Deep Fire Rising Page 28

  “If this was the Cold War and the target was in Eastern Europe or Russia I’d say there’s a shot. In China, forget it. A Special Operations force would have to come in overland from Nepal or Pakistan, crossing one of the most heavily fortified borders in the world. They wouldn’t make it five miles before being picked up.”

  “What if the team is made up of Chinese-Americans?”

  “I don’t have that kind of manpower. All our Chinese-American agents are analysts or translators. None of them is trained for fieldwork.”

  “A budget of three billion a year and you don’t have one Asian James Bond?” Dick said archly.

  “Gentlemen,” the president cut in smoothly, “we’re going to concentrate on locating Rinpoche-La first and hammer out how to get her afterward.” Henna and Barnes mumbled an assent in unison. “Mercer, I would like you to draft a memo for the people at NIMA to tell them exactly what they’re looking for. Finding needles in haystacks is their specialty, but I’m sure they’d appreciate anything you can give them.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then I’d like you to pack for La Palma.”

  “No, sir.”

  The chief executive wasn’t used to being defied. He looked more startled than upset. “Excuse me?”

  “I said no, Mr. President. I trust the people Ira sent to the island are more than qualified to study the volcano. They’re specialists in that field. I am not. I’d be in the way. I think you’d be better served if I accompanied whoever is sent in to rescue Tisa.”

  “Out of the question!” Barnes thundered. “I will not allow a civilian to join one of my teams. If you think you’d be in the way around volcano specialists on La Palma, just what do you think you can add to a contingent of CIA operatives?”

  Mercer could have gloated. Lord knew, Barnes deserved it, but the director was just trying to protect his fiefdom. The CIA should have known about this case long before Mercer handed it to them on a platter. Barnes was humiliated, and needed to do some damage control to reestablish his authority. It wasn’t in his personality to work with Mercer so he was lashing out instead. “Mr. Barnes, you’re forgetting a very basic fact. None of your people have the slightest idea what Tisa looks like. In this situation, a composite sketch based on my impressions won’t do a rescue team much good.”

  Making ready to reply, Barnes let his mouth close. There was nothing he would say. Although Barnes couldn’t see Dick Henna directly, the FBI director put his hand over his mouth so no one could see his smile.

  “You have a point there, Doctor,” the president said. “I assume you know what you might be getting into?”

  “Yes, I do. I wouldn’t consider it if I didn’t know it was so important.”

  “Then if we do go in to get her, consider yourself on board.” The president stood and swept the assembled group with a stern look. “For now I don’t want this getting too far beyond this room. Make the inquiries you need but keep it quiet. If this eruption is as serious as we believe we have a small window of opportunity before the media get wind of it. We all know what’ll happen then. Dr. Mercer, on top of everything else, you are my special science advisor. I want options.”

  “Options, sir?”

  “To save our country. We may only have a couple of weeks or months. I think we all agree that evacuation is pretty much out of the question. Even if we could pull it off, the United States would cease to exist as the country it is now. The same goes for the sections of Europe that get hit too. There must be a way to prevent the eruption or stabilize the side of the volcano. Those are the options I want.”

  “I understand,” Mercer replied, thinking that the president didn’t have a clue what he was asking.

  RINPOCHE-LA, WESTERN TIBET

  The western portion of Tibet had never had a substantial settled population. There was little pasturage for nomadic shepherds and few areas low enough in elevation to support farming. For this reason, the Chinese military, following their invasion in 1950, maintained a tight cordon and used the land for their own purposes. There were a few political prisons, but mostly the region was given to observation and radar installations securing the borders with Nepal and India. Tibet had been annexed as a buffer state and the Chinese kept their cushion rigid. Except in closely monitored tour groups, foreign travelers aren’t allowed much outside of the Tibetan capital of Lhasa, and the western reaches of the country are particularly restricted. Military patrols sweep the few roads on a regular basis and no one is ever granted overflight rights. The handful of drug smugglers who tested the air defenses soon found themselves painted by ground-based radar and in the sights of MiGs or Sukhoi fighter jets a short time later.

