The Bone Hunters (4 page)

“Concrete,” she said, grinning at Jurgen.

Using a marking pen, she outlined the circumference of the striations and then had them return to the Eagle's Nest. Tom Luciani assembled some basic digging tools and they were soon on their way back down, this time with Jurgen replaced on the freight bed by Luciani and Roy Boulting.

Two sharp blows from a small pickax caved in a small section of concrete. Lexy saw that the concrete wall patch had a thickness of about four inches. Dampness had softened the concrete and Luciani expanded the opening to a hole about three feet in diameter using an iron bar. Beyond the opening, there was only blackness.

“I'm going in,” said Lexy, turning on a high-intensity flashlight and positioning herself to climb through.

Crawling inside, she tipped the flashlight upward to confirm there was enough space for her to stand up and then played the beam in a midlevel arc. The cache looked to be the size of a railroad car. It resembled her grandmother's basement, cluttered, chaotic, and smelling of mold and mildew.

One reason for it was only a few feet away. What at first appeared to be a small herd of woolly animals lying dead on the floor turned out to be a pile of fur coats, seemingly thrown in at the last minute before the cache was sealed.

Beyond the furs were stacks of unframed canvases piled on crates of labeled medical supplies. She turned over one of the canvases and bathed it in light. It was an oil painting, a mother and child standing in a sun-splashed garden. She gently scraped away the light patina of dust in the bottom corner, revealing the painter's signature. A. Renoir.

She slowly worked her way through a six-foot-high corridor of hastily piled wooden crates that were labeled
DEUTSCHE BANK
. One of them had split open, revealing what looked like a bar of gold.

There was no way for her to know yet if the Norse documents stolen from the Trondheim Museum were part of the treasure lode that had been hastily secreted in the stone cavern, but she felt confident they were.

She was unable to escape a feeling of failure, a letdown she couldn't explain at first. It was a feeling that she had uncovered a place of plunder, that she had exposed something morally corrupt, a reminder of the evil that was
Nazism, and perhaps something that should have remained buried.

Crawling back through the hole, she regained her place on the freight bed.

“As soon as we are back on top, please call Dieter in the German Department of Interior,” she said. “It's a looter's paradise in there.”

Exhausted, she made her way back to the Eva Braun Room. Closing the door, she began to remove her soiled clothes, desperate for a long, hot bath and a full glass of Calvados.

“I vership you, Alexandra,” came Jurgen's voice from the shadows near the closet.

He came up behind her, making a low noise like a barking seal. His hands began groping her breasts as he shoved her forward, using his strength to force her over the edge of Eva Braun's dressing table.

“Get off me,” she demanded.

His face craned around to kiss her, his eyes looking crazed.

She raised her right leg and stomped down on his instep with her boot heel. He let out a yelp of pain and released his grip.

“Du Schlampe,”
he hissed in German.

“Yes, she's a bitch,” came a deep, resonant voice behind them.
“And du bist gefeuert.”

Lexy turned to see the massive figure filling the doorway. He was smiling at her in a paternal way.

“Barnaby,” she said.

11 May

Qiao Jia Bao Village

Sichuan Basin, China

Yu Wei watched from the kitchen window of her cottage as a lone mallard circled twice over the lake and slowly descended to the shallow, fetid water at the edge of the bank. As soon as it landed, the bird tried to clean itself from the polluted lake water before attempting to climb up to the grassy shoreline. That was when she saw it could not stand up on both legs.

Seeing the bird was in distress, she slowly approached it, noticing immediately that one of its legs was either broken or badly sprained. Kneeling next to it, she began to sing the first verse to the Buddhist chant her mother had taught her as a little girl. Somehow it seemed to ease the bird's fear and agitation. When it was completely relaxed, she picked it up and carried it back to her cottage.

After creating a splint by shaving two small wooden stems from a block of soft wood, she carefully set the leg
and fastened the stems in place with silk thread. She then entrusted the bird to Me Lei, the ten-year-old daughter of her closest neighbor, showing the girl where the mallard could rest its broken leg in the small spring behind her cottage.

Wei returned to the job she had been doing, which was cleaning the sweet potatoes she had picked earlier that day from the acreage shared by all the farmers in the village. Her yams should have been plump and mature by now but instead were stunted and soft. The fibrous skin sloughed off as she tried to rinse them in the enamel tub.

Wei spent the rest of the afternoon preparing the message on note cards for the evening prayer service she would be leading that night at the village meeting hall. Remembering how the mallard had recoiled at the putrid condition of the lake, Wei recalled her early childhood years when the water had been pure, a welcome resting place for migrating ducks, geese, and other waterbirds. She silently vowed that she would help restore those days again.

Wei had left the village at the age of seven to enroll in the classical Chinese dancing academy in Chengdu. A prodigy, she had become its leading dancer at fifteen. Twenty years later, she had been forced at thirty-five to retire like the other dancers to make way for younger artists.

