The Hunt for Shambhala

1

John Mitchell Decker sighed and pushed the brim of his hat an inch or so up his forehead with a weary forefinger. He was standing on the docks in Kowloon Bay opposite Peter Ying, who was jabbing him in the chest with the tip of his pen.

“Tell me again,” Ying said, “just how my entire inventory was destroyed?”

Decker looked over his shoulder at the enormous Grumman Albatross flying boat that was now gently bobbing up and down in the bay behind him. Written in large black letters on the gunmetal grey tailfin were the words AVALON CARGO. “I told you, it was just a bit of turbulence.”

Ying was astonished. “Just a bit of turbulence? There couldn’t have been any more damage if you had flown upside down all the way from Jiangxi!”

“You can’t help clear air turbulence, Peter. There’s a disclaimer in the contract.”

“Not good enough, Mitch,” he said. “You think I’m going to pay you for this delivery? I paid Avalon Cargo a lot of money to import ten thousand lucky cats, not a hundred thousand pieces of lucky cats.” He turned his angry face down once again to the box Decker had hauled off the Albatross for the inspection. “Look at them — just smashed pieces of ceramic… worthless dust!”

“Turns out they weren’t so lucky, I guess.”

Ying looked like he was about to explode. “Are you trying to be funny?”

Decker looked down at the box of shattered maneki-neko ceramic Japanese cats and sighed once again. The cats were believed to bring good luck to their owners, but this time they had badly failed in their duty. To Western eyes they looked like they were waving goodbye, but this was because in Japan and China the palm-down finger-fold gesture was used to beckon, not wave. The factory owner in Jiangxi had told him that when he’d collected them.

He turned back to Ying. “No, Peter… I am not trying to be funny.”

“I want all my money back, Mitch. I gave you Top Dollar!”

“You paid me squat, which is why you hired me in the first place. All the other guys charge ten times more.”

“Maybe if you didn’t fly this old piece of junk, this disaster wouldn’t have happened.”

“Hey! Don’t talk about the Avalon like that, Peter. She doesn’t like it.” Decker was used to taking heat from above thanks to his years as an officer in the United States Marine Corp, but that was then and this was now, and Peter Ying was definitely not ‘above’ him, but a customer he was supposed to keep happy.

Ying looked at Decker for a moment, unsure if the American was being serious or not. “Nevertheless, I want a refund.”

“There must be something wrong with the quality of the ceramic, Peter. You know that. How many times have I done cargo jobs for you?”

“I don’t know, but this is the last time.”

It was then he saw a good-looking, tall woman with brown hair and a very heavy-set young man in a baseball cap approaching them. They were walking as fast as you can go without breaking into a jog, and both were looking over their shoulders. The man in particular seemed very anxious about a huddle of men gathering around a cutter at the end of the docks.

When they reached Decker and Peter Ying they stopped and the man in the baseball cap let out a long sigh of frustration. “We’re buggered, Lena.”

The woman looked at him with wide eyes. When she spoke, Decker thought she sounded like a queen. “Do you really think so?”

“Uh-huh — they’re already here… and… oh shit!”

The men who were huddled around the boat had started to peer down the docks at them, and one of them started to make a phone call.

The woman turned to Peter Ying. “Is this your boat plane?”

Ying cocked his head at her and took a step back. He looked distracted. “What? No, it’s not my damned plane. Who are you?”

“So it’s yours then?” As she turned to Decker she looked him slowly up and down in the way a countess might regard a mud-caked groundskeeper who had strayed into the drawing room at high tea.

Decker rubbed the sweat off his forehead with a greasy palm and gave the look right back to her. “Who the hell are you, lady?”

“I’m Selena Moore,” she said, breathless. “Professor Selena Moore. How do you do?”

Decker looked down at her hand and brought his up to shake it, wiping the engine grease off on his pants first. “I’m John… John Decker. Friends call me Mitch.”

“And this is your plane?”

Decker turned and looked at the man beside Selena. “And who are you?”

The woman nearly stamped her foot. “I just asked you a question!”

Peter Ying laughed at the look on Decker’s face, but the American was less amused. “I don’t know who the hell you think you are, but…”

“Name’s Riley Carr, mate,” the man in the baseball cap said in a broad Australian accent. His face burst into a wide, tanned grin all full of white teeth and he offered his hand to shake.

Decker took it and the two men shook hands. “So why are you asking about my plane?”

