“Ah come on,” George said, face darkening.
“That’s what some Hindus think.”
George scowled. And the next time I went with him, I noticed that after checking to see if A.S.J.B.R. were watching from his inner office, he was slipping a hand into the outer office’s desk and snatching stationery and the like. One time when A. Rana left us alone he even typed on some of it. “We’ll see who sets up who,” he muttered as he slipped the typed pages into his briefcase.
But meanwhile A. Rana was soaking us for baksheesh, demanding payment for his time and then putting us off again. George had to keep visiting Yongten to get more cash, and Yongten started shaking his head. “Not working,” he said.
Colonel John was furious. “The bulldozers are there and they’ll be starting construction as soon as the monsoon ends! We’ve got to get something done!”
Really, it was worse than Singha Durbar. A. Rana and his buddies in the Secretariat were entertaining themselves by playing volleyball with George’s brains, bump, set, spike, hilarious! and meanwhile he was still suffering from the runs, losing a lot of weight. He was just about to break.
And so one day A. Rana plopped us in his outer office and got busy ostentatiously ignoring us, talking to somebody on the phone in Nepalese and laughing a lot, and then he put down the phone and emerged from his inner sanctum, yawning. He dismissed us with a wave. “I must leave now. Come back later.”
I could hear the cables snapping inside George. All of a sudden he was standing in front of A. Rana, blocking him and saying in a real intense voice, “Listen you little tin god, you either give me the records for that road extension or I’ll break your fucking neck.”
Which of course is exactly what you must never do with a Kathmandu bureaucrat, as George himself well knew—usually he was Mr. Valium with these guys. But as I say, he had snapped.
And A. Rana immediately huffed up like a cobra in a corner, crying out “Do not think you can threaten me sir! Leave this office at once!” and George took a step toward him, threatening to touch him with his forefinger and growling “Who’s gonna make me? Gimme those records right now!”
A. Rana picked up his phone and cried “Be gone or I will call the police to eject you!”
“What makes you think they’ll come!” George shouted, furious at the idea. “You’d have to bribe them to get them to come! And then they’d have to bribe the people at the door to get in, and where are you all gonna get the money for that? Gonna skim another foreign aid project? Gonna rip off another development agency to pay for throwing me out of your office? It’ll take you ten years to throw me out of this office!” and then I had him by the shoulders, and I kind of lifted him out of there, holding A. Rana away with my foot while they screamed at each other and everyone else came out into the hallways to watch.
Scratch that opening.
* * *
That night George was inconsolable. “I blew it, Freds, I blew it.”
“Yes you did.”
We smoked several bowls of hash and went to K.C.’s to get over it. Once there George started to down enormous quantities of beer.
Pretty soon he was shitfaced. “I just don’t know what to do, Freds. I just don’t know what to do.”
I nodded. Truth was, my bud was overmatched. I mean what could he do? The people he had taken on were eating up the foreign aid agencies of the entire world, the World Bank, the IMF, all the giant cash cows.
And then Steve came in and joined us and we sat there drinking and Steve told us some of his Peace Corps horror stories, how once the palace had run short on cash when they needed to buy the panchayat elections for their candidates, and so they had gone down to the Terai and cut down a huge swath of hardwood forest and sold the lumber to India to raise the bucks, and then gone to the World Bank and said Oh, sir! Deforestation, what a horrible problem for us, come look! and took them to the piece of the Terai they had just finished wiping out and sure enough the soil was already in Bangladesh and so the World Bank gave them money, and they quick reforested about thirty acres and put an airstrip in the middle of it and pocketed the rest, and after that they took people down to see the great reforestation project every chance they got, and soaked every visitor for money to help finish the task, which money went immediately to tux uniforms for the Army and other less crucial things.
And this was the crowd George was going up against. With limited funds, and no Nepalese. What was he going to do against guys like these?
He was going to get drunk and smash beer cans against his forehead. At least on that night. No mean feat given that the beer cans were from India and still made of tin. “Thass all right, I’m used to it,” George said. “Beat my head against a brick wall for a month now, gotta big callus up there.” He demonstrated. Crunch. I took him home.
