The Spirit Banner

by Alex Archer

  It just didn't add up.

  "What do you propose we do? Put the spear on the floor and spin it around, then head off in whatever direction it lands?" Mason asked.

  Annja bit back the quick retort that sprang to her lips. "I just think we should look around a bit more. It has to be here somewhere. The lama wouldn't have sent us here if that wasn't case."

  "Maybe he just wanted us to find and protect the sulde," Mason grumbled, but he started looking around like the other two, checking the walls, the floor, even the ceiling, for hiding places or secret passages.

  When they struck out there, Davenport took the sulde and began going over it inch by inch, while the other two turned their attention to the platform itself and the chest the sulde had been stored in.

  The two of them were searching the interior of the chest when Annja heard a soft click coming from Mason's end.

  "Hold still!" she said sharply the second she heard it, and Mason, used to a lifetime of obeying urgent commands, froze immediately.

  Annja had encountered quite a few booby traps while searching ancient ruins and the quiet snick she'd just heard sounded uncomfortably similar. She had a sudden vision of a blade flashing downward in the dark, of screams of pain echoing down the pitch-dark hallway through which they stumbled. She shook her head, dispatching the illusion. That had been another day, another time, and besides, she'd made it through. If she wanted to prevent something deadly from happening to Mason, she needed to focus on the here and now.

  Mason's right hand was pressed against the inner surface of one end of the chest.

  "What did you do?" she asked him.

  Without moving his hands, he said, "Nothing. I just pushed against the interior wall, trying to see if it was solid."

  Annja brought the candle closer and peered at the area behind Mason's hand. A small section of the chest wall had shifted backward the slightest bit, which must have been the sound she heard. With the candlelight, the outline of a small rectangular opening was revealed.

  "Pull your hand away slowly," Annja said. She watched closely as he did so, ready to knock him out of the way if she saw any hint of movement from that section of the chest, but nothing shot out at them and Mason was able to remove his hand without incident.

  Once he had, they could all see that he had inadvertently opened a small compartment built right into the side of the chest. Using the edge of his knife, Mason was able to slip the cover free, revealing the scrap of parchment that was hidden inside the cavity.

  Very carefully, he fished it out and then handed it to Davenport.

  "Why don't you do the honors," Mason said, and Annja nearly laughed aloud when she saw how excited the offer made their employer. He was like a giant kid turned loose in the candy store and, seeing his exuberant attitude, she understood what drove a man as wealthy as he to get his hands dirty, literally, on an expedition like this. She had to admit, that was one of the things she liked about him best, his desire to experience things for himself and not just through his employees.

  Annja and Mason crowded around him so they could see as he unfolded the small piece of parchment.

  The revelation, when it came, was a disappointment, however.

  Annja had been hoping for another stanza or two in the puzzle, another set of clues that could help her narrow down the directions to bring them to the second destination necessary to find the tomb. Instead, all they got was a few wavy lines that looked like lightning falling from the sky; they started at the same point and then spread downward away from one another from there. Above them was a triangular shape that could have represented everything from the delta symbol to a visit by space aliens.

  It looked pretty useless.

  22

  While Davenport puzzled over the meaning of the drawing, Annja and Mason finished searching the rest of the chest. That took another ten minutes and ultimately proved fruitless, so they turned their attention to the spear itself, looking for markings or any kind of writing that might help them.

  They struck out there, as well, just as Davenport had moments before.

  A glance at Mason's watch told them it would be dark soon, so they decided to wait until after their evening meal before making any decisions regarding what to do next. They placed the sulde back inside the tangka and wrapped it all up, then carried it with them back to the surface, closing the entrance to the secret chamber behind them and exiting the building.

  Mason's men had managed to get the fire out and rescued what bodies they could while the others were underground. The heavy stench still hung over the area, as did a dark cloud of smoke, but there wasn't anything they could do about either, and so they did the best they could to ignore them.

  There was considerable concern that whoever had done this might return and so the decision was made to continue up the road a bit before finding a place to camp for the night. Jeffries and his men hadn't found anyone else alive in the ruins and the boy had walked off in the wake of the old man's death.

  Mason gave the orders and the teams quickly regrouped, loaded back into the vehicles and left the shattered remains of Shankh behind them as they drove toward the setting sun.

  About ten miles farther up the road they found a nice spot in the lee of a small ridge to set up camp for the night. A cold wind was pushing down from the north at this point and the ridge would at least provide some shelter during the course of the night.

  They had a quick dinner and then retired to their tents, one for each carload.

  The excitement of the past few hours was still with them and so no one wanted to sleep. Davenport was making notes in his journal, chronicling the trip, while Annja stared absently at the map over Mason's shoulder as he tried to figure out their next course of action.

