The Kingdom

by Clive Cussler

  As the crow flies, the mining camp was not quite thirty miles north of the city. By road, it was over three times that distance—a short drive in any Western country but a daylong odyssey in Nepal.

  “Judging by this map,” Remi said in the passenger’s seat, “what they call a highway is actually a dirt road that’s a bit wider and slightly better maintained than a cow path. Once we pass Trisuli Bazar, we’ll be on secondary roads. God knows what that means, though.”

  “How far to Trisuli?”

  “With luck, we’ll be there before nightfall. Sam . . . goat!”

  Sam looked up to see a teenage girl escorting a goat across the road seemingly oblivious to the vehicle bearing down on them. The Range Rover skidded to a stop in a cloud of brown dust. The girl looked up and smiled, unfazed. She waved. Sam and Remi waved back.

  “Lesson relearned,” Sam said. “No crosswalks in Nepal.”

  “And goats have the right-of-way,” Remi added.

  Once clear of the city limits and into the foothills, they found the road bracketed by terraced farm fields, lush and green against the otherwise barren and brown slopes. To their immediate left, the Trisuli River, swollen with spring runoff, churned over boulders, the water a leaden gray color from scree and silt. Here and there, they could see clusters of shacks nestled against the distant tree line. Far to the north and west stood the higher Himalayan peaks, jagged black towers against the sky.

  Two hours later, just as the sun was dipping behind the mountains, they pulled into Trisuli Bazar. Tempted as they were to stay in one of the hostels, Sam and Remi had decided to err on the side of slight paranoia and rough it. However unlikely it was that the Kings would think to look for them here, Sam and Remi decided to assume the worst.

  Following Remi’s directions, Sam followed the Range Rover’s headlights out of the village, then turned left down a narrow service road to what the map described as a “trekker’s waypoint.” They pulled into a roughly oval clearing lined with yurt-like huts and rolled to a stop. He doused the headlights and turned off the ignition.

  “See anyone?” Sam said, looking around.

  “No. It looks like we have the run of the place.”

  “Hut or tent?”

  “Seems a shame to waste the ugly patchwork pup tent we paid so much money for,” Remi said.

  “That’s my girl.”

  Fifteen minutes later, under the glow of their headlamps, they had their camp set up a few hundred yards behind the huts in a copse of pine. As Remi finished rolling out their sleeping bags, Sam got a fire going.

  Sorting through their food supply, Sam asked, “Dehydrated chicken teriyaki or . . . dehydrated chicken teriyaki?”

  “Whichever one I can eat the fastest,” Remi replied. “I’m ready for bed. Got a terrible headache.”

  “It’s the thin air. We’re around nine thousand feet. It’ll be better tomorrow.”

  Sam had both food packets ready in minutes. Once they finished eating, Sam brewed a couple cups of oolong tea. They sat before the fire and watched the flames dance. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted.

  “If the Theurang is what King is after, I wonder about his motivation,” Remi said.

  “There’s no telling,” Sam replied. “Why all the subterfuge? Why the heavy-handedness with his children?”

  “He’s a powerful man, with an ego the size of Alaska—”

  “And a domineering control freak.”

  “That too. Maybe this is how he operates. Trust no one and keep an iron thumb on everything.”

  “You may be right,” Sam replied. “But whatever is driving him, I’m not inclined to hand over something as historically significant as the Theurang.”

  Remi nodded. “And, unless we’ve misjudged his character, I think Lewis King would agree—alive or dead. He’d want it handed over to Nepal’s National Museum or a university.”

  “Just as important,” Sam added, “if for whatever twisted reason King had Frank kidnapped, I say we do our level best to make sure he pays for it.”

  “He won’t go down without a fight, Sam.”

  “And neither will we.”

  “Spoken like the man I love,” Remi replied.

  She held up her mug, and Sam put his arm around her waist and drew her close.