We stumbled through Thamel’s narrow streets and George stepped in all the puddles as he looked around. “Look, Freds. Look at these poor fuckers, I mean look at them.”
Someone said “Hey, Mr. No!”
George shook his head and almost fell over. “I’m Mr. Yes! Mr. Yes! Yes yes yes!”
I waved the curious kids away and helped George walk. He staggered along unsteadily. “Wouldn’t it be great if Tibet and Nepal just changed places, Freds? If they had just started on opposite sides of the Himmies? See what I mean?”
“China would have conquered Nepal.”
“Thass right! Then they’d be the ones diving into this bureaucracy! They could use it for population control! Send people into it and watch them disappear! Pretty soon China’d have only a few people left, and the Ranas could take over Beijing. Have ’em begging for mercy.”
“Good idea.”
“And meanwhile the Tibetans and the Dalai Lama woulda been on the south side and they could’ve kept on doing their brother from another planet trip in peace and quiet, and wouldn’t it be wonderful, Freds? Wouldn’t it?”
“Yes it would, George. You’re drunk. You’re crying in your beer. Let’s get you home and smoke a few bowls and sober you up.”
“Good idea.”
But Colonel John was back at the Star waiting for us, and he was not amused. He did not approve of our obvious dereliction. That didn’t stop us, but whilst we were getting high he paced back and forth in front of us like a mummy drill sergeant, spinning a hand prayer wheel and snapping “What’ll we do now? You’ve spent two thousand rupees and we don’t have a thing to show for it! All we got is the most suspicious gang of bureaucrats on earth! What’ll we do now?”
George took a huge hit and held it till he turned blue. “Gahhhhhh. Dunno. Dunno! Dunno. I mean what can we do? We got an Indian road, that’s all we know. Swiss don’t want. Why not? Dunno. Indians building it. Chinese can’t be too thrilled, I mean the Indians weren’t happy when the Chinese built that Lhasa-to-Kathmandu road. Right? All these roads are nothing but attack corridors far as New Delhi and Beijing are concerned, they’re both paranoid about it. I suppose we could try to scare them out of doing it, I dunno. Fake a raid, or something like that—”
The colonel grabbed him by the neck and lifted him bodily. “YES!” he shrieked, and let George fall back to the bed. “YES!” Quivering like he had stuck his toe in an electrical socket.
“Yes what?” George said, massaging his neck.
Colonel John bayonetted him with a finger. “Raid! Raid! Raid!”
“Doesn’t work. The little bastards crawl back under the door.”
The colonel ignored him. “We dress up some of the Khampas as Chinese, and make a night raid on the Army barracks in Chhule.”
“How’ll you get Chinese uniforms?” I asked.
“We’ve got a lot of those,” he said darkly. “Just have to sew up the holes.” He thought more about it. “We go down into Tibet that same night, and attack the nearest Chinese Army post. Cross over Nangpa La, so it looks to both sides like the attacks came from the other side. Keep Shambhala out of it. Border incident, Chinese complain, Birendra chicken
s out like in ’72, and the road project is stopped for good. YES!” He leaned over to yell in George’s face. “Great plan, soldier!”
But George had passed out on the bed.
* * *
Next morning he couldn’t even remember what the plan was, and when we told it to him he wouldn’t believe that it was his idea. “Oh no you don’t, Freds. You’re doing it to me again, and I don’t want any part of it!”
Colonel John was already packing.
“Think about Singha Durbar,” I said to George. “Think about Birendra and the Ranas. Think about A. Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana.”
That got to him. He would have growled, but he was too hung over. He crawled to his window and looked out at the rooftops of Thamel.
“All right,” he said after a while. “I’ll do it. It’s a stupid plan, but it’s better than this—” waving out at all of Kathmandu.
