Eliot Pattison - Beautiful Ghosts

The American wasn’t unconscious, did not appear physically hurt, but his eyes had a strange glaze in them. He sat on the rocks, his face drained of color, rubbing his arms as if he were cold, his eyes vacant, not reacting when Ming and Lu offered him water. Finally he stood, stepped to Ming, and shoved him to the ground. He jumped on him, pummeling his face and chest with his fists as Lu struggled to pull him away. Ming did not resist, not even when his nose began bleeding, but gazed in horror at the American.

The violence seemed to revive Dolan, who shrugged off Lu, and stood, ignoring Ming, looking at Lokesh now. “You knew, you son of a bitch!” Dolan shouted at the old Tibetan, and charged toward him as if to attack him. Shan jumped in front of Lokesh, Corbett a step behind him.

Lokesh did not retreat, did not react to the American’s strange burst of temper. “I only knew that what you need would not be found here,” he said in a calm voice. “I told you that.”

Dolan grabbed the army radio, switched it on, then halted, looking at the Tibetans, who had fallen back to the shadows of the walls, staring in fear at Dolan, then at the slope above. Several Tibetans were running up the ridge, fleeing the wild American. He seemed about to speak into the device, then cursed, lowered it, and with a venomous expression marched back to the camp in the courtyard.

By the time Shan and Lokesh reached the entrance to the chamber Lu had tied the rope to a standing pillar twenty feet away and Ming was being lowered inside. Without a word Lokesh lowered himself onto the rocks, his legs into the hole, and dropped down as soon as Ming stepped away. When Shan followed a moment later he assumed the sound behind him was Corbett, but it was Ko who stepped to his side in the shadows, holding one of the electric lamps.

They seemed to be inside a frame of heavy timbers, a chamber perhaps twelve feet to a side, with a wooden floor whose shattered planks jutted upward at wild angles. Behind them was a short, intact wall of planks, all uniformly broken along the bottom. Ming was only a step ahead of them, navigating around the planks and other debris, nervously sweeping his light about the chamber, aiming high, mostly at the ceiling beams, because, Shan suspected, he was worried they might collapse. Suddenly Ming moaned and stepped backward. Lokesh pushed past him, paused, and reached back to touch Ko’s arm. “You must bring Gendun Rinpoche,” he said softly, and moved aside for Shan. Ko, his face drained of color, backed away.

Dust had long ago settled over the two dead men who sat against the wall in front of them, though not so much as to obscure their features, preserved by the dry, cold air, nor so thick as to cover the short grey hair on their scalps, or the gold fringe on the collar of the maroon robe worn by the man on the left. The man beside him wore a robe, too, and with his colorless, desiccated face he might have looked like another Tibetan monk, except for the grey handlebar moustache under his nose and the unusual raiment he wore over his robe. As Shan squatted and touched the dust-encrusted fabric, enough dust fell away for him to see it was a red tunic, a gold brocaded tunic, the dress uniform of a British soldier from another century. It was a uniform Shan had seen before, in the photograph at the cottage. Brother Bertram, once Major McDowell, seemed to be staring at his legs, which were obviously broken, and the dark stain beneath them, which probably indicated that the shattered bone had cut into blood vessels.

As Lokesh knelt by the bodies, Shan looked again at the shattered timbers along the walls, which seemed crushed from a great pressure, not broken or burned by explosion. “It was the top of the tower,” Shan said as the realization hit him. “The tower was hit by a bomb at the bottom and collapsed. The top chamber slid downward, crushing the timbers.” He looked toward the jagged upturned timbers at the far side of the room, where they had entered. “That’s not a wall of timber, it was a veranda, a balcony that was sheared upward as the chamber fell.”

“But why were they here?” Lokesh wondered. “Not in the temple?” He gently prodded at a grey blanket on the major’s lap. Dust fell away, and vivid colors were revealed, diagonal stripes of red and white and blue.

“Because they were trying to stop the bombers,” Shan said. “There was a place above the major’s bed where something large had hung. This flag. When he learned what was happening, he grabbed his tunic and the flag, trying to make the pilots see a British soldier, a British flag, thinking it might stop them.”

“And the abbot,” a voice rasped behind them. Gendun had arrived. “It is the blessed abbot with him.” Gendun touched the gold fringe of the robe, a symbol of high rank in the old gompa. “The last of the Stone Dragons.” Shan turned. There was no sadness in Gendun’ s voice. The old lama was smiling radiantly as he stepped forward and reverently grasped the abbot’s mummified hand. In his arm were tucked the robes from the temple. Lokesh took them and laid one over the legs of each of the dead men.

As Shan helped Lokesh, he saw Ko, standing five feet away, his light out, staring at the bodies. “They were both still alive when the rubble trapped them,” Shan explained, “both suffering mortal wounds.” He pointed to the odd angle of the abbot’s left arm and the dark stain beside it on his robe. It had probably been a piece of shrapnel that broke the arm, and pierced his body. “They sat together in the dark, trapped, knowing they were dying, knowing their gompa was destroyed.”

“No,” Gendun disagreed, in a whisper. “Knowing that their gompa could never be destroyed.” He settled onto the floor in front of the mummified bodies and began a mantra that had a tone not of mourning, but of greeting.

“They should have had rifles,” Ko said. “You can shoot down a plane with rifles, if you know what you’re doing.” He ventured closer. There was something in his face that looked revulsed, yet something else that seemed to compel him to keep looking at the remains of the two old men, who looked as serene in their painful deaths as no doubt they had been in life.

When Shan looked up Ming was gone. Gendun was lost in his mantra.

“We’ll need a lantern, full of fuel,” Shan said. Lokesh nodded. Gendun would probably not move for hours.

“Why doesn’t he just bring in the soldiers?” Ko suddenly asked. “He could rip everything apart. He can do whatever he wants.”

“No,” Shan said. “He can’t. He wants to steal the treasure. He wants no one to know about it, no one to even know of its existence.”

“We know,” Ko said.

“He thinks we are powerless. He thinks he has neutralized us.”

“And if he can’t find the treasure he’ll leave?” Ko asked.

“He knows it is here. He won’t leave. He is certain he will find it. He is certain at least one of us knows, and that will guarantee he finds it.”

“Gendun? Only Gendun knows, right? Dolan wouldn’t … Gendun can be hidden. There’s more of us than them.” Ko, Shan realized, was asking Shan what they should do.

“Gendun won’t hide, won’t do anything because of fear. And Dolan doesn’t know how to act without using fear,” Shan said, gazing at the dead men. He felt not frightened, but strangely empowered by them, as if their tomb had been opened for a reason, to pass something on to the living.

When they returned to the camp Ming had fled.

“He called a helicopter to meet him at the old stone tower,” Jara explained. “That man Lu went with him, too. They flew away just minutes ago.” Dolan and Ming had argued while Dolan had been drinking from a bottle of whiskey, Jara reported. Tashi the informer had arrived in a helicopter delivering equipment, then when Dolan had gone into the tent with the whiskey Ming, Tashi, and Lu spoke quietly and began packing. “They took the radios, all the radios.”