He tried in vain to recreate in his mind the pattern of ropes he had seen that day on the rocks, then spotted another remnant of red rope still wrapped around the broken column of rock that had stopped the bus, now pushed along the edge of the road. The rope had been used to ease the column forward as the wedges were inserted. But it made no sense. The strength of several men would have been required to topple the rock, but they would have been conspicuous to anyone coming up the road.
Kypo sat at the edge of the road examining a section of the red rope that he had cut away from the debris. It was, they both knew, some of the rope included in the inventory they had done a week earlier.
“How do I set up an avalanche to trigger when a bus passes?” he asked the Tibetan.
Kypo considered the terrain a moment. “These rocks get rearranged all the time,” he said, as if the mountain itself had willed their release. “It wouldn’t take much persuasion.” He pointed to the slope above the road. “Undermine a few of the biggest boulders until they begin to roll, then brace them. Chip away the support of the column so that when it is hit by the boulders it snaps.”
Shan realized the rope had not been used to pull the column down, but to stabilize the loose rocks above. “How would I know how far to chip into the base of the column?”
Kypo shrugged. “Luck, I guess,” he said with an uneasy glance toward Shan. They both knew it had taken consummate skill with chisel and wedge to loosen the column just enough to be toppled by a rolling boulder at the right moment.
“But the timing of the avalanche wasn’t just luck.”
Kypo adjusted his glasses, his gaze shifting back and forth from the road to the slope. “If you knew how to work with ropes and harnesses, you could fashion a tether, like a cradle, and roll the stones into it, putting pressure on it so the stones would roll away when the tether was released.” He pointed to another large outcropping that shadowed the slope. “I would do it behind there, so no one in a vehicle coming up from the valley could see me. Stay in the shadow, release the ropes, and run away into the maze of rocks above.”
“It might take only one person to trigger such a rockslide, but more than one to rig it.”
Kypo shrugged again. “Two, four, ten, who cares? When the wind blows your house down, you don’t care about how many clouds were pushing it.”
It was a particularly Tibetan perspective. Violence was like a storm, seizing both those committing it and their victims. It was a waste of time to try to explain, it was only necessary to burrow into a safe place and let it blow itself out.
“How many people in the base camp knew about the bus?”
“No one. It was a Public Security secret. Why?”
“Because someone planned all this very carefully. Stole the ropes and rigged the avalanche in advance. The ropes were taken from the base camp days ago, and the camp is full of people who know how to rig ropes. How long do you think it will be before Public Security realizes that?”
The words seemed to hit Kypo like a blow. His face darkened. He whipped the section of rope in his hand against a rock. His livelihood, and that of his entire village, depended on the base camp, and Public Security could easily shut it down if it suspected the camp was connected to the murders.
Shan paced along the rocks that had tumbled down the slope to block the bus, now pushed to the side of the road. Halfway along the row he paused. At first he thought the faint pattern was a trick of the light. Then he knelt and studied the marks, seeing more, one on each of the large rocks. Someone had lightly chalked an ancient Tibetan mantra, an invocation of a protector demon, on the rocks facing the road. It had been done after the stones had been bulldozed to the shoulder. He stood and looked at the warning signs and bullet casings on the opposite side of the road. The opposing teams had squared off, facing each other.
He watched Kypo climb back up the road and followed, finding him staring at the killing ground with a hollow expression as Jomo, leaning against the truck, nervously watched him.
“There are people already leaving for the season,” Kypo stated, his gaze fixed on the outline of the bodies Shan had drawn in the soil. “Good porters, the seasoned ones who know the mountain, will be hard to find.”
“Because the traditional ones respect the mountain deity,” Shan ventured.
Kypo nodded. “Violence like this could anger the mountain for months. Every team last week had to turn back from the summit because of storms.”
“There are always storms.”
“Not like these. One of them had ice needles, like little knives. Two sherpas came back with bloody faces, their parkas ripped to shreds. She’s furious, more than anyone can remember,” Kypo declared, and walked around the truck to climb in.
Shan knelt again, studying the contour of the ground. Where they had not dumped the fresh soil the knobs had raked the ground clean, but he perceived the bare suggestion of a disturbance, a subtle mound with cracks at the top, as if the mountain were pushing something out, rejecting something. He bent and with his fingers probed the loosened dirt, quickly extracting three dirty pieces of black plastic and metal. He experimented with the pieces a moment, fitting them this way and that, until he had constructed most of what had been a cell phone. Someone had smashed it before burying it. He gazed at it in confusion. The only wireless phones that worked in the region were the larger satellite phones. Such a phone would have been useless. Why would someone-the murderer? — think it so dangerous it had to be destroyed?
He rose and showed the fragments to Jomo, holding them together so they were clearly recognizable. “What was this phone in its prior life?” he queried absently.
Jomo’s expression became very serious. He took the pieces, turning them over in his palm, then looked up. “A prayer wheel,” he declared.
The words filled Shan with a strange, unexpected sadness, and he spoke no more as they climbed back into the truck.
The Himalayas were the great planetary train wreck. Here, at the high spine of the world Shan now gazed over, was where tectonic plates constantly crashed and ground, here the Eurasian plate was clawing its way over the Indian subcontinent. As he paced along a high knoll, waiting as Jomo scanned the slopes with binoculars, Shan watched a huge slab of ice and snow slough off the side of the nearest mountain, taking house-sized boulders with it. Here was a place where worlds were constantly changing, and Shan had a gnawing sense that he was caught up in one of the seismic shifts that would alter the region forever.
After leaving Kypo at Rongphu gompa, the monastery nearest the base camp, Shan had directed Jomo to cruise slowly along the high mountain roads, pausing frequently to scan the slopes.
“There!” Jomo now called, pointing to a white spot on the adjoining slope before handing Shan the glasses. He studied the familiar white land cruiser that was parked on a steep dirt track near a shepherd’s house, then motioned Jomo back into the truck. They reached the weather-beaten structure just as Constable Jin emerged around a corner.