Shan drove as far as he could up the ridge that led to the Demon’s Den and then set out on foot up the old pilgrim trail, apologizing to Jinhua for the two miles they would have to walk to reach the Plain of Ghosts to avoid being seen from the road. The young knob looked ready for a parade. He had ironed his uniform, polished the badge that Public Security officers wore on holidays, even rubbed a sheen into his shoes. Shan had tried to sleep in a cell, then, giving up, had found Jinhua solemnly cleaning his gun at Jengtse’s desk.
“You should get your pistol,” Jinhua had said. “Clean it, make it ready.”
“I don’t carry guns,” Shan had replied, then brushed his uniform and cleaned his gau instead.
They walked in silence, each man lost in his own thoughts. The night before Shan had written two letters that he had left on his table, knowing that Yara or Trinle would eventually find them. If you get this, know that I have been freed of all cares, he had penned to Lokesh. He had lit his brazier and thrown in the registration card he had secretly, illegally obtained for his friend, watching until it was reduced to ashes. Then he had apologized to the old man for ever opposing his efforts to become a feral Tibetan in the service of the Dalai Lama. One of the greatest blessings of my life, he wrote, has been to call you my friend. You are the bravest, wisest human I have ever known. If I have to throw off this face then I pray we meet again. I have a recurring dream of you and I as farmers in a high mountain valley with a white yak looking down on us. I know you would tell me it is a sign of future incarnation. Now I embrace the joy of that knowledge.
He had torn up four letters to Ko before finally writing just You are all that is left of me on this earth, son—and I rejoice in that thought.
He resisted the temptation to look back toward Yangkar. In his short time there, he had developed an unexpected affection for the unkempt little town. He paused and shut his eyes, pushing back the premonition that he would not see it again, fighting the recurring sensation of a cold blade driving down into his neck.
* * *
When Jinhua, clearly still feeling the pain of his injuries, dropped onto a boulder at the top of the ridge, Shan admonished him. “You must stay here. I will be back later,” he added without conviction.
“It was my partner who was murdered,” Jinhua replied and touched the two pairs of manacles that hung from his belt. “One of these was issued to him, one to me, when we were first assigned as partners. I am going to put them to use today.” With obvious effort he stood and set out along the trail, Shan a step behind. The constable from nowhere and the fugitive Public Security officer were marching to do battle with the Hero of the Motherland and his Snow Tiger protectors. Shan stopped only once, to straighten a line of mani stones.
An hour later they looked down on the Plain of Ghosts. Jinhua had begun to descend the final slope when a loud, threatening snort stopped him. His hand went to his pistol as a yak appeared from behind an outcropping.
Shan could not help but smile when he saw the red yarn on the animal’s neck. “It’s the lama yak,” he said, as if the name explained the animal’s presence. The old bull, far from its usual pastures, stared at Shan for a moment, then appeared to nod at him before slowly turning to gaze at the distant snowcapped peaks. The yak seemed to have grown more contemplative since being ransomed.
They crossed the grounds of the old college and paused at the path down the embankment as they saw the black helicopter sitting idle on the flat below. Shan pushed Jinhua into the shadow of the entrance to Nyima’s cave and they briefly watched to be sure there were no soldiers stationed below. At the entrance to the ice cave they halted once more, hearing the sound of machinery inside, then straightened their uniforms and stepped inside.
Yintai and a man in a ski mask were burrowing into the ice wall, using battery-powered impact hammers and drills. General Lau was kicking away the chunks of ice as they fell. Jig Bartram was sitting in a corner, her arms tied against her chest and a gag in her mouth. Lau turned at her muffled cry, then followed her gaze to Shan and Jinhua.
“Comrades!” the general exclaimed. “How convenient that you would arrive now! It’s your destiny! You can witness our final triumph!” The general made a gesture that swept in both men and the American. “And then we can deal with all our problems at once!”
The tools, making short work of the thick ice, had already penetrated two feet, following a passage between rock walls that had been chipped smooth and plastered. Shan leaned close and peered through the thin layer of ice that remained on one side. The golden eye of a garuda, messenger of the gods, stared back at him.
