“Now we go find plane,” he announced.
When they were leaving the caves she noticed a lot of frenetic activity. “What’s going on?”
Porter said, “The entire clan will pack and get ready to move to a new location in a few days. This won’t be a hospitable hideout much longer. It appears we are the focus of every bad guy for a hundred miles in any direction. And they fear government forces might learn what’s going on and send in the Lao military.”
While the preparations for the foray were being made, rope to strap—whatever they found loaded into the elephant baskets, she and Porter grabbed an hour’s sleep in one of the smaller rooms of the cave complex.
37
When Kiera and Porter were abruptly awakened, she wasn’t sure she had slept at all. When she realized Porter was beside her, it immediately calmed her.
They went out on the hill. The five elephants watched and waited almost as if they too grasped the importance.
Porter said, “Owning this many elephants is an indication they aren’t as poor as they look for a slash and burn, nomadic culture.”
The elephant mahout motioned for them to get back on the big female, Bo.
Kiera watched the mahout work with her. Bo seemed very fond of the man, nuzzling him affectionately with her trunk.
Once up on the elephant she worked her way to the bamboo seat box and Porter soon joined her.
Phommasanh, his son and Narith, along with the other two monks and four soldiers, mounted the other elephants and then they headed out.
Porter said it was expected to be about a three-hour trek getting to the mountain they would need to climb. “By the time we reach it and get up it’ll be afternoon. They want to be back before dark.”
For hours they moved along a winding narrow trail that climbed through heavy jungle.
Kiera felt close to her grandfather in a new way now. The war that had ruled his life and influenced hers was always a distant awareness, something in the past, something far away on so many levels.
But now it was very close. He had crashed in these mountains a decade before she was even born, and had made his way on foot through these very jungles. And here she was nearly forty years later hunting for that fated plane.
She felt now her whole life he’d been preparing her for this. All the extreme camping treks, the lectures on survival, her becoming a war correspondent—all of it added up to this moment in her life. Maybe he hadn’t consciously intended it as a purposeful training course, but she didn’t think it was totally irrelevant or disconnected. He wanted her to do what he, for whatever reason, couldn’t.
The sun-infused mist that hung over the narrow valley below finally burnt away as they approached the flat-topped mountain where the plane had crashed.
It was steep and forbidding. She’d trekked in rugged mountains, and climbed many, and knew a difficult place when she saw it.
A conversation between the Hmong stopped them for a time. Phommasanh was on his satellite radio.
Porter got down and joined the talks. When he came back he said there were armed men coming up into the Hmong territory. “They could be, and probably are, hunting us and not tigers.”
“How close?”
“Not close. But it puts some pressure on. They want to get up there. They don’t want to go around to the east side of the mountain where they might be able to get the elephants up because it’ll take way too long.”
Kiera studied what she could see of the mountain. “I don’t see anywhere around this side of the mountain where the elephants can climb.”
“They want to leave the elephants below and climb here. The plane—if the map is correct—would be on this side and close once we’re up there.”
Kiera nodded. “Okay. Let’s do it.”
They headed toward the mountain face, and the closer they got the worse the climb looked. The walls were sheer and challenging, though not really very high if they worked up some of the rises and outcrops.
They stopped beside a huge bomb crater that had become a watering hole for elephants and other creatures. The watering hole lay near the base of granite cliffs. The elephants were thirsty and as soon as everyone dismounted they went to drink and sloshed each other with water.
Daylight had only six or seven hours left. Porter conferred with Narith and Phommasanh.
Kiera studied the cliffs. She’d climbed a lot higher and harder than this, but there were problems with the lay of the cliff face. “The Hmong aren’t free rock climbers?”
“They don’t hike or climb for fun,” Porter said. “That’s a Western thing. And maybe they’re a little afraid to violate the sacred mountain even if the ceremony okayed it. The mountain may get angry and shrug them off.”
