Blood of the Reich

22

Toward the Kunlun Mountains, Tibet

September 30, 1938

T he Germans drove seven hundred miles north and west of Lhasa, first on a winding caravan track through a maze of mountains, and then on the trunk road that led across Asia toward Kashmir and the Karakoram. A hundred miles before Karakoram Pass, they turned north again into wilderness, so high and unpopulated that they no longer encountered any nomads. Animals watched them curiously and without fear, not understanding what the two-legs were. Raeder itched to kill some-they wandered near enough to try the submachine gun-but hunting would only slow them down. The distant peaks were getting whiter as autumn began, the snow line lower each morning.

The Kunlun Mountains, a two-thousand-mile-long range that parallels the Himalayas, forms the northern border of Tibet. It lay along the horizon like a white wall, remote as the moon. Keyuri Lin had combined her fragmentary clues from the old peches, or books, with ancient legends to turn Tibetan mystery into a tangible goal, a gamble like Columbus’s sailing west to go east. Now the roof of the world swallowed them as they drove into a geographic vacuum. Maps were blank here.

When the British motorcar broke down after thirty straight hours of dirt roads and steppe trails, its tires blown, Kurt Raeder’s party siphoned its gas tank and unceremoniously rolled it off a hillside. They whooped as it bounced and spun, pieces flying off like bright marbles.

The truck and trailer made it for three more days, some of the Germans riding like coolies on the towed cart.

Then they came to an impassable gorge.

It was as if God had taken the earth into two mighty hands and cracked it across its crust. This was not a canyon, it was a rock crevasse, a split in the plateau that extended as far as the eye could see in either direction. Water glinted at its depths, a thousand feet down. The lip of the other side was a tantalizing fifty yards away. The rift was effective as a moat.

“Now what?” asked Muller.

“We cross it,” said Raeder.

“Impossible,” said Diels. “We need a balloon.”

“Nothing is impossible for National Socialists. And your idea of a balloon is not a bad one, if we had means to make one.” Raeder inventoried the truck and trailer. “Unfortunately I don’t see how.”

“Maybe we can drive around it?”

“Through those boulder fields? How far, and what if the Tibetans are pursuing? Detour and delay could ruin everything.”

“We could throw a light line to someone on the other side,” Eckells said.

“Do you see anyone, Franz?” Muller asked. He sat on a rock.

“One of us climbs down and up the other cliff.” Eckells peered over the edge. “But we don’t have rope enough for the entire route. A single slip…” Their cameraman/political officer was the most eager of the group, and the most stupid.

Raeder paced the edge like an impatient animal. “Let me think.”

“Perhaps this is why no one has ever found Shambhala,” said Muller.

Raeder ignored him, scratching a design on the dirt with the toe of his boot. “What if we could shoot a line across? Eh, comrades? A rope to shimmy across?”

“Shoot with what?”

“Our truck. Look. I have an idea.”

The truck’s exhaust pipe became their cannon muzzle. The vertical stakes of the front grill were dismantled, crossed, and bent to make a grappling hook. The lightest line they dared trust a man’s weight to was tied to the hook’s cross and carefully coiled next to their makeshift launcher. Gunpowder became the charge, and a revolver was dismantled to provide a trigger and firing pin.

“We’re going to blow our eyes out,” Kranz said nervously.

Raeder grunted. “You sound like my mother.”

“I’m going to film it on camera,” promised Eckells. He backed away. He was not as stupid as the others thought.

A sloped trench had been dug and the butt of their launcher braced against the dirt. The muzzle of the exhaust pipe pointed across the canyon, the pole of the grappling hook inserted like a ramrod. Someone had to get down in the trench to pull the trigger.

“I’ll do it,” Diels finally said, “if someone else is first across.”

“That will be me,” Raeder said.

