by Chris Angus
Marcia hovered nearby, offering occasional suggestions on how to proceed. The initial separation of the body from the glacier required cutting a much larger chunk of ice than would be necessary in the end. As Logan neared the end of his task, the others moved in to assist in lowering the slab gently.
“Just a couple more inches and it should come free,” he said. “Get ready. It’s going to be heavier than it looks.”
Alan and Marcia stood on one side, their hands groping for a hold on the icy surface. Duncan and Leeanne prepared to ease the opposite side to the ground.
Logan commenced making his final cut when suddenly the ice snapped free of its own weight.
“Watch out!” he yelled, dropping the torch and trying to get a grip on the ice. But it was impossible to restrain the slab. It still weighed several hundred pounds and there was nothing to hold onto. The ice fell straight to the ground and then pivoted sideways. For one terrible moment, Logan thought it might fall into the crevasse and be gone forever. But the front of the ice body hit a small boulder jutting from the snow at the edge of the opening and fell back safely.
The ice split in two from the impact in a neat fissure that ran straight up the front of the ancient form. Fortunately, the body itself did not break. As the ice came to a halt, rocking back and forth beside the boulder, the face of the creature could be seen clearly, for the remaining ice covering the front was now barely an inch thick.
The face was still surprisingly human in appearance. It had high cheekbones and a piercingly straight nose. The eyes were shut, their lids and even eyebrows vivid in detail. The lips were curled and thin, the mouth slightly open, yellow teeth visible. The hair was dark and pulled back on either side, held with some sort of leather tie. One other feature was immediately obvious now that the front of the body was exposed. It had sunken flaps of skin that could only have been one thing. Breasts.
“It’s a woman,” said Duncan, his voice registering surprise. “It’s an ice woman!”
“Oh my God!” cried Marcia, shrinking away from the strange form. She looked as if she’d seen a phantom.
“What is it, Marcia? What’s wrong?” asked Leeanne.
The archaeologist fell to the ground and sat, staring at the body, her eyes wide, mouth open, unable to speak.
Logan said, “I admit, it’s a pretty frightening spectacle. But first things first. At least we haven’t damaged her, and there’s still enough ice to preserve it.” He stared at Marcia, not comprehending her horror.
Slowly, Dr. Kessler got to her feet. She leaned heavily against Leeanne, unable to take her eyes off the frozen woman in front of them. “No one’s going to believe me,” she murmured.
“Believe what?” asked Logan, a quizzical look on his face.
“I’ve seen this person before.”
Leeanne let go of her and backed away a step. The others stared at Marcia in silence. Finally, Logan asked, “What on Earth are you talking about, Marcia?”
The scientist broke her gaze away from the ice body and slowly scanned their faces. “This is the woman in my dream,” she said simply.
The silence was thick. They all stared at her with varying degrees of disbelief.
Marcia took a deep breath. “I know it’s hard to accept. But in my dream, I’ve come very close to seeing the face of the woman leading the little band of people. I have an image of her burned into my mind. High cheekbones, thin lips, the dark hair pulled back, even the rawhide tie in the hair are all the same. I can’t explain it. But this is precisely the image I’ve carried around with me all these years.”
It took Logan another hour and a half to melt down the excess ice surrounding the frozen woman. At last, the requisite three inch buffer was all that was left on the rear of the slab. The front had considerably less ice, but nothing could be done about that.
They maneuvered the four-foot-long figure into its special, insulated container and screwed down the lid. It was now completely safe from the elements. Despite his exhaustion and the lateness of the hour, Logan immediately ordered that they break camp. They could still garner two or three hours of travel before dark. The container was secured to the extra pack horse and less than thirty minutes after the body had been placed in its holder, they were once again under way.
Marcia rode at the rear of the column. Almost no one had spoken to her since her startling revelation. To their way of thinking, the world-renowned scientist in their midst was either losing her marbles or else was engaged, for some unknown reason, in perpetrating a grim joke on her companions. Archaeologists were noted for their tasteless jokes, not unlike physicians, but this seemed to go too far. To claim some sort of personal relationship with a twenty-thousand-year-old body was a tad too bizarre.
By late afternoon of the second day, they found themselves back at the monastery. Though everyone was tired, they were now faced with another important decision.
“I’m going to see if I can sell the horses back to the monks and then negotiate a place for us to sleep,” Logan said. “We could all use a good night’s rest. But the rest of you have to decide among yourselves what you want to do next. I’ve got my own schedule to keep with regards to transporting the body out of China. This is something I have to do alone through my own network. Once I’ve put the ice woman in the right hands, I intend to go back and get Diana.”
“We’re not going to stick together?” asked Leeanne.
“No. The people I work with don’t trust anyone. If they see me with a group, they’ll bolt.”
“Sounds pretty marginal to me,” said Duncan. “What’s to keep them from just dumping old frosty here in the nearest crevasse?”
“Money. They won’t get paid until they deliver the goods. It’s the one thing they understand. But the rest of you need to decide what you’re going to do. With China in the throes of this epidemic, whatever it is, you might be better off if you just sit tight for a while. Marcia has the satellite phone. She can use it to find out what’s going on and when it will be safe to attempt to leave.”