“If you had told us about this, Shan,” Lau said with a shrug, “things would have gone so differently.” Yintai lowered his hammer and fixed Shan with an expectant gaze.
“I didn’t know,” Shan replied. “The evidence was there for all to find, but no one knew how to look. The manuscript describing the 1897 earthquake was with the later records for a reason. It explained how a new well had to be dug because springs shifted and the glacier spread its roots. Lamas who came into this chamber would have known it was incomplete, that it is missing its most important gods. There had to have been an inner chamber that had been sealed by the ice. The ravens chipped away the ice like you are now and blew up the entrance when their task was complete. Over years, as the ice grew back, Nyima cleared away the blockage of rubble to open the outer chamber so she could pray here.
“Simple, really. But you killed everyone who knew the secret. Almost everyone.”
Lau smiled. “Tons of gold. Just waiting for us all these years. Even more valuable today. Our investment has appreciated, you might say.”
“I’ve learned something about this land, general,” Shan observed. “Tibet doesn’t give you what you want. It gives you what you need.”
“Perfect! I need that gold! I need to buy companies in America!” Lau pointed to the ice chunks at their feet. “Now help with the work.”
“I came to make arrests.”
The man in the mask lowered his tool to listen.
“You never cease to amaze me, Shan,” Lau continued, his silver hair shining in the lantern light. “How can a man who has been punished so severely by the world still have such a poor grip on its reality?”
Shan looked past the general. “The time for masks has passed, deputy.”
“Buddha’s breath!” came the familiar epithet. Jengtse peeled off the mask and sneered at Shan. “Constables come and constables go.”
“But General Lau’s spy endures,” Shan continued. “Never complaining about the lack of a promotion, just offering to help each new constable while sharpening his knife in the dark. Constable Bao was lucky to have survived you. I never checked earlier records. How many constables have you killed?”
“The first one, before Bao, he tried to transfer me. Didn’t know I had seen the papers. Stopped him before they reached the mailbox. He fell off a cliff, scared by a walking skeleton. Then Fen. Counting you, it will be three by the end of today. I will take you to the vultures. In a few days no one will know who the bones belonged to.”
“How did you know about Constable Fen’s secret? How did you know where to intercept him?”
“He laid out the drawings on his desk, even asked me what I made of them. Then he went to see the astrologer. He came back all excited, told me to find some canned food to take to the old nun, and asked if I knew how to find her. I said she had been staying with some feral herders in a winter camp, but I could find them.”
“You took him to the Demon’s Den,” Shan said.
“He did me the favor of walking right behind me all the way from the road, just to be killed. Saved me the trouble of hauling his body all that way in the snow. Then I went back and eased the truck off the road.”
“To insert the blade with such precision, you must knock out your victims first.”
“I had a good teacher,” Jengtse said with a glance at Yintai, who fixed Shan with the stare of a hungry predator. “To obtain the right killing angle the subject is best immobilized.”
“One of those Snow Tiger traditions,” Shan suggested. “Fifty years and counting.” He turned to Yintai. “Of course, if a knife isn’t practical, a dump truck will do. And if you do use the knife near a city, try to find a pile of lime to hide the victim.”
Yintai’s grin was as cold as the ice. He touched the big sheath knife on his belt. “They go limp as a rag doll if you do it right. Severs all the nerves connecting the limbs to the brain. Usually they live a few more minutes, not able to move anything but their eyes. More entertaining when they stay conscious. Oh, those eyes! It always makes me laugh.”
Jinhua made a growling sound and stepped toward Lau’s aide, his hand on his pistol.
“Enough!” Lau snapped. “Lieutenant, your gun.”
Jinhua didn’t seem to understand as Jengtse extended his hand, until Jinhua turned and saw that Lau’s own pistol, his old Russian weapon, was aimed at his head. Jengtse took Jinhua’s gun, and Lau motioned him toward the debris. “Clear the damned path!” the general ordered. “You too, Shan!”
