“Not a scientist,” Shan observed.
“Not a scientist,” Yates admitted. “Once I heard my aunt and uncle talking about him with an older cousin. They were angry at him, said he could have come back and had a rich career as a pilot with the airlines. None of that made him alive for me. I wanted to know the sound of his laugh, wanted to know what was in his heart, to know the words he would have used to put me to bed if he had ever returned. They kept secrets about him, I knew that. Once when I was nine they were away and I found a shoebox hidden in their bedroom closet filled with letters and photos. There was a cloth pouch with little rolled up papers, only an inch wide, each tied with strips of leather. I had no clue what they were, just some strange adult thing. They frightened me somehow. They had an Eastern scent, incense I learned later. The paper was different, like it was handmade. The letters were tiny, in tiny handwriting.
“The early letters, the normal letters, were mostly to my mother. They looked like they had never been touched by her. I don’t think they were ever delivered to her, because she divorced my father a year after I was born and my aunt and uncle never spoke to her. I took a few and kept them under my mattress, reading them over and over. He wrote to her about a place called Camp Hale, hidden in some mountains somewhere.
“Whatever he was doing was a big secret. He kept saying it was very important and someday he would explain everything. What he did speak of made it sound like he was a professor. My students have come along faster than anyone expected, he would say, we are finished with our first round of classes and everyone passed with flying colors. But it was a strange kind of school. Sometimes it sounded like he was a student himself, saying he had finished his course in winter survival and was moving on to navigation and language.
“The more I asked, the less my aunt and uncle wanted to talk about him, as if he was some kind of mistake, which meant I must be some kind of mistake. I began to get angry at them. I took the shoebox out of their room and hid it in the attic. I took the cylinders of paper to a secret place I had up on the mountainside above the house and read them all. In them my father wrote about being in the Himalayas, about the wonderful people he was meeting. He drew little pictures in the margins. Some of strange churches with steeples like upside down ice cream cones. Shaggy cows with long horns. I opened another, and another. He asked about me in every note, kept saying the mission was going well. I couldn’t understand any of it. The notes scared me. Finally I got my nerve up and dropped one on the dinner table. My aunt became very angry and wouldn’t answer my questions. She said there was no need to drag up that rotten history. My uncle just became sad. Later he told me that his brother, my father, had sent a note mailed by someone else, from a city in India. In it he said he had found a way to send messages back that would be safe, that he would send bronze statues of a god called Yama, that the people who made them used the hollow compartment inside it to hold prayers and things. When the statue came my uncle was to cut open the base or loosen its solder with heat and he would find letters inside, wrapped up like the prayers that usually went inside. My father said that he was sending them because if something happened to him he wanted his son to know of the good work he was doing, of how important it was for the world. He said he would send a statue every couple of months, because he was allowed to send gifts home but letters were always censored.
“I couldn’t really understand. It seemed like my father was a prisoner in India. I heard my aunt telling someone that my father had become addicted to the drugs grown there and dropped out, then died in some alley in Calcutta. My uncle got angry at my aunt and said my father was no drug addict, just a good soldier.” Yates looked down at the ground for a moment, seeming overwhelmed by his memories. Shan gave the crucifix back to the American, who closed his fist around it and pressed it to his heart.
“So there I was, eleven years old and as confused as ever. My father was an addict, he was a soldier, a pilot, a professor, a prisoner, a mountain climber. I would have dreams about him, but he was always in shadows. No more of the statues ever came after the first, my uncle told me. But he gave me one more thing, a letter from the Army sent to him as next of kin. My father had been killed in the service of his country, it said, and he was being awarded a medal for bravery. The circumstances of his death did not permit recovery of his body. I didn’t know what else to do, where else to turn for the truth. I put the letter in the shoebox and didn’t open it again until I was years out of college. That’s when I noticed something in that letter from the army, a printed line at the top that said Office of Special Operations. I began writing my own letters to the government. It was a slow process. I had my business to worry about, running a sporting goods store first, then my trekking and climbing business. I married and got divorced. But I kept writing letters, to the army, to senators, to the veterans’ office. The few responses I received said all the files on the matter were classified, top secret. Eventually I found out Camp Hale was high in the Colorado mountains and I went there, at least to the nearest town. The people there said it had been used for radioactive testing so everyone stayed away from it.
“Then five years ago the files were declassified,” Yates continued, “and made available to the public.”
“Camp Hale,” Shan suggested, “had nothing to do with atomic tests.”
“Camp Hale was the only facility in the army that came close to a Himalayan habitat. It had been used as a training ground for mountain commandos in World War Two. The army loaned it to Special Operations, what later became the Central Intelligence Agency. A small group in the American government was formed for the purpose of supporting Tibetan independence. They brought in Tibetan resistance fighters to teach them English, survival training, navigation, radio operation, parachute jumping. It was so secret the Tibetans didn’t even know where they were. That’s what my father was doing, training the resistance. Eventually a base for the resistance army was set up in Nepal, along the Tibetan border. I finally received my father’s service records. They showed that after a year at Hale he asked to be transferred to Nepal, with the fighters he had trained.”
Yates stood and paced along the altar. “After that everything gets murky. Officially, Americans never crossed the border, except on air missions at night to drop Tibetans and supplies, sometimes hundreds of miles inside Tibet. Officially, my father was stationed at the base in Nepal the whole time. Officially, he was on a plane that never returned. But eventually I tracked down some of the other Americans involved, old men now, all retired. To a man they insisted no plane was ever lost, and several had known my father, said he was a great climber, that he fervently believed in what they were doing for the Tibetans. Not one would say anything about what happened to him. But when one of them, a pilot who still had a map of Tibet on the wall, discovered I was leading climbing expeditions onto Everest, he opened an old file and wrote down a series of numbers for me.”
“Map coordinates,” Shan said with a rush of realization. He unconsciously touched his pocket with the paper on which he had transcribed the numbers Yates had hidden in his cot.
“All within a hundred-mile radius of Everest. A preferred location because the Chinese air bases were far removed from this area, and the Chinese planes couldn’t handle the wild winds off the mountains.” Yates paused, gazed again at the row of silent Yamas as if waiting for them to speak.