“And you think the monks aren’t going to mind putting us up indefinitely?” asked Duncan, incredulously.
“I don’t know. We can only ask.”
The same ancient monk, Liu Xuemin, acknowledged their arrival with the merest nod of his head. Leeanne wondered if this was how the old fellow had managed to stay alive for so long, through an economy of movement that preserved whatever energy his shriveled body still possessed.
He listened to their request to sell back the horses and agreed, offering considerably less than had been paid for them just a few days earlier. However, Logan’s petition to stay the night was not met with enthusiasm. The negotiations dragged on, marked by long periods of silence as Xuemin seemed to be communicating, somehow, with his inner self. Finally, the old monk stood up abruptly, made a motion for them to follow, and went down a long corridor, through a central courtyard where other monks were busy making bread in large ovens, and then into a massive central stone building. They continued down several flights of worn stone steps until Logan decided they had to be well beneath the surface of the earth.
“Where the hell do you think he’s taking us?” asked Alan, a bit nervously. They were in an underground warren of rooms, constructed of stone with beamed ceilings that dripped with moisture.
“This place must date from medieval times,” said Leeanne.
“Older than that,” replied Logan. “Perhaps by as much as a thousand years.”
“Well, if these are the accommodations he’s offering, I can’t say I’m terribly impressed with Buddhist hospitality,” she said.
Finally, they reached a heavy, iron-banded door. The old monk stood aside and gestured for Logan to open it. Inside was a surprisingly cozy space about thirty feet long by twenty wide. There was a fireplace at one end and a large stack of firewood. At least a dozen Spartan beds consisting of simple wooden frames covered with straw-stuffed mattresses lined the walls.
“Better than I expe
cted,” said Alan, dropping his pack on one of the beds.
The others selected beds while Logan continued to talk to the monk. Then he turned to Alan. “I told him we have something we’d like to store in a cold place if possible.”
“Seems to me this would qualify,” said Leeanne, shivering in the damp air.
“It should be all right once we get a fire going. Turns out they have a sort of ice house two levels above us. Alan can help me carry the container with the ice woman there for the night.”
An hour later, they ate a dinner of bread and goat cheese offered by the monks. Then, one by one, they nodded off in their Spartan beds. The unnatural quiet of the place was soporific. Here, beneath the earth, in the heart of the bleak Bogda Feng Mountains, it was hard to imagine that China lay in turmoil all around them.
Sometime after midnight, Logan woke in his bed. He lay still, trying to determine what had roused him. There was a strange sort of humming sound at the edge of his hearing. Rolling over, he sat up. Directly across from him, Alan was also awake.
“I heard it, too,” Alan said. “What do you think it is?”
Logan shrugged. “Let’s go see.”
They got up quietly, so as not to wake the others. In the dim glow of the remaining embers of the fire, they dressed quickly and went out into the corridor. The stone steps they’d descended to reach their room continued past their door going down God knew how many more levels. But the strange sound was coming from above them.
They followed the sound up to the level of the room where they had deposited the ice woman in her container. Here, the humming was much clearer and took on an almost chanting cadence. As they approached the room, Logan realized the door was open and a dim light emanated from it. He exchanged glances with Alan, whose face was twisted in puzzlement.
As soon as they entered the small room, the sound stopped. Half a dozen monks, including Liu Xuemin and his gaunt nemesis, Li-Wen, who had argued so fiercely with Xuemin during the negotiation to buy the horses, stood like silent, ghostly apparitions, surrounding the ice woman’s container. The walls of the room were lined with large blocks of ice, covered with wood chips as a further insulator. The temperature was well below freezing. As Logan approached, he noticed with a start the container sat in a pool of water.
Alan exclaimed, “The ice has melted! How could that happen? It’s freezing in here.”
Logan was just as perplexed. To Xuemin, he asked, “What’s going on?”
The old monk stared at him immutably. Then, slowly, he moved forward and lifted the lid of the container, which had already had its screws removed. What Logan and Alan saw made so little sense they could only stare dumfounded.
The block of ice that had encased the body was gone, completely melted away. So much for NASA technology. But that was the least of the wonders. The ice body they’d traveled halfway around the world to save, whose intact condition was so important to scientists struggling to determine what was going on with human DNA, was deteriorating before their very eyes. What remained was little more than a pile of white bones covered in a chalk-like dust.
Logan swore. He turned angrily on the old monk. “What happened?”
“Come,” Xuemin said and turned and went out of the room.
Logan stood looking at the pitiful pile of bones and the pool of water on the floor a moment longer, then went after the old man.
They crossed the dirt courtyard, lit by torches along its walls, and entered another building. Alan and Logan followed him up a set of stairs and into a room that was the most luxurious of any they had yet seen in the monastery. A large desk dominated one corner in front of a window. The walls were lined with bookshelves and a heavy carpet covered the floor. Lying on the monk’s desk was a medieval-looking parchment, so old the edges were curled and discolored.
“Sit,” the monk ordered, and the two men obeyed without a word.
The ancient man settled slowly into the chair behind the desk. Logan thought he could almost hear Xuemin’s body creak with every motion. But it was clear a fierce fire still burned behind those sagging eyes.