They stared at the sheer walls broken here and there by cliffs and fissures filled with stubby growth. Kiera said, “Let me see your binoculars. It looks doable. They bring enough rope, you think?”
“I’m sure. Mostly for packing whatever they found on the plane.”
He handed her his glasses and she took them and walked closer to the rock face.
It wasn’t high, maybe a fifty-foot climb, but there was a section near the top with an overhang that had to be negotiated. She studied it for a long time looking for a possible route with enough finger and toeholds.
Kiera said, “You do any free climbing?”
Porter shook his head. “No. I’m not a big fan of rock climbing, free or otherwise. How much have you done?”
“I’ve done some,” she said. “All we need is for one person to get up and feed rope back down. I guess that’s going to be me.” She tracked several routes.
“Let me check with these guys. Maybe one of them—”
“No,” Kiera said. “I don’t want some volunteer who doesn’t know what he’s doing getting killed. This is my mission. I have experience. It doesn’t look all that difficult.”
She pulled the binoculars down. “I can get up there. There are some easy shelves that I can climb to with no problem. But then it gets tricky with that outcrop, and it goes on…and where it stops on both ends is too sheer. I need to get closer.”
After some discussion, Phommasanh reluctantly agreed to go along with the idea of Kiera doing the climb.
They had plenty of nylon rope. She had to square knot three lengths to get what she thought she’d need.
They left the animals at the watering hole and walked up around the side of the first jut of rock. They then climbed through huge shoulders of rock at the lower elevations, the rocks covered with vines and mosses and shrub. All of them mounted the first level.
Kiera studied the climb up close, tracking each move over and over, back and forth, imagining how she would ascend, where she would approach the overhang.
At the solid face, they were stymied and this would be the beginning of her climb.
She said, “It’s not that high from here and shouldn’t be all that difficult except getting over that overhang.”
After mentally repeating the process half a dozen times, picking out her toe and finger holds, envisioning each point of the climb, she felt ready.
The surface at one point looked burnished in the sun, wet from some underground water source, and she wanted to go around that to where it was dry, choppy with fissures and cracks.
But that put her up under the shelf at the top. It would take a lot of upper body strength and that could be tricky.
When she had the best route mapped in her mind she turned to Porter and handed him the binoculars. “I get up over that lip, we’re home free. Let’s do this.”
38
After removing all other items from her pack and distributing them to Porter and other men, she took only the rope.
Kiera began the climb, slowly getting comfortable with the feel of the mountain.
The first half of the ascent proved easy enough. It was the last half that would be challenging to her already tired leg muscles.
She rested for a moment, the late afternoon sun burning on her neck and the backs of her legs.
She now began to inch her way carefully up along the breaks and outcrops to her left. The limestone felt solid, but a climber could never trust feel alone, you had to know what the different shades told you, the moisture content, where weaknesses were that color revealed.
The stone was warmed now by the sun, and felt rough and maybe not very solid from all the water these mountains had to deal with.
Kiera liked to grip the face of a wall with every part of her body and talk to the mountain as she climbed. Ask it questions.
Show me. Tell me
.
Her legs cramping up became an issue, the muscles already seriously stressed from the trek up to the Hmong. She had to compensate with her hands and knees and when she began to tremble she knew she was in some trouble.
C’mon, dammit. This is nothing. This is practice.
The last third under the ledge was sheer and looked more formidable up close than it had from the shelf below.
She took another rest where she had a good foot-hold.
When she started up again a piece of the rock she grabbed gave way. She felt herself slipping.
No, no, no.
She gripped with her hips, face, fingers, knees and thighs. But it wasn’t going to be enough and she knew it.
Her right foot found a tiny outcrop and stopped the slipping.
Both her hands were without good grip. Her left foot had a precarious toehold.
That’s when she heard the chopper. She wanted to laugh at the cruel irony, but she couldn’t do anything that would alter the relationship she had formed with the rock wall. Even a macabre chuckle could end that relationship.
