Fearful Symmetry: A Thriller

by McBride, Michael

  It served them all right when the rain brought out the leeches, which dropped from the trees and attacked from the tall weeds. I taught them how to clear their path by swinging a stick, although not until they had been drained of a good amount of blood. And my laughter ceased. I did try to warn them, after all.

  It wasn’t until late afternoon, when the mist crept down from the mountaintops and settled into the valleys and the rumble of the Yarlung Tsang-po [sic] turned into a roar that we finally caught up with König.

  A steady drizzle fell on the treetops and dripped to the muddy path all around us in drops the size of marbles. As we had throughout the day, we came upon König squatting on the ground, his face mere inches from the earth, gently running his fingers over the mud. Metzger called out to him, but he appeared oblivious to our presence. He merely stood, walked a few more feet, and then crouched again. When he finally rose once more, he walked away from us toward the near-deafening sound of the river and stood framed in the mouth of a rope bridge over a deep gorge with the howling wind tossing the trees around him.

  I recognized it as a moment of significance and commenced filming the silhouette of this man we all knew and yet didn’t know, this explorer who had led us to the top of the world and then down into the most holy of sites, the hidden lotus that was Motuo, a jungle captured by the Himalayas and jealously guarded where few men could ever reach it.

  König stood there for several minutes while I filmed him. The others used the respite to shed a layer of clothing and change their sodden bandages. When he turned to face me, it was as though he had just awakened from a deep sleep and was surprised to find the rest of us behind him. He slung his Browning over his shoulder, smiled that boyish smile of his, and with a tip of his pith helmet, struck off across the bridge.

  I filmed the others as they filed onto the decrepit bridge behind him and braced themselves against the wind. Once they reached the other side, I hurried back to gather my gear, which I had set down near where we had first come upon König squatting in the mud. His footprints were deep and clearly defined, but the one he had been studying and tracing with his fingertips, the footprint I was certain couldn’t have been more than a few hours old, was like nothing I had ever seen before.

  Ten

  Gateway to Motuo

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 15th

  Two Days Ago

  Brooks closed his eyes and savored the warmth of the sun on his face. The skin on his cheekbones and around his eyes still burned from the harsh elements in the higher elevations and his lips were chapped to such an extreme that they cracked and bled when he smiled, but everything he had endured to bring him to this point in time had been worth it. The feeling of knowing he had conquered some of the most treacherous terrain on the planet while standing six hundred feet from an untouched biome, where few beyond the most devout and revered of Buddhist monks ever set foot, was almost euphoric. He wanted to breathe it all in and commit how he felt right now to memory, but the excitement was simply too great. He turned to face the others and recognized the same expression of awe and wonder he must have been wearing.

  He reached up and straightened a ripped prayer flag that had tangled with one of the ropes that supported the bridge. It was yellow and the words printed on it were faded, but he recognized the wisdom it imparted as that of harmony. He smiled and stepped out onto the wooden bridge. The planks had been laid in a crosshatch pattern: three-foot lengths laid horizontally from one side to the other and two long planks staggered right down the middle. The Yarlung Tsangpo flowed far below, a shade of blue generally reserved for the most placid of tropical seas. It thundered from the sheer cliffs along its banks, down the faces of which vines slithered through a preponderance of bromeliads. The far end of the bridge appeared to terminate against a solid mass of camphorwoods.

  The bridge shook beneath him and even the most gentle of breezes made it sway. He used both hands on the rope rails and leaned forward to brace the weight of his pack.

  This was positively surreal. He’d explored and excavated some of the oldest and most remote anthropological sites in the world, but even they had been accessible by road or by trail from nearby towns. A part of him had almost built this up to be a mythical place in his mind during the course of nearly the full week it had taken him to get here after his plane landed in India. It was no wonder so many myths about this area had sprung up through the eons. Even as he stepped from the bridge and into the dense thicket, he found it difficult to believe he was actually here, and now that he was, he found the prospect of locating what he was looking for in nearly nineteen thousand square miles of rugged terrain—encompassing everything from sub-tropical jungles to temperate forests to tundra and spanning nearly thirteen thousand vertical feet—more than a little daunting.

  Fortunately, Brandt had told him where to start.

  He shoved through the branches into an emerald world of blossoming rhododendrons and overbearingly fragrant sandalwood trees. Crimson and olive-backed sunbirds chirped and flitted through the upper canopy with flashes of red and gold. Langurs barked a warning from uphill to his right. A cairn of flat stones marked a sharp bend in the path. The faint smell of incense hovered around it from a carbon-scored natural indentation in the uppermost stone. He had no more than turned his back to it when he heard a clattering sound and an enormous bird reminiscent of a pheasant, with red feathers and white spots, shot past his feet and into the underbrush. He looked back to find Warren picking himself up from the pile of toppled stones.

  “Lost my balance,” he said.

  “That tragopan ran out of the bushes and spooked him so badly he threw himself from the path,” Julian said.

  “You should have seen the look on his face,” Adrianne said. “You’d have thought it was a tiger for as wide as his eyes—”

  “All right. You’ve all had your fun,” Warren said.

