Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation (28 page)

“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.

“You think he came across, against orders, parachuting in with the Tibetan fighters.”

Yates nodded. “I am certain of it. I know it in my heart. And now you proved it with this cross.”

“Megan Ross knew about your father.”

“We were close friends. More than friends once. She found me with those old letters and we started talking—she loved the intrigue. It became a project for her. She helped me find some of the drop points.” He reached into a pocket of his parka and extracted a small handheld device. A cell phone, Shan thought at first, then the American turned its face toward him. “Global positioning. When the right satellites are overhead it tells your exact longitude and latitude.”

Shan remembered the pieces of the device he had found at the crime scene. “Megan had one,” he suggested. “And you were in a barley field with this one.”

Yates flushed with embarrassment. “I didn’t mean to damage the crops.”

“What did you expect to find at the drop points?”

“I don’t know. Anything. Maybe they died jumping, maybe I would find bones. Maybe one of them would be a place where some of my father lingered, left something of himself. It was the only hard evidence I had, that list of coordinates.”

“And the sign of the hammer and lightning.”

Yates nodded again. “It was drawn on one of those little rolled letters from my father, where he spoke of a new enemy arriving. A couple weeks ago I showed it to Megan, and she drew a copy of it, said she would ask some of the old Tibetans about it.”

“Suppose she did ask some old Tibetans about it. Not long after, she stepped into the car with Minister Wu.”

“Surely they are not connected.”

“You tell me. You knew why she went with the minister that day.”

“No. Yes. I don’t know. We were going to meet, to wait up the road together and intercept the minister’s car so we could have a private conversation about Wu’s development plans. But Megan never showed up that morning. I figured she got some other ride.”

“What she got was a book,” Shan said, “a book she stole from the library in town.”

“A book?”

“It had photos of the leaders of the Red Guard unit that had destroyed all the local temples and gompas, and killed the local monks.” Shan pulled out the photo he had taken from the library and handed it to the American. Yates gasped as he saw the crossed lightning and hammer; his jaw dropped as Shan pointed to the woman at the center of the table.

“It can’t be!”

“Megan was helping you with your project but she had another project that was even more important to her, her Himalayan Compact. This photo, or one like it, provided Megan the preemptive strike she needed. The book had long ago been removed from the library, may even have gotten the prior librarian killed. But the new librarian is a fanatic about having a complete collection. She tracked down what may be the only remaining copy this year. Megan was there in the library, reading it, the day before the murder. That’s when she discovered that Minister Wu had been the commander of the Hammer and Lightning Brigade.”

Yates’s face darkened with despair. “The fool. She should have told me.”

“Wu is a common name. There is no reason that people would have connected the minister to the Red Guard who used to be in Shogo. If people here knew Wu had been the head of the Brigade she would have been totally discredited in the region, her reputation destroyed in the international community she wants to attract. It was Megan’s bargaining chip. But Megan didn’t know the minister had a gun. Wu was as relentless today as she was forty years ago. Megan thought she was going to change Wu’s mind about her new campaign. But Wu would have known it meant the destruction of her career.”

“Surely the minister didn’t kill Megan.”

“There was no sign of a struggle, by either of them. I think Wu did not protest when Megan was shot, may have done it herself. But someone else was there, who was given the gun by Wu.”

“Given?”

“There was no sign of a struggle,” Shan said again. “She handed the gun to the third person, who promptly shot her too. I think the photo got both of them killed.”

“But what does my father . . .” Yates began in confusion.

“Megan was at the library because of your father, she thought she might learn more about the resistance fighters in the region. She never expected to find that photo. But when she did, it changed everything for her. No doubt she was going to give it to you but first she was going to use it against Wu.”