  A sudden thought occurred to her. She stared at the map for a long moment, following the topographical lines to be certain, before turning to Davenport and asking him for the piece of parchment they'd found in the chest.

  He saw the look in her eyes as he handed it over. "You've figured it out, haven't you?" he asked eagerly.

  "Maybe. Not sure yet." She took the scrap of parchment from him and unfolded it, making sure she was remembering the design on it properly.

  She was.

  Mason was watching her now along with Davenport, so she reached out and took the topographical map he was holding. "May I?" she asked.

  "Be my guest," he replied.

  She laid it across her knee, then put the piece of parchment against it, comparing the two.

  After a moment she looked up at her two companions and said, "I'm an idiot. It was right there in front of us the whole time." She pointed at the three wavy lines on the piece of parchment. "'To where the blood of the world intertwines, and the voice in the earth has its say.' Freakin' obvious," she said, grinning.

  Apparently Mason didn't think so, for he stared at her as if she'd suddenly lost her mind.

  "Obvious?" he said. "Riiiight."

  She shook her head, frustrated with her slowness in not seeing it before. She hadn't expected Mason to catch it, but she should have seen it right away. "The Mongols were, at heart, animists. Everything had its own spirit, including the earth. Still with me?"

  Mason nodded.

  "A typical Mongol encampment stank to high heaven, which was one of the reasons the Europeans began calling them the Mongol horde, but that was because they didn't understand the cultural differences between the two societies.

  "Unlike their European counterparts, Mongol warriors refused to bathe in rivers and streams. This wasn't because they liked being dirty, but because they considered such places to be holy. They saw the land beneath their feet as the body of the earth spirit, so to speak, which meant that the rivers and streams…"

  "…would be the veins that carried its blood through its body," Mason finished for her. "So, if that's the case, what's with the triangle-looking thing?"

  Davenport answered that one. "It's a mountain. Or, at least, I think it's a
mountain."

  Annja nodded encouragingly. "That would be my guess, too. A mountain. Which means that all we have to do is find one that stands near the convergence of three rivers and we've found where the blood of the earth intertwines."

  "Should be easy enough," Mason said, and the three of them huddled around the map.

  Fifteen minutes later, they'd found several different possibilities and had only covered half of the map. Clearly they were missing something.

  "How do we know which one is more likely than another?" Davenport wanted to know.

  Mason thought about it for a moment. "Well, it would probably be one that was important to the Khan, wouldn't it? Someplace that held special meaning for him?"

  They sat in silence for a few moments, thinking, until Annja suddenly exclaimed, "Khokh Lake!" and grabbed the map, looking it over as she explained. "Genghis Khan was named clan chief on the shores of Khokh Lake at the foot of Khara Jirgun Mountain. The Mongol name for it was the Blue Lake by Back-Heart-Shaped Mountain. Just about every single historical account we have about Genghis's life notes this as significant. That's got to be the place!"

  But it wasn't.

  Khokh Lake was fed by two rivers, not three.

  That started them down a list of major events in the Khan's life, and it wasn't long before they figured it out. The boy who would later become the Khan of khans had been born along the Onon River, near the spot where the Onon, the Tuul and the Kerulen all began. Looming over them was the tallest mountain in the Hentiyn Nuruu range, Burkhan Khaldun, or God Mountain, as it was called.

  Annja pointed to the spot on the map about three or four days' hard drive from where they were. "That's it. That's the place. It's got to be. That's where we'll find the next clue."

  23

  The night passed without incident. They broke camp with the rising sun and headed north toward the Hentiyn Nuruu mountain range. They kept their vehicles in the same formation, but now everyone paid more attention both to the traffic they passed on the road and to the clear sky above, looking for the helicopter Chingbak claimed Ransom had arrived in.

  It wasn't long before they left the last remnants of civilization behind and headed into the heart of the Mongolian steppes. Annja had seen pictures of spring in the steppes: the vast green plains stretching as far as the eye can see, wildflowers and herds of wild horses occasionally breaking the ocean of green with a riot of color and motion, all framed by the clear blue sky above that just seemed to go on forever.

  Unfortunately, they were just a few short weeks from winter at this point. Those endless green plains were now dull beige in color. The wildflowers were nowhere to be found and the horses had gone south for warmer pastures. The blue sky was the same startling color, but even that seemed colder and harsher to Annja than it had in the photographs.

  Just about midday they came upon an old chain-link fence stretching across the road and disappearing into the distance on either side. The gate had been forced at some time in the past; it lay bent and pulled to one side, the chain that once secured it now draped across the road.

  A sign with Cyrillic letters, pockmarked with bullet holes, hung about five feet to the left of the gate.

