38

THE BALLAD OF
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

Tengboche Monastery, Khumjung, Nepal

October 18, 2014

When Beth sought Quinn out the next morning, he made no effort to conceal the materials from Henrietta’s chest spread across the low table in his room.

“What’s all this?” she asked, looking curiously at the pile of journals and papers.

“My next climb, just as it said on that postcard you brought from Pashi’s. Henrietta is still much too ill to talk at any length, but she gave me all this in the middle of the night. I haven’t looked through everything, but I have seen what Fuji passed to her at the Kumari Jatra and the notes she made immediately after.”

“So did Fuji bring out a child that last time as you suspected?” Beth questioned urgently. “Did he tell Henrietta who the boy is? Where did he hide him? Not on that mountain surely. Is the rightful Panchen Lama dead? Is the child the reincarnate?” “No, it’s nothing like that,” Quinn said, reluctantly stopping Beth in her excitement. “However it does relate to something essential and hidden. Look at this.” Quinn passed Beth the drawing of the skull.

“What is it?” Beth asked as she looked at the picture.

“Henrietta’s notes say it is a kapala, a precious Tibetan relic of engraved human bone not unlike those mala beads she was given. In the other picture, I think Fuji was drawing what he remembered of the mountain to remind Henrietta of an old climbing route. The old photographs from the file are hers. They show a possible line to climb the mountain that she worked on back in the day and called ‘the Kapala Route.’ On the drawing you can clearly see the same red line and markings.”

“Who did the climb?”

“Her lover, Christopher Anderson—and it killed him. I suspect there are many more details that will better connect the drawings to that climb in those older diaries and journals. However, from what Temba has said of the original Ghost Moths and what I have read in Henrietta’s notes, I think I know what I have to do.”

Beth picked up one of the older journals and began to read.

“Like my next climb seems to have found me, I think your next story has found you,” Quinn said. “In the meantime, I need to speak with Temba Chering and Sir Jack to see how all this can be organized.”

Beth spent the morning piecing together the older contents of Henrietta’s tin box, studying journals and maps, patches and photos of a journey through Kathmandu and the Himalayas forty years earlier. When she returned later to find Quinn assembling an assortment of climbing gear that had been hastily brought up from the trekking shops of Namche Bazaar, she asked, “So it looks like you have a plan?”

“Of a sort. I’m going to be dropped in alone by the helicopter. It needs to be as light as possible to go really high and I should still be acclimatized from my last climb, so I should be able to move relatively fast once I’m on the mountain.”

“But how high? Aren’t helicopters limited for altitude?”

“The H125 is new and has pretty much changed the face of high-altitude rescue over the past few years. A stripped-down prototype even touched down on the summit of Everest in 2005 and that’s 29,000 feet.”

“So it’s just going to drop you on the top of the mountain?”

“Sadly not, but Pertemba thinks if it’s just me, we can get into the Camp Two basin at 21,000 feet, which is a good head start. It seems the weather is going to hold for a bit so from there I can climb the traditional route through to a high pass on the mountain called the Makalu La and then retrace Anderson’s last known steps from Henrietta’s photographs. If I was going to hide something so no one could get at it, it would be on the final section of the route, a steep wall of rock above what is known as the French Couloir that leads directly up to the main summit. Very few would even consider going that way to the top.”

Quinn made it sound straightforward, routine even, but Beth had read more than enough in the diaries and journals that morning to know that it wasn’t.

When she asked Quinn how he was going to get off the mountain, he busied himself in making sure that the satellite phone laid on an open orange plastic flight case was properly charging.

“We’ve got a couple of ideas. Depends.” He almost mumbled. “This old sat-phone from the gear market in Namche will allow me to communicate with Pertemba fairly anonymously just in case our Chinese friends are listening in. We also have a small rescue beacon. It looks a bit dodgy but still seems to work. I’m sure he’ll get me out when the time comes.” He changed the subject. “Anyway, how did you get on?”

“Good. I think I have it all pieced together now. It’s a great story. Henrietta Richards and Christopher Anderson were quite the pair.”

“Well, let’s hear it then, and while you’re at it, can you cut off all that nonsense?”

Quinn tossed Beth his penknife and pointed to an old and somewhat worn yellow down climbing suit so covered in sponsor patches it looked like a billboard.

“There’s a needle and thread on the table also, for the holes.”

“Really, the little lady has to do that?” Beth asked.

“No, I . . . I didn’t mean it like that. I just need the help to get ready.”

“I’m kidding, you jackass,” Beth replied with a smile to show she was messing with him. She began to snip away at the badges as she recounted everything she had learned from the older contents of Henrietta’s tin trunk. She called it, “The Ballad of Christopher Anderson.”