  They were up before dawn the next day, fed and packed and back on the road by seven. As they gained altitude and passed through hamlet after hamlet with names like Betrawati, Manigaun, Ramche, and Thare, the landscape changed from green stair-step fields and monochromatic hills to triple-canopied forest and narrow gorges. After a brief lunch at a scenic overlook, they continued on and reached their turnoff, an unmarked road just north of Boka Jhunda, an hour later. Sam stopped the Rover at the intersection, and they eyeballed the dirt road before them. Barely wider than the Rover itself and hemmed in by thick foliage, it looked more like a tunnel than a road.

  “I’m having a bit of déjà vu,” Sam said. “Weren’t we on this road a few months ago, but in Madagascar?”

  “It bears an eerie resemblance,” Remi agreed. “Double-checking.”

  She traced her index finger along the map, occasionally checking her notes as she went. “This is the place. According to Selma, the mining camp is twelve miles to the east. There’s a larger road a few miles north of here, but it’s used for camp traffic.”

  “Best to sneak in the back window, then. Do you have a signal?”

  Remi grabbed the satellite phone from between her feet and checked for voice messages. After a moment she nodded, held up a finger, and listened. She hung up. “Professor Dharel from the university. He made some calls. Evidently there’s a local historian in Lo Monthang who is considered the national expert on Mustang history. He’s agreed to see us.”

  “How soon?”

  “Whenever we get there.”

  Sam considered this and shrugged. “No problem. Providing we don’t get caught invading King’s mining camp, we should make Lo Monthang in three or four weeks.”

  He shifted the Rover into drive and pressed the accelerator.

  Almost immediately the grade steepened and the road began zigzagging, and soon, despite an average speed of ten miles per hour, they felt like they were on a roller-coaster ride. Occasionally through the passing foliage they caught glimpses of gorges, surging rivers, and jagged rock outcroppings, soon gone, absorbed by the forest.

  After nearly ninety minutes of driving, Sam came around a particularly tight bend. Remi shouted. “Big trees!”

  “I see them,” Sam replied, already slamming on the brakes.

  Looming before the windshield was a wall of green.

  “Tell me it isn’t so,” Sam said. “Selma made a mistake?”

  “No chance.”

  They both climbed out, ducking and weaving their way through the foliage surrounding the Rover until they reached the front bumper.

  “And no valet, either,” Sam muttered.

  To the right, Remi said, “I’ve got a path.”

  Sam walked over. As promised, a narrow, rutted trail disappeared into the trees. Sam dug out his compass, and Remi checked their bearing against the map.

  “Two miles down that trail,” she said.

  “So, translated to Nepalese distances . . . ten days, give or take.”

  “Give or take,” Remi agreed.

  The trail took them through a series of down-sloping switchbacks before bottoming out beside a river. Flowing from north to south, the water crashed over a series of moss-covered boulders, sending up plumes of spray that left Sam and Remi dripping wet in a matter of seconds.

  They followed the path south along the river to a relatively calm section, where they found a wooden suspension bridge barely wider than their shoulders. The canopy from both banks spanned the water; vines and branches draped over the bridge and obscured the other side.

  Sam shed his pack and, with both hands clenched on the rope side rails, crept onto the bridge’s head, probing with his foot for cracks or loose
planks before transferring his weight. When he reached the bridge’s midpoint, he tried a test hop.

  “Sam!”

  “Seems sturdy enough.”

  “Don’t do that again.” She saw the half smile on his face, and her eyes narrowed. “If I have to jump in after you . . .”

  He laughed, then turned and walked back to where she was standing. “Come on, it’ll hold us.”

  He donned his pack and led the way back on the bridge. After two brief pauses to let the bridge’s swaying slow, they reached the other side.

  For the next hour they followed the trail as it weaved up and down forested slopes and across gorges until finally the trees began to thin ahead. They topped a crest and almost immediately heard the rumble of diesel engines and the beep-beep-beep of trucks backing up.

  “Down!” Sam rasped, and dropped to his belly, dragging Remi with him.

  “What?” she said. “I didn’t see anything—”

  “Directly below us.”

