He sensed a new movement and turned to see the driver craning his neck forward over the steering wheel. Hammering the gearstick hard into third, the jeep jumped forward as the engine took the brunt of the braking and their speed slowed. Up ahead, a small outcrop of houses stood baking in the midday sun.
They pulled up behind the lead jeep. Chen could see the other soldiers quickly leave their vehicles and fan out across the tiny village square. All of them brandished rifles on their shoulders. The locals melted back into doorways, their eyes wide.
Chen watched through the streaked glass of the windshield. Despite the long hours and the stifling heat of the jeep, all he wanted to do was stay where he was.
Beijing must have known how much he would hate this. It was always like that. Always a test. And once he opened the door, he knew he would have to go through with it. The die would be cast.
There was a tentative rapping on the window and Chen swivelled in his seat to see a man standing only a few inches from the glass. With a flick of his wrist, Chen motioned him to back off and then, with a heavy sigh, pulled on the door handle.
Outside the air was maddeningly hot. Everything was caked in dust: houses, vehicles, people. Everything was grey, and still as the grave.
Straightening his back so that he brought himself up to his full height, Chen motioned for the man to come closer. He was not Tibetan. Indian perhaps, or a mixture of the two, with fast, shifting eyes that like a fly never seemed to settle on anything for more than a moment. His teeth were badly worn, the discoloured roots visible behind crooked stumps.
‘Where is he?’ Chen asked, staring down at him.
‘Money first,’ the man said, rubbing his fingers together slowly. Chen reached into his back pocket and pulled out a small wad of fifty-yuan notes held together by elastic bands. He tossed the money over, keeping his distance.
The man took his time, creasing back the corner of each note as he counted. Eventually he simply pointed to an unremarkable house set back from the central square.
‘You’re certain?’
‘Certain,’ the man replied in a low voice. ‘I have been watching.’
Chen signalled to the soldiers with a couple of fast jabs of his hand and they fell in behind him. As they walked the few paces to the house, he could already feel the sweat prickling up in the small of his back and armpits. He marched on, reaching the battered wooden door in just a few strides and slamming it open.
At first all he could see was blackness.
Thin shards of light pierced through the uneven woodwork of the house and eventually he could make out a tiny living area: central fire, a few pots and pans, and a couple of low wooden stools. From round the corner, a young woman in a dirty apron suddenly appeared and screamed with shock at the sight of the soldiers. Chen motioned again and two of his men moved forward quickly, dragging her out through the doorway.
Stooping under the low ceiling, Chen moved through the house and located two further rooms. In the second, a boy was sitting cross-legged on the floor. As Chen stepped into the room, the boy’s startled brown eyes followed his every movement.
He was wiry and dirty, his face streaked with mud. Despite his age there was a certain calmness to the way he stared, as if in the battle between confusion and fear, he had not yet managed to decide between the two.
He remained seated, his chin tilted upwards as he took in the entirety of the huge man looming over him.
‘What is your name?’ Chen said in Tibetan, feeling the words fall from his mouth.
‘Gedhun,’ the boy replied quietly.
At this response Chen shut his eyes for the moment, blocking out the world. When he opened them again, the boy was still staring at him.
‘Come here,’ Chen said, gesturing with his hands.
The young boy stood and took a hesitant step forward across the room, his small hands balled nervously into fists.
‘Everything will be OK,’ Chen heard himself saying. ‘Shut your eyes.’
He was looking at those hands, trying not to think of his own son.
‘Go on,’ he said again. ‘Shut your eyes.’
The boy squeezed them shut and a couple of tears rolled down his dusty cheeks, leaving two clean tracks.
His lips were still moving in prayer when the bullet came. With a deafening crack, his small body was thrown back across the room, slamming into the far wall before sliding down into a pile of disjointed limbs.
The dying noise of the shot left an eerie stillness behind it. Chen sagged to his knees, trying to fight against the suffocating feeling that seemed to cramp his entire abdomen.
It wasn’t imaginary – suddenly he couldn’t breathe. The air just wouldn’t pass into his lungs. He clawed at his shirt collar, desperately trying to loosen his tie. Lurching forward on to his feet, he stumbled out through the living area, toppling a pot resting on the corner of the fire. He heard it crash to the ground just as he arrived outside and into the terrible heat.
They were all there, staring at him. They fixed him with their vacant, stupid gazes, as he pushed past them towards the jeeps. He leaned against one of the cars, finally dragging the dry air deep into his lungs. Pulling open the door, he frantically tried to find the cigarette pack he had seen earlier which belonged to the driver. It was jammed under his seat, by the door. Chen broke open the pack and put a cigarette to his lips then tried to inhale. It didn’t work. He tried again, sucking hard on the filter.
Why was it not working?
It was the sergeant who grabbed his shaking hands, holding them still for a moment as he brought a light to the cigarette. Chen inhaled deeply, once, twice, and then a third time in quick succession. Eventually he let out a long, ragged breath, sending a plume of smoke skywards.
‘Get the body. Beijing will want to see it,’ he managed. ‘And get those fucking people away from the house.’
The sergeant nodded curtly and then ran off towards the house, barking orders. Chen watched him go then silently moved around behind the two stationary jeeps, into the shade of one of the nearby houses. He inhaled on the cigarette again then leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and vomited.
Chapter 6
‘I don’t hear from you for three months. Then you turn up out of the blue with a rucksack full of dirty clothes and want me to dig up some old satellite maps . . . Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?’
Luca smiled, resting his hands on the arms of his leather chair. He still remembered the days when he used to be genuinely terrified of Jack Milton’s craggy face and withering gaze. As a boy he’d sat in this study, in this same sagging armchair, and felt the weight of the long silences that seemed to be part of every conversation he had with his uncle.