The story began in the autumn of 1974 when Henrietta was still a junior at the British embassy in Kathmandu. Late one night, while she was on what was euphemistically known as “cleanup duty,” dealing with those British citizens who had taken the hippie trail east and fallen foul of Kathmandu’s temptations, she received a call from an exasperated police officer.

A notorious English wastrel known as “Acid Eric,” was once again in the Jochne lockup just off Freak Street, totally naked and screamingly high.

Henrietta arrived to find the English lunatic sharing a cell with a host of imaginary creatures dive-bombing his head and a not imaginary American climber called Christopher Anderson, who had been arrested after punching out one of the Barrett brothers in Sam’s Bar. Given that in Henrietta’s book, thumping a Barrett—as well known for their hard drinking and brawling as for their tough climbs—was hardly a crime and sharing a cell with Acid Eric on a bad trip was more than punishment enough, she got the American released as well.

For Acid Eric, Kathmandu’s seemingly endless patience was exhausted. He was deported on the next BOAC plane out, leaving Henrietta with his sole possession—the ex-army Norton motorcycle he had ridden there from England in the first place—to settle what she could of the cost. When Anderson later sought Henrietta out to thank her, she asked if, in return, he would help her collect the old motorbike. They did so, and together rode it back through the—in those days—traffic-free streets of Kathmandu. Enjoying themselves, the American suggested they continue to the medieval town of Bhaktapur and on to a nearby hill station called Nagarkot with a distant view of Everest. There, they ate a hastily assembled picnic and looked at the mountain on the far horizon.

Anderson talked of how he wanted to climb it and was surprised, in return, at Henrietta’s already great knowledge and interest in the peak. From that day they became an item. In her diaries, Henrietta acknowledged that they were an unlikely couple: she, the straitlaced Englishwoman and he, the tightly wound American climber who had served in Vietnam. But in those days, little in Kathmandu was likely and, in her words, “the mountains had matched us well.” Together they began to plan his climbs, she researching routes that challenged the idea of what was possible at that time, and he attempting them with a string of other like-minded alpinists of all nationalities.

They grew ever closer and Anderson let Henrietta in on the fact that there was something beyond climbing that had led to his presence in the ancient city. The confession came as little surprise to Henrietta who had always assumed that Anderson was partly driven to take risks in the high mountains by what he had experienced in the jungles of Southeast Asia. However, while related, it proved to be more complex than that.

Anderson was originally from Colorado. His mother had died young to leave his father alternating his broken existence between Leadville’s wind-scoured molybdenum mine and equally bleak dive bars. As a result, young Christopher went to live with his maternal grandmother in a tiny mountain town nestled beneath the red cliffs with which it was eponymous. In the late ’50s, while out squirrel hunting, a then twelve-year-old Anderson saw what he thought were “Indian braves” hunting on the land of what had once been Camp Hale, a remote base in the mountains where the US Army had trained its fabled Tenth Mountain Division during the Second World War.

Soon after, an army officer, who had picked up on local gossip of the encounter, came into town. Searching out Anderson and his grandmother, he told them, and subsequently everyone else still capable of listening in Red Cliff’s only bar, that from then on everyone needed to stay clear of the old camp as weapon testing had been resumed. To just Anderson, he secretively explained that the “braves” he had seen were indeed a new generation of “code-talkers”—Ute this time, not Navajo—under training for a role in the ongoing Cold War. The admission was followed by the equally cold threat that if Anderson ever mentioned them again to anyone, he would be separated from his grandmother and placed into care.

Anderson’s grandmother died of pneumonia just as he was finishing school, so having swapped his obsession with cowboys and Indians for hunting and climbing, he rejected his father’s invite to work at the mine and dirtbagged west via the sandstone of Utah and the red rocks of Nevada to arrive at the granite walls of Yosemite. When the unofficial climbers’ camp there was hosed and closed by the authorities, a number of the residents were drafted, Anderson included. His skills on a rock face and hard upbringing in the highlands of Colorado ensured that he was well suited to the army. Becoming a Ranger, he served three increasingly desperate tours in Vietnam.

During the third, Anderson was involved in a Green Beret operation over the mountainous Laotian border to exfiltrate a man known as Tommy Rowe, who had been training the indigenous Hmong people to fight the Viet Cong. Anderson helped rescue Rowe from a bitter firefight only to realize on the Huey out that he had just saved the same man that had warned him off Camp Hale all those years before.

