The Kingdom

7

CHOBAR GORGE, NEPAL

They set out shortly before four the next morning, hoping to arrive at the gorge before sunrise. While they had no idea how strictly the Chobar Caves’ no-trespassing rule was enforced-or whether the area was even patrolled by the police-they didn’t want to take any chances.

At five, they pulled into Manjushree Park and found a spot under a tree not visible from the main road. Headlights off, they sat in silence for two minutes, listening to the tick-tick-tick of the Nissan’s engine cooling down, before climbing out, opening the tailgate, and gathering their gear.

“Did you really expect them to tail us?” Remi asked, settling her pack over her shoulders.

“I don’t know what to think anymore. My gut tells me they’re bad to the core, and I know without a doubt King didn’t ask them to help us. He ordered them to keep an eye on us.”

“I agree. Hopefully, your heart-to-heart with them will do the trick.”

“Bad bet,” Sam said, and slammed the tailgate.

Led by the glow of the rising sun, they walked down to the bridgehead. As advertised on their map, twenty yards to the east of the bridge, behind a copse of bamboo, they found the trail. With Sam in the lead, they headed upriver.

The first quarter mile was an easy hike, the path three feet wide and covered in well-groomed gravel, but this soon changed as the grade steepened. The trail narrowed and began going through a series of switchbacks. The foliage closed in, forming a partial canopy over their heads. To their right and below, they could hear the river gurgling softly.

They reached a fork. To the left, the trail headed due east, away from the river; to the right, down toward the river. They paused only a few moments to double-check their map and Sam’s iPhone compass, then took the right-hand path. After another five minutes of walking, they came to a forty-five-degree slope into which rough steps had been cut. At the bottom, they found themselves facing not a trail but a rickety suspension bridge, its left side affixed to the cliff by lag bolts. Vines had overrun the bridge, so tightly twisted around the supports and wires that the structure looked half man-made, half organic.

“I have the distinct feeling that we’re looking down the rabbit hole,” Remi murmured.

“Come on,” Sam said. “It’s quaint.”

“With you, I’ve come to equate that word with ‘hazardous.’”

“I’m crushed.”

“Can you see how far it goes?”

“No. Keep ahold of the cliff side. If the span goes, the vines will probably hold.”

“Another lovely word, ‘probably.’”

Sam took a step forward, slowly shifting his weight onto the first plank. Aside from a slight creaking, the wood held firm. He took another cautious step, then another, and another, until he’d covered ten feet.

“So far, so good,” he called over his shoulder.

“On my way.”

The bridge turned out to be a mere hundred feet long. On the other side the trail continued, spiraling first down the slope, then up. Ahead, the trees began thinning out.

“Round two,” Sam said to Remi.

“What?” she replied, then stopped short behind him. “Oh, no.”

Another suspension bridge.

“I sense a trend,” Remi said.

She was right. On the other side of the second span they found another section of trail, followed by yet another bridge. For the next forty minutes the pattern continued: trail, bridge, trail, bridge. Finally, on the fifth section of trail, Sam called a halt and checked his map and compass. “We’re close,” he murmured. “The cave entrance is below us somewhere.”

They spread out, searching up and down the trail for a way down. Remi found it. On the river side of the trail, a rusted cable ladder affixed to a tree trunk dangled in space. Sam dropped to his belly and, with both of Remi’s hands wrapped around his belt, scooted forward through the underbrush. He wriggled back.

“There’s a rock shelf,” he said. “The ladder stops about six feet above it. We’ll have to drop.”

“Of course we will,” Remi replied with a tight smile.

“I’ll go first.”

On her knees, Remi leaned forward and kissed Sam. “Bully King’s got nothing on you.”

Sam smiled. “On either of us.”

He shed his pack and handed it back to Remi, then crab-walked through the underbrush. He wrapped his arms around the tree trunk, then slowly lowered himself, legs dangling and feet probing, until he found the ladder’s top rung.

“I’m on,” he told Remi. “Starting down.”

He disappeared from view. Thirty seconds later he called, “I’m down. Drop the packs over the edge.” Remi crawled forward and dropped the first one.

“Got it.”

She dropped the second pack.

“Got it. Come on down. I’ll talk you through it.”

“On my way.”

When she had reached the second-to-last rung and her lower body was hanging in space, Sam reached out and wrapped his arms around her thighs. “I’ve got you.”

She let go, and Sam lowered her to the shelf. Remi adjusted her skewed headlamp, then looked around. The shelf on which they were standing was six feet wide and jutted several feet over the river. In the cliff face was a roughly oval-shaped cave entrance, closed off by hurricane fencing screwed into the rock. The bottom left corner of the fence had sprung free from the rock. A red-on-white sign written in both Nepali and English was affixed to the rock:

DANGER

NO TRESPASSING

DO NOT ENTER

Below the words was a crudely painted skull and crossbones.

Remi smiled. “Look, Sam, it’s the universal symbol for ‘quaint.’”