For a moment Shan wondered why Lau had not brought more men, then realized that the general expected to uncover secrets he did not want shared. Knowing that they would never reach the final act of their drama until the last secret of the Plain of Ghosts was revealed, he bent to the ice on the floor. “Better if three of us helped,” he said, nodding toward Jig Bartram.
“Not a chance,” Yintai growled. “The bitch kicked me in the balls.” He drove his drill into the ice again, and the blockage began to fall away in great shards, in places exposing the plaster surface of the passage wall.
Lau’s impatient anger was quickly replaced by excited anticipation, and he repeatedly pushed Yintai and Jengtse out of the way to swing a hammer himself at the thick ice. He hesitated as a small sheet fell away. “What the hell is this?” he demanded of Shan. He was pointing at another painted figure.
“One of the wrathful protectors who inhabit this place. I think you are waking them up, general.”
Lau laughed and smashed his hammer into the eye of the god. “Not that one!” he crowed.
Shan and Jinhua labored in silence, picking up the ice shards to deposit along the walls of the outer chamber. No one noticed that Shan’s trips to the walls gradually took him closer to Jig. At last, balancing a load in one arm, he dropped his opened pocketknife into one of her hands.
Minutes later Lau hammered loose a jagged sheet of ice that had nothing behind it but black, empty space. The general took a step forward, then hesitated. He thrust a flashlight at Jinhua. “You go in,” he ordered.
As Jinhua stared fearfully into the darkness, Shan stepped forward and grabbed the light. He aimed the beam directly in front of him as he entered the chamber. Two huge yellow eyes stared back at him.
Someone gasped behind him. A pistol cracked, and a bullet ricocheted somewhere ahead of Shan.
“It’s a painting, Jengtse,” Shan stated without turning around. “And those ricochets could hit one of you as easily as me.” He aimed the light at the rear wall, revealing a huge black leopard god on the rear wall. Yintai laughed, saying they had found a friend.
The chamber certainly had been the inner chapel of the gonkang. Shan’s light illuminated one painting after another on the upper panels of the plastered walls. Above old altars, the remaining protectors waited. Hayagriva, the horse-headed demon, extended a blood-filled skull beside Yamantaka, Conqueror of Death, draped in the skins of humans. Then came the three-eyed Mahakala in his black, savage form, riding a tiger. Arrayed around them were their escorts and demon guards, including an especially disturbing image of a grinning skeleton deity that held a human head in one clawed hand and extended its other hand outward as if in invitation. It had been a long time since any had heard a prayer.
Jengtse took one step inside and halted. He stared uneasily at the skeleton. “This is where he lives,” Shan said to his deputy. “The god you’ve been mocking all these years.”
Jengtse seemed to try to sneer, but his mouth twisted into a grimace. “Bag of bones in a cold, dark hell. Can’t be too powerful.” He picked up a piece of ice and threw it at the demon.
“Find it!” Lau barked. He had entered with a bright gas lantern in his hand and was clearly displeased at not being greeted by stacks of ingots. Yintai and Jengtse hurried along the walls, pulling out and emptying crates from under the old altars, spilling out old rolled thangka paintings and empty copper altar bowls. The bowls had been on the altars, which themselves had each been turned into the base of makeshift shelves of planks and blocks. The shelves were packed with peche.
“What is this?” Lau shrieked. He kicked an altar bowl across the chamber.
“The treasure of the Dalai Lama,” Shan said. “He had gold, yes, but it was only used to honor the deities and maintain the gompas.” He surveyed the precious manuscripts and realized he felt no surprise. “The real treasures were the collected teachings of lamas over the past thousand years.”
“You stole all the gold already, general.” The thin, carefully controlled voice came from the ice-framed entry. Colonel Tan was alone and clad in fatigues, wearing a full equipment belt as if ready for battle. His face was haggard but set with a determined glint. As he took a step inside, Jig Bartram appeared beside him.
General Lau seemed confused for a moment, but then nodded, gesturing Tan forward. “At last you see the sense of my proposal. Bring the American in. As good a place as any. Her family has caused enough trouble.” He turned to Yintai. “When we finish, blow it all up with the bodies inside.”