They sat in silence a long time, Yates gazing at the altar, fingering his father’s cross, Shan at the outer edge of the clearing, by the cliff. He too had not fully digested the truth. He let the ice-scented wind scour him, peeling away his misconceptions about the murders. There was no mystery in events, his old friend Lokesh had once told him, only mysteries of the people involved. Like many Chinese, every Tibetan he knew had grown a hard, impenetrable shell around memories of the Cultural Revolution, around the years when the Chinese had cleansed the land of all resistance. But Shan knew now that it was in that black, inaccessible place where the truth would be found.

Chapter Thirteen

YATES WOULD NOT leave the shrine without searching every inch of the ground, hoping for some further sign of his father. Shan helped for a few minutes then sat on the stone bench, extracting the notepad from his pocket, and began writing events and dates, one line at a time in English, starting with the
Religious
Affairs office burns down, Tenzin murdered at the advance camp, Tan
loses pistol, murder of Minister Wu, Director Xie killed, Gyalo attacked
in Shogo.
When Yates appeared at his side, finished with his futile search, Shan extended the notebook.

“What’s this?” the American asked.

“A wise man once said that if the true face of a mountain cannot be known, it is because the one looking at it is standing in its midst. I want to trade, what I know for what you know. I want you to look at what I know, because I am standing in its midst.”

Yates cast a skeptical glance at Shan, shrugged, then went to his backpack and extracted a tattered nylon pouch. He accepted the pad from Shan then emptied the pouch onto the bench. Several old letters, the photos Shan had seen at the base camp, a map, copies of pages from a book, a printed form.

The two men sat in silence for several minutes, Yates flipping pages in Shan’s notepad, writing his own notes. Shan read the form, an official copy of the military service record for Captain Samuel Yates, then the letters, which were nothing more than what Yates had already explained. The copied pages contained a description of Camp Hale from some annal of the Cold War, recounting how a small group of elite intelligence operatives and military experts had created a miniature world for Tibetan trainees in the Colorado mountains, teaching them about Western history, introducing them to hot dogs and hamburgers. The pages from the book included photos, showing American men in uniforms without insignia, some with pipes or cigars in their mouths, others with white khata offering scarves around their necks, traditional Tibetan offerings of friendship. There were a few quotes from some of the participants, recorded years later, reflecting deep admiration for the Tibetans. Shan paused over one passage, reading it twice:

Love of their land and their Buddhist faith burned like an
intense fire in many of the trainees. It so moved the American
trainers that several requested, and were promptly refused, permission
to parachute into Tibet with them when the training
was concluded; others requested transfer to the advance base in
northern India so they could participate in airdrops and radio
support for the missions.

Shan felt a flutter of excitement as he unfolded the map. It was an intricate rendering of the Everest region, in English. He stretched it out with stones on each corner, examining it closely then, noticing Yates’s curious gaze, handed the American his own Chinese map.

“I have heard the term political map in English,” Shan said. “What does it mean?”

“It means cities and towns and highways, manmade features, are included,” Yates explained.

“In China all maps are political,” Shan said, and gestured to the map Yates was unfolding. “The government controls all maps. No military bases are shown but also terrain in sensitive areas is obscured.”

The American uttered a syllable of surprise and began pointing out discrepancies between the two maps. On the Chinese map large expanses along the border were just fields of white, indicating huge ice fields. Most of the border showed only general topographical lines and nothing else. Shan pointed to the American map. “It’s like a different land on your map,” he explained, and settled a fingertip on Tumkot. On the Chinese map the area above the settlement, the high plain that could not be seen from below, consisted entirely of an ice field, marked inaccessible, as the villagers insisted. But the American map showed a more narrow glacier above rough, steep, but open terrain.

With a pencil Shan made a mark on the road that led to the base camp. “The site of the murders,” he noted.

“What’s your point?”