Wei decided to return home to her small farming village in Sichuan. By then, her parents had died, their ashes spread on the lake they had once cherished. She moved back into the thatched hut where she had been born and set to work farming their family's share of the community-owned acreage.

At forty-seven, she still maintained her proud and lithe dancer's figure. Her skin was taut and unblemished, her large brown eyes stunning against her polished ivory complexion. Her only concession to vanity lay in keeping her face covered with a broad-brimmed hat when working in the fields.

Unlike Wei, many of the villagers had recently been beset with a range of serious health problems. The village's “barefoot doctor” had told Wei that some of the medical conditions, including an alarming number of cases of bone cancer, were probably caused by the fact that many villagers drew their drinking water supply from the lake.

Wei thought she knew what was happening. Five years earlier, the Dong Tao Chemical Corporation had begun buying up farmland in the area around the lake to the north of the village. Those farmers who refused to accept the company's purchase offer had had their land confiscated by the local municipal court.

A few months after moving back to the village, Wei walked the two miles north along the edge of the lake to the site of the factory. As she approached the chain-link fence that surrounded it, the noxious air made her eyes water and her nose run. In the distance, she could see a man wearing a mask in a bulldozer moving material from the factory to a twenty-foot-high pile of waste deposited nearby.

Examining the terrain, she could see that each time it rained, the waste pile would leach down the hill toward the lake. The trees below it were brown and dying, the bark looking as if it had been burned by fire.

Wei returned home determined to try to make the
factory stop its actions. Nearly everyone in the village was able to contribute at least a small amount of money to the effort each month. When she felt she had enough, Wei traveled to Meishan and retained a young lawyer to represent them.

The lawyer quickly learned that the factory manufactured chlorate, which was used in bleach and disinfectant. Its waste products included chromium 6, which was known to cause cancer and respiratory problems. Wei engaged him to bring a suit against the chemical company, alleging that it was polluting the land and water around it.

Before the action could be brought to the regional court, however, the lawyer suddenly disappeared, and no other lawyer in Meishan would take the case. Wei remained undeterred. By then, she had acquired an inner strength to see her through any and every trial. It came down to one simple word.

Faith.

The holy man had arrived one night at her door in the midst of a fierce rainstorm.

“I seek shelter, Shou Yu,” he said when she opened the door.

“How do you know my real name?” she asked. “Wei is my stage name.”

“I know all about you, Little Jewel,” he replied. “I have journeyed far to come to this place.”

In manner and dress, he looked like nothing more than a common beggar, wrinkled with age and dressed in a simple wool robe drawn at the waist by a sheep's wool strap and black cotton slippers. His smiling face reminded her of an ancient monkey. Moved by his plight, she
invited him to stay for the night, making him comfortable on her spare sleeping pallet in front of the fire. In the morning she asked if he had eaten recently, and he responded, “Not for a few days.”

He ate like a ravenous bird, consuming four poached eggs with steamed corn bread and peanut milk. The holy man remained with her for a month, slowly rebuilding his strength. Each evening he would talk to her about his own life journey from the westernmost province of China, where he once fought alongside Mao Tse Tung against the Japanese invaders, but now devoted his life to sharing the word of the Ancient One.

“I can see that you are eager to learn, Little Jewel,” he said, “and I will do my best to teach you.”

He had come with a message, he said, and he wanted to share it with her. It was a message of hope along with the promise of eternal life and inner peace. The Son of the Universe had descended from heaven to save the entire Chinese race, he said. He had come to her because she had been chosen to play a special role in leading her people. She was set aside to serve.

During the days and nights he stayed with her, he told her about the discovery of the bones of the Ancient One in 1926. He was the original man, he assured her, the Son of the Universe who taught the earliest Chinese people to live in accordance with the highest qualities of the universe—truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, labor, and love. Through the Ancient One, there was a chance for every man and woman to join in that spiritual journey.

It all suddenly made sense to her. The meaning of life itself and her place in the great firmament, simply but
magically told. A week later, Wei asked the elders to introduce the holy man to the entire village.

When he spoke to them that night bathed in the gentle glow of the oil lamps, the holy man's words about the Ancient One's power to heal the sick and finding a path to eternal life seemed to resonate with them all. What other hope did they have to survive the disaster looming in front of them, their drinking water poisoned, their babies dying, their crops withering in the sun? By the time the holy man had moved on a few weeks later, all but a handful of the villagers had embraced his truth.

They would need allies, Wei decided, and she began trying to rally the farmers in the nearby villages to their cause. By then she had taken to wearing the same simple garb as the holy man. Her proselytizing of the faith began to find converts around the countryside. Many came to meet her and listen to the message of truth. A roving reporter at the provincial newspaper even wrote a story about her.

•   •   •

Zhou Shen Wui gazed out at the sun-splashed provincial countryside as it flashed past the bulletproof windows of the pressurized railroad car. With the train traveling at more than two hundred fifty miles an hour, the distant panorama sped past in lush copper brushstrokes. Whenever his eyes would lock on something closer to the train, the fleeting image of a horse or a tractor would disappear a millisecond later.