  “We keep moving,” Zhang said. “Camp still far and it soon be dark.”

  He stepped past the others, nodded to Brooks, and assumed the lead without another word. His customary grin was conspicuously absent.

  Brooks tried to drink it all in as he walked. Only occasionally did the sun perforate the upper canopy in thin columns of sparkling light. Condensation clung to the tips of the leaves and shivered loose with little more than the air of their passage. It was staggering how day and night—time itself, for that matter—seemed to lose meaning in the eternal twilight beneath a canopy alive with birds and insects. He noticed anomalies in their behavior he couldn’t at first define, until he finally realized they had merely yet to learn to fear man and were as curious about him as he was about them. Juvenile langurs with leathery black faces and gray fur that curled like chocolate chips on top of their heads followed them from a distance, swinging from branch to branch at the edges of sight before simply losing interest and fading behind them. A red deer—a species believed to have been extinct for nearly half a century—exploded from the shrubs and bounded past him in a blur.

  The others traveled in something of an awed silence behind him, making little more noise than the crunching of detritus, the snapping of twigs, the whistling sounds of branches whipping back into place behind them, and the occasional groan when someone stepped in the omnipresent yak excrement. An aura of reverence surrounded them, an indescribable sensation that made speech nearly impossible. For most of them, anyway.

  “I won’t have a drop of blood left in me by the time we make camp if these bloody mosquitoes have anything to say about it,” Warren said. “So much for being at the top of the food chain.”

  “There are tigers up here that would undoubtedly dispute your assertion,” Brooks said.

  “Assuming the mosquitoes haven’t hunted them to extinction.” He swore and fanned at the whining cloud around his head. “Even if you’re right, surely they’ve learned to keep their distance from humans.”


  Zhang chuckled and shouldered through a wall of branches that had overgrown the trail. Despite his outward attempts to hide it, something was making him nervous. His head was on a swivel and his right hand continually sought a better grip on the wooden handle of his old ice ax. Brooks found himself increasing his pace to keep up with their guide. He had to remind himself that westerners were prohibited from entering Motuo and that coming upon a group of Tibetan monks bore dramatically different consequences than encountering a patrol of Chinese soldiers. Especially for Zhang.

  The columns of light faded from gold to gray. Mist crept silently through the treetops. Brooks tracked its slow descent and for the first time noticed the complete and utter lack of birdsong. In conjunction with Zhang’s behavior, that realization caused the hackles to rise on the back of his neck.

  He stopped and listened for the grunting of monkeys or the whistling of ground birds, for the sounds of animals moving unseen through the wilderness, but heard only the ruckus of his companions. He held up a hand to halt their advance.

  How long had it been since he last heard the che-chewee of the sunbirds or the almost metallic screech of the parakeets or the chirping of the wagtails?

  “What’s wrong?” Adrianne asked.

  Brooks shushed her and closed his eyes.

  The sound of the river had faded to a distant rumble. He didn’t know how far they had traveled, only that darkness was falling on a steady drizzle that made a faint pattering noise far overhead. He’d been so focused on thoughts of what lay ahead and on the mystery and beauty of this isolated world that he hadn’t noticed the birdsong wane or the curious monkeys that followed them fade into the trees. He might have been completely unfamiliar with Motuo, but he knew enough about nature to understand that sudden silence meant one thing.

  There was a predator in the forest.

  He turned to find Zhang frozen ahead of him on the path, at the edge of sight, nearly swallowed by the forest. So still Brooks couldn’t even tell he was breathing.

  Brooks walked toward him. Even the crackling of the dead leaves underfoot was too loud in his ears.

  Clattering in the branches above as the first ambitious raindrops preceded the storm.

  “Jordan,” Warren whispered from behind him.

  Brooks shot him a look that could have stopped a charging bull. When he turned back, Zhang was gone and only the gently shivering branches marked his passage. They had nearly stilled when Brooks ducked through.

  A tug on his arm and he dropped to a crouch. Zhang closed a hand over his mouth to prevent him from speaking and pointed into a small, dark clearing ahead.

  A biological smell wafted into his face. Warm and metallic. Meat on the verge of spoiling.

  A clump of fur was tangled around the end of a branch, from the leaves of which a dark fluid swelled and dripped with the viscosity of syrup. And beyond it, Brooks saw the source of both the smell and all of the blood.

  And for the first time, realized just how isolated from the rest of the world they truly were.

  Part III:

  Shambhala

  Eleven

  Yarlung Tsangpo River Basin

  Motuo County

  Tibet Autonomous Region

  People’s Republic of China

  October 15th

  Two Days Ago

  Years ago, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Brooks participated in a dig in the South African province of Limpopo, during which they exhumed the maxillae and lower orbital framework of the skull of Australopithecus robustus. The excitement of being party to such a tremendous discovery had been almost euphoric. He and the other grad students had pounded unqombothi—a South African beer made from a slurry of maize and sorghum malt—into the wee hours of the morning, reveling in the kind of success few ever experienced in the field, let alone as twenty-three year-olds who hadn’t done anything to earn the right. He’d stumbled away from the ring of tents around the fire to relieve himself and remembered hearing a crinkling sound from a stand of sickle bushes maybe twenty feet away, past where a trio of wildebeests had bedded down in the tall grasses. Were it not for the noise, he never would have seen their horns rising from the wavering field or the reflection of the firelight from their eyes. More crinkling sounds and they’d turned to face the shrubs.

