The Kingdom

33

NORTHERN NEPAL

Exhausted and shaking with adrenaline, Sam slogged his way up the rope until Remi could reach over and help him the rest of the way. He rolled onto his back and stared at the sky. Remi flung her arms around him and tried to hide her tears.

“Don’t you ever do that again.” After a deep sigh, she asked, “What’s in the duffel?”

“A whole bunch of I’m not sure. I was grabbing anything that looked useful.”

“A grab bag,” Remi said with a smile. She gently lifted the duffel’s handle over Sam’s head. She unzipped it and began rummaging inside. “Thermos,” she said, and brought it out. “Empty.”

Sam sat up and donned his jacket, cap, and glove. “Good. I’ve got a mission for you: take your trusty thermos and go scoop up every drop of unburned aviation fuel you can find.”

“Good thinking.”

Sam nodded and grunted, “Fire good.”

Remi slowly moved off and began kneeling beside depressions in the ice. “Found some,” she called. “And here.”

Once she was done, they met back at the gondola. “How’d you do?” Sam asked, jogging in place. His pants were beginning to stiffen with ice.

Remi replied, “It’s about three-quarters full. The melted ice partially diluted it, though. We need to get you warmed up.”

Sam knelt by the pile of debris they’d collected from the Bell and began sifting through it. “I thought I saw . . . Here it is.” Sam held up a length of wire; at each end was a key ring. “Emergency chain saw,” he told Remi.

“That’s an overly optimistic name for it.”

Sam examined the gondola, walking down its length, then back again. “It’s half tipped into the crevasse, but I think I’ve found what we need.”

He knelt beside the near corner of the gondola, where a series of wicker stays had popped free. As though threading a needle, Sam slipped one end of the saw through the wicker, then out the other. He grasped both rings and began sawing. The first section took five minutes, but now Sam had an opening in which to work. He kept sawing chunks from the end of the gondola until he had a good-sized stack.

“We need flat rocks,” he told Remi.

These they found in short order; they fit the rocks together to form a hearth. On top of this went the wicker chunks, stacked in a pyramid. While Remi balled paper from the pilot’s kneeboard into kindling, Sam retrieved the lighter from the duffel. Soon they had a small fire going.

Arm in arm, they knelt before the flames. The warmth washed over them. Almost immediately they felt better, more hopeful.

“It’s the simple things in life,” Remi remarked.

“I couldn’t agree more.”

“Tell me your theory about the Chinese.”

“I don’t think the Z-9 showing up was a coincidence. One shadowed us the first day, then again today. Then one shows up here just minutes after we touch down.”

“We know King is smuggling artifacts over the border; it follows that he’s got a Chinese contact. Who would have that much freedom of movement, that much clout?”

“The PLA. And if Jack’s right, King probably guessed the general area in which we’ll be searching. With King’s reach, all he had to do is call his Chinese contact, then sit back and wait for us to show up.”

“The question is, what did this Z-9 have in mind? If Hosni hadn’t opened fire, what would they have done?”

“I’m only speculating, but this is the closest we’ve come to the border; it’s about two miles to the north. Maybe the opportunity was too good to pass up. They take us prisoner, slip across the border, and we’re never heard from again.”

Remi hugged Sam’s arm more tightly. “Not a happy thought.”

“Sadly, here’s another one: we need to assume they’re coming back-and sooner rather than later.”

“I saw the pistol in the duffel bag. You’re not thinking of trying to-”

“No. This time, it was mostly pure luck. Next time, we’d have no chance. When reinforcements arrive, we need to be gone.”

“How? You said yourself we can’t climb out.”

“I misspoke. We need to appear to be gone.”

Remi said, “Tell me.” Sam outlined his plan, and Remi nodded, smiling. “I like it. The Fargo version of the Trojan Horse.”

“Trojan Gondola.”

“Even better. And, with any luck, it’ll keep us from freezing to death tonight.”

Using the rope and the makeshift piton as a grappling hook, they slid the gondola a few feet from the crevasse, a task made easier by the ice. The tangled rigging Sam had spotted earlier trailed from beneath the gondola down in the crevasse. Sam and Remi looked over the edge but could see nothing beyond ten feet.

“Is that bamboo?” Remi said, pointing.

“I think so. There’s another one, that curved piece there. It would certainly make our job easier if we cut it all free, but something down there might be of use to us.”

“Piton?” Remi suggested. “Cut it free and tie it off.”

Sam knelt down and gathered some of the cordage in one hand. “Some kind of animal sinew. It’s in amazing condition.”

“Crevasses are nature’s refrigerator,” Remi replied. “And if all this was covered by that glacier, the effect is even more dramatic.”

Sam collected some more of the rigging and gave the mess a tug. “It’s surprisingly light. It would take me hours to get through all this sinew, though.”

“We’ll pull it along, then.”

Using the avalanche probe, Sam measured first the width of the gondola, then the width of the crevasse.

“The crevasse is four inches wider,” he announced. “My gut tells me it’ll get wedged, but if I’m wrong, we lose all our firewood.”

“Your gut has never steered us wrong.”

“What about that time in the Sudan? And in Australia? I was way off that time-”

“Shush. Help me.”