For the young Luca, Jack’s prematurely lined face and shaking hands had always been just another sign of his strange otherwordliness. He was a professor of geology at Cambridge University and somehow different from everyone else. Everything about him was unpredictable, often erratic and confused. It was only as an adult that Luca saw these idiosyncrasies for what they really were – the signs of an ex-alcoholic who had strayed too close to the edge before purging himself of his addiction. Now he drank endless cups of coffee, channelling his compulsive drive into the minutiae of the rocks he studied.
The study hadn’t changed in all those years and was still crammed with books. Wooden shelves honeycombed the walls right up to the ceiling, so that the uppermost volumes threatened to shower down amidst a cloud of dust. At shoulder height, some of the books were pushed aside to make room for selections of rock samples, stacked in small piles and having long since lost their identifying labels.
‘You’re the only person I know who really gives a shit,’ Luca said, dunking a biscuit into his coffee.
‘Well it’s good to know I’m top of a long list,’ Jack laughed, creasing the deep-set lines at the corners of his eyes. ‘So go on, tell me everything. Makalu must have been quite something.’
There was a pause. As his nephew remained silent, Jack stopped smiling.
‘Is something up?’
‘Everything’s fine. Except Bill got altitude sickness and we missed the summit by a couple of hours. We sort of fell out on the way back down and I’m not sure we’re on speaking terms right now.’
‘Oh, I am sorry,’ said Jack softly. ‘I know how much time you two put into it. But I’m sure you’ll sort out things with Bill. You’ve been friends far too long to fall out for long.’
‘Yeah, I suppose so.’
‘Come on, Luca. Nothing can have been said that can’t be taken back.’
Luca shrugged. ‘Is it all right if we don’t talk about this?’
Jack’s brow creased further as he took another gulp of coffee. ‘Sure. So are you going to tell me some more about this pyramid mountain?’
Luca smiled, his face lighting up.
‘I wish you had been there to see it, Jack. It was incredible. And set in the middle of a stunning ring of mountains. Have you ever heard mention of it?’
‘No,’ Jack said, standing up and walking over to his desk. ‘After you called, I dug everything we have on the area east of Makalu from the departmental library. Took me a while to find these and blow the dust off them. Not exactly the world’s most sought-after documents.’
He carried the maps over to the low table and knelt down. Fishing out his reading glasses from his breast pocket, he held the first map up to the light.
‘This one’s about six months old – the most recent.’
He pulled it a little closer and studied the grid references, drawing a finger over the contours of the Himalayas. He stopped suddenly and prodded. ‘There’s Makalu.’
Luca moved round the table so that they were shoulder to shoulder and peered more closely at the markings. The map showed a vast swathe of the Himalayas, with swirling currents of cloud bending round the massive peaks and valleys.
‘I’m guessing it would be forty kilometres or so east of that,’ said Luca. ‘Somewhere over here.’
Simultaneously their eyes swept over the map until they alighted on a small cluster of peaks, bent round in a perfect circle.
‘That’s them!’ Luca said, feeling a strange lift of excitement. Part of him hadn’t expected them to exist at all.
‘It’s strikingly symmetrical, I’ll admit,’ said Jack, adjusting his reading glasses and leaning forward to examine the formation more closely. ‘But you say the most interesting mountain was the one in the middle? All I can see is cloud.’
‘It was right in the centre, Jack. It sounds odd, I know, but it was like a kind of a pyramid, perfectly proportioned, as if someone had been up there with a chisel. I only caught a glimpse of it when I was high enough on Makalu.’
‘A pyramid-shaped mountain,’ repeated Jack, immersing himself in the twisted contours of the map. He had studied maps all his working life and was able to interpret the graphite markings as if staring down on each peak for real. ‘If it’s anywhere near the same height as the others in that range then that would make it nearly seven thousand metres high – which, as you know, would make the Matterhorn look like a molehill.’
Luca nodded. Between the ring of mountains, all he could see was a thick belt of cloud twisting in between the peaks. He leaned closer, searching for the slightest sign of the pyramid mountain. There was nothing.
‘Any other maps of the region?’
‘Sure,’ said his uncle. ‘We have nine or ten of these satellite images, going back a few years. One every six months or so.’
Together, they lifted the first map off the table and laid it on the floor. Luca quickly bent over the next one, his face furrowed in concentration. Jack glanced over at his nephew, feeling a flicker of concern to see that light in his eyes. It was no accident that whenever Luca worried him the most, it was when he reminded Jack of himself. It was not something he would ever put into words, but he was pretty sure his nephew had inherited the same dark, addictive streak.
‘Shit!’ said Luca as he traced his finger across the region. ‘Still cloud.’
They went through each of the maps in turn. Discarded, the massive sheaves of paper covered most of the study floor, their edges curled up like giant scrolls.
‘Always the same: cloud covering the entire region. How is this possible?’ Luca said eventually, staring directly at Jack. ‘There’s not a single break in any of these images.’
Seeing his frustration, Jack sighed. Wincing slightly as his knees cracked, he began gathering the maps off the floor.
‘You have to understand that some mountains create their own weather systems. They reach so high into the atmosphere that they actually change the weather around them. In this particular case, they create a lot of cloud.’
Luca had heard the theory before. The great summits of the Himalayas could cause moisture in the atmosphere to condense around them and collect along their massive flanks. The invariable result: cloud.
‘But why can’t the satellite penetrate the cloud? Can’t you switch to infra-red or something and see through all that kind of stuff?’