“Isn’t this desecration?”
“My guess is he’s been here since 1945 and either the explosion or subsequent rockfall covered him up. The poor guy has never had a decent burial. Maybe we can arrange one.”
“But what’s he doing here?”
“That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? Here, shine the light, can you?”
The flesh had long since rotted away, thank goodness, but the skeleton was still enclosed in shreds of decayed clothing. There was no obvious injury to the skull, and no indication of how the man had died. It was a man, because the other shoe was male as well. The clothing looked like… the ruin of a business suit. Out here?
“Not really outfitted for mining, was he?” Jake asked.
“What was he doing in the woods dressed like that?”
“We need identification.” The flashlight danced. “Eureka!” He crouched again and threw aside more rocks to uncover a pack. “Look. Old oilskins to keep out the weather.” He pulled it out, ignoring the mold and grime. Bones fell aside, fabric deflated. “And inside… Ah. A leather satchel. Maybe this is what your calendar map was directing us to, Rominy.”
Despite herself, she was getting excited again. She played the light over what Jake held. “What’s inside?”
He opened the satchel carefully. There were papers, documents with script in a foreign alphabet, curious diagrams, and maps. He carefully unfolded one. Central Asia. They could still read it clearly in the flashlight beam: Tibet. “Hallelujah,” said Jake.
“So it is my great-grandfather?”
“In a business suit. A burial suit.” He rocked back on his heels. “Was he a suicide? He makes obscure clues, hikes in his funeral best to an old mine, and uses dynamite to seal himself in? Man, that’s grim. I don’t get it.”
“But they said they found him in the spring of ’46. Dead of natural causes.”
“Yeah. And this happy camper… has all ten fingers. Look.”
“So it’s not Benjamin Hood.”
“Or that’s not Grandpa’s finger.”
She shook her head. “I’m more confused than ever.”
“Me, too. But I think this is some other guy, who maybe Grandpa sealed in. So who is it?” He began digging through the leather satchel, looking for a clue.
Rominy had spied something else, caught among the tendrils of decayed fabric and old ribs. It was a much smaller bundle. She didn’t want to touch, but curiosity animated her arm. Besides, once they identified the body maybe they could concentrate on escape. Squeamishly she reached in, snagged the packet from the bones, and pulled it out.
Jake looked up from his papers. “What you got?”
“His wallet or something.”
“Open it up.”
It was a leather folder of the kind that carried official identification, stuck shut with moisture, grime, and time. Gingerly, the old leather cracking, she spread it apart. “It’s some kind of government credentials,” she read slowly in the beam of the flashlight. “A badge. Office of Strategic Services.”
“OSS? That’s the war’s predecessor to the CIA.” He frowned. “What was an overseas operative doing here?”
“There’s a name, too, I’ve never heard of. Have you?” She held it out.
He looked, his head next to hers.
Special Agent Duncan Hale.
28
Shambhala, Tibet
October 3, 1938
K urt Raeder’s mother had taught him that life is a series of disappointments, where reality falls short of hope. She’d been widowed by the Great War and impoverished by that widowhood. She’d almost starved in the chaos of the Weimar Republic that followed Germany’s defeat and become bitter because of it, a shrew for whom even the good was never good enough. She’d spent Kurt’s youth recoiling from any suitors and railing against fate. In reaction, Raeder had retreated into adventure stories. His childhood strategy was to believe that if he just hiked hard enough, or climbed high enough, or won prizes enough, he could reach the end of the rainbow and flee his family gloom. His thick-necked, mustached father, who disappeared at Verdun, had glared balefully at him from a photograph fading in a tarnished frame; he’d sought to please the brutal ghost who had beaten him in his earliest years by fighting bullies, until he became one himself. Always, though, Kurt felt destined for something nobler than his mother’s religion of pessimism and his father’s eternal dissatisfaction. He would scale Valhalla.
Well, he had hiked and climbed now. He’d come to the very end of the earth, a place of thin cold air and epic vastness, a Hyperborea of ice and rock, seeking the victory of the hero stories he’d escaped in as a child. And here, finally, was the rainbow’s end, the El Dorado he’d dreamed of all his life.
He’d found Shambhala. He was sure of it.
The survivors of their party had fallen silent when they emerged from the gorge into the valley. Even Keyuri, who had somehow betrayed him to Hood, had gone quiet in awe and trepidation. The valley into which they’d emerged was surrounded by cliffs so precipitous that it was craterlike, glaciers hanging above like half-descended curtains. A dozen waterfalls that cascaded down from those ice fields were drawn like wavering lines of chalk, feeding the river they’d just inched along. The river, gray and cold, bisected the valley. There was no pass at the upper end, just towering mountains. The effect was claustrophobic but sheltering.
The valley floor was a wonder. It was green in this otherwise brown Tibetan autumn, not lush by any means, but full of grass and heather.
“The mountains must catch the clouds and wring out more rain,” Muller speculated, as much to himself as to the others. “The cliffs trap warmth.”
This pasture was broken by old ruins, a crumbled maze of roofless walls and pillars. Their style was vaguely Tibetan, the walls sloping slightly inward to mimic mountain slopes and brace against earthquakes. Yet in detail, the stonework was different from anything Raeder’s party had seen. There was a hint of Egypt, Rome, and China, and yet the architecture was none of these and impossible to date. Abstract patterns created a frieze on some of the broken walls. Pediments, buttresses, and porches had carvings of animals both recognizable and fantastic, from lions and camels to winged serpents, shaggy yetis, and crocodiles the length of a Mediterranean galley. Here the remnants echoed Babylonia; there the geometry of the Yucatan. Erosion had taken its toll, but there were still bits of bright paint on the stonework.
“This place might once have been as brilliantly colored as the Potala in Lhasa,” said Diels, the archaeologist. “The Egyptian and Greek temples were like that, too, before the paint wore away.”
“We’ve found our lost city,” Raeder announced, unnecessarily. He’d expected the others to cry out in wonder at this moment, or slap him on the back, but instead everyone seemed subdued and wary. There was something haunted about this place.
“Feel the air,” said Diels. “It’s warmer, is it not? Not warm, but warmer than outside. Isn’t that strange?”
“There’s an odd tingling, too,” said Kranz. “Do you feel that? A silent buzzing, like electricity. The feeling you get in a generating plant. Could this be some trick of electromagnetism, Julius, like an energy field?”
“If we’d brought my instruments, I could tell you.” Muller was grumpy.
“And if I had my cache of schnapps, we could drink a toast,” quipped Diels.
“Are you mad?” snapped Muller. “Franz Eckells is dead! I can’t get my instruments because our leader has destroyed our only escape. And you want to celebrate? Or comment on the temperature?”
“A scientific phenomenon.” Diels sounded hurt. “We can’t bring Franz back, and he was too much the Nazi brownnose anyway. Come, Julius, we’re making one of the greatest discoveries in the history of the world! Don’t