With one of them stationed at each end, they crouched together and grasped the bottom edge of the gondola. On Sam’s signal, they heaved, trying to straighten their legs. It was no good. They let go and stepped back.

“Let’s concentrate our power,” Sam said.

Standing an arm’s length from each other at the gondola’s center point, they tried again. This time, they got the gondola two feet off the ground.

“I’ll hold it,” Sam said through clenched teeth. “Try a leg press.”

Remi rolled onto her back, wriggled beneath the gondola, then pressed her feet against the edge. “Ready!”

“Heave!”

The gondola rolled up and over onto its side.

“One more time,” Sam said.

They repeated the drill, and soon the gondola was sitting upright. Remi peered inside. She gasped and backed away.

“What?” Sam asked.

“Stowaways.”

They walked up to the gondola.

Lying at the far end of the wicker bottom amid a jumble of rigging and bamboo tubes was a pair of partially mummified skeletons. The remainder of the gondola, they could now see, was divided into eighths by wicker cross struts wide enough to also serve as benches.

“What’s your guess?” Remi asked. “Captain and copilot?”

“It’s possible, but a gondola this size could hold fifteen people at least-it might take that many to handle all this rigging and the balloons as well.”

“Balloons . . . as in plural?”

“We’ll know more when I see the rest of the rigging, but I think this was a full-on dirigible.”

“And these were the sole survivors.”

“The rest may be . . .” Sam jerked his head toward the crevasse.

“That’s no way to go.”

“We can speculate later. Let’s keep going.”

After securing the rigging so it would hang off the end of the gondola and not get wedged against the crevasse wall, Sam and Remi took up stations on either end of the gondola and pushed in unison until the wicker bottom began sliding over the ice. As they neared the crevasse, they picked up speed, then gave the gondola a final shove. It slid the last few feet, bumped over the edge, and disappeared from view. Sam and Remi ran forward.

“Always trust your instincts,” Remi said with a smile.

The gondola sat wedged between the crevasse’s walls about a foot below the edge.

Sam climbed in and, careful to avoid the mummies, walked the length of the gondola. He proclaimed it solid. Remi helped him back up.

“Every home needs a roof,” she said.

They walked the plateau together collecting pieces of the Bell’s aluminum exterior large enough to bridge the crevasse, then began layering them over the gondola until only a narrow slot remained.

“You’ve got a flair for this,” Sam told her.

“I know. One last touch: camouflage.”

Using a bowl-like chunk of the Bell’s windshield, they collected about five gallons of water from the runnel, which they poured over the gondola’s aluminum roof, followed by several layers of snow.

They stepped back to admire their handiwork.

Sam said, “ “Once it freezes, it’ll look like part of the ice sheet.”

“One question: why the water?”

“So the snow would stick to the aluminum. If our hunch is correct and we’re visited by another Z-9 tonight, we don’t want the rotor downwash exposing our shingles.”

“Sam Fargo, you’re a brilliant man.”

“That’s the illusion I like to create.”

Sam looked up at the sky. The sun’s lower rim was dropping behind a jagged line of peaks to the west.

“Time to hunker down and see what the night brings.”

With their supplies either stuffed into the duffel or buried in the snow, Sam and Remi retreated to their shelter. In the quickly dwindling twilight, they took inventory of the duffel’s contents.

“What’s this?” Remi asked, pulling out the lumbar pack Sam had snagged just before leaping from the Z-9.

“That’s a-” He stopped, frowned, then smiled. “That, my dear, is an emergency parachute. But to you and me, it’s about a hundred fifty square feet of blanket.”

They extracted the chute from the pack and soon they were huddled tightly inside a white fabric cocoon. Relatively warm and so far safe, they chatted quietly, watching the light fade into complete darkness.

They slowly drifted off to sleep.

Some time later Sam’s eyes sprung open. The blackness around them was complete. Wrapped in his arms, Remi whispered, “Do you hear it?”

“Yes.”

In the distance came the chopping thud of helicopter rotors.

“What are the chances it’s a rescue party?” Remi asked.

“Virtually none.”

“Thanks for playing along.”

The sound of the rotors slowly increased until Sam and Remi were certain the helicopter had dropped into the valley. A few moments later a bright spotlight swept over the crevasse; blinding white slivers of light arced through the gaps in the roof.

Then the light was gone, fading as it skimmed over the plateau. Twice more it returned and went away.

Then, suddenly, the helicopter’s engine changed in pitch.

“Coming in to hover,” Sam whispered.

Sam grabbed the pistol from where he had tucked it beneath his leg and switched it to his right hand.

The downwash came. Jets of icy air and swirling snow filled the gondola. Based on the shadows cast by the searchlight, the helicopter seemed to be crabbing sideways over the plateau, pivoting this way, then that way, either looking for them and/or survivors among their missing comrades.

Sam and Remi had left the Z-9’s tail jutting from the runnel as a clue to the helicopter’s fate. Anyone lucky enough to survive a plunge to the lake would have certainly drowned soon after. It was a conclusion that Sam and Remi prayed this search party would make.

Doggedly, their visitors made three more passes over the plateau. Then as suddenly as it had appeared, the spotlight went dark, and the rotors faded into the distance.