“Funny lady,” he replied. “Ready to spelunk?”

“Have I ever said no to that question?”

“Never, bless your heart.”

“Lead on.”

Their suspicion that the cave had been sealed off to keep curiosity seekers from getting lost or injured was confirmed seconds after they crawled through the gap in the fence. While pushing himself to his feet, Sam’s arm slipped into a fissure in the floor barely larger than his forearm. Had he been moving even at a modest pace, he would have broken a bone; had he been walking, it would have been his ankle.

“Bad omen or fair warning?” he asked Remi with a half smile as she helped him to his feet.

“I’m going with the latter.”

“Reason 640 why I love you,” he replied. “Ever the optimist.”

They shone their flashlights around the tunnel. It was wide enough that Sam could almost spread his arms to their full breadth but only a few inches taller than Remi, forcing Sam to stand stoop-shouldered. The floor was rough, like stucco magnified a hundred times.

Sam turned his head, sniffing. “Smells dry.”

Remi ran her palm over the ceiling and wall. “Feels dry.”

With luck, moisture was out of the equation, or almost. Spelunking in a dry cave was dicey enough; water made it hazardous, with floors, ceiling, and walls that could collapse at the slightest disturbance. Even so, they knew that unseen tributaries of the Bagmati River could be running beneath their feet, so the cave’s composition could change with little or no warning.

With Sam in the lead, they started forward. The tunnel veered sharply left, then right, then suddenly they found themselves standing before their first obstacle, this one also man-made: a set of vertical iron bars running from wall to wall, drilled into the floor and ceiling.

“They’re not kidding around,” Sam said, shining his flashlight over the rusted steel. How many curiosity seekers had triumphantly squeezed through the hurricane fence at the entrance only to find themselves thwarted here? Sam wondered.

Remi knelt before the bars. One by one, she gave each a shake. On the fourth try, the metal let out a grating sound. She smiled over her shoulder at Sam. “The beauty of oxidation. Give me a hand.”

Together they began working the bar back and fourth until slowly it began to loosen in its socket. Stone chips and dust rained down from the ceiling. After two minutes’ work the bar fell free, striking the floor with a clang that echoed through the tunnel. Sam grabbed the bar and dragged it back through the gap. He examined the ends.

“It’s been cut,” he murmured, then showed it to Remi.

“Acetylene torch?”

“No scorch marks. Hacksaw, would be my guess.”

He shone his flashlight into the bar’s empty floor socket and could see, a few inches down, a stub of metal.

Sam looked at Remi. “The plot thickens. Somebody’s been here before.”

“And didn’t want anyone to know about it,” she added.

After taking a moment so Sam could get a bearing on his compass and sketch a rough map in his moleskin notebook, they squeezed through the gap, refitted the bar in its upright position, and continued on. The tunnel began zigzagging and narrowing, and soon the ceiling was at four feet, and Sam’s and Remi’s elbows were bumping along the walls. The floor began sloping downward. They put away their flashlights and turned on their headlamps. The floor steepened until they were sidestepping their way down a thirty-degree grade, using rock protrusions as hand- and footholds.

“Stop,” Remi said suddenly. “Listen.”

From somewhere nearby came the gurgling of water.

Sam said, “The river.”

They descended another twenty feet, and the tunnel flattened out into a short corridor. Sam shimmied ahead to where the floor began sloping upward again.

“It’s nearly vertical,” he called back. “I think if we’re careful, we can free-climb-”

“Sam, take a look at this.”

He turned around and made his way back to where Remi was standing, her neck craned back as she stared at the wall. In the beam of her headlamp, an object about the size of a half-dollar bulged from the rock.

“It looks metallic,” Sam said. “Here, climb aboard.”

Sam knelt down, and Remi climbed on his shoulders. He slowly stood up, allowing Remi time to steady herself against the wall. After a few seconds she said, “It’s a railroad spike.”

“Say again?”

Remi repeated herself. “It’s buried in the rock up to the cap. Hold on . . . I think I can . . . There! It’s tight, but I managed to slide it out a few inches. There’s another one, Sam, about two feet up. And another one. I’m going to stand up. Ready?”

“Go.”

She rose to her full height. “There’s a line of them,” she said. “They go up about twenty feet to what looks like a shelf.”

Sam thought for a moment. “Can you slide out the second one?”

“Hold on . . . Done.”

“Okay, climb back down,” said Sam. Once she was back on the ground, he said, “Good show.”

“Thanks,” she said. “I can think of only one reason they’d be that high off the ground.”

“So they’d go unnoticed.”

She nodded. “They look fairly old.”

“Circa 1973?” Sam wondered aloud, referring to the year Lewis King disappeared.

“Could be.”

“Unless I miss my guess, it looks like Bully, or some other phantom spelunker, built himself a ladder. But to where?”

As Sam’s words trailed off they panned the beams of their headlamps up the wall.

“One way to find out,” Remi replied.