  The country at the roof of the world has always been steeped in legend and mystery and no place was more unknown than the western borderlands.

  To keep their valley’s secret, the Order had a strict protocol for reaching Rinpoche-La. The trek from the Nepalese frontier never followed the same route twice and never took less than two weeks, and even this pushed the threat of detection. That time frame didn’t include the days spent in Katmandu evading the Chinese informants that infested Nepal’s capital city, each eager to make a few yuan by reporting suspicious parties.

  Moving hard and ignoring the safety protocols, Luc Nguyen forced the group carrying his sister from Nepal to Rinpoche-La in a mere eight days. They risked using trucks on open roads and took minimum shelter when specially modified helicopters that could fly in the rarified atmosphere of the Himalayas thundered through mountain passes. The choppers often patrolled the area searching for people trying to flee the worker’s paradise that the Chinese had imposed on the people of Tibet.

  At twelve thousand feet, the wind was a constant presence. Whether a soft summer zephyr or the shrieking gales of winter, the wind never stopped moving through the valley, funneled by peaks that rose a further eight thousand feet above the valley floor. The mountains were jagged and barren, scoured clean of snow and soil except in protected pockets and veins. While much of Tibet is renowned for its rugged beauty, the land around Rinpoche-La was particularly harsh and ugly. Isolated in an isolated country, the nearest town was sixty miles east and there were no connecting roads, just a barely marked footpath that only the heartiest could attempt.

  Construction on the monastery at Rinpoche-La began in 1052 under the guidance of the Indian scholar Atisha and was added on to in fits and starts until its abandonment in 1254 to protest how Godan Khan, Ghenghis’s grandson, had made the Lama of the Sakya Buddhists regent of all Tibet. Because Rinpoche-La was at the outskirts of the Tibetan kingdom, it remained completely forgotten save for the handful of self-sufficient villagers who eked out a living in the shadow of the huge building. That was until Zhu Zhanji, the Confucian who defied the emperor, cached the knowledge of Admiral Zheng He’s historic sea voyages. There were no records in the Order’s archive describing how Zhu Zhanji knew of the valley’s existence. It remained one more of the legends that surround Rinpoche-La.

  The nearly six hundred years since saw countless invasions of Tibet from the south and the east and the north, culminating in the totalitarian occupation by the Chinese. Even as they slaughtered an estimated one million Tibetans and doubled the country’s population by the forced migration of ethnic Han Chinese, Rinpoche-La remained nestled in its valley, unknown beyond rumors and the whispered tales of nomads who rarely ventured close to the intimidating mountains. Beyond its geography, the valley was further isolated by a river that was barely negotiable in winter and seemingly impossible to cross in summer.

  The monastery dominated the end of the valley, a five-story central structure surrounded by various out-buildings and a thirty-foot-tall, ten-foot-thick wall of mortared stone. Behind the hermitage, the valley dropped away in a sheer hundred-foot cliff, hemmed on each side by towering stone ramparts. The village lay at the monastery’s feet, clutches of stone buildings that seemed to grow out of the living rock. Because the valley was little more than an ax s
troke cut into the mountains, little light filtered to the floor and this was diffused by the steam escaping through countless geothermal fissures.

  It was the steam that provided the village shelter and also its means of survival. The microbes that flourished in the scalding waters of the hot springs were the basis of a bizarre food chain similar to that found in the deep-sea thermal vents called black smokers. In the absence of sunlight, creatures depended on chemosynthesis, the transformation of chemical, rather than light, energy into life. Around the black smokers, microbes fed off the exotic plumes of chemicals belched from the earth’s interior and in turn fed a myriad of odd creatures: tube worms that grew to six feet or more, mussels and crab species found nowhere else and fish able to withstand the tremendous heat. The difference at Rinpoche-La was at the top of this food chain were goats and yaks that ate nutrient-rich aquatic weeds and provided meat and wool and milk for the villagers. A further advantage to those living amid the geothermal vents was that heat was provided for them. There was no need to gather wood to warm their homes or cook their meals, a time-consuming necessity that handicapped the rest of Tibet’s rural population. Over the generations, the valley had become its own self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem.