  "Restricted Zone," Mason read aloud. "Violators Will Be Shot."

  They had reached the edge of the land Genghis Khan had called home.

  Annja knew that after Genghis Khan was secretly buried in his homeland, his soldiers sealed off several hundred miles of pristine countryside. No one but members of the Khan's family could enter. A special group of soldiers was assigned to protect what would become known as the Ikh Khorig—the Great Taboo. Annja knew that even long after the Mongol Empire had collapsed and other cultures had invaded the area, the Mongol people had still prevented anyone from entering this sacred land.

  When the Soviets arrived, there was concern that the Mongol people would use the memory of Genghis Khan as a rallying point for nationalism. To prevent this, they kept up the age-old habit of preventing entry into the region, even going so far as to stop referring to the area by its Mongol name and reclassifying it as the Highly Restricted Area, an innocuous bureaucratic designation if there ever was one. Not satisfied with that, they surrounded the Highly Restricted Area with another equally large buffer zone they named the Restricted Zone.

  Neither roads nor bridges had been built anywhere within this zone during the Soviet era. With so many other issues occupying the Mongol people's attention, nothing had been built since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

  It was going to be a different ride from here on out.

  With a wave of his arm, Mason ordered the convoy to continue forward into the Great Taboo.

  * * *

  F ROM HIS POSITION a few miles behind, Ransom sat and watched the blip on his tracking device that represented Davenport's convoy as they crossed into the Restricted Zone. He wondered exactly where they were headed. His team had struck out twice so far, first with the translation of the journal and then again at the monastery. Clearly, Davenport and his pet archaeologist knew something he did not.

  But what?

  He was growing more frustrated with each passing hour. Where were they getting their information?

  His inside source was due to report in later that evening, so it was only a matter of time before Ransom would have a handle on where Davenport's team was headed. And once he had that, he could set up the next stage of his plan.

  As if on cue, the rear door opened and Santiago slid into the seat beside him.

  "Well?" Ransom asked.

  "We're set. All we need is the cash to pay them off and they'll do whatever we ask them to do."

  Ransom smiled and it wasn't a pleasant smile. "Good. And they know not to touch anything they find?"

  Santiago nodded. "I made it quite clear."

  "Excellent!"

  Ransom turned back to the GPS monitoring device and watched the blip continue on its forward journey. "Let's see how Davenport deals with a little unexpected company, shall we?"

  24

  The trip became more surreal the deeper they went into the Restricted Zone. The Soviets might not have wasted their time building bridges or roads, but that didn't mean they shied away from building everything else. The first thing they encountered, less than half a mile from the boundary, was an abandoned tank base.

  At least, that's what Annja assumed it to be, given the rusting hulks that sat still and silent off to each side of the road and the cluster of buildings they could see in the distance. The tanks looked as if they had been in the midst of maneuvers when the call had come for everyone to drop things where they were and walk off the set. It was an eerie feeling driving by those abandoned tanks; there was sense of fearful expectation about them, as if they were just waiting for the right stimulus to reawaken, to suddenly return to life and their deadly missions. Annja's imagination quickly went into overdrive as she imagined the turrets suddenly rotating in their direction, the squeal of steel on steel as long-unused ammo cases suddenly dropped a round into the firing mechanisms and…

  That's enough of that, she told herself firmly as the tanks disappeared into the distance behind them.

  That was just the beginning of the weirdness, however.

  They passed a long stretch of flat country filled with craters and strewn with the wreckage of trucks, tanks and what seemed to be the partial remains of aircraft. Any interest in examining them was quickly stifled when unexploded artillery shells were found in a nearby crater. Collapsed buildings and complexes also showed up regularly along their route, lounging empty and all but forgotten among the waving grasslands.

  More than once they were forced to detour around large pools of stagnant water mixed with unidentifiable chemicals that shimmered in the sunlight like Christmas lights. Far more often than not the banks of such oases were lined with the decaying carcasses of animals that had crept down to the water's edge for a drink and never managed to leave. Even the air seemed to be against them, with strange
smelling vapors rising from the cracked and cratered landscape as they drove farther and farther from civilization.

  They had been driving for eight long hours when Mason called a halt. It would be dark soon and he wanted to have camp set up while they could still see. A quick conference with the other drivers resulted in the choice of a suitable location. The tents were pulled out and set up while two of Mason's men set about making dinner for the rest of the team.

  The food was good and the coffee afterward even better. Annja found that she enjoyed Mason's company and the two of them stayed up much later than the others, swapping stories. Annja talked about the various expeditions she'd been on and what it was like working on a popular cable show, while Mason filled her in on all the craziness that came with being the personal bodyguard to one of the world's richest men. By the time they were both ready to call it an evening, it was close to midnight.