“What are you complaining about? Now I don’t have a parachute at all. Go, go, it’s getting dark!”
He glanced around. A cirque of mountains, frigid air, strange greenness below, enemies who’d vanished. The sun had long since set behind the mountains, and all was pale gray. Too awkward to jump with his rifle. He checked his Duncan Hale–issued government .45. Taking a breath and trying to think of as little as possible, he grasped the rim of the cockpit and boosted himself out, tensing as the wind hit him full force. He clawed for a strut, trying to get in position to jump. Every instinct screamed not to let go.
But then Beth abruptly tilted the biplane and the cold air plucked him off.
Hood fell toward Shambhala.
27
Eldorado Mine, Cascade Mountains
September 6, Present Day
Rominy plummeted, slid, and dropped again. It happened so suddenly, in such disorienting darkness, that it was over before she could scream. She and Jake tumbled into a tangle at the base of some mine shaft, the rotting wood of an old lid piled around them. As her wits returned from the blast of adrenaline, the real fear began. What if they couldn’t get out?
“Rominy! Are you okay?”
“I can move.” She groaned, but when she tested her limbs they all seemed to work, thank God. “Barely.” She coughed. “I’m covered with dirt, my body aches, and I can barely see. I think my knees are getting scraped down to the bone.”
“I’ve got more bandages.”
Dim light filtered down from where the cave-in had occurred above. It was like looking at the top of a well.
“You know, you’re the worst date I’ve ever had.”
Jake coughed, too. “Ditto.”
She looked around. They’d tumbled at least forty feet and were in a wider cavity about ten feet high, which meant it was impossible to jump up to the narrow tunnel they’d fallen down. The walls and ceiling were rock, the floor dirt and rubble, and the darkness in every direction but up was profound. “This is very bad, Jake.” She tried to keep any tremor from her voice. “What now?”
He stood up, weaving a moment from dizziness before straightening and brushing himself off. “I’m guessing you found where X marks the spot. Maybe Great-grandpa came back to be some kind of hermit miner.”
“Great.” She wobbled to a stand, too. Yep, nothing broken. Not that it mattered if they couldn’t get back out. “It didn’t occur to him to dig sideways?”
“I don’t know. Maybe this is an old pioneer mine he found.”
“So why is it on his fingerprint map?”
“You’re asking all the right questions. Fortunately for us, I’m a Boy Scout, remember?” They’d fallen with their packs and he rooted inside for a moment before digging out a flashlight. “I’ll keep the other in reserve. Let’s see where this thrill ride goes.” The beam was as welcome as coffeehouse neon on a cold Seattle night. Gloom shrank back to reveal a horizontal shaft that must run toward the cliff face they’d spied from above; the old horizontal shaft would have opened to a view of Eldorado.
Mine timbers at the ceiling sagged from age. In a hundred feet, the tunnel ended disappointingly in a wall of rubble and snapped bracing.
“Cave-in,” Rominy said. “This place feels very unsafe.”
“You’ve got all the instincts of an investigative reporter.” He played his light on the blockage and then on the ceiling. Back and forth he shone the beam, like a paint roller. “Look at those streaks. Soot radiating from an explosion.”
“Which means?”
“That maybe this mine didn’t cave in, but was sealed. Dynamite, and boom. That closes the front door. We fell through the back.”
“So no way out.”
“Maybe there was a rope or ladder at one time. Would have rotted since the end of the war, of course.” He kept staring at the ceiling. “Looks pretty firm to me, but I’m not a mining engineer. Probably best to go back to where we fell in while we figure out what to do. But, you know, I don’t get it.” He sounded more puzzled than worried. “What did Hood expect us to find here?”
“My guess is an old gold claim,” Rominy said. “Maybe he thought his heirs could make something of this, but no way today. Too many environmental restrictions. I think we’re on federal land in the exact middle of nowhere.”
“Which means he definitely thought he had children, or a child. That’s interesting, isn’t it, because there’s nothing in the records about one living up here. So where was Great-grandma? Mystery upon mystery.”
“Jake, the mystery is how we’re going to get out of here.”
“Maybe I can lift you up until you can get a grip in that shaft.”
“I’m not much of a climber.”
“Consider the alternative.”
And then Rominy stumbled on something that gave way with an audible crack, an object softer than rubble on the floor. “Oh, Geez! What’s that? There’s something creepy, Jake.”
He shone the light. “Yuck. A shoe.”
A man’s dress shoe had been kicked out from the rubble by her stumble. There was a gleam inside. Barrow bent to peer.
