“Before she was a fortuneteller,” Shan observed, “she was a soldier for the Dalai Lama.”

Ama Apte grinned, then loosened her grip to let Jin slide away.

“We’re going to have some food,” Shan announced to the crestfallen constable, gesturing his companions to the smoldering fire of goat dung and old crate fragments. Jin cursed and peevishly walked in the opposite direction.

“I can’t believe you let the Manchurians run away like that,” Yates complained as the others moved to the fire.

“I told them it would take twenty-four hours to track their truck’s papers. At most it will take twelve. They might get a few hours’ north of Lhasa, that’s all.”

They ate in an unsteady silence, Kypo tending his mother’s wound, which had begun to bleed profusely. “She has to go down to the lower elevation, to the village,” Yates said.

Shan nodded agreement, then began silently checking the soles of the monks’ boots.

“What are you doing?” the American asked.

“She has to go down,” Shan said. “But they cannot.”

With a grimace Yates looked up at the rough icebound landscape above them, then glanced at the climbing equipment they had left by the gully. “There’s a hundred ways to die up there.”

“The trail on your map goes all the way over,” Shan pointed out, with an expectant glance at Kypo.

The Tibetan nodded. “It’s the route of the sherpas who come across without papers. Tenzin took it last month. There’s a cliff on the Nepal side but it has a hidden goat path down it.”

“There’re border patrols,” Yates argued. “Helicopters that drop off snipers.”

“And there’s also fog and heavy wind and snow squalls. We can deal with the weather better than they can.”

“These monks don’t know anything about climbing,” Yates said, shifting to English.

“They seem to know,” Shan replied, “a lot about surviving. They have to go now. More will come for them.”

Ama Apte spoke from her seat on a rock, obviously struggling against the pain of her wound. “The mother mountain watches. She will protect you.”

Yates stared at the Tibetan woman for a long silent moment then stepped to her, cradled her in both of his arms before turning to Shan. “The mother mountain will protect us,” he repeated, then pulled out his map. “But I don’t know how far it is. And it’s nearly twenty thousand feet at that pass. We have no oxygen.”

“I came across that way,” the youngest monk declared, “years ago. I was born in Nepal. From here it is maybe four hours, no more.”

Shan studied the towering glacier with foreboding. It was a killing field, with crevasses covered with brittle windblown crusts, jagged spires of ice, expanses of treacherous, loose scree. We should rest first, he was about to say, when he spotted Jin standing on one of the flat outcroppings near the edge of the little plateau. He had taken out his much reviled radio, and was speaking into it. Jin might not get a bounty for turning in the monks to Public Security, but he would gain enough glory for the promotion and transfer he so desperately wanted.

“Go!” Shan shouted to the monks, pulling the youngest to his feet and pointing toward the distant pass. “He’s calling in soldiers!”

By the time Yates and Shan had hurried Kypo and Ama Apte to the passageway and gathered up their equipment the monks were already past the winding gravel path that led to the ice and were on the glacier itself. Shan cast a worried glance at Kypo and his mother, then ran desperately to catch up with the monks, fearful that one would fall and break a bone, ending all chance of escape. He had reached them and was explaining how they must use ropes to connect themselves when the crack of a gunshot split the thin, chill air.

They turned to see Jin at the trailhead, shouting something that was lost in the distance. But there was no mistaking the threatening way he shook his fist at them, or the object he held in his other hand. He had retrieved his pistol and found more ammunition in his pack. As they watched, Jin took off at breakneck speed in pursuit of their little party.

They moved at a brutal pace, jogging when they could find purchase in the swales of gravel that sometimes defined the trail, slowing to creep around crevasses that opened unpredictably beside them, pausing to study Yates’s map and compass when the young monk, their only guide, hesitated in selecting the route.

Steadily upward they climbed, one foot in front of the other, squinting against the glare, fighting gusts so abrupt they were sometimes caught off balance and pushed backward. The rising spring temperatures had brought a treacherous softening to the ice in spots, exposed swaths of bare gravel elsewhere. For the first hour the monks softly chanted a barely perceptible mantra as they walked. But eventually the lack of oxygen took its toll, and they conserved their breath.

Tiny, sudden snow squalls drove crystals of ice and snow against their unprotected faces. Shan and Yates exchanged agonized glances as the two older monks began to audibly wheeze, knowing that at any moment one of them might clutch his head and burst into the moans of pain that signaled cerebral edema. They stopped often, watching for Jin, consulting Yates’ map after the young monk fearfully announced he no longer knew where they were.

Three hours later they stopped, spent, gasping in the thin air, passing around Yates’s water bottle, the only one left, scooping handfuls of raisins from a bag the American had stuffed into his pack at the warehouse. Shan’s heart thundered as they moved, not only from the altitude but also from the knowledge that they had reached their limit, that they were demanding that their bodies perform beyond endurance, the condition when death took many climbers. They had two pairs of gloves among them, which they alternated wearing, and Shan’s fingers were growing stiff from the cold. The hardest, highest part of the climb was still ahead.

They did not speak as they kept ascending, sometimes slipping until a hand reached out to assist, never able to maintain the same gait for more than a few steps, sometimes creeping along the side of ice crevasses with no way of knowing if the lip would crumble under their weight.

As the wind ebbed and the clouds cleared, each man’s eyes lingered on the summit of the mother mountain Chomolungma, so close it seemed they could reach out and touch it. They had grown so used to the groaning and cracking of the glacier that only Shan looked back toward a particularly sharp retort to their rear.

Impossibly, Constable Jin was there, less than half a mile away, waving his arms again, not at them but toward the mother mountain, as if he had something to say to her. Then Shan heard the low, metallic ululation that brought terror to so many Tibetans.

“Down!” he shouted reflexively, then he realized the helicopter, rising along the north col of Everest, was too far away to see them. He turned to borrow the American’s binoculars but Yates already had them trained on Jin.

“He’s lost his pack,” Yates reported. “He doesn’t have his radio.”

“We must go!” Shan urged the monks, “quicker than ever!” When the helicopter crew gave up the wider search they would likely fly to the head of the pass and work a pattern down the glacier. The bright parkas of the monks would be like beacons on the white surface.

They ran, slipping, sliding, falling and scrambling up again. Jin came on relentlessly, jumping recklessly over jagged shards of ice, skidding down low slopes, increasing his speed whenever he saw them pause. Shan stopped looking back, stopped listening for the helicopter, willing himself and the others on, trying with increasing despondency to understand if the next dip in the ice field marked the end of the pass or just another undulation in the glacier.

Suddenly it was over. The oldest of the monks stumbled, then slipped on a patch of ice, wrenching his ankle, crying out in pain. Shan and Yates bent over him, examining the sprain, then Yates handed Shan his pack so he could carry the monk on his back.