Could they see her there? Kiera found herself alone on the side of a cliff, her reserves about tapped out. She froze in a spread-eagled embrace of the mountain.
The sound of the
whap whap whap
of the chopper blades seemed to grow ominously closer.
Were they Loation military or the men chasing them? She didn’t know which would be worse.
The forest towered into the sky and might block their vision of her. But if they were high enough, she thought she would be easily seen.
Her face, plastered against the smooth rock, grew wet around her jaw from saliva.
This isn’t good, she thought. I’m going to fall right off this goddamn rock and soon if they don’t get the hell out of here.
Then she thought, if they see me, what does that matter? They won’t shoot me. Or will they? If they see me and try and land they’ll be pretty far out. No landing places existed except the crater watering hole. And they wouldn’t fare well in a battle with Phommasanh’s people, except all the men were now up on a narrow ridge.
But then she thought if the chopper was military it would possibly open fire at the people below before they could get down into the trees. They were exposed on a shelf pretty high up. It would be a disaster. This was no place to get caught.
Her legs trembled and felt like dead weight.
Her fingers cramped. She wanted to sink her teeth into the damn rock. Anything to hold on.
I can’t wait. Got to go up, she thought. Whether they see me or not, I can’t stay here.
***
Porter saw her legs doing a little quiver. She was about forty feet above him when he heard the chopper.
She’s going to fall real soon, he thought. “C’mon Kiera, you can do this. You can get up there girl.”
I should never have let her to this, Porter thought.
If she didn’t fall, she’d be caught right where she was. An easy target if the chopper got close enough to see her.
There was nowhere to hide. They were all basically stranded on the shelf and if the chopper was hunting and spotted them they were all pretty much done.
“You’re fine,” he yelled. “Don’t worry about the chopper. Just get up over that ledge.”
She didn’t answer. Not good, he thought. She’s in big trouble.
There was no way to catch her or break the fall. He motioned for the men and they put the packs together and quickly gather some fronds and light, leaf-filled branches to put on top, but Porter wasn’t confident it would be all that effective. He looked up at Kiera.
Don’t fall. Forget the chopper. Just get over that damn ledge.
39
Flying low over the valley Arnold Cole tracked the jungle with his binoculars as he hung out the open doorway of the chopper as it leaned against the wind.
He glassed one side, scanning the jungle below while Besson working the other.
Where the hell are you, people?
Besson was in communication with three teams in the area. A mix of gangs that had responded as the word went out.
One of the bandit groups looking to get in on the reward reported from a ridge across the valley that they’d spotted several elephants cross an opening before the jungle swallowed them again.
Had to be them, Cole thought. “Run the valley one more time,” Cole demanded. “They’re in there somewhere. The crash site is probably on that mountain, or near it. None of the other tops are flat enough to even attempt a landing.”
The mountains were the strangest Cole had ever seen. Massive protrusions that looked like a giant version of Stonehenge covered with jungle. Whatever the volcanic action had been to create them, it was like nothing he’d ever seen before.
He blamed this all on Porter Vale. Cole believed if he could have sat down with the Hunter woman and talked it over, they could have worked out a deal. Hell, he’d have given her a piece of the action.
He could feel them down there, invisible but definitely there. He glassed slowly, carefully, tracking back and forth.
Where the hell are you? C’mon, I got you now. Give it up. Let’s talk about this.
He pulled the binoculars up to look along the cliffs.
“Swing around the horn.”
“There’s nothing there,” Besson said. “We need to refuel soon.”
“There’s got to be a path that goes up on the mountain. How the hell else could they get up there? That’s where they’d be going. Find it, you find them.” Cole turned to Besson. “How close are the Ks?”
The Ks were Chinese drug runners, former members of the defeated Kuomintang armies that fled China when the Communists took over and found a home in Burma, taking control of the Golden Triangle drug trade. A group of them in the area had signed on to help in the search.