“So it is your plane then?” Selena said.

Decker gave a sarcastic look. “You catch on real good, don’t you?”

“Yes, about that,” Selena said. “I was wondering when your next flight was.”

“I only fly cargo,” he said loudly. “No self-loading freight, at all.”

“Self-loading freight?” Selena said, turning to Riley. “Whatever does he mean?”

“He means no passengers, right?”

“Right.”

“That’s right,” Ying said. “He only flies cargo, and when he does he smashes it all up! Look at my lucky cats!”

Selena glanced at the broken pieces of ceramic in the box on the quay. “Oh…”

Decker gave a polite smile. “So if you’ll move along, Peter and I have some business to discuss.”

“No business discussions with you, Mitch,” Ying said, waving a fly from his face. “You give me a full refund or I go to the authorities.”

“I thought we agreed these were faulty ceramics.”

Selena cleared her throat and stepped closer. “The thing is, Mr Decker — was it?”

He nodded. “Friends call me Mitch. I already said that.”

She peered over his shoulder at the men hanging around the cutter. “Yes, right… well the thing is, I think we may need to get out of China in a bit of a hurry.”

“Listen, I already told you… wait a minute — you’re on the run or something?”

“Not exactly,” Selena said. “The truth is that…” She stopped suddenly and looked once again at the men who were hanging around the cutter down at the end of the docks. They had started to walk away from the boat. “Oh dear,” she said.

“Damn it all!” Riley said. “They’ve seen us and they’re coming this way.”

The woman looked at the approaching men and turned an anxious face to Decker. “I don’t suppose on this one occasion you could fly people as well as broken ceramic cats? I’ll self-load!”

Decker sighed. “Not in any way.”

Riley stepped up. He was a few inches shorter than Decker but still a pretty solid proposal if things got ugly. “The thing is we’re in a bit of a tight situation here, mate. Those guys down there hanging around my boat are under the impression we might have something that belongs to their boss and they’re serious about getting it back.”

Decker followed the progress of the men on the dockside for a second. The sun pierced the thick tropical cloud for a few seconds and he felt the temperature rise immediately in response. “And what would that be?”

“Just a silly old telephone,” Selena said. “Nothing at all really.”

“And does under the impression mean you have this phone or not?”

“It does,” she said proudly.

“Which you stole?”

“Thieves as well as cat smashers,” Ying said with a sigh. “What is happening to Hong Kong?”

“We did take it, yes,” Selena said, anxiously glancing at the men now only a few hundred yards away.

“You stole it.”

Riley stepped in to defend the Englishwoman. “You don’t understand. They stole something from us and we had a bit of a bust-up. That was when I took the phone so we could identify them.”

“And what did they steal from you?”

“Just a silly old journal, which I would like back,” Selena Moore said.

“So why not go and ask them?” Decker said.

“Because those men over there do not have the journal, Mr Decker.”

“Journal’s long gone, mate. That’s what the phone’s for — the contact numbers and addresses.”

“Yes, and the men over there want to kill us.” She looked up at the American pilot and locked her eyes on his. “So will you help us or not?”

“No.”

Riley wiped the sweat from around his squinting eyes. “If those guys catch up with us we’re diced and sliced and sprinkled in their boss’s coy pond, mate.”

“It’s still a no.”

“Have you no heart, Mr Decker?” Selena said.

“Not for thieves.”

Riley sighed. “I already told you they stole from us first… we’ve got to split, Lena.”

“I’ll give you ten thousand dollars,” the woman said suddenly.

Decker had already returned to Ying but now his eyes flicked over to the Englishwoman. “No.”

“Twenty thousand dollars.”

“Geez, Louise!” Riley said. “I’m not selling my boat.”

Decker shook his head. “And it’s still a no.”

Before any of them spoke another word, an enormous explosion filled the air at the end of the docks and sent dozens of black kites flying into the sky to escape the fireball.

“Holy crap!” Riley said. “They just blew my boat to shit!”

“And now they’re running this way!” Selena said.

Ying leaned forward and raised his hand to shield his eyes from the muggy sunlight. “Are they carrying guns?”

Selena turned to Decker and opened her eyes wide. “Twenty-five thousand dollars, final offer.”

A suspicious smirk slowly appeared on Decker’s face. “You’ve got a deal. Get in!”

Selena and Riley didn’t need an embossed invitation, and disappeared inside the aircraft in a heartbeat.