So we got ready to leave again, which for Colonel John meant jumping in the Land Rover and for me meant packing my backpack, but George had a list of Things To Do. First he bought a couple big canisters of kerosene. Then he bought near all the antibiotics in Kathmandu, a search that took him not only into the little drug stores around Thamel but also to the many dealers on the sidewalks, who sat there on cloth spreads next to folks selling candied fruits or incense and yet stocked state-of-the-art drugs because they were supplied by returning climbing expeditions. Among the finds was a load of Tinnidazole, which is a treatment for giardia not approved in the States—you take four giant horse pills of the stuff all at once, and next day all the giardia in you is dead, along with much of the rest of your insides no doubt. George bolted down a dose of this poison himself on the off chance it was giardia he was suffering from, and staggered on through his tasks.
One of these was to drop by our friend Bahadim and confer with him, giving him a notice he had written for the Nepal Gazette, along with some letters that looked to me like A.S.J.B. Rana’s stationery.
Then after quick visits to drop off more paperwork at the Swiss office and the Palace Secretariat, he was ready. Colonel John drove us up to the farm near the End of the Road, and we hid his Land Rover and took off practically running for three days straight, then around Chhule, through the rhododendron forest with all its flowers now fallen and matted on the ground, and up the high valley, now roaring with monsoon runoff. Then over the glacier and up the ridge into the snows, over the pass and down into Shambhala.
Once down in the sacred valley the colonel told everyone about George’s plan. All the Khampas went wild for it, but the Manjushri Rimpoche was not so enthusiastic. “By no means can you harm anyone doing this. That would be an injustice so serious that it would overwhelm any good that could come out of it.”
Colonel John was not pleased to hear this, but he agreed to it, sounding just like Eddie Haskell—“Of course not, holy Rimpoche, no killing whatsoever. We’ll direct our fire against property only.”
“We just want to scare them,” I explained.
“Yes!” Colonel John said, seizing on the concept. “We only want to scare them,” and he went away fizzing over with plans to terrify the border posts on both sides so thoroughly that some of them might die of fright, which would be too bad but not our fault, not directly. Not as directly as bullets, anyway.
So with the organizing of the raid he fell back completely into his Marine Corps mode, setting up the two forces and drilling them and making up maps and charts and battle plans. His idea was that the two forces would time their attacks on the border posts in Nepal and Tibet so that they could retreat up into Nangpa La from each direction, meet, and then slip away, leaving any pursuing Chinese and Nepalis to face each other. He thought this was great. Every day he came up with a new twist to add to it. “Okay,” he’d say after one of these brainstorms, “we’ll come down on Chhule dressed in Chinese Army uniforms, but every fifth man will be wearing one of the monastery’s festival demon masks, which’ll give the Nepalis a subliminal shock. Consciously they’ll think it’s the Chinese, but corner-of-the-eye-wise they’ll think it’s all the demons of Yamantaka coming at them.”
George would frown heavily at these ideas. “Don’t you think that’s overdoing it a bit?” he would suggest. “I mean, it’s really important that the Chhule soldiers think that it’s the Chinese attacking them. I’m not sure festival demon masks will help support that.”
“Of course it will,” Colonel John would say, dismissing the objection. “It’s their subconscious minds we’ll be tampering with. Psychological warfare. I didn’t spend ten years in the CIA for nothing, you know. You just leave that part of things to me.”
“If there’s any Gurkhas stationed there they aren’t gonna care what we look like,” George warned. “They’re gonna come out firing.”
“There’s no Gurkhas up here!” Colonel John snapped. “They’re Nepali Army police, the worst troops on earth.” And he stopped telling George his plans.
Eventually all was ready. Two raiding groups were to go out on the same night, one led by Colonel John into Nepal, the other by Kunga Norbu into Tibet. The Manjushri Rimpoche had given us permission to use some of the tunnels in Shambhala’s ancient secret tunnel system, so that we could emerge well away from the valley—just up the ridge, in fact, from the saddle of Nangpa La itself.