Diels closed his eyes and squeezed. There was a boom, the tube jerked, and the archaeologist yelled as hot metal lacerated his arm. The butt of the makeshift cannon had burst. But their hook was arcing like a rocket, line unreeling like a writhing snake. The grapnel struck ten yards beyond the far side and Raeder pulled until it caught on a boulder.

He swiftly tied their end to the truck. “Back enough to give it tension!”

Then he slung a heavier rope coil on his shoulder, grasped the line, wrapped his legs, and pulled himself out into thin air. It was like watching a spider bob in the wind, a thousand feet above a maw of rocks.

Foot by foot, he pulled himself across, the line sagging but not breaking.

“Heil Hitler!” he called from the far side.

In astonished acknowledgment, they raised their arms.

The heavier line was pulled back across the chasm. Flywheels from the truck were unbolted to make a crude pulley system for a rope cradle. By the end of the day even Keyuri had been conveyed across, along with all the food, water, and ammunition they could carry. The truck was left, bottomed on rubble and leaking oil. The remaining canisters of gasoline were left in the trailer.

Raeder turned to Keyuri. “Are we close enough to trek from here?”

“Somewhere on the far side of that.” She pointed to a horizon of snow-dusted hills ahead.

He nodded. “I know you could lead us into oblivion.”

“My people want Shambhala’s secret, too.” She shouldered a pack.

“Yes. And if you mislead us, you’ll never see Lhasa again.”

“If we find it, I may not see Lhasa, either. No one has ever returned, Kurt.”

Raeder didn’t tell Keyuri the Germans wouldn’t return to Lhasa either. Maybe they’d sneak through China to the Japanese. Or go north to the trans-Siberian railroad and take ship at Vladivostok on the Pacific to avoid Communist scrutiny in Moscow. But the safest route might actually be west, through the wilds of Afghanistan to Persia. A direction in which no power, including Tibet, was likely to stop them. A route that brought them and the secret of Shambhala safely home to Germany.

He’d no intention of sharing anything with the holy men of the Potala Palace, despite what he’d promised. The prize was to help conquer the world.

Nor would those holy men even hear what the Germans had found, until it was too late. Raeder had no intention of leaving Keyuri Lin alive.

The Nazi leader had reestablished his domination of her the first night, muttering to the other Germans not to come near. He’d pitched a British tent out of earshot of the others, ordered Keyuri inside, and pointed his Luger. “Take off your robes.” He was master, she was slave, a game that delighted him.

Shaven or not, she was ripe as a young peach under her religious cloaking. But Keyuri was annoyingly indifferent to his attentions. She didn’t respond to his caresses, didn’t protest, and didn’t fight. Her mind fled.

Raeder had been angry at her surrender and took her quickly, his rutting savage. All he felt afterward was disgust. She did curl and weep, but that only added to his dissatisfaction. Where was the fire they’d felt in Hood’s camp? Where was her fear? Where, even, was her hatred? She was nothing like his fantasies.

He hadn’t touched her since.

Worse, the other men had grumbled. Muller was disapproving. “What did you do to her, Kurt? Look at her, she’s a whipped dog.”

“She’s pretending.”

“Why do you get a woman and we don’t?” complained Eckells.

“Take her yourself for all I care.” But he would kill Franz if he did, and somehow the man knew it.

“I’m not taking anyone. I just say there should be women for all of us, or no women at all.”

“Yes, we need a guide, not a concubine,” grumbled Muller.

“And I need a geophysicist, not a nanny.” He scowled at them. “All right, she asked me for it but from now on she sleeps alone. She’s only here because she has maps and clues. We brought her for National Socialism, comrades. She stays until we find Shambhala.”

