The Thieves of Darkness (48 page)

The ground was hard-packed soil and rock, intermittently covered in snow. The temperature hovered around thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, the summer high for this part of the world.

Iblis’s team quickly broke open the large crates and withdrew a table, unfolding it before Venue. They removed prepacked rucksacks and backpacks, tents and laptop computers.

Kunchen walked around the open rocky fields of grass and snow, occasionally pausing, smelling, appearing to taste the air. He spread his arms wide, spinning about as if in ritual. He looked up and read the blue sky, looking at the great sharp peak that loomed above them at twenty-eight thousand feet, studying the wisps of snow that curled off the jagged edges of the summit, looking like an Ansel Adams photograph.

KC turned from Kunchen’s ecoanalysis and cast her eyes on the Piri Reis chart that had been rolled out on the table. Appended to the map were yellow Post-its written in English that Iblis had translated from Turkish during the plane ride. Sonam held down their fluttering edges, sheltering them from the slight breeze as he read. He turned his eye to the mountainous depiction of Kanchenjunga on the animal hide, tracing his callused forefinger along the red path. Venue, Cindy, and Iblis stood with bated breath awaiting his assessment, but he remained silent, his eyes falling closed at intervals of deep thought.

Abruptly he opened his eyes and turned to Venue with a broad smile filled with misshapen teeth. “Five hours,” Sonam said as he pointed west toward a snowy mountain pass.

Venue looked at his watch and shook his head. “Three years’ salary for five hours’ work.”

“Wait for destination before you start crying for discount,” Sonam said in broken English.

“Not to worry,” Venue said. “I have no intention of renegotiation.”

Iblis turned to his men. “Secure the crates and suit up; we leave in ten minutes.”

KC looked back at Kunchen, who was walking toward Venue. The older guide walked slowly, his hardened eyes filled with warning.

“We cannot go,” Kunchen said.

Venue said nothing as he watched the man approach.

“Why,” Iblis barked.

“Storm’s coming.”

“Storm?” He looked up at the blue sky.

Venue turned and looked down to Sonam, his raised brow asking for a confirmation.

Sonam looked up at the wisps of curling snow as they wafted off the mountain peaks, and nodded in agreement. “Big storm.”

“How big?”

“Down here, nothing to worry about. Throw up tents, make coffee, tells jokes, and in thirty-six hours we go.”

“Thirty-six hours?” Iblis shot back.

“How long until it gets here?” Venue asked.

Sonam and Kunchen looked at each other.

“Six hours,” Kunchen said. He was obviously the senior, the man of greater experience, and on the third-largest mountain in the world, experience always took precedence.

“We could make it to our destination if we leave now,” Iblis said to Venue.

“Understand,” Sonam interjected. “If we wrong, if we get slowed, if there’s rockslide in our way, you could be added to body count of Kanchenjunga.”

“Where I come from, weathermen are wrong all the time,” Iblis said.

“That’s because they learned their science from books.” Sonam laughed. “We learned ours from God.”

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” Kunchen said to Venue, bowing his head. “But where
I
come from, I’m never wrong.”

Venue stood there thinking. He looked at the eleven guards now wearing backpacks. “Five hours, you said,” he asked of Sonam.

“If all is right in the world. But I, too, can already taste the storm in the air.”

Venue turned to Iblis. “Secure the base camp, keep everything crated. If the weather turns bad we’ll turn back and make camp here. Let’s take what we can carry, whatever doesn’t slow us down.”

A silent buzz overtook the camp as Iblis’s men quickly got to work. Venue rolled up the map and tucked it into his backpack. Iblis grabbed the satchel containing the rod, throwing it over his shoulder. Cindy stood there like a fish out of water in her ill-fitting hiking clothes, looking like some sort of academic. Her hiking boots were poorly tied, her vest wide open, her hat rested in her pocket so as to avoid a matted head of hair. She was entirely naive about what she was facing, as though her intelligence had dimmed as she had fallen under the spell of her father.

KC shook her head in disgust as she picked up her pack, settling it on her back. She snatched the empty leather tube for the chart off the table as two of the guards broke it down. She watched as they stored the table inside the largest crate, along with the other bags of supplies, and began to close it.

