“Not for years.”
“What would he say?” Shan asked after a long silence, “when he transmitted on the radio?”
“The first few years, he stayed on the run, using a sleeping bag from the Americans, saying his mission now was intelligence, whatever that meant. He would watch the highway, watch the Chinese army, then come up and report the movements, like in the days of the fighting. For a while he decided the Americans had changed the codes, or frequencies, and so he would turn the dials and repeat his number, announcing again and again that he was a sergeant in the Tibetan resistance army. In the end he would talk about the weather or read sutras.”
“Sutras?” Shan asked.
“Eventually he realized it wasn’t the Americans he was trying to reach. He said it was something people didn’t always understand about radios, that even if the Americans stopped listening the heavens always heard.”
Yates extracted one of his old photos, of Tibetans lined up with parachutes and packs, ready for a jump, and pointed to his father, standing with the aircrew.
Dakpo responded immediately. “He was a good man, your father. Kundu, the two-legged one, was with him in that camp in America.”
Yates seemed to stop breathing for a moment. “How-how did you know he was my father?”
“The first time you took your hat off in Tibet, the mountain knew,” Dakpo said enigmatically. Then with new enthusiasm he took the photo and began pointing to the men, reciting each name in turn. Not until he had finished and looked up did he see the dumbfounded grin on the American’s face. “Once, I remember at the end of your year, in our eleventh month, your father taught us some of your festival songs in English and we sang them around a fire eating sweet biscuits he had saved. Songs about snowmen and bells and the birth of his lama on that cross. Jingle bells, jingle bells, we would sing. He laughed a lot, your father. He gave us strength.”
“How many of you were there?” Shan asked. “Survivors.”
“A few,” Dakpo said in a wary tone.
“You said each found his own way to survive. Not everyone became a hermit.”
Dakpo nodded. “I had been a novice at one of the little monasteries they burned down in the first campaign. I saved most of the old books, brought them here and tried to concentrate on them the way my teachers had taught me before they died. But eventually I realized I had to fight before I could study.”
“Gyalo went to town,” Shan said. “Ama Apte went to her village and became a fortuneteller.”
“She couldn’t very well stay in the mountains. She needed to be with her family.”
“Was it one of them who betrayed the rebels?”
“There was always going to be someone. It was the way the Chinese worked.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“They each think the other did it. I don’t know. All trust was gone after that day. I thought about it, for years I thought about it. There were others who could have helped the Chinese. Shepherds who knew us. Maybe one of our own band who slipped across the border. Who’s to know what makes a bird wake up and decide to change its song? It was written that our world would change, and it changed.”
Shan pulled away a piece of felt covering a stool by the radio, revealing more military equipment, a compass, a bayonet, a small set of binoculars. He paused, looking back at the stacks of old books at the far side of the cave. Both the equipment and the books were well maintained.
Dakpo saw the query in Shan’s face. “The more one understands the world,” he declared, “the harder it is to obtain Buddhahood.”
Yates began to fire off questions about his father. After a moment Shan held up his hand. “There is no time. The slopes are crawling with people searching for the monks.” He turned to the hermit. “Can you take us there, to the hidden place where they are going?”
Dakpo pointed to his sandals. “With these, no. I gave the only boots here to the monks. “But,” he added, rising, “I can guide you for the first hour and point the way from there. It is difficult,” he warned. “Not even the wild goats can do it.”
They paused every quarter hour to scan the slopes with Yates’ binoculars. As they rushed up one steep switchback after another, Shan caught Yates looking back with worry toward the smoke of Tumkot’s chimneys, visible now over a ridge, the village that had been saved in the deal that had betrayed the rebels. The hermit had not actually denied that Ama Apte was the traitor. And the fortuneteller, while secretly trying to force Yates out of the country, had deliberately hidden the fact that she had known his father.
The hermit led them at a near-frantic pace after the first steep slope, through tight rock passages, under a narrow waterfall, around fields of jagged snow bound scree, through several frigid streams gorged with meltwater. He halted abruptly as they navigated along a glacier-shattered landscape, a fractured wall of granite on one side of the trail, a treacherous vertical drop on the other.
“If you watch carefully, there is an old trail,” he announced, “at least the shadow of an old trail. When there is a choice to be made, always go up.”
Yates and Shan exchanged confused glances then the hermit stepped aside to reveal a two-foot-wide hole in the ledge they walked on, no different from a dozen others they had passed. Except that this one had a barely perceptible legend painted on a rock above it, a mantra to the mother protector. Shan removed his pack and lowered himself, taking it on faith he would find purchase in the deep shadow below, and in fact discovering slots carved in the wall like a ladder, leading to a flat stone floor eight feet below. A moment later Yates had joined him.
“Lha gyal lo!” Dakpo called as he handed their packs down.
They had dropped into a twisting corridor of stone that soon opened onto a steep sheltered slope dotted with heather and wildflowers. The granite wall they had taken to be the side of the mountain revealed itself to be a massive outcropping that hid the slope and the path above it. They climbed without speaking, spotting fresh boot prints where rare patches of soil showed, at every junction in the path following the hermit’s advice to take the more difficult, steeper route, climbing up narrow shelves that had been chiseled into the stone like stairs. Yates moved with increasing urgency, hesitating not a moment when they reached a tall chimney, grabbing the narrow bars of old juniper wood that had been fixed between the stone walls. They climbed another steep slope that glistened with pockets of snow, passing a row of stone columns, then halted at a path through a high wall marked by a crumbling stone cairn.
At the end of the path they emerged onto a broad, nearly flat shelf almost two hundred feet wide and a quarter mile long. Directly to the south a glacier rose toward the horizon. To the southeast was a sweeping view of Everest and her sister peaks Lhotse and Makalu. To the north, in the shadow of the massive granite wall, were several crude structures of dry laid stone. Yates took a step and raised a strange jingling sound. He kicked and loosened several long brass cylinders, bearing the green patina of age. Bullet casings.
There was no sign of anyone, though in several patches of snow Shan saw more fresh imprints of boots. He willed himself not to follow them, to move instead toward the ragged lip of the deep crevasse that ran along the eastern edge of the little plateau.
“We came for evidence,” Shan reminded Yates, who insisted on searching each of the crude, crumbling structures before joining Shan at the lip of the crevasse. Lying at the lip, with the American anchoring his legs, Shan searched the fissure with the binoculars, studying the jumble of broken slabs and boulders that lined the bottom nearly two hundred feet below. Much of it was shrouded in shadow, though at its end it curved toward the southeast, where many of the slabs of rock were lit by the sun. The unlikely odds of discovering Megan Ross were compounded by the many gaps between boulders and slabs where a corpse dropped from above could easily have fallen. Seeing nothing, Shan rose and walked slowly along the top, studying the ground. At last, less than fifty feet from where the crevasse opened out onto the side of the mountain, he found older prints in a patch of snow, grown faint with freezing and thawing. There was more, a long indentation where something heavy had been dragged to the edge. He laid down again over the lip and instantly saw a patch of red below, the color of the windbreaker the woman had been wearing when she died.