Keyuri hiked in the center of their file. She’d acquiesced to her new destiny with the curious fatalism of the Asiatic. She didn’t seem terribly surprised that Raeder had successfully ambushed the British, nor that he would drive their vehicles to ruin without hesitation, nor that he’d bridged a chasm no normal person could cross. That was who Kurt Raeder was. Had she actually been waiting for him to return, a secret she withheld not only from her nunnery and Reting but from herself? Did a flicker of attraction still exist? Kurt still thought it possible, but she hid all signs of it. Was indifference her way of punishing him for what happened before? Had her study of the old books infected her with the same lust the Nazis had: to find Shambhala and harness its powers? Was she, the Buddhist nun, as greedy as any of them?

Yes, that was it. Raeder didn’t believe anyone could shed longing, no matter what religion they claimed. Longing was what humans were, one convoluted mass of longings. People were defined by desire. Keyuri could pretend to spiritual superiority until the sun went cold, but her soul was still his. He’d caught her eyeing the death’s-head insignia, the blue gleam of weapon barrels, the hard forearms of his company of SS knights. She was secretly fascinated, he was sure of it. Serenity was a facade.

He was determined to see some kind of final lust in her eyes, a desire for something, before he had her murdered.

So they marched. The utter emptiness of the land had begun to strike the Germans as eerie. There was desolate beauty, of course. Much of their route led by lakes three miles high, backed by snowcapped peaks one to two miles higher. The water ranged from indigo to the iridescent green of a hummingbird’s neck, as if the plateau were a succession of watercolor cups. The sky remained deep and clear, as roofless as outer space. Everything was immense, shrinking their party to insignificance. The other Germans whispered. Did the Tibetan woman hope to lose them in this wilderness? Would it swallow the Reich’s finest as the Reting had warned it had swallowed all who sought Shambhala before them? Were they being led astray?

No, Raeder assured. The Tibetans were as curious about the legends as the Germans were. They’d work together until the inevitable betrayals at the end.

There were no trees at this altitude, and the grass, brown and desiccated at the end of the season, was sparse on the stony ground. As they marched, the blue and brown snouts of bulldozing glaciers came more sharply into focus, descending from the sea of peaks ahead. Clouds clung to the summits, casting gray shadow. The explorers drank from pothole lakes that had a fringe of ice on the shore, and woke in pup tents that each morning had a coating of frost. There was no wood or dung for fires. Their fuel for cooking was dangerously low.

Then the ground heaved up into the hills Keyuri had pointed to and they climbed upward, the air thinner, the wind more shrill. Early snow puffed. The men wrapped scarves over their beards, their eyes pinched into narrow slits. Keyuri coughed but never complained.

“Is this the Kunlun?” Muller asked Keyuri.

“This is only its porch.”

They trudged up on old snow patches until there was no more up and they were on a summit of shrieking wind and stinging flakes.

“Kurt, where’s Shambhala?” Kranz gasped.

“There.”

The setting sun broke through to their left. They could see ahead for a hundred miles. Another vast, frigid basin, a desert dotted with frozen lakes, stretched before them. Beyond were higher mountains yet, icy, mist-shrouded, implacable.

Raeder pointed. “The Kunlun?”

Keyuri nodded.

“Come. Let’s get down into the basin as far as we can before nightfall.”

They made eight more miles and camped.

When he roused them at dawn their clothes were stiff. Their only liquid water was what they’d kept in canteens close to their chests. They shuddered as they ate cold food, ice mountains behind them, ice mountains ahead.

And marched on.

Then they came to the disappearing river.

A milky glacial stream ran from the mountains, seeming to emerge from nothing-a wall of cliffs far ahead-and sink into nothing. It fanned out onto the stony plain in a braid of channels, getting smaller instead of bigger as it poured from its source. It was obviously seeping into the ground. Its last tendrils disappeared in a bed of rocks. As they hiked upriver along its bank toward the Kunlun range, the flow paradoxically grew stronger.

“It’s very peculiar,” said Muller. “Following this feels like walking backward in time. Who ever heard of a river bigger at its source than downstream?”

“There’re no tributaries to feed,” said Keyuri. “The plateau drinks it. I’m guessing that in winter, when the source glaciers stop melting, it disappears entirely. But this is what the legends talk of, a river without end. I thought they meant endless, perhaps circular, but instead they meant it never reaches the sea.”