“With a foot attached. You broke the bone.”
“Oh, my God. I’m going to be throw up.”
“It’s just a corpse, Rominy. Dust to dust.”
“Jake, let’s go. I’ll climb, I promise.”
“No, this is important. Great-grandpa led us to a body. The ankle bone is attached to the shin bone . . .” He sing-songed, playing the light. “There.” A bone projected from the loose rock, and near it was another shoe. “Hello. Looks like we really found someone.”
“This is so sick!”
“What if this is your illustrious ancestor?”
“Dunnigan said they found him in the cabin.”
“That’s right. So, in that case, who’s this?”
“I don’t think I want to know. I can’t take looking at bones, not when we’re trapped like this.”
“We can’t just walk away, girl.” He squatted and calmly began throwing aside rock. “Yep, there’s a whole dude in here.” What was wrong with him that he could just dig up the dead like that?
“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
Kurt 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 Yucatán. 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 you feel anything?”
“I feel trapped. Look at what you’re seeing. The city’s dead. There’s no way out. We’re led by a fanatic.”
“And I feel on the brink of achievement,” Raeder retorted. “Germany sent us here out of conviction that there were valuable secrets to be learned. This is what Heinrich Himmler dreamed of. Sulk if you want by the river, here, Muller, but the rest of us are going to explore Shambhala.”
“Even her, this Delilah who somehow helped the American find us?” Muller pointed to Keyuri.
“Especially her, to interpret what we find. She can scheme all she wants, but the American can’t follow us. And look at her eyes. She wants to explore this, too. You didn’t really believe it, did you, Keyuri? You thought we were chasing a myth. But German will prevailed. National Socialism prevailed.”
“Destiny prevailed,” she said. “Remember, none have ever returned.”
“I’ll return. With Vril.” He addressed the others. “Unsling your weapons. We don’t know who might be hiding here.”
“Ghosts,” Muller said.
They advanced into the bowl, the geophysicist reluctantly bringing up the rear. The valley’s sides had been terraced, Raeder realized, with the glacial streams feeding pools that at one time were part of a complex irrigation system. At some point in the past this had been an intensively farmed oasis. Why had this civilization tucked itself away like this? Who’d come to build it?
They found themselves walking on what must have been the principle avenue, many of the paving blocks heaved or broken. Their gun muzzles swept the road. The lost city’s layout and order became plainer, but so did the fact that it had almost certainly been abandoned, contrary to myths of long life and perfect harmony. Had it fallen prey to catastrophe, or to the simple old age that doomed all civilizations? This find was the fantasy of any archaeologist—Diels was walking goggle-eyed—but Raeder’s goal was a practical one, to find a new kind of power.
They passed two enormous statues of warriors or kings, each at least sixty fee
t high. The men, one on either side of the avenue, were holding staffs thrust forward in their fists. Their bodies were encased in a kind of chain mail. This was overlain by rigid armor across the chest and groin. Curiously, however, their helmeted heads were turned backward, as if looking for followers through the narrow slit of their visors. Their faces couldn’t be seen.
“They don’t know whether they’re coming or going,” joked Kranz. “Not the most heroic of poses.”
“They’re looking for something behind them, I think,” said Diels.
“Or they’re turning away,” said Muller.
“Turning from the face of God,” Keyuri said quietly.
“God?”
“Or his manifestation. The power of the universe. It’s blinding, like the sun.”
“Hmph,” said Muller. “What do you think, Kurt?”
“I think all humans have historically worshipped the sun because it’s the obvious source of life on our planet. We’re dust and water animated by energy. Some theosophists believe there’s a black sun at the center of our planet with similar power. Perhaps the Shambhalans tapped that, or brought their own energy with them. Look at those friezes. They could be ships, but we’re thousands of miles from the ocean. They could also be flying machines, or rocket ships like the American Buck Rogers. Their suits could be spacesuits. Or they could be gods, with winged chariots.”
“But why Tibet, in this valley?” said Kranz.
“If you wanted an outpost or base hidden from hostile natives,” Diels speculated, “this is the very best place. It’s too high for conventional civilization, and far away from roads and cities. It’s on the highest plateau of our planet. The valley is hidden, but easily defended. Maybe they just stopped here to build something or repair something.”
“Who stopped here?”
“The helmet men,” Raeder said. “Gods, or visitors from outer space. The ancestors of us Aryans. They cast the seeds of civilization, completed what they wished, and moved on. Possibly leaving descendants, Germans, to rule the earth.”
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