Tan didn’t move. “I suppose things were too disorganized back then to worry about those missing in action,” he observed. “A few dozen Tibetans.” He shrugged. “Liabilities to the state. A company of Red Guard punks. God knows I wanted to shoot a few of the little pricks myself.”
Lau gave a distracted nod. “Yintai! Sergeant Jengtse! Empty those boxes and shelves. There has to be more hidden here. They were devilishly clever, those ravens. Pull down the altars. Look for false bottoms in the bottoms of those boxes. No one would go to all this trouble over heaps of crumbling paper! It could be gemstones. Rubies and emeralds, secreted in the wood panels!”
As if to help, Tan went to the nearest of the shelves and pulled out one of the ancient volumes, contained in an ornate box. He carefully lifted the top page of elegant script inscribed on palm leaf paper. Lau shoved Tan aside and grabbed the book. The general had decided Tan had become another servant, bought and paid for with money in a Hong Kong account.
“You were ever the efficient officer, Lau,” Tan continued in the same level voice. “You had soldiers and heavy equipment drivers here. No one could be spared, of course. I think you locked the Red Guard and the Tibetans in the buildings and then shoved them off the cliff with your bulldozer. Driven by Sergeant Ma. Is that why he got a place of honor? The hero of your battle for Pure Water College?”
Lau hesitated. “We had orders to destroy all facilities of the reactionaries. You know that.”
“You wouldn’t have locked your soldiers inside. You still needed them. They had dealt with the ravens in the stable but all that gold had to be loaded and everything else pushed over the side. There were mules and the one bulldozer. I suppose you used the mules to haul debris to the edge of the ravine as well. It must be damned deep, one of those chasms where you can’t see the bottom. Nothing but shadows. Tibetans say such places can reach all the way to bottom of the world.”
Yintai tossed a manuscript cover made of gold brocade to Lau, who brightened as he examined it.
“But after a day or two the work was done,” Tan continued. He handed the manuscript page he had been holding to Shan. Its margins held images of birds flying among clouds.
“Colonel, look for more of the gold cloths,” Lau ordered.
Tan, still ignoring him, paced along the shelves, touching dusty manuscript covers. “I’ve heard books like this could take a year or more to produce,” he said. Jig Bartram inched along the wall. Jengtse cast her an uncertain glance and crossed to the opposite side.
“You were done,” Tan continued, “but still had a company of soldiers who knew too much.”
Lau eyed Shan, then frowned at the colonel. “This is getting tedious, Tan. Get to work! Clean things up in Yangkar and you can come visit me in Hong Kong.”
“They would have been blindly obedient. Your men always adored you. You would have done it in stages, probably picked one squad to take care of the others.” He turned to Yintai. “What did you tell them? The others were advocating treason, siding with the Tibetans?”
Yintai seemed amused at the suggestion. “Just a victory photograph. Lined them up at the edge of the ravine so we could get the snow peaks in the image, we said. All lined up like targets.”
“Ah,” Tan said. “A hidden machine gun.”
“In the back of a truck,” Yintai confirmed.
“The few left would have been no problem,” Tan said in a passionless voice. “Separate them, send some out on guard duty. Is that when you learned to use your knife, Yintai?”
“That was a trick from one of those Red Guards, a zoology student. He had demonstrated it on a captured Tibetan rebel. The funniest thing, how he still kept blinking his eyes. As an experiment we broke his legs with a sledgehammer and he didn’t feel a thing.” Yintai picked up another manuscript box, glanced at it, and tossed it on the floor before glancing up at Tan. “First we got rid of the mules. Rounded them up, shooting guns in the air, and drove them right off the cliff.”
Shan closed his eyes. The mules, the monks, and the ravens in the last drawing. They had not been flying. They had been falling.
“Sergeant Ma must have been the last. You needed the bulldozer until the end.”
Yintai shot Tan one of his lightless grins. “The general told him to drive the bulldozer over the edge,” the captain explained. “We had already reported it lost in a sabotage incident, so we did not have to account for it. The general said just leap out at the last minute. The fool hit his head when he jumped. Never regained consciousness.”