The running water cheered the Germans up. Before, the immensity seemed too quiet, except for the ceaseless sigh of the wind. Now they walked beside the chuckling sound of a glacial stream, familiar from their treks in the Alps and Himalayas.

The longer they followed the river toward these highest mountains, however, the more forbidding their goal became. The Kunlun loomed white, storm-whipped, forbidding. There was no valley or pass promising entry. Glaciers ended like gray palisades, their leaning snouts cracked and leaning. Huge moraines of gravel ran out on the plateau like tongues. Plants were shriveled and stunted. It was the Ice Age. The stream itself sprung improbably from a wall of black cliffs, which made no sense at all.

Then they topped a small hillock next to the now-roaring river, foaming tan with glacial slurry, and saw where the water was coming from.

There was a vertical cleft in a cliff that Muller estimated at two thousand feet high, as if some giant had split the wall with an ax. This canyon was no wider than a room, its walls sheer as a castle’s, and it was from this narrow gate that the stream erupted, shooting into the air like a fire hose before falling a hundred feet to the plain they stood on. There was no obvious way up this waterfall to the canyon, and certainly no way through the canyon to whatever the source was. The roaring river filled the cleft from wall to wall, its mist coating the slit with a rime of ice.

They stood, dismayed.

“This can’t be right,” Raeder told Keyuri.

She looked baffled as well. “But everything else is as the stories describe. A river that becomes a gate. Beyond it, the legends say, is a valley nestled from all storms. And from there, an entrance to Shambhala.”

“It’s a trap,” Muller muttered.

“A trap is something you can get into,” Diels disagreed. “This we can’t even enter.”

“But what a sight, eh?” said Kranz. “Have you ever seen a canyon so narrow? This is more sheer than that gorge! Made from an earthquake, perhaps? Or a lightning bolt. Franz, you must get some pictures.”

Their cameraman was already setting up his equipment. “Look, you can see a glimpse of white beyond it,” he said. “There’s a glacier in there I think, giving birth to this river. This will excite the geographic societies.”

Raeder was studying the wall with his binoculars. The cliffs soared up to precipitous slopes of snow that went into the clouds, the white mantle scarred by avalanche tracks. At the crests, wind blew the snow into sharp cornices, their edges swirling away like smoke. “We’ve no ability to get over the mountains,” he said. “If there’s a valley in there, it’s guarded like a fortress by this canyon gate.”

“And if we can’t get in, no one else can either,” said Muller. “We’re chasing a myth about an inaccessible place, I think. That’s why Tibetans could invent stories about it. A valley with no entry? Why not pretend a secret kingdom lies within? Who will contradict you?”

“Wait,” said Raeder. His binoculars aimed at the canyon. “There’s a path, maybe, or at least a ledge. Here, take a look.” He handed the binoculars to their geophysicist.

“You can’t be serious,” said Muller, focusing. “What path?”

“There’s a ledge in that canyon twenty feet above that rushing stream. Too narrow for most animals, I’m guessing, and maybe too narrow for us. If we fall into the water and don’t drown, we go straight over the falls. It looks ludicrous, and yet it doesn’t appear to end. The ledge goes on into the shadows, as if it were hewn.”

“You want us to follow that?” Kranz said, taking his turn through the binoculars. “It’s suicide, I think. That is a trap.”

“Or a test,” said Raeder. “If Shambhala was easy, it would have been found long ago, no? We need to at least get up there and see if it’s really a trail, and what might lie on the other side.”

“And then what?”

“We leave our extra equipment and sidle our way in there. If we fall, we die. But if we turn back now-if we return to the Reichsfuhrer and say yes, we saw something promising, something that fit the legends, but prudently turned back-then I think we die anyway.”

Eckells nodded. “The Fatherland does not permit failure.”