  On an upper story of the monastery a window sash rattled as a fresh gust of wind blew by. The candle on the table flickered and shadows jumped along the stone walls of the cell. Tisa barely looked up from where she sat, a cup of pungent butter tea cooling at her elbow. She was physically and spiritually drained, but she knew the bed in the corner would provide no succor. In sleep lay the nightmares that had plagued her for so long.

  Added to them were her fears for Philip Mercer.

  She was sure he had survived. When she’d left him on the floating tanker truck and struck out for Luc’s boat, she’d tried to convince her half brother that she alone had escaped from the sinking ferry. He hadn’t believed her, but the crush of survivors trying to board the speedboat nearly capsized the vessel and forced him to motor away before mounting a search. Mercer would have surely been rescued when word reached Santorini that the ferry had gone down.

  No, her fears were based on what she knew was coming. She wondered if she should have bothered giving him the warning about La Palma now that she couldn’t be with him. Mercer would doubtlessly figure out that the volcano was going to erupt and she was just as certain he would try to minimize the devastation. He’d go to La Palma and be one of the first to die. Her interference had sealed his fate. She’d only just discovered that in their short time together he’d evoked emotions she’d thought she was incapable of. She’d fallen in love with him. Now he was gone forever.

  She knew now that whoever said it was better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all had no idea what they were talking about. She looked at her wrist where for a few hours she’d worn the watch he’d given her. It was the sweetest gesture she’d ever seen. He couldn’t possibly understand why she wouldn’t wear one, couldn’t know the fear she had of time itself, how finite it was and how she couldn’t stand the constant reminder.

  She wished now she’d kept it.

  The monastery was so solidly built that it seemed to absorb all sound. Tisa didn’t hear the footsteps outside her door, didn’t know anyone was coming for her until the heavy iron lock slid back against its stop.

  She remained bowed, not needing to look up to see that it was her brother who had come for her. “Leave me, Luc.”

  “You know I would never do that,” he whispered. When they were together at Rinpoche-La, they spoke Tibetan. For some unknown reason, when they were on the outside they conversed in either French or English.

  She raised her head. She’d lost her glasses during her escape from the ferry. Her spare pair weren’t the correct prescription, forcing her to squint slightly to focus her vision. Like her, Luc was dressed in voluminous wool pants, a fine cotton shirt and a heavy cloak. She noted he’d taken to carrying a pistol belted around his lean hips. “What did you hope to accomplish by bringing me here?”

  He crossed the murky room to stand behind her. She could feel his hands near her shoulders but he refrained from touching her. “I just want to keep you safe.”

  “From what?” she snapped. “Inevitability?”

  “Tisa, it doesn’t have to be like this. I forgive you for trying to warn the world. At times, even I thought that we should. In the end, we both know it’s for the best that we don’t.”

  She turned in her seat to look him in the eye. “Best for who? Who are you to decide?”

  “I can ask you the same question. For centuries the Order has done nothing but watch as cataclysms destroyed nations, laid waste to entire regions, and killed millions. No one ever questioned our need to remain silent. Just because the scope is so much greater now doesn’t mean we should part with our traditions.”

  “Luc, if we don’t do anything a hundred million people will die outright and many more later as civilization unravels.”

  “This is where you and I disagree, dear sister. I don’t see that as a bad thing. Civilization as it is today is fundamentally flawed and can’t be sustained. Its demise is certain. Rampant consumption in the west and exploding populations in the developing world are either going to bleed the planet dry or collide in a monumental war that will destroy both. The eruption on La Palma is a pressure relief valve, a way to turn back the clock a century or two and give humanity a chance to learn from its mistakes rather than continue to build on them.

