Deep Sea One

Chapter 15

After two days of continuous flying and occasional breaks to refuel and enjoy proper meals, the party arrived in Nepal, specifically Lumbini. It was an alien and beautiful world of temples, lying in the embrace of the Himalayan paradise sought out by explorers and tourists from all over the world. Exhausted, the five travelers stumbled from the jet before it was taxied back to the hidden hangar in the canopy of woodlands outside the town.

"I think a few hours of rest would be in order," Nina suggested, hoping that Purdue had the same idea.

"From your lips, darling," Calisto sighed, wincing at the discomfort of her bag's strap eating into her shoulder.

"What do you have in there, sergeant?" Sam chuckled. "An RPG?"

She laughed with him. But she laughed in such a manner as to suggest that Mr. Cleave was not far off in his assumption. Calisto looked at Nina and winked, leaving the historian to giggle in amusement at Sam's sudden realization, which subsequently removed his smile.

"Come on, everyone! Time is money. A night's rest here in the birthplace of the Buddha should do us all wonders, I think," Purdue called out, as he walked to their waiting car. It was a 4×4 with a canopy of tarp and iron bars, but the bed of the truck was lavishly laid out with ample cushioning and straps to secure the passengers comfortably.

"Fucking Purdue, thinks of everything, doesn't he?" Nina nudged Sam as they examined the back of the vehicle.

"Aye," Sam replied, with an impressed nod and reached for his dwindling pack of cigarettes to mark the occasion. Nina gasped. Her big eyes reminded him of the request not to smoke around her and he promptly replaced the pack before it even came out of his pocket. He hung his head in disappointment and gestured with his arm for her to step onto the back of the truck. Gary joined them while Purdue sat in front with his guide, Jodh, who was driving. Calisto kept an eye on her employer from the back, sitting against the small window that divided the cab from the back. Her hand remained firmly in her bag, grasping something inside as they drove to their accommodations on the edge of town. Sam found himself spellbound by her hidden hand, but she ignored him in lieu of staying vigilant.

Calisto watched Jodh intently. She had received no intel on him subsequent to their arrival a few minutes ago. That made him a marked man in her eyes, until she was told differently. One positive trait of her paranoia was that she never got caught off-guard by betrayal, because she normally found every single person she encountered threatening in some degree.

Jodh did not look like a typical guide from Nepal. He was young and attractive, in his thirties. From what she could hear he spoke perfect English and wielded an impressive vocabulary. Even his choice of clothing was modern in the milieu of this country — jeans and Caterpillars, Ray Bans and a sports watch.

"What are you holding in there, sergeant?" Sam suddenly asked, drawing both Nina and Gary's attention to Calisto.

"How curious are you about that, Mr. journalist?" she asked in her teasing husky voice.

Nina scoffed at her flirting. Sam withdrew a little. He did not want Nina to think he was interested in the new female any more than he should be, but Gary did not hide his wide smile. The pilot peeked at her hand, "Is that a gun you are handling there?"

Calisto slowly pulled her hand free, revealing a palm full of jelly beans, which she shoved into her mouth.

Gary sank back, disappointed.

The town passed behind them as they drove and the party looked out the back at the beautiful architecture of several temples and statues, which towered a few stories into the air. It was late afternoon and the pale sun still managed to ignite a golden glimmer on the domes and windows of the ancient religious buildings.

In the wake of their vehicle they saw the triangular magnificence of the sloping bronze shrine on the side of the road, its walls white and marble-like under the miniature awnings of golden design. Among the meager traffic were donkey carts and bicycles leisurely making their way in all directions, peacefully unaware of time. As they turned in another direction, driving carefully at a snail's pace, a breathtaking monument came into view in the distance. The World Peace Pagoda reminded Sam of the Taj Mahal, but it was simpler and whiter than snow. It squatted like a puff of whipped cream slopped onto the ground, almost luminous white with a majestic dome rounding it perfectly overhead.