“I did not want you to stay here this night, and now I have been proven correct in my judgment,” he said. “You have brought something unwanted into our home.”
“What on Earth are you talking about?” asked Logan.
“It is the sickness,” intoned the monk. “The ancient sickness.”
Logan looked at him in shock. “You know about the epidemic?”
“We have heard there is sickness in China, but didn’t know, until you arrived, where it came from.”
“Are you saying the epidemic was caused by the ice body?”
“Yes. It is the decaying sickness. There can be no doubt. It has happened before.”
“I don’t believe it,” Alan said.
Xuemin turned slightly and looked down at the parchment in front of him. “Deep below our monastery—several levels below where you slept—is a burial vault. In it are the remains of more than two hundred of our brethren, our forerunners here in the monastery. They died nearly two thousand years ago, of the same sickness your ice woman had. You may look at their bodies if you wish. They appear the same.”
“But the sickness now spreading across Asia—it’s killing everyone without exception,” said Logan. “You’re telling us the same thing happened here two thousand years ago? Why didn’t it also kill everyone?”
Xuemin shrugged. “Perhaps it was not yet time.”
“Time? Time for what?”
The monk gestured at the parchment in front of him. “This scroll was inscribed by a monk named Zhang Minqing. He tells about the sickness when it first struck. It began following the carving out of a foundation to create a new part of the monastery. The diggers uncovered an ancient body that, according to the text, ‘at once became fouled in the sunlight and decayed before our very eyes.’ During the next several months, more and more of the monks became sick and all who did so died. It was believed at the time to be a curse, that somehow the monks had angered the supreme Buddha.”
“But clearly they didn’t all die,” said Alan, excitement suddenly in his voice. “Which means there must be a way to survive the sickness . . . or to cure it.”
“Yes. The sickness stopped as suddenly as it started. No one knows why. But we have never ceased studying the ancient texts about the incident. According to this parchment in front of me, the monks of that time discovered something about the origins of the sickness, but the text describing what that was has been lost. However, there is reference to an object.” He took out a pair of wire spectacles, leaned over the text and began to read.
“‘I, Zhang Minqing, have discovered a strange object in the earth near where the body was found. It is not constructed of stone or wood and appears to be made’—here the translation is not clear—‘of a dark, black substance. There are marks on the object, of a kind I have never seen before. I believe they must be words, but no one understands them’.”
Xuemin looked up. “What happened to the object Minqing found, no one knows. We have been searching for it ever since, for countless centuries—oh, not every waking moment, to be sure, but with each new excavation, each cultivation of the fields, we investigate any unusual object found.”
“My God,” cried Alan. “You’ve spent two thousand years looking for something that’s vaguely described on a rotting piece of goat hide? You must have more time on your hands than I would have suspected.”
The old monk almost smiled. “Time is something we have no shortage of here. Indeed, our persistence may have paid off. Only two days ago, we discovered a hidden chamber walled off from the rest of the burial vault beneath your room. We were about to open it when your return delayed us.”
“Maybe we can assist you in opening the chamber,” said Logan. “We would be very interested.”
“I thought you might,” said the monk.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE HELICOPTER VEERED sharply as it plunged toward
Earth in a nauseating spiral, then struck hard, tilting sideways until the propellers struck the ground. The props splintered, virtually exploding, sending shards of steel flying in all directions. Then, everything was still.
Littlefield lifted his head from his lap where he’d cowered, hands over his head. He saw two of the general’s aides slumped in their seats, sharp splinters of shredded propeller steel sticking out of their chests. They were obviously dead. The pilot, too, appeared to have died, probably from the impact. His neck looked broken.
Slowly, he tried to move. Everything seemed to work. He had survived. Once again, he realized with a profound certainty, God was protecting him for some larger purpose.
Next to him, he felt movement and looked to see that General Zhou also appeared to have come through the terrible crash. He had a gash on his forehead, and was holding a bloody cloth against it, but otherwise seemed okay.
“What happened?” asked Littlefield.
“I don’t know,” the general replied. He eased out of his seat and peered out the pilot’s window. He swore suddenly, “Come on! We’re getting out of here.”
“What’s wrong?”
The commander pushed on the cockpit door. Slowly, creaking with twisted metal, it gave way. He pushed Littlefield out the opening onto the ground and leaped after him. “They’re coming,” he cried. “Run! That way.”
Littlefield stared. The helicopter had landed a hundred yards from the road. A road filled with diseased and staggering Chinese of every sort. Some had turned toward them, picking up sticks or rocks as weapons. As mindless as they appeared, there was obviously menace in their actions. He’d never seen anything so frightening. Any thoughts that he was somehow protected by an aura of God’s grace evaporated. He turned and ran.
Zeli matched him step for step. They bolted for a cluster of rocks where the flat terrain turned into low hills backed by ever-steeper mountains. Once they made the protective screen of boulders, they paused and looked back. As soon as they were out of sight, their attackers lost interest in them, as though they couldn’t keep any sense of purpose once the focus of their madness had disappeared. The improvised weapons fell to the ground and they slowly returned to the road.