Back in Saigon, steeped in toxic Vietnamese whiskey, Rowe told Anderson that he was with the Agency and specialized in training indigenous peoples to help America fight its wars. At Camp Hale, he revealed, they had not really been training Ute Indians, but Tibetans to fight their Communist Chinese invaders. He confessed to Christopher that of all the dirty wars he had worked in since being a teenage Marine at Iwo Jima—Korea, the Permesta rebellion in Indonesia, Vietnam itself—only the Tibetan struggle had been similarly honorable to his first fight in the Pacific. The man deeply regretted how the Tibetans had been subsequently abandoned as American interest had turned elsewhere in their ongoing battles against Asian communism.

After that third tour, Anderson, disturbed and depressed, missed his flight home and drifted to Nepal as so many were doing at that time. Climbing in the Khumbu Valley he met two Tibetans called Pema Chöje and Temba Chering, who had escaped during the Tibetan uprising and were working as Sherpa to survive. He became particularly close to Pema, who would tell him of how he had flown from his hometown “like a ghost moth” bearing a precious relic to keep it from the Chinese destruction. Inspired by Pema’s story, Anderson had begun to help other refugees in the valley when he was on climbs.

Henrietta, on hearing this, had joined Anderson in his support of Tibet and, in turn, used her own contacts to disseminate the information he learned about the Cultural Revolution’s persecution and destruction ravaging what was left of Tibet.

Together they recruited a small group of other climbers to help, and after Pema Chöje, they called themselves the Ghost Moths. The letters T.I.B.E.T. on their badges signified “Tibetan Icon & Buddhist Evacuation Team,” a play on the style of Anderson’s Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol insignia from Vietnam. It was actually a sort of in-joke between the Ghost Moths, but at its heart that was exactly what they were doing, they were helping get both people and relics away from the destruction happening beyond the mountains.

For a brief period in the late 1970s the group was successful, but those same mountains were unforgiving and the attrition of the Ghost Moths was high. When Makalu took Anderson, the matter, for Henrietta, really stopped there as she became lost in her own mourning for the one person she had ever really loved. The others carried on, but when they too were taken by the mountains, it apparently finished completely. Only now had they learned that Fuji had actually survived to continue the mission in his way, but Beth said there was nothing in all Henrietta’s notes to suggest that she knew.

“Was Fuji on the climb with Anderson?” Quinn asked when she’d finished. “Is that why he recognized the skull drawing?”

“No, Anderson was climbing alone when he was lost.” She looked at Quinn when she realized what she had said. “I think that another of the Ghost Moths, a Pole called Piotr Glowacki, was on another mountain nearby and it was he that told everyone back in Kathmandu that Anderson had been killed—but with deliberately incorrect details of how and which route he had been climbing. Henrietta herself underwrote the Pole’s report, so few queried it. Glowacki himself died on K2 a few years later. I think Fuji only knew about the route and the kapala because when he later went to climb the mountain himself, Henrietta wrote that she told him all about it and asked him to try and find Anderson’s body. He made the summit on that climb, but told Henrietta that he saw no sign of Anderson.”

“And what happened to the Tibetan, Pema Chöje?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to ask Temba since they worked on the mountains at the same time.”

She handed Quinn back the climb suit, asking of her work, “So what do you think?”

“It’s a hell of story.”

“No, the suit, dummy.”

Quinn looked to see it newly intact but unadorned except for Henrietta’s original ghost moth badge that Beth had stitched on.

“Nice, but personally I would have preferred the ‘Super Freak’ patch that was in the tobacco tin,” Quinn said, laughing.

“Creep,” Beth replied.

“But seriously, when I set off, you’ll need to go back to Kathmandu with Temba Chering and Sir Jack. If there really is a lost child that Fuji smuggled out, then that boy must be hidden somewhere in the city. He certainly won’t be up Makalu, that’s for sure. Do you have any clues from the diaries where he might have been left?”

“It seems the Ghost Moths sometimes housed young refugees at an orphanage called the Hello Welcome Home until onward passage to India could be arranged,” Beth replied.

Quinn pointed to the prayer wheel and the mala beads. “I think you should take those with you. Perhaps the boy will recognize them. This also.” He tossed Beth the small toy from Shishapangma. “It seems that nothing Fuji did was by accident. He knew his time had run out. He chose his exit I think to draw attention onto him and away from the puzzle he had left. Only that way could he be sure to protect against everything falling into Yama’s hands. I think he deliberately showed part of that puzzle to Henrietta and the rest to me on Shishapangma. You are going to have to be the link that brings it all together.”

“I think so too,” Beth said. Looking at the small toy and then the Englishman, a thought suddenly became clear in her head about what she had to do with it.