“Why put him in the tomb?” Shan asked.
“The slab had been knocked open by the bulldozer the day before. If any Tibetan came back, that would be the one they opened since the seal had already been broken. Tibetans are terrified of ghosts. One look at the dead sergeant and they would never come back.”
Lau had paid no attention to the conversation. He was busy ripping open manuscript cases.
“It’s true, then,” Tan said to the general. “You killed a company of your own men. Loyal Chinese soldiers.”
Lau threw him an impatient frown. “We can salvage this catastrophe, Tan. We will call it in together, say that our joint investigation team discovered the biggest cache of illegal Buddhist artifacts found in years, hidden by spies working for the Dalai Lama gang. That’s the line! Front page in Beijing! Clandestine enemies of the motherland subvert the—”
The gunshot ripped the still, cold air. Lau sagged. He gazed with a curious expression at Tan’s smoking pistol, then became aware of the blood pouring onto his chest from his throat. He raised a hand toward the wound as he slowly collapsed. The bullet had gone through his neck, ripping apart an artery.
Shan bent to check Lau’s pulse, then saw the rapidly expanding pool of blood and knew there was no point. Jig Bartram grabbed his flashlight and aimed it at the opposite wall. The little white circle of shattered plaster made it clear where the bullet had struck. It was precisely in the center of the outstretched, clawed hand of the skeleton god, as if the demon had directed the shot.
There was motion at Shan’s feet—Jinhua was checking the body—then at the entry, where Jig Bartram and Tan were blocking the flight of Yintai. The general’s aide, ever the warrior, swung his heavy knife at Tan’s belly. The blow was blocked by a broken plank from a manuscript box thrown by Jinhua, who then kicked Yintai’s leg, knocking him to his knees.
“You killed my partner!” Jinhua growled, then leapt back as the knife slashed at his thigh.
“He was nothing but dirt under my fingernails,” Yintai snarled. He crawled backward to Lau’s body, shaking the general’s lifeless shoulder, then reached for Lau’s pistol.
“You killed my partner,” Jinhua repeated as Yintai looked up in surprise. The holster was empty. Jinhua held the general’s gun. As Yintai flung back his arm to hurl his knife Jinhua fired a single shot into his chest. Yintai collapsed onto the general and Jinhua flung the gun on the bodies.
“Jengtse!” Jig cried. The deputy was gone. She darted down the passageway.
Shan was about to follow when he saw Tan’s face. The colonel was still staring at the skeleton demon. He seemed to have aged years in the last few minutes. “Colonel!” Shan said, tugging at his arm. Tan took no notice of him.
“I have him!” Jinhua shouted to Shan. He was tightening a belt around his bleeding thigh. “I will get the colonel outside. Jengtse still has my gun. Go!”
As Shan emerged into the brilliant sunlight, Jig Bartram was running frantically along the lip of the steep embankment. Jengtse was already halfway down the path to the flat parking area, where Lau’s helicopter had landed.
Suddenly his deputy halted. The American too slowed her pace. Both were staring downward. Shan ran past the outcroppings by Nyima’s cave, where at last he had an unobstructed view of the flat below. A second helicopter was there, no doubt flown by Tan, but so too were Tserung’s old Red Flag sedan, Trinle’s orange motorcycle, and one of the battered trucks from the garage. Spread out in a line, blocking Jengtse’s flight, were a dozen Tibetans. Shan saw Yara, Dorchen, Dingri, Lodi and his dog, Marpa, Shiva, and several farmers. They were holding spades, pitchforks, lengths of pipe, and other makeshift weapons. Dingri raised a club over his head and charged at Jengtse.
Shan’s heart sank as Jengtse lifted his pistol and fired. The bullet ricocheted off a rock beside Dingri, who kept running up the path. Jengtse fired another shot and Dingri staggered, clutching at his shoulder, but then extended his makeshift weapon and took an unsteady step forward. The others slowly advanced behind him.
Jengtse did not have enough bullets to stop them all. He turned and ran back up the trail, keeping Jig at bay with his gun as he passed her.