  He’d zipped up and rejoined the revelry without sparing the encounter a second thought, until the next morning when he crawled out of his tent, slipped through the same bushes to the same spot to relieve himself again, and found the remains of what was once a wildebeest strewn everywhere. The carcass looked like it had been attacked by an entire pride of lions. There was fur and blood everywhere. Gnawed bones and appendages scattered through the high weeds. He’d looked up to find a pack of jackals staring back at him with the early morning sun reflecting from the blood covering their snouts and bared teeth and vultures hopping through the grass with their wings spread and their heads lowered.

  That had been nothing compared to what he saw in the clearing before him now.

  At a guess, he was looking at the remains of three Tibetan red deer like the one that had blown past him maybe a mile and a half back, but it was impossible to tell for sure. There were brick-red swatches of fur everywhere, tattered pelts with greasy yellow adipose layers. Violently broken and disarticulated bones. Dismembered carcasses on the matted grass, swarming with flies. The flowers and weeds were trampled and covered in black spatters where the blood had yet to fully dry.

  Brooks had never seen anything like it. It was one thing to come upon what was left of a lone deer that a predator stalked and overcame, but this was another thing entirely. Deer were fast animals, especially these Tibetan morphs, which had to be able to bound over great distances and often even greater heights. Whatever had come upon them had caught them completely unaware and overwhelmed them before they could react. Their bodies were no more than a single stride from the impressions in the grass that were only now beginning to spring back into place.

  He pushed through the trees and stepped out into the clearing. Both hands came away smeared with blood. He looked back to see the leaves of the trees spattered with crimson droplets.

  Zhang grabbed his arm with a ferocious grip that bit into his biceps.

  Brooks looked down at the hand, and then pointedly at Zhang, who released it and whispered something in Sichuanese under his breath. Brooks’s Chinese was limited to the Mandarin he’d picked up from his colleagues during a three-month dig in the Liaoning Province, but the two dialects were similar enough that he was certain Zhang had said something about a forest ghost.

  He watched the trees for the slightest hint of movement. Between the roiling clouds of flies and mosquitoes and the way the leaves twitched with the rainfall dripping from the upper canopy, everything seemed to be alive. Tigers were intelligent animals that knew well enough to make themselves scarce when they caught the scent of man. Most of them, anyway. There were areas on the southern slope of the Himalayas where the occasional Bengal tiger developed a taste for human flesh, but he felt confident that if this was the work of a tiger, its appetite was surely already sated, and it would be unlikely to attack him, especially in the company of four others. Bears, on the other hand, where unpredictable, especially in an area like this where they rarely encountered human beings. This slaughter, however, didn’t look like the work of a bear. And he didn’t know enough about dholes to have any idea what to expect as far as the wild canines were concerned. Still, the dead silence of the forest meant that whatever was responsible was still somewhere nearby, and Zhang’s reaction, superstitious though it seemed, made him uneasy.

  He recalled the plaster mask Brandt had shown him and shivered.

  “We’d better keep moving,” Warren said from behind him. “We need to pitch camp before dark and I think we’re all in agreement that the farther we get from this area the better.”

  “It won’t matter if this is the work of a tiger,” Julian said. “If it decides to hun
t us, it will stalk us for weeks—or longer—if that’s what it takes.”

  “This from our resident tiger expert,” Adrianne said.

  “Tell me I’m the only one who bothered to do his research before hopping on a plane and traveling halfway around the world to sneak into one of the most isolated regions on the entire freaking planet.”

  “Natural predators are the least of our worries," Warren said. “Our greater concern would be encountering either Tibetan or Chinese patrols. We’d have a hard time explaining our presence in a restricted area like this. Besides, I brought along—shall we say—a little protection.”

  He pulled open the left side of his khaki cargo vest to reveal a hunting knife with a thermoplastic handle and six-inch blade in a leather shoulder sheath and gave Julian a practiced wink.

  “What are you, Crocodile Dundee?” Adrianne said.

  Brooks sighed and wondered not only if Warren had any experience with the enormous knife, but how he had managed to get it through customs. He imagined the four-day trek back to Pai carrying Warren after he inadvertently disemboweled himself. It wasn’t nearly as amusing as he would have thought.

  “You think a buck knife is going to stop a tiger?” Julian said. “The Thak man-eater killed four people before they finally tracked her down. You know what they found? She'd already been shot twice. And that was in the Eastern Kumoan Division of India, maybe fifty miles from here.”

  “This is no mere buck knife,” Warren said. “With a mere flick of the wrist, I can embed this three inches into the trunk of a tree.”

  “Trees aren’t the most elusive of targets. You think you could hit a jungle cat running low to the ground at thirty-five miles an hour when it bursts from the brush fifteen feet away?”