From the back of the truck they marveled quietly at the beauty of Lumbini, as if saying anything would stain the moment with words, meaningless in comparison to the atmosphere the buildings exuded in their souls. Just before they reached their hotel they passed a massive statue of the seated Buddha, cast in bronze, maybe gold. Its face evoked calm in all who beheld it, the hands of the figure rested on its lap.

"No wonder Buddhists are so relaxed," Sam noted. "Look at that bloke, smirking where he sits, watching over the anthill of scuttling humans."

That bloke? Nina sighed. "Do you have any culture in you, Sam Cleave?"

"Of course I do. I just don't get excited about semantics. We are in Nepal. You should meditate away that stress in your shoulders, Dr. Gould," he smiled. Sam meant it, but he tried to formulate his words so that they would fall on Nina's ears as friendly mockery.

"For your information, Mr. Cleave, I meditate often," Nina informed him and snubbed her nose at him to look out at the layered roofs of the thorny temple passing them.

After dinner Nina opted for a shower while the men became acquainted in the bar. Purdue had Calisto by his side, and ordered a round of drinks for him, Sam and Jodh. Gary was a nondrinker, due to his profession. The lounge of the bar was warm and cozy with a fire in the hearth and soft traditional music playing from a damaged old speaker behind the counter of the bar. On the walls hung portraits of previous dignitaries and celebrities who paid a visit, including Dave Purdue's old friend and world-famous explorer Jefferson Daniels, who posed with a Nepali beauty who's swarthy skin challenged his overly done spray tan and ridiculously white teeth. Other black-and-white photos farther back in the room dated from a few decades before, fading behind the glass of their photo frames as if time had reached through the barrier and aged them.

Calisto's dark eyes gleamed in the yellow flicker of the fire and candlelight. She paid close attention to her surroundings as she followed close behind Purdue. Her feet fell inaudibly as she moved, even though her shoes were hard-soled.

Sam and Jodh ordered tongba, to take in the culture, while Purdue thought a vodka chaser suitable for the occasion.

"Where is Dr. Gould?" Calisto asked, surprised that Nina did not join them.

"Oh, she elected to spend the evening in her room to have another look at the artifact's contents for more clues. So far she had translated most of the texts to bring us here, but other than that she has not yet discovered any specific locations to what we are supposed to uncover," Purdue said with a hint of annoyance in his voice.

"Well, sir, that is why they call it an expedition, not a holiday," Calisto remarked. Purdue stared at her in amazement of her insubordination and she quickly cleared her voice and lifted her hand apologetically. Sam smirked to himself. He liked the woman's sharpness and her general disregard for hierarchy.

"Not drinking, sergeant?" Gary asked.

"I am on duty. No drinking, but I shall have whatever they have in the way of espresso," she replied with a smile. Calisto combed the room with her gaze. In particular two men at the back of the bar room, seated on a couch, leered at her. It was a strange interest somewhere between curiosity and lust that she was all too used to. They did not look local. They lacked the exotic traits of the Nepalese men and Calisto paid close attention to their looks. One was tall, blond and strongly built, while the other had grey hair in a ponytail.

She kept near her employer, watching the two men in the mirror behind the bar.

"Mr. Purdue, I have to know," started Jodh, "and I mean no disrespect toward the lady, but do you really think she is up to Blomstein's level?"

Purdue chugged back a shot and gestured for another. He caught his breath without looking at Jodh, gave it some thought, and then answered, "What about her tells you that she is not? I have never judged people, especially security, by stereotypes, Jodh. Ever. I look at training and efficiency under pressure."

"But, let's face facts — women are nowhere nearly as proficient in hand-to-hand combat. They simply do not have the strength of men," the guide retorted.

"Just like a man to match winning a battle with physical strength," Calisto spoke from his right ear, startling him so he jerked back. He had not heard her steal up on him and the other men sat watching in amusement while she did so. "Don't you know that cunning and misdirection is the essence of war? I have never seen muscle defeat a bullet, but I have seen powerful men fooled to their knees."