Now Nangpa La, as I said, was the old salt and wool traders’ pass between Tibet and Nepal, exactly the pass that would be used by the Chinese or the Nepalis if an attack were to be made on each other—not that the Nepalis would ever be so stupid as to attack China, but the Chinese were convinced the Indians would use the route, ignoring the existence of Nepal. So it was perfect for our purposes—it fit with our cover story, and there would be nothing to lead any pursuit into the area of Shambhala itself. So we could make our attacks and be back to Nangpa La by dawn, and when we had disappeared, any pursuers could sort it out in mutual extreme paranoia.
“I don’t know,” George kept saying. “Maybe we should just try the Nepal side. I mean what are they gonna think when they both get attacked?”
“They’ll both think the other side is lying,” the colonel said, “and they’ll both have years of good reasons for thinking it.”
The only question in the colonel’s mind was whether he was leading the right group. His deepest hatred was directed against the Chinese, and it was likely that their Army post would be the more dangerous when attacked. But these were in fact good reasons for staying on the Nepali side, because if he and the Khampas were to get in a fire-fight with a Chinese platoon, they were liable to go crazy and kill them all. Even the colonel recognized this. The chance to scare the daylights out of the craven Nepalis, on the other hand, sounded both satisfying and safe—as good a revenge as the Manjushri Rimpoche would allow for Birendra’s betrayal of the Tibetan resistance back in ’72.
So three days after our return, we assembled in the monastery courtyard at noon. Demon masks were distributed, along with a collection of rifles and mortars that looked like they had come out of a museum of the Kashmiri Wars. I was loaded up with a mortar, and George was given a backpack filled with its ammunition, rocks by the feel of it. The colonel told us how to use the thing. Turned out the mortars were in fact antiques, and the Khampas had long ago run out of ammunition for them, so they made their own explosive charges by gutting bullets stolen from the Chinese. Once these charges were in the mortars you then stuffed in yak wool wadding, followed by cannonballs or birdshot or rocks, whatever was at hand and fit the barrels.
The Manjushri Rimpoche came out and gave us his blessing, and Colonel John gave a pep talk. Then the Kalapa kuden joined us, looking stunned and about to die as usual, all dressed in his gold ceremonial robes, and suddenly he fell in a seizure and swole up, and they struggled to tie on his helmet which weighed around a hundred pounds and looked like it would keep him floored, and they tightened the strap under his chin till he should have been strangled and then the spirit of Dorje Drakden entered him fully and suddenly h
e was strutting around the courtyard with his eyes bugged out, hissing in strangled Tibetan that I couldn’t understand, swinging a giant wooden sword and taking short rushes hither and yon that forced us to clear the way for him. It was as clear as the nose on your face that Dorje Drakden had possessed him and was snarling at us—a fierce deity, rushing among us under the dark sky and the strange light of the eternal flame, and damned if some of that spirit didn’t arc across into every one of us, so that when Dorje pointed his giant sword at the lower entrance to Kalapa we all tore into it.
Down and in we ran, until the walls of Kalapa had run out and the room we were in was made entirely of stone, and we continued down a tunnel that was lit by butter lamps until we clattered down a set of dark stairs into a huge underground cave, walled with gold. This apparently was the Grand Central Station of Shambhala’s vast tunnel system. “Whoah,” George says. “You didn’t tell me about this.”
“I didn’t know about this,” says I. The few points of light coming from butter lamps didn’t show us much, but it seemed to me that around twenty tunnel entrances opened out of this golden cave. “Hope we don’t have to make our way back alone.”
“Don’t say that.”
We took off along one of the tunnels, following Kunga Norbu and a few Khampas with torches who ran ahead in the dark filling and lighting the butter lamps. The lamps were in niches which held statues of Bönpa demons or Bodhisattvas, so that we were either shrieked at or cheered on as we passed. There were occasional splits in the tunnel, and usually we turned right, but not always. We moved along at a jog, uphill most of the time, even stairs in some places, so it got to be hard work. Except for puddles and little drip waterfalls and the lamp niches the tunnels were nearly featureless, so that it was impossible to tell how far we were going. But it must have been several miles over and about four thousand feet up, because that’s how far away Nangpa La was.
Escape From Kathmandu Page 21