Shan and the American reached the top of the path to the Plain of Ghosts together. The plain was empty except for the big lama yak, grazing above the ravine. It paused and looked up, first at them, then at the outcroppings near the old well. Shan remembered the little niche in the rocks Jengtse had found the day he and Jinhua had explored the plain.
“Go around,” Shan said to Jig, pointing to the outcroppings. “I will flush him out. He will run up the trail along the edge. You can surprise him in the rocks there.” He extended a set of manacles to her. She pushed his hand down. “He killed my brother,” she reminded him and darted away.
“Jengtse!” Shan called as he approached the short tower of boulders. “You’ll get a trial. You can tell your story. You were forced to kill by your former officers.”
As Shan gazed up at the little niche in the rocks, Jengtse appeared from around a boulder in front of him, his gun aimed at Shan’s heart.
“You deserve to die just for being such a fool.” There was nothing of the subordinate officer in his voice. “People like you are ruining the future of Tibet, helping them live in the past. I’d be doing the motherland a favor.”
“I’m a fool, yes,” Shan said, “for not checking your background at the start. How did you like serving Lau in London?”
Jengtse grinned. “I drove the general’s Mercedes. What a place! Last week he said he was thinking about buying a house there, said I could be the caretaker if I was successful here.”
“That’s gone now.”
“I can still disappear in Hong Kong. He had companies there. They’ll give me a job.”
“Why did the American have to die? He just wanted to bury his mother.”
“Who comes from the far side of the world to bury some ashes? No, he was after the treasure too. He had to be. I was sure he knew more. But the bastard was silent as a stone.”
“Did Dingri help you kill him?”
“That weakling? All bark and no bite. He had no stomach for that kind of work. He thought I was bluffing when I said I would nail that American’s hands to the table, so he helped me hold the first one down. When I pounded in the first nail he shouted, louder than the American. Said I had to stop. I told him he would never get a new life by playing the coward. But with both the American’s hands nailed down I didn’t need him for the rest. He ran.”
“And Nyima?”
“She started sending messages to the herders. It had to stop. I didn’t kill her. She was supposed to say a demon attacked her, to scare away the others. But the old goat never said a word.”
The gun was still aimed at Shan’s chest. “The others will be here any moment, Jengtse. Are you going to kill them all? Nyima? Lhamo? Old Trinle? And Colonel Tan is made of iron. Bullets bounce off him.”
At the mention of Tan, Jengtse lowered the gun, glanced over Shan’s shoulder, and disappeared around the rocks. Shan warily followed. By the time he emerged onto the open plain, Tan and the Tibetans were indeed at the head of the path, working their way toward the ravine. Jengtse, running along the edge, suddenly halted. Jig Bartram had appeared in front of him.
“I’ll shoot you, I swear!” Jengtse shouted at the woman, then retreated a step as the old yak appeared behind the American, still grazing.
“You’re going to have to, deputy,” the American said as she slowly advanced. She was only half a dozen steps from Jengtse when she halted. Her knife was in her hand and she slightly bent, as if coiling for a leap.
“Why the hell did you come?” Jengtse spat. “You ruined everything.”
“My mother wanted me to understand Tibet,” was all Jig said. She took a step forward. Jengtse fired.
She jerked as the bullet grazed her arm, then took another step. Jengtse glanced at the approaching Tibetans and fired at her again. The shot ripped away fabric at her shoulder. She kept walking. She was reciting a mantra.
Jengtse took his time now, steadying the pistol in both hands, aiming at her head. She stared back at the gun. Her only reaction was to chant the mantra more loudly.
The angry bellow seemed to come out of the earth itself. There was a blur of something heavy in motion, as if a boulder were rolling. Jengtse took his eyes off the pistol an instant before the yak was on him. The great beast had him in its horns and with a deep bellow it swung its mighty neck. Jengtse was thrown impossibly high over the abyss. For a moment Jengtse clawed the air just as the figures in the drawing had done. Then he was gone.
The bellow still echoed off the side of the mountain.