“Wait,” KC said, running over. She opened the top of the tube and slipped her letter to Michael inside. She closed it and passed it to the guard. “Only bringing what we need.”

The guard said nothing as he tucked the leather case into the larger crate and sealed it, pulling down the hasps, securing it tightly.

KC looked around; there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run. She hated herself for falling into this situation, for ever having listened to Iblis, for trusting her sister.

When she turned around she saw Venue, Cindy, and Iblis already hiking along the snow and rock toward the mountain pass one mile in the distance. The guards were heading up behind them in pairs. She had never thought she would die so young, but the possibility presented itself more strongly now than it had when she had been trapped in a jail
cell, sentenced to die. KC turned to the two mountain guides who stood silently staring at her.

“This is a really bad idea,” KC said as she put on a black wool hat, tucking her blonde hair up inside. She took off her pack and checked it, pulled out a bottle of water, and affixed it in a net pouch on the side. She looked at her watch, noting the time, put on her sunglasses, and looked at the summit of Kanchenjunga.

“You’ve climbed before?” Sonam asked.

“Nothing like this.”

“At least you respect the mountain.”

“It’s going to get bad, isn’t it?”

Kunchen nodded as he looked at Venue and his team heading off.

“Don’t worry,” Sonam said with a crooked-toothed smile. “You seem scared—more than any of this group—which is good. Maybe, out of us all, you’ll survive.”

Banyo Chodan gripped the stick guiding his helicopter across the green foliage for the second time in four hours. The former Indian military pilot loved his job shepherding rich Europeans and Americans who picked mountains out of catalogues to add to their travel-experience collection. Mountain climbing had once been reserved for the hardiest, most adventurous of men: The great peaks had first been scaled only in the fifties, and climbs had been infrequent at best for the following decades. A sport reserved for intelligent, athletic risk-takers, it led to death and tragedy more often than any other. But now, with the vast amount of new money floating around, people thought they could buy their way up a mountain, could buy medals and badges of courage just like shopping for a new pair of shoes. Banyo did not mind that the jet-setters chose Kanchenjunga over Aspen, Tahiti, or Africa, he just had to be sure not to get too friendly, as the survival rate was not as high as Aspen and the death of his clients had a tendency to bring him down.

Banyo had arrived back at the airstrip to find the Boeing Business Jet taxiing toward him. It was larger than Venue’s jet, which sat in the distance. With the cost of fuel these days, larger meant greater resources, more funds, which was confirmed by the brown-haired American and his large blond friend as they slipped the five thousand dollars into his hand.

Banyo explained everything he could remember about the European
party and their foolishness at traveling in the off-season. He described the eleven large men and their militarylike countenances, the two guides, who were the best the area had to offer, the European Venue, his short, dark aide, and his young daughter. And finally, the beauty of the tall blonde with the look of defiance in her eyes, the second daughter, the one with a will of her own.

It took all Banyo’s will not to break out in his usual belly laugh when they said they needed to go to the same place. Two thirty-million-dollar jets in a single day was no coincidence.

Banyo had called his two cousins Achyuta and Max, offering them as sherpas for a fee of five thousand dollars, and hit the two men for two thousand more for clothes, boots, and climbing gear. The American kept peeling off the bills, without protest, until Banyo finally overflowed with guilt.

All told, Banyo ended up with twenty thousand dollars to take this second party out to the mountain and be on call to snatch them back. It was definitely time to take another vacation with his wife in the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean.

Banyo showed them to the back of the hut to change and pointed out the back door to a large natural steam bath that bubbled and fogged the cool air.

“Hot springs; you’ll like them,” Banyo had offered. “Not a bad idea in preparation for where you’re going.”

“No, thank you,” Busch said uncomfortably.

“They are everywhere around the Himalayas, but here, they are medicinal, no sulfur odor.” Banyo sniffed the air. “See?”

“We really need to get going, if you don’t mind,” Michael had said.

And so they were flying out over the green, rolling mountainside, heading straight for the peaks of Kanchenjunga, the thrumming blades announcing to the mountain that more victims were en route.