“Ama Apte has admitted she helped Megan Ross with the avalanche that stopped the bus, but she will not explain how she managed such secrecy. No one could have gone up or down the road without being stopped. For someone from Tumkot to be involved they would have had to travel hours by road, and they would have been seen and stopped. But someone who knew these trails could have gone up and over the ridge. A difficult path, judging by the contours, but not impossible for a seasoned trekker.” He saw for the first time four different lightly drawn circles spread miles apart, three of them with X’s through the center. “You haven’t visited this drop zone?” he asked the American, pointing to a circle on the plateau above Tumkot.

“I must have made a mistake when the numbers were written down. There is no way up there. Megan said she tried, and it was impossible. All cliffs and ice along the only possible route.”

Shan studied the map again, and after a moment saw a dotted line that crossed into Nepal along a high altitude pass that was marked inaccessible on the Chinese map. He realized he was looking at the route the sherpas used to invisibly cross back and forth across the border. The border guards no doubt knew about it, but the weather would be so hostile at such an altitude that there would be no manned outpost.

“And you?” Shan asked at last, gesturing to his notebook. “What have I missed?”

“It’s all still a puzzle to me,” the American admitted. “We can ask the fortuneteller about the hidden meaning of twos when we see her again.”

“Twos?”

Yates turned to a page near the front of the pad and pointed to the words, written in English. “Religious Affairs office burns,” he read, and drew a line beneath it that extended past the words. “Tenzin killed” he said, and drew another line. “Minister Wu is killed.” Another line. “Director Xie is killed, on the same day Gyalo is attacked and left for dead,” he finished with another line. With the tip of the pencil he quickly wrote numbers in the spaces between the lines. “Two days, two days, four days. All twos or a combination of two. Ama Apte would probably say the mountain breathes in for a day, then breathes out.” He shrugged. “It’s nothing. I’m possessed by a math demon. Although,” he added in a curious tone, “it’s been two days since the last violence.”

Shan stood, strangely disturbed by Yates’s words, glancing back and forth from the map to the lines and numbers drawn by the American. He stepped to the edge of the cliff, letting the chill wind slam against his face, considering the pattern of life down in the world. Then abruptly he turned and darted over to Yates. “There is a place,” he announced as he urgently packed up the items on the bench, “that lives by a pulse of twos. If we hurry we can be there by sundown.”

YATES HAD NOT stumbled upon the rhythm of the mountain, Shan explained as they pulled into the dusty truckers’ compound in Yates’s red utility vehicle, but the pulse of the Friendship Highway. Shogo was strategically situated on the truckers run between the Nepalese border and Lhasa.

“It’s the natural break point. Drivers can get food and gas, then they sleep in their trucks or buy a cot in the back of the teashop. At dawn they pull out and reach their destination before nightfall. The regular drivers turn around the next morning and repeat the trip.”

“Putting them here every two days,” Yates concluded.

“Gyalo said the men who attacked him were strangers. He knows nearly everyone in town. Everyone else seems to think they were Public Security soldiers. But if they weren’t knobs,” Shan said, “they were transients.”

“So now we’re looking for murderous truck drivers? How many theories are you allowed before you admit failure?”

“Gyalo said someone watched from the shadows as he was beaten. Wu’s killer had help. Two men in black sweatshirts. Most truck drivers would know how to operate a bulldozer, and could arrive at the base camp in a small supply truck without raising suspicion. More than a few are former soldiers.”

They watched until dark, studying every truck that entered the compound, watching for those few that had pairs of drivers, then ventured inside after Yates found a hooded windbreaker to cover his features. The American uttered a low choking sound as they opened the door of the cafe to a powerful scent of grease, cabbage, cigarettes, motor oil and burned rice, then followed Shan to a table in the back corner, where they pushed aside dirty dishes and sat with their backs to the wall.

They ordered noodle soup, which was not as bad as Shan expected, and momos, which seemed to be made of cardboard.

“This is your plan?” Yates muttered. “Sit and wait for two drivers to walk up and confess?” He poked at his stale momos. “Of course they might prefer jail to these dumplings.”