Li Shen Wui bowed at the entrance to the dining compartment and waited to be summoned.

“Enter,” said Zhou, a benign smile on his pink, rotund face.

At his age of fifty-eight, his bald head retained a fringe of the rare ginger hair color that had once been lacquered into a luxuriant pompadour. Only his butterscotch eyebrows remained thick and bristly above his gold-flecked brown eyes.

“Thank you, my lord,” said his oldest son.

Li came and stood by the inlaid mahogany dining table that had once graced the palace of the Yellow Emperor in Xinm. He formally bowed to his father again before sitting down across from him.

Zhou speared a chilled jumbo prawn from a filigreed silver platter and placed the crustacean in his mouth. He chewed the tender meat with pleasure before taking a sip of well-chilled sauvignon blanc.

“We will be arriving in thirty-five minutes, my lord,” said Li.

There were no longer any royal titles in the Chinese ruling class, but one of the women in Zhou's personal entourage assured him that based on genealogical research, Zhou was a direct descendant of Liu Bang, the founder of the Han dynasty. Liu Bang had assumed the formal title of Huangdi, or Yellow Emperor.

In a rare moment of self-perceived humility, Zhou had announced that even though he was entitled to be called emperor, in the future he was to be addressed by all as simply Lord Zhou. This included his family.

Li favored his mother's looks, his face almost simian in caste with a bulging lower lip and close-set black eyes. Also in contrast to his corpulent father's, his sinewy body was muscular and strong, and he worked hard to keep it so as an example to the men. His only physical weakness lay in his severely myopic eyes. In public he masked the
affliction with contact lenses, but in private he wore thick spectacles.

“These people need to be taught a lesson,” said Zhou. “An object lesson to show the others.”

“It will be done, my lord,” said Li as the train's speed began to perceptibly slow down.

Zhou had his own set of the train's gauges and instruments in his personal car. He had been fascinated by trains from the time he was a little boy, back when the steam locomotives barely exceeded forty miles an hour on the old narrow-gauge tracks.

Now he could afford to indulge his passions. This fifteen-car train had cost Zhou three hundred million dollars, but it was proving to be a sound investment. It housed and fed his paramilitary team of two hundred Special Forces troops along with their weapons and attack vehicles.

Alone among the oligarchs, he had foreseen the rapid development of high-speed rail in China, a network that had grown exponentially since 2007. More than twenty thousand miles of track now connected every part of China except the western provinces.

Zhou hadn't been born at the time of the Chinese revolution, but his father, Xi Shen Wui, had become a senior bureaucrat in the party and he had paved the way for his son's rise to the politburo. Zhou had come to power during the capitalist reform period in the late 1990s.

One of the first oligarchs, he had built partnerships with other members of the politburo before outmaneuvering them and stripping them of their holdings. His fortune was now estimated at eighteen billion dollars.

Much of his wealth was situated in Sichuan Province, historically called the “Province of Abundance.” His holdings included millions of acres of oranges, peaches, grapes, and sugarcane. His pig farms produced nearly ten percent of the pork output in the country. In recent years, he had acquired a major interest in the companies producing vanadium, cobalt, titanium, and lithium, along with a string of newly constructed chemical companies.

“Did your legionnaires enjoy their feast?” he asked.

He inserted a gold-tipped oval Turkish cigarette in his ivory holder, lit it, and took a deep, contented puff.

“To a man, my lord.”

Zhou had arranged for three Bengal tigers that had been captured in Nepal to be delivered to a smuggler of rare animals in Guangdong. There they had been tranquilized and delivered to the train by truck. The freshly butchered animals were then roasted for the men on the way to their current mission.

“I abhor the taste of tiger meat, but your legionnaires apparently believe it bestows one with bravery and strength,” said Zhou.

“My men have great bravery and strength,” agreed Li.

Zhou looked at him skeptically. “On the other hand, tiger eyeballs are considered an excellent tonic for impotence.”

“I do not have that problem, my lord,” said Li humbly.

“And reportedly good for improving eyesight too,” he said, glancing at his son's thick spectacles.

Li said nothing. Removing them, he cleaned the lenses with a white silk handkerchief.

“Are they ready for their mission?” said Zhou, his chin hardening.

“Like tigers,” said Li.

“Tigers are not meant to be caged,” said his father.

“No, my lord,” said Li.

“A tiger never shows mercy,” said Zhou.

“None will be shown.”

“These people have become a security threat. I am told by Colonel Wong that there is a woman in the village who is particularly troublesome. You will make sure that she no longer makes trouble.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“You are humorless, my son,” said Zhou. “You must find something in your life that gives you pleasure.”

“I have already found it, my lord.”

Leaving his father, Li walked back to the fourth car in the train, which included the fitness facility and swimming pool. Stripping off his clothes, he dove into the lap pool that ran half the length of the car.