“Looks like we’re going to have to finish this discussion another time, Peter,” Decker said. He walked under the wing of the enormous flying boat and climbed into the door at the back of the plane.

“There is no discussion. You smashed my cats. I want my money back.”

“Maybe over some eel claypot rice down at Sun’s?”

“You’d better not come back to Hong Kong, Mitch!”

Decker closed the door and secured the lock. He walked past his two visitors on the way to the cockpit. The woman looked horrified.

“What’s the problem now?” he asked.

“There’s nowhere to sit!”

“It’s a goddamn cargo plane,” he said. “You sit up front with me.”

They strapped into the seats up in the cockpit and Decker started to go through the takeoff checklist. Outside on the docks he heard the men shouting and then a few isolated gunshots followed by the distinctive sound of a bullet ricocheting off metal. “Wait a goddam minute!” he boomed, leaning out his window. “Was that my plane they just hit?”

The men on the docks were much closer now, and two of them were holding pistols. They each aimed at him and fired more shots. He saw Peter Ying was running away into a side street behind the docks.

As a second bullet whistled past his head he felt someone grab his shoulder and pull him back inside the cockpit. He turned to see Riley Carr looking down at him.

“Not a good idea mate, these bastards mean business.”

“They shot my plane!”

“And they’re getting closer by the second,” Riley said, looking out of the small window on the portside just behind the pilot’s seat.

“Mr Decker,” Selena said, her Oxford accent cutting through the humidity like a solid silver entrée knife, “Perhaps it’s time we took off?”

Another bullet pinged off the fuselage outside the cockpit. “Damn it!” Decker took off his hat and tossed it over his shoulder as he fired up the first engine. It spluttered to life, belching a thick cloud of gray smoke out of its exhaust outlets, and they all felt the bass vibrations moving through the old plane. “Tell me,” he said as he fired up the second engine. “Why are these men trying to kill you again — something about a journal?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Selena said. “Please just get this thing airborne!”

“That’s what I’m trying to do, lady.”

“I take it your aircraft actually flies?”

“Sure it flies.” He reached up and pushed the throttles gently forward. They were overhead because the Albatross was a high-wing aircraft, which made the engines overhead too.

“Just how old is this heap?” Selena asked, looking down her nose at the chipped paint on the instrument panel. As she spoke she heard the voices of the ATC tower talking through the static. They were pulling into the middle of Kowloon Bay now, and getting further away from the men on the dock.

“Sixty-eight years old this year,” Decker said with pride. “She was born in 1949, and lovingly restored by me over the last five years.”

The Englishwoman ran a finger around a large tear in the co-pilot’s leather seat.

Decker caught her eye and grinned. “It’s an on-going project.”

“I had no idea they had aircraft in the Jurassic era.”

“Funny.”

Decker made a tweak to improve the tuning to the tower’s frequency and tried to remove some of the static. “Tower, this is Albatross niner-seven-four, ready on the water and requesting a departure to the west.”

More static and buzzing. “You’re cleared for take off to the west, Albatross niner-seven-four.”

With more gunshots tearing into the fuselage, Decker turned to his new passengers. “You buckled up?”

“Ready to go, mate!”

Selena rolled her eyes. “Of course. I’m not an idiot.”

“Good,” Decker said. “I’d hate for something to happen to you.”

He began to power up and Selena peered outside through the cockpit window at the enormous engines hanging off the cantilever wings. Compared with the smooth sound of the high-bypass turbofans of modern jets, there was something unsettlingly raw about the idea of three eleven-foot propeller blades being flung around so fast by such an old, noisy radial engine. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

“She’ll cruise at one-twenty-five at twenty thousand feet and has a range of nearly three thousand miles. She’ll get you wherever you want to go. And yes… she’s safe.”

“Because no offense, mate,” Riley said from the jump seat. “But it kind of looks like a pile of crap.”

“She just saved your ass, mate,” Decker said through the earpiece. “So how about showing a little respect?”

He lined the Albatross up in the center of the bay and after clearance to take off from the tower he opened the throttles and increased to full power.

Selena gasped. “Oh goodness, that’s noisy!”

“And you’re certain this thing flies?” Riley asked.

“Absolutely — unless your men have hit the ailerons, or the rudder, or the stabilizer, or the flaps, spoilers, or balance tabs. Then we’ll go up and come down again real hard and fast.”

“Is that likely?” Selena asked.

“We’re about to find out, lady.”