“The plan,” Shan said as he spotted a familiar face exiting the cafe, “is for you to stop speaking English and sit here.” Shan grabbed a newspaper from an empty table and tossed it in front of Yates. “Pretend you read Chinese. I’ll be back.”

Shan stayed in the shadows as he exited the building, following the path that led to the latrine at the rear of the complex then stealing around the parked trucks until he reached the mechanics’ workshop at the far side of the complex. The man under the hood of a small truck was too engrossed in his work to notice Shan enter and lean against the workbench behind him.

“Last I saw him,” Shan declared, “your father was sleeping. I think he will make it.” Jomo’s head jerked up so fast it hit the lifted hood of the truck.

“They don’t allow visitors in the garage,” he groused, pulling an oily cloth from his pocket to wipe his hands.

“When I said it wasn’t Public Security who attacked your father you didn’t seem surprised.”

“I can’t afford trouble. I did a year in prison when I was younger. It still could have been the knobs. They hire people sometimes.”

“As informers, yes. But not for that kind of work. For sake of argument, let’s say it was strangers, like your father said. This is the local market for strangers, you might say, full of Tibet’s new nomads. Men looking for a little extra money, who wouldn’t be recognized.”

“Last spring when an avalanche covered one of the roads they put a sign up here and quickly hired twenty drivers for a couple of days.”

Shan nodded. “What was your year away for?”

“A disagreement over the sky.”

“The sky?”

“All my life I walked the town at night and watched the stars, would sit right in the town square and count meteors. Then someone decided to install street lights, those ugly orange vapor lamps. No more stars. I used to spend summers with shepherds when I was a boy. I have always been good at throwing stones.”

“Civic pride,” Shan suggested, “can take many forms.”

Jomo forced a slow, uneasy grin in reply.

“What if I had a special job, no questions asked? What if I wanted two men in black sweatshirts who weren’t afraid of bending the rules?”

The Tibetan turned to the bench, began sorting through a pile of wrenches. “You are the only one in town interested in saving that Chinese colonel.”

“That Chinese colonel didn’t kill Tenzin or Director Xie.”

Jomo shrugged. “Tenzin was from Nepal. And no one cries over Religious Affairs bureaucrats.”

“When the real killer finds out your father is still alive those two men will probably be sent again. If they can’t find him they will start with you.”

The Tibetan lifted a wrench and looked at Shan, as if considering whether to use it on him or the engine. “I have work to do,”

he complained, then bent over the engine again.

“If you don’t choose a side,” Shan said, “others will choose it for you.” He retreated, though only around the two vehicles in the bays, where he watched Jomo from the shadows.

After several minutes the Tibetan paused and straightened, looking toward the parking lot. He glanced around the garage, then disappeared behind a crude plank door into what no doubt was a tool storage closet. Shan gave him another minute before he followed.

The door of the closet was ajar. Shan hooked a finger around it and silently pulled it open. Jomo stood between two walls on which tools hung, facing a small workbench that had been cleared of all tools. On it sat a small Buddha, a cheap steel casting with streaks of oil on its face. The Tibetan was placing pieces of sweet biscuits in front of the Buddha, as offerings.

“I was still young when the Red Guard became active,” Shan said to his back. Jomo’s breath caught at the sound of his voice but the Tibetan did not move. “They came to my school and made the students gather up every book in a foreign language. They made us put them in a big pile in the courtyard and said we would have a beautiful cleansing fire the next day. That night I went back to school. I pulled out twenty books of history and poetry and replaced them with twenty books of the Chairman’s essays I took from the classrooms.”

“Did they find out?” Jomo asked in a whisper.

“No. But years later, after we returned from reeducation camps in the country, they found my father with Western books he had kept hidden. Some were those I rescued that day. He died from the beating they gave him. He died holding my hand, smiling at me. I always felt somehow responsible.”

“It’s hard to know the right things to do,” Jomo said, speaking toward the Buddha. “It’s hard to know how to be.”