  He gestured for her to follow, then turned his body left and crawled off the trail into the underbrush. After twenty feet he stopped, glanced back, and curled his finger at Remi. She crawled up beside him. Using his fingertips, Sam parted the foliage.

  Directly below them was a football-shaped earthen pit, forty feet deep, two hundred yards wide, and nearly a quarter mile long. The sides of the pit were perfectly vertical, an escarpment of black soil dropping away from the surrounding forest as though a giant had slammed a cookie cutter into the earth and scooped out the center. In the center of the pit itself, yellow bulldozers, dump trucks, and forklifts moved to and fro on well-worn paths, while along the edges teams of men worked with shovels and picks around what looked like horizontal shafts that disappeared into the ground. At the far end of the pit, an earthen ramp led up to a clearing and, Sam and Remi assumed, the main service road. Construction trailers and Quonset-style huts lined the sides of the clearing.

  Sam continued to look around the site. “I’ve got guards,” he muttered. “Stationed in the trees along the rim and in the clearing.”

  “Armed?”

  “Yes. Assault rifles. Not your run-of-the-mill AK-47s, though. I don’t recognize the model. Whatever it is, it’s modern. This isn’t like any exploratory mine site I’ve ever seen,” Sam said. “Outside of a banana republic, that is.”

  Remi stared at the steep slope of the pit. “I count thirteen . . . no, fourteen side tunnels. None of them are big enough for anything but men and hand tools.”

  The bulldozers and trucks seemed to be skirting the edges of the pit. Occasionally, however, a forklift would approach one of the tunnels, pick up a tarp-covered pallet, then scale the ramp and disappear from view.

  “I need the binoculars,” Remi said.

  Sam dug them out of his pack and handed them over. She scanned the pit for half a minute, then handed them back to Sam. “Do you see the third tunnel from the ramp on the right side? Hurry, before they cover it up.”

  He panned the binoculars. “I see it.”

  “Zoom in on the pallet.”

  Sam did so. After a few seconds, he lowered the binoculars and looked at Remi. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s not my area of expertise,” Remi said, “but I’m pretty sure it’s a goliath ammonite. It’s a type of fossil, like a giant nautilus. This isn’t a mining camp, Sam. This is an archaeological dig.”

  13

  LANGTANG VALLEY, NEPAL

  “A dig?” Sam repeated. “Why would King be conducting a dig?”

  “No way to tell for sure,” Remi said, “but what’s going on here breaks about a dozen Nepalese laws. They take archaeological excavation very seriously, especially anything dealing with fossils.”

  “Black market trade?” Sam speculated.

  “That’s the first thing that popped into my head,” Remi replied.

  In the last decade, the illegal excavation and sale of fossils had become big business, especially in Asia. China in particular had been cited as a primary offender by a number of investigative bodies, but all of them lacked the teeth to enforce penalties within her borders. The previous year, a report by the Sustainable Preservation Initiative estimated that of the thousands of tons of fossil artifacts sold on the black market, less than one percent of them are intercepted—and, of these, none led to a single conviction.

  “It’s big money,” Remi said. “Private collectors are willing to pay millions for intact fossils, especially if it’s of one of the sexier species: Velociraptor, Tyrannosaurus rex, Triceratops, Stegosaurus . . .”

  “Millions of dollars is pocket change to King.”

  “You’re right, but there’s no denying what’s in front of us. Wouldn’t this qualify as leverage, Sam?”

  He smiled. “It would indeed. We’re going to need more than pictures, though. How do you feel about a bit of skullduggery?”

  “I’m a big fan of skullduggery.”

  Sam checked his watch. “We’ve got a few hours until nightfall.”

  Remi turned around and retrieved their digital camera from her pack. “I’ll make the most of what daylight we have left.”

  Whether a trick of light or a genuine phenomenon, twilight seemed to last hours in the Himalayas. An hour after Sam and Remi hunkered down in the foliage to wait, the sun began dipping toward the peaks to the west, and for the next two hours they watched dusk ever so slowly settle over the forest until finally the bulldozers’ and trucks’ headlights popped on.