No one moved. Jig slowly dropped to her knees. The lama yak went back to its grazing. Shan stared at the animal so long he did not even see Tan until the colonel himself was at the edge of the bottomless ravine.
At first Shan thought he was looking for Jengtse’s body, but then the colonel turned and Shan saw the desolation on his face. He could not understand what Tan was saying, then he realized Tan was speaking to the yak. “No!” Shan shouted as Tan unbuttoned his gun belt and let it drop to the ground. Shan tried to run forward, to pull Tan away, but his feet were leaden.
Tan spread his arms wide. The yak raised its head and stepped closer, studying the colonel. It stopped a dozen feet away and cocked its head. Tan, arms still outstretched, gazed up at the sky as if in prayer, then stared into the yak’s eyes with a pleading expression.
Time stood still. The old soldier, ravaged by time and his heart-breaking country, and the weather-beaten yak seemed aware of nothing but each other. Then the yak gave a shuddering sigh, turned its back on Tan and began to graze again. Shan walked slowly forward and pulled Tan from the edge.
* * *
A quarter hour later they watched as the motley caravan from Yangkar drove away. Tan, still wearing a glazed expression, had collapsed onto a rock, then weakly pointed to the American, who now stood herself at the edge of the cliff. Shan realized he had never told her what he had learned from Ko.
“I have an idea,” Shan had said as he approached Jig. “A theory about who drew this place as it became the Plain of Ghosts. A hope.”
The American turned. She ignored the blood seeping down her sleeve.
“I can’t be sure, Jig. We couldn’t do anything more than move him to the 404th, not while Lau still lived. Prisoners get assigned Chinese names. Sometimes they themselves forget who they were.”
She looked up at him with dull eyes, then back into the abyss. “All these years, my mother kept writing to the dead.”
“All but the one we found, the one who sent the drawings. He speaks with mules.”
The words took several moments to sink in. She slowly turned back to Shan, then sobbed and embraced him.
By the time the Tibetans were gone, Tan had revived. A familiar guile had returned to his countenance, and Shan asked no questions as he directed Shan, Jig, and Jinhua to carry the bodies of Lau and Yintai out of the cave. He examined Yintai carefully, confirming that Jinhua’s bullet had passed through his body, then took Lau’s lifeless arms and helped carry him down to the general’s helicopter.
“I need cord,” the colonel said to Shan. “Something that will burn.”
“We could have just thrown them off the edge,” Jig suggested when she and Shan finished a fruitless search of the gear compartment of the helicopter.
“No.” Tan had the voice of command back. “If the famous general disappears there will be inquiries, search parties dispatched all over the mountains. He must die like a hero.” Tan turned to Shan, who shrugged. “Your boot laces, then,” Tan said, then motioned to the cockpit. “After I start the engine, belt Lau into the pilot’s seat, then Yintai beside him.”
The colonel climbed into the cockpit, and with a low whine the rotor started moving. He climbed out to help them with the bodies, then took the laces from Shan. He tied a loop in each, then leaned into the cockpit, adjusting controls and securing them in position with the laces.
The helicopter was already off the ground when he leapt out. It climbed slowly but steadily. When it was several hundred feet high, the wind caught it and it gradually veered north.
“Good,” Tan said. “By the time it crashes they will be far away from my county.” He watched the receding helicopter with a satisfied gaze. “I’ll wait a few hours then call his quarters to see if he is free for dinner. When they can’t account for him I will order an urgent inquiry. I will report that I agreed to let him take one of the new helicopters out for a test flight with Yintai this morning. The brave general, ever a friend of the common soldier, took time out of his retirement to make sure new equipment was safe for his beloved Snow Tigers. There will be great pageantry in Beijing, and he will be laid in a hero’s tomb.” Tan cast a mock salute toward the north. “May you rot in eternal hell, general,” he added.
They waited in silence until the black speck of the helicopter disappeared behind the first range of snowcapped peaks. “What’s that the old ones say, Shan?” Tan asked with a new light in his eyes, then remembered. “Ah, yes. Lha gyal lo. It means victory to the gods.”