B
USCH AND
M
ICHAEL
sat in the back of the helicopter, both wearing large yellow earphones equipped with microphones to communicate with each other over the engine noise. Achyuta and Max sat across from
them, studying the large blowup picture of the untranslated map that Michael had given them. Neither of the young men who hailed from Sikkim was older than twenty-five, and their mahogany-brown skin seemed yet unfamiliar with facial hair. Both were reed-thin, which couldn’t be disguised by their mountain wear. There was a joy and a sense of mischief in their eyes as they looked at the chart, pointing and whispering in their native Nepali language, the excitement on their faces unmistakable. They were heading into terra incognita, unknown territory, much as their fathers and grandfathers had before them.

But their adventure would be short-lived. Michael had already decided that once they were within an hour of their destination, he would send the two brothers back down the mountain; he had no desire to wipe the innocence from their eyes.

“Kind of makes me miss Istanbul,” Busch said, seeing his breath coalesce in soft clouds before their eyes.

“Bet you’re thinking of that nice hot spring and its nice hot water right about now,” Banyo’s voice came over the headset.

“Yeah,” Busch said in reluctant agreement as he pulled his backpack up onto his lap. He reached in, withdrew his GPS tracker, and turned it on. He magnified the image and found that the two red dots had separated, one stationary, the other moving northwest. He held it out to Michael. “It looks like they split up.”

Michael rose from the wooden bench and, with his hand against the copter’s ceiling to steady himself, walked to the front of the aircraft.

“How far up the mountain can you take us?” Michael said, thankful for the headset, which enabled him to avoid shouting.

“Not far.” Banyo shook his head. He pointed at the mountain that loomed large in the windshield, its peaks silhouetted by dark, ominous clouds. “There’s a storm coming in. You may want to reconsider and sit back for a day. I won’t charge you again.”

Michael shook his head. “Take us as far as you can.”

The chopper rode low over the green hills, which gave way to rocky scrub. This part of the world appeared deserted, fresh, and unblemished by man, as if God was keeping secrets.

Busch made his way up to Michael and held out his GPS to Banyo, pointing at the stationary dot. “Can you take us there?”

Banyo nodded. And within five minutes they were touching down in exactly the same place he had dropped off the first team. There was not a soul in sight as they all disembarked, working together to pull off the backpacks and supplies.

Their equipment was de minimis; climbing, in the sense of using crampons, ropes, and spikes, was not what they would be doing. They didn’t need oxygen, as they would be well below the eighteen-thousand-foot barrier for breathing, though fatigue would be a major factor. Michael couldn’t imagine the foolish desperation that drove Venue and Iblis. Once they hit ten thousand feet they would be feeling it. And the climb to their estimated fourteen-thousand-foot destination would result in nothing short of sheer exhaustion. The terrain would be rocky and snow-covered at the higher altitudes, dangerous even to the sure-footed, but at least the gradient wouldn’t exceed twenty degrees.

Achyuta and Max walked about the abandoned camp, the reproduction of the chart held before them. They looked at the looming mountain, pointing and speaking in hushed tones.

“You call me on the two way-radio when you’re ready to come back,” Banyo said as he stood by the open door of his helicopter. “And don’t be stupid; it’s always the ones with too much pride who die up there.”

Michael nodded and shook Banyo’s extended hand. “Thanks.”

Banyo jumped in and started up the HAL Dhruv, pulling her into the sky; Michael watched it disappear south and turned around.

Busch stood among ten large wooden crates, each secured with large hasps and locks. He tapped his finger on one of them and then on his GPS display.

“Do you think they left something behind?”

Michael walked over, withdrew a small climbing ax from his pack, and hammered off the lock. He flipped open the clasps and threw back the large top of the crate. He dug through the tents and duffel bags, pushing back a collapsible table, and found the leather tube.

He pulled it out and unsealed it. He briefly looked at Busch before
withdrawing a folded piece of paper. Two pages. He unfolded it and began reading:

Dearest Michael
,

I’m sorry to be leaving you this letter. I know it was something your wife did on so many occasions and that it was something special between you, but it is the only way I can contact you now
.