  “They’re finishing up,” Sam said, pointing.

  Along the perimeter of the pit, digging crews were emerging from the tunnels and heading toward the ramp.

  “Working from dusk till dawn,” Remi remarked.

  “And probably for pennies an hour,” replied Sam.

  “If that. Maybe their pay is, not getting shot at.”

  To their right they heard a branch snap. They froze. Silence. And then, faintly, the crunch of footsteps moving closer. Sam gestured to Remi with a flattened palm, and together they pressed themselves against the ground, their faces turned right toward the sound.

  Ten seconds passed.

  A shadowed figure appeared on the trail. Dressed in olive drab fatigues and a floppy jungle hat, the man carried his assault rifle diagonally across his body. He walked to the edge of the pit, stopped, and gazed down. He raised a pair of binoculars to his eyes and scanned the pit. After a full minute of this, he lowered his binoculars, then turned, stepped off the trail, and disappeared from view.

  Sam and Remi waited for five minutes, then rose up onto their elbows. “Did you see his face?” she asked.

  “I was too busy waiting to see if he was going to step on us.”

  “He was Chinese.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Sam considered this. “Looks like Charlie King’s got himself some partners. One bit of good news, though.”

  “What?”

  “He wasn’t carrying night-vision binoculars. Now all we have to worry about is bumping into one of them in the dark.”

  “Ever the optimist,” Remi replied.

  They continued to watch and wait, not only for the last of the men and equipment to make their way up the ramp and out of sight but also for any signs of further patrols.

  An hour after night had fully fallen, they decided it was safe to move. Having decided against bringing rope of their own, they tried the organic approach and spent ten minutes quietly rummaging about the forest floor until they found a vine long enough and strong enough for their needs. After securing one end to a nearby tree trunk, Sam dropped the coil over the side into the pit.

  “We’ll have a drop of about eight feet.”

  “I knew my paratrooper training would come in handy someday,” Remi replied. “Give me a hand.”

  Before Sam could protest, Remi was wriggling sideways, sliding her lower body over the edge. He grasped her right hand as she clamped onto the vine with her left.

  “See you
at the bottom,” she said with a smile and dropped from sight. Sam watched her descend to the bottom of the vine, where she let go, hit the ground, and performed a shoulder roll that brought her back to her knees.

  “Show-off,” Sam muttered, then went over the side. He was beside her a few moments later, having performed his own roll, though not as gracefully as his wife. “You’ve been practicing,” he told her.

  “Pilates,” she replied. “And ballet.”

  “You never did ballet.”

  “I did as a little girl.”

  Sam grumbled and she gave him a conciliatory kiss on the cheek. “Where to?” she asked.

  Sam pointed to the nearest tunnel entrance fifty yards to their left. Hunched over, they dashed along the pit’s earthen side and followed it to the entrance. They crouched just inside.

  “I’ll have a peek,” Remi said, then slipped inside.

  A few minutes later she reappeared beside him. “They’re working on a few specimens, but nothing earth-shattering.”

  “Moving on,” Sam replied.

  They sprinted to the next tunnel and repeated the drill, with similar results, then moved on to the third tunnel. They were ten feet from the entrance when, on the far end of the pit, a trio of pole-mounted klieg lights glowed to life, casting half the pit in stark, white light.

  “Fast!” Sam said. “Inside!”

  They skidded to a halt inside the entrance and dropped to their bellies. “Did they spot us?” Remi whispered.

  “If they had, we’d be taking fire right now,” Sam replied. “I think. One way or another, we’ll know shortly.”

  They waited, breaths held, half expecting to hear the pounding of footsteps approaching or the crack of gunshots, but neither happened. Instead, from the ramp area they heard a woman’s voice shout something, a barked command.

  “Did you catch that?” Sam asked. “Is it Chinese?”

  Remi nodded. “I missed most of it. Something like ‘Bring him,’ I think.”