dreadnaught ' You are the dreadnought who cannot be stopped. Where you come from, Dreadnought?"
The white man pointed toward the mountains to the southwest wordlessly. He seemed preoccupied.
"It is said that among those mountains is the abode of Gonpo," Kelsang said in a trembling voice. "Are you Gonpo?"
The man did not answer directly. "I need to get to Lhasa," he said.
"There are horses."
"No cars?"
"We are poor village. Only Chinese have jeeps here."
"Show me the Chinese jeeps," said the white man, who might not be a man after all.
AS REMO WILLIAMS followed the Tibetan whose life he had saved to the other side of the village, people began pouring out of their houses. They saw the dead Chinese soldiers scattered about like so many shattered puppets. The sight made them cry out.
The Tibetan called back to them in his native language. Remo understood almost none of it. Just two words. Gonpo and Jigme. He wondered who Gonpo was supposed to be. Probably some Himalayan legend. The abominable snowman or the local Hercules.