“Dr. Gould, what do you see? Who… do you see?” she asked her shivering patient.
“Deiter! A-and Thomas… and…” she stuttered, pushing herself up on her hands and retreating against the headboard of the bed.
“Who is Deiter? And Thomas, who is he?” Dr. Basu asked with her velvet voice that seemed to calm Nina instantaneously.
“The yeti in the cave,” Nina spoke evenly, as if in a trance for a moment, reminiscing.
“Did they hurt you?” the doctor asked, while Sam, Purdue, Paddy, and Neville sat in tense anticipation.
“They were going to kill me, they said. I pretended to be from the Black Sun, because they were umm… also… no, they were some… they were German and bad,” Nina struggled.
“That narrows it down,” Sam remarked softly.
The others hushed him.
“Sam?” Nina said suddenly, snapping out of her delirium. “Is that Sam?”
“Aye, fruitcake, it’s me,” the whimsical journalist with the smoldering dark eyes played and came to her side. Gradually the blur dissipated into a clear veil and she recognized the men sitting on the far of the room.
“Sam!” she smiled, finally animating her wan complexion with a positive emotion. “You were with me in the tunnel when I was scared!”
He looked back quickly at his companions, puzzled, but they shrugged and egged him on to go with it. Purdue got up and came to stand next to Sam, his clear eyes and taller frame being a stark contrast to Sam’s.
“Hey, Dave,” she smiled, as he took her hand.
“Hello, love,” he answered. “What the hell were you doing in that mole’s heap?
“Are the yeti still here, Dr. Gould?” Dr. Basu asked.
Nina shook her head, “No, just my friends… and Neville.”
“Hey,” Neville frowned at the exclusion, but Nina laughed.
“I’m just fucking with you, Indian Jones,” she joked. They could almost see the pink flush back in her pretty face.
“Indian Jones?” Purdue repeated in amusement.
“Aye. He is an archeologist, and he is Indian, get it?” she replied, rousing a good chuckle among them.
“Nina, not to piss on your parade, but I’m afraid I have to know what happened down there while you still have a vivid recollection of it,” Paddy interfered politely from the foot of her bed.
“Please, Agent Smith, I do not want her agitated right now,” Dr. Basu appealed to him.
“No, I’ll be fine, doctor,” Nina assured Dr. Basu with a sturdy nod, much like her old self. She took a deep breath. Her eyes ran from one visitor to the other, not seeing any trace anymore of the men who held her in the bowels of the excavation site.
“We saw nobody else there when we got there,” Neville mentioned with some concern.
“I don’t know what to say, Neville,” she answered. “There were four men with me down there, those very men you and I saw before the task force got there. Those things that killed the other members of the Cammerbach party, it was them.”
“And their names were Deiter, Thomas… and…?” Paddy asked, taking notes.
“I don’t remember. Those two I remembered because they were primarily the ones threatening me and dragging me along,” she told them. Sam shook his head, looking bothered by the whole thing, while Purdue just listened.
“Why did you go alone?” Paddy asked. “Had Sam not asked me to find you, and had Neville not been available at the lodge to guide me to the dig site, you would be dead as a doornail right now, young lady,” Paddy reprimanded her gently. “It was a bloody stroke of luck that all this happened at the same time from all parties involved. You are remarkably lucky. I don’t know what god you believe in, but he or she is genuinely attending his or her post.”
“Synchronicity,” Purdue agreed.
“Why did you need to find me, Sam?” she asked. Purdue and Sam looked at each other before Purdue filled her in, “We’ll discuss that when you are well.”
She could read their faces. They were up to something illegal again. It was obvious that they did not want to talk in front of outside individuals.
Here we go again, into the belly of the beast with my two best wingmen, Nina thought, and she knew that soon she would be immersed into the underworld of relic hunters and nick-of-time survival games again… just the way she liked it.
Chapter 10
Special Agent Patrick Smith and his team of subordinates pulled out of Tibet by the next day, en route back to Edinburgh to have the strange generator analyzed. Patrick and his assistant, Agent James Gallagher, were in possession of the object that held foreign technology, found on the person of Dr. Nina Gould when they rescued her from near death in the sub-zero temperatures of the Himalayas.
“James, please call Helen at Exova and let her know that we will be delivering the Dewar by 7pm tonight, her time,” Paddy told his right-hand man while they were preparing to take off in their private aircraft at Paro Airport.
“Yes, sir,” James replied and moved to the back of the plane to make the call while Paddy called in his errand to his superiors, using his usual subterfuge to convince them it was in the interest of Britain’s security, which it actually was. Discovering such an unprecedented item was most definitely a dangerous acquisition to any civilian, unless a reputable company could verify by chemical analysis that it was nothing to fret about.
But Paddy had a hunch that what Nina brought with her from apparent oblivion was of historical and scientific significance. What perplexed him and the archeologist assisting him there was how she seemed to have come out of the wall of the cavern. There was no crawlspace, because they combed the place after she was taken to hospital. How could a team of eight men, all guides and hired local laborers, explore the hole the Cammerbach party excavated and not find one single duct or vent break off from the main tunnel, but Nina recalled in detail where she went from there and returned, no less.
He had to get to the bottom of it, but first he needed to find out what the device did and why was it so significant, if Nina was indeed not delirious, that a group of killers would send her to retrieve it. Frustrated, he tried to think of something else, but he just could not wrest the idea of not being able to examine the object himself before it was opened by skilled chemical scientists in the correct environment.
After a terrifying takeoff from the world’s most dangerous airport, Paddy asked for a stiff drink and made good use of it. He wondered what Sam and Purdue were up to. Patrick Smith was no fool, and he knew that the three of them — Nina, Sam, and Purdue — were always caught up in some unsavory company when they got together.
I’d have to keep a keen eye on that bunch, he thought as he went for his second whisky. I mean, I’m glad summoning me to help look for Nina pretty much saved her skin, but it was no use saving her from one certain death only to dump her into another.
He was in a position to clean up most of their messes, provided they did not leave too many traceable problems behind, but sometimes he wondered if Sam being his best friend was coaxing him into enabling them to operate above the law and under the radar. Was he the reason they sometimes got away with things others would be incarcerated for?
He had to jump through hoops less than six months before to cover up the destruction of the freakish and exotic animal bombed by the Royal Navy off the coast of Scotland. And the discovery of the grotesque colossus that could have posed a catastrophic threat to the ocean and marine environment was once again a result of Nina Gould and whatever company she kept.
In the same instance he had to get his Hazmat affiliates to investigate her property in Oban. And subsequently he had the well under her house filled in with rock and concrete before it was officially declared a historical site to keep it from being demolished at the demand of Oban’s terrified citizens. They still claimed that her house was a portal to some dimension of monsters, but now she could move back in after she thought she had lost her entire life’s savings on that house.