"Touché," he laughed, embarrassed and impressed. Purdue beamed with pride by association.

But not all in the Purdue party were having a night of relaxation.

Nina sat in the miserable light of a study lamp in the loneliness of a dreary single hotel room. She made sure to wear gloves as she paged carefully through the antique book they had recovered from the sunken German U-boat. Now that she had some privacy she could truly savor the substance in the pages. Lifting the book to her face, Nina breathed in the unique scent of the paper, imagining the age of it and what it had lived through. Most of all she imagined that it could have passed through the very hands of prominent Nazi authoritarians and chiefs, men only existent in the halls of history, who made themselves legends through terrible and magnificent deeds.

The musty smell of the paper contrasted the strange smell of the cover. It still perplexed her what the book was bound in. It was not any kind of leather she had ever seen and the thought of what it could be gave her chills. The Nazi regime and its scientists, historians and occultists spared no immorality or taboo in their pursuits of power, skinning some poor bastard to make a nice book cover would not be surprising at all. Nina looked closely at the German sections and matched all those paragraphs written in the same hand to manage some sort of consistency.

It looked fascinating, but in her mind she imagined it to be the script of insanity, the hand of a madman.

"Tic-tac-toe," she whispered as she paged.

On the next page she found what looked like a grid, containing letters and random dots in some of the sections. It made no sense, but she imagined it was there for a reason. However, that was not was she was looking for at the moment. She needed a route.

When she examined the map on the ninth page, its withered green lines and dots, names omitted and replaced by numbers or formulas, she realized that the winding thick black stripe that stretched from Lumbini to the far northern area of Nepal consisted of a grainy ink, which ate up the coloring of the other inks that crossed it.

She ran her glove over a part of the line and noticed that it crumbled from the page onto her finger in a solid substance that looked like sand.

"What the hell?" she whispered. The swastika on the map sat more to the left of Lumbini and from there the strange black meander followed to the border of Nepal and China. Nina frowned in the harsh light, trying to dissect the meanings of the strange grains. A knock on her door frightened her, her body jolting in her chair.

"Goddammit! What?" she cried to the unwelcome visitor.

"I thought you'd be hungry, Dr. Gould," she heard Calisto's voice muffled on the other side of the door.

"Oh, God, I'm sorry," she said and opened the door. The bodyguard's frame filled the door, looking awfully intimidating. In her hands she held a tray with two coffees and a bowl with a delicious rice dish that was covered in cellophane wrap.

"Are you still at the studying?" Calisto asked, as she placed the food and coffee carefully down on Nina's bedside table. Nina sighed, "Yes, I am trying to figure out what they mixed into this ink? The black ink absorbs all the other lines, do you see?" She did not expect the bodyguard to understand, but it was nice for someone to show interest in what she was doing.

"It absorbs the ink?"

"Yes. Rather odd for a map."

"Is it salt, by chance?" Calisto asked matter-of-factly as she sat down on Nina's bed.

Salt? Nina did not think about that at all. Of course, salt in the ink would absorb the wetness of the other lines. She flicked the point of her tongue over the glove's fingertip, tasting the saline contents of it. Her face lit up.

"It's salt!" she exclaimed.

"Great!" Calisto replied, having no idea what it was supposed to mean to Dr. Gould.

"Yes, it is, Calisto. Salt! The country used to have a lucrative salt trade and there was a route across the mountains to the Humla District, a salt-trading route to Tibet! The black line ends in the same area as the Himalayan trail to the border," Nina beamed with relief and excitement. "I could kiss you!"

"Please don't," Calisto rapped quickly, "I already have enough untrue rumors about my sexuality cock-blocking my love life, if you don't mind." Nina laughed. She suddenly had a bit of an appetite. Now she knew where the map led. In the mountains of Humla there was a shrine and the numbering at the end of the black line was not a date, but coordinates that would tell them exactly where the shrine was located. Her concerns could be laid to rest for the next few days.