Chandra nodded. “I remember.”
“Come on, let’s look back there.” Bond stepped over the body and moved back into the small main cabin. He counted the corpses.
“The plane has twelve seats for passengers. The crew consisted of the pilot, copilot, and an attendant.” He indicated a woman sitting in a single seat facing the other passengers. “Here she is. There were ten tourists booked on the flight, which would have left two empty seats, right? I count nine bodies.”
“The woman we found near Camp Four would make ten,” Chandra said.
“But Lee Ming and the three hijackers would have made fourteen. One hijacker is accounted for, making eleven. That means there should be eleven bodies in here. Where are the other three?”
“Wait, here’s someone not sitting in a chair,” Chandra said, shining his light in the back of the cabin. It was another man, dressed similarly to the hijacker they found in the cockpit.
“It’s one of them,” Bond said, examining him. “All right, that means there are two missing. Let’s see if Lee Ming is one of these people.”
They each took a side of the plane and shined their flashlights on the faces one by one. The dead were all Caucasian men and women of varying ages. At least three had their eyes open, fixed in a frosty expression of fear.
“He’s not here!” Bond said through his teeth. “Damn!”
“Hold on, James,” Chandra said. “If that woman survived and got out, maybe Lee did, too. And the other hijacker. They couldn’t have got far. They must be in the vicinity.”
“Unless they dropped off the face of the mountain like that woman did. They could be anywhere!”
Chandra knew Bond could be right. “What do we do?”
“Nothing to do except search the area. Let’s look at the ground outside again. Maybe there are some faint traces of footprints or something.”
They came out of the plane and found Marquis and Glass waiting patiently. Paul Baack was standing anxiously nearby, and Otto Schrenk was not far behind him.
“Well?” Marquis asked Bond.
He’s not in there,” Bond said quietly. “We’re going to have to search the surrounding area. Chandra and I will do that. You go on with the salvage operation.”
“Not in there? Are you sure?” Marquis looked as if he might panic.
“Quite sure.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Marquis said. He threw the ski pole he was holding against the side of the aircraft. “That’s just great.”
“Why are you so concerned, Roland?” Bond asked. “You did your job. You got me up here.”
“I just . . . I just wanted you to succeed in your mission, that’s all. I want Skin 17 back in the UK as much as you do.”
For a brief moment Bond thought that Marquis might be the Union operative. Could that be possible? Usually Bond’s instincts were sharp, but at such a high altitude all his senses and reflexes were numbed. He suspected everybody and anybody.
“We’re going to see what we can find,” Bond said, and walked away.
Marquis composed himself and turned to the others. “Right, let’s help set up camp.”
By the second day Camp Five was completed and the rest of the parts had made it up to the site. The salvage operation began, with the first stage being the removal of the corpses from the plane and hauling them down to Camp Four, one at a time. The plan was to start a convoy, assembly-line fashion, with some workers stationed at each of the four lower camps. The sirdar arranged for a yak herd to pick up the bodies at the Base Camp and take them back to Taplejung for a flight to Kathmandu. It was an expensive, time-consuming, dangerous, and absurd thing to do, Bond thought. The families and governments paying for this needless operation should have left the remains on the mountain. It would have been a different story had they been alive. But to go to all this trouble for the dead? At least it made a somewhat feasible cover story. Bond was thankful that he had a different job, although it was one he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to complete.
After three days Bond and Chandra had found no traces of Lee Ming or the other hijacker.
The physical changes one experiences at 7,900 meters are remarkable. Bond felt that every move he made was in slow motion. It was quite like being underwater in a JIM diving suit. He was packed in solid warm clothing, every inch of skin covered, with an oxygen canister on his back and a hose running to his mouth. He was concerned that the team might not have brought enough oxygen to last for the next few days. Even with oxygen, the team still found that they were able to perform only a few seconds of work before having to stop and catch their breath.
Bond sent a message to London via Baack’s laptop that Lee’s body wasn’t in the plane. Tanner came back with M’s instructions to keep looking until Marquis’s job was finished. If Lee wasn’t found by then, there was nothing to do but come home. Bond read between the lines of the coded message and saw her disappointment. He hated to let her down.
There was no news about Helena.
Tired and frustrated, Bond left the tent and found his companion.
“Dammit, Chandra,” Bond said. “If you stumbled out of that plane onto this plateau, where would you go?”
“I’d try to find my way down . . . over there,” he said, pointing to a gradual slope on the south side.
“That’s the first place we looked, remember?”
“Maybe we should look again. There were crevasses down that way that we didn’t examine. Maybe they fell in one.”
“You could be right. The ice seemed very unstable when we were there the other day. Freezing to death in a crevasse isn’t very appealing,” Bond said.
“It is not the way in which one dies that is important,” Chandra said. “It is the reason. Let’s look again.”
Bond knew he was right. “We also haven’t looked over there on the east side of the plateau. Let’s try there first. I want to find that bloody body and go home. All right?”
They had begun to trudge through the snow, when they heard Marquis calling.
“Damn,” Bond said. “Come on, let’s see what he wants now.”
They turned around and went back to the camp HQ, where everyone had gathered. Marquis had already begun talking.
“—with the extra men we hired for the lower camps. The yaks are in place at Base Camp now, and we shouldn’t have too much more to do. Oh, there you are, Bond. I was just saying that our time here is being cut short and we’re trying to determine how much more we can do before we have to get out of here.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“Storms coming,” Baack said. “I got the weather report a few minutes ago. Two successive storms are on their way and will reach the upper altitudes of the mountain by tonight.”
“Bad storms?”
“Severe. Monsoons. One today and one tomorrow.”
“Right,” said Marquis, “and they can be quite deadly up here. We either have to take shelter for several hours or get down.”
“I can’t go yet,” Bond said. “I haven’t come all this way just to turn around. Our tents are built to withstand a storm. I’ll risk waiting the two storms out.”
“I figured you would say that. However, I must offer the option to everyone on the team of going down now. Some of you can make it all the way to Camp Three before the storm hits, or at the very least Camp Four. The next day you can descend to Base Camp. Just remember that you’d have to come all the way back up so we can finish the job.”
“How much is left?” Leaud asked.
“We’ve estimated it to be at least two more days, not counting the rest of today. That would completely clean out the plane. At the rate we’re going, we can send down only three bodies a day. There are six left.”