“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.
“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.”