  “This is the very nature of evolution—the adaptation to changing circumstances. Those that can do it will survive, those that can’t will perish. The planet doesn’t care which species resides at the top of the evolutionary ladder so long as it can endure the tests thrown at it. We’ve done well for so long that we forget we’re here only by the earth’s grace.”

  Tisa couldn’t form a response. Far from growing blank, her mind was a swirl of images and thoughts, a torrent that crashed like a hurricane. In the months since she’d learned about the La Palma eruption, she’d strived to find a way to avert it, or at least reduce the impact. She’d remained confident that she could make a difference. That knowledge had given her the determination and courage to continue. Hearing her brother now, she understood how useless it had all been. For the first time she knew she was going to fail.

  There was no escaping Rinpoche-La. Upon her return she’d seen that Luc had mobilized dozens of followers into a loose army. Like her brother, they all seemed to be carrying guns. Even if she could slip past the guards and make it out of the valley, she’d never survive the trek to Nepal. Darchen, the closest Tibetan town, was out of the question too. It was a backwater village with a heavy military presence. She’d be arrested the first time she tried to hitch a ride to Llasa.

  Luc began to massage her shoulders. Tisa didn’t have the strength to shrug him off. “We’ll be safe here. When the time comes we will rejoin the world and take our rightful place. The oracle will guarantee our primacy.”

  “I want to see the Lama,” she said, trying to keep from sobbing.

  “Of course.” Luc stepped back to allow Tisa to stand. He smiled at her, a patronizing look that said he could see past her anger and not care about her pain. “Whatever you want is yours for the asking.”

  He led her from the cell. In this wing of the lamasery, the hallways were wide and lined with rooms once used by some of the hundreds of monks who’d lived here. Precious prayer scrolls called thangkas adorned the paneled walls. The floors were made of tropical woods, burnished to a mirror gloss, then mostly covered by intricate carpets. He took her to one of the central mezzanines where a staircase seemed to float in space yet was large enough to accommodate a dozen people walking abreast. Oil lanterns lit the way. The ground floor was an open space several acres square, cut by marble columns that supported the floors above. There were so many supports that the grand entrance was called the stone forest. The ceiling gleamed with gilt.

  It took se
veral minutes to cross to another set of stairs that descended below ground level. This passage was part of a dormant geothermal vent, and once at the bottom of the steps the passage took random twists and turns that had once been an ancient lava tube. After a hundred yards they came to a towering door. Luc unlocked it with a key kept on a long leather thong around his neck. He gave Tisa an appraising look.

  She remained expressionless. Three months had passed since she’d last been here and taken the chronicle from the archive that lay beyond this door. Only the archivists, the most venerated members of the Order, had the key. Luc had not been among them then. Her brother must have been busy consolidating power within the Order. She feared what else had changed.

  The archive chamber was dark until Luc turned on lights powered by a geothermal generator buried deeper under the monastery. The walls were draped with heavy, moisture-absorbing carpets to protect the priceless volumes. The rugs were replaced on a regular basis and the ones here appeared fresh and vibrant. The air was chilled, not damp exactly but clammy and claustrophobic. The chronicles were arranged along two walls in shelves that stretched from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling. There were several antique desks for the archivists and drawers filled with maps and manuscripts. This wasn’t where Admiral Zheng He’s cache was stored, although a few pieces were generally kept here for reference. The bulk of that horde was in another chamber Tisa had never seen.

  When she’d taken the book she’d shown Mercer, she had tried to disguise the theft by spacing out the nearby journals. Luc, or one of his underlings, had reformed the tight ranks and the gap where the chronicle once stood was as obvious as a missing tooth. From the blank spot to the end of the last shelf were six more journals awaiting the time when the predictions in them could be verified.

  Luc crossed the room and opened another locked door. Tisa’s unease increased. She hadn’t seen the Lama in almost a year. Even back then his health was failing and his mind had lost much of its keen edge. She dreaded that he’d died in her absence and her brother was leading her to his ossuary. That would explain how Luc had taken such complete control over the monastery and the Order.