Eliot Pattison - The Skull Mantra

By the time Shan joined her, she was on her knees. Water was rapidly seeping through the weakened dam. With small, frantic groans she shoved dirt into the hole. The tractor arrived beside her and began pushing dirt with its bucket. A trickle appeared on the side of the hole. As the tractor edged closer the dirt under it began to shift. Fowler screamed, leapt up, and pulled the driver away just as the wall disintegrated and the machine lurched into the hole. The back wall held for the few seconds it took for the hole to fill with water, then it, too, was gone. The tractor was washed into the gorge and the pond broke through.

They watched helplessly as the water hurled down the Dragon Throat, ripping boulders from the sides, collapsing the banks, gathering speed as it dropped under the old suspension bridge toward the plain below in a maelstrom of rock, water, and gravel. Shan became aware of Tan standing beside him. He had binoculars. He was watching his bridge.

But they did not need the lenses to see the wall of water slam into the concrete pillars. The bridge seemed to totter for a moment, like a fragile toy, then it lurched upward and was gone.

Shan remembered the sound of the dike surrendering the car, the shudder of the earth, the wrenching, sucking, squeezing scream of the mud that had shaken his spine.

All it would take, Je had said, was one perfect sound.

Kincaid, who had darted past the disinterred limousine to join Fowler, now stood by the open trunk, his jaw open, his eyes disbelieving. "Jesus," he moaned with a cracking voice. "Oh Jesus." He bent as though he needed to touch her, then stopped and slowly straightened. As though guided by some sixth sense he turned to stare at the road leading down to the mine. Following his gaze, Shan saw a new vehicle appear, a bright red Land Rover.

Even from thirty feet away Shan could sense Kincaid's body tighten. "Damn you!" the man screamed, and began running toward the road, bending to grab stones which he hurled in the direction of the still distant vehicle. "Come and see her, you bastards!"

The red truck halted, then began backing up the ridge and disappeared.

Tan had also noticed. He was back on his radio.

Luntok appeared, carrying a blanket to the limousine. The ragyapa were never afraid of the dead. He reverently covered the woman in the trunk then turned and stared at his friend Kincaid. But there was something new in his eyes.

Rebecca Fowler took a step toward the ragyapa engineer. "Whose work crew was responsible for the final fill on this dam?" she asked him in a strained voice. Luntok did not reply but kept staring at Kincaid.

The expression on Kincaid's face hardened momentarily into defiance as he glared back at Luntok. But when he looked at Fowler and Shan, standing together near the car, confusion seemed to overcome him. He bolted toward the office building.

Fowler's sigh was almost a sob. "If my mine was hiding someone's evidence," she said, "we could be deported, couldn't we?"

Shan did not reply, and watched as she slowly followed Kincaid. Five minutes later Shan found her in the computer room, her head in her hands, staring into a cup of tea. Kincaid was there, playing slow, sad notes on his harmonica, one hand urgently scrolling text on the screen of the satellite console.

"It's over," Shan said as he sat across from her.

"Damned straight. I'll lose my job. I'll lose my reputation. I'll be lucky if they give me airfare home." Everything about Rebecca Fowler, her voice, her face, her very being, seemed to have been hollowed out.

"It wasn't your fault. The army will rebuild your dam. The Ministry of Geology will receive an official explanation. This is Party business. They will clean it up quietly."

"I don't even know what to report home."

"An accident. An act of nature."

Fowler looked up. "That poor woman. We knew her. Tyler took her hiking sometimes."

"I saw her in the photo on the wall." Shan nodded. "But I believe she knew what Prosecutor Jao knew. If Jao had to die, so did she."

"Someone said she was on leave."

"Someone lied." He remembered how excited Tan had been when he had established contact with Lihua by fax. The faxes had indeed come from Hong Kong. Shan had seen the telephone transmission codes. The source had even been identified as the local Ministry of Justice office. Someone had lied in Hong Kong. Li, who had reported taking her to the airport the night she died, had lied in Lhadrung.

"The satellite photos and the water permits," Fowler said. "It was somehow about them."

"I'm afraid so."

Fowler buried her head in her hands again. "You mean I started it all?"

"No. What you started was the end of it all."

"The end of Jao. The end of Lihua." Her voice was desolate.

"No. Jao was already marked for murder. They probably would have eventually found a way for Miss Lihua to disappear."

Fowler looked up with a haunted expression.

"There were five murders really, five that we know of. Plus the three innocent men wrongly executed." Shan poured himself some tea from a thermos on the table before continuing. After seeing the body in the car he felt he might never get the chill out of his gut. "It seemed hopelessly confused. What I didn't understand at first was that there were two cases, not one. The murder of Prosecutor Jao. And Jao's investigation. I couldn't understand the murder without understanding what Jao was tracking. And the motives. Not one, not two, but several, all coming together that night on the Dragon's Claw."

"Five murders? Jao. Lihua-"

"And the victims of the earlier trials. The former Director of Religious Affairs. The former Director of Mines. The former Manager of the Long Wall collective. Then the monks. I never believed the Lhadrung Five were guilty. But the likely suspects never fit the crime. No pattern. Because it wasn't a single man. It was all of them."

"All of them? Not all the purbas."

Shan shook his head and sighed. "The hardest thing was connecting the victims. They were all the leaders of a large government operation so they were symbolic of the injury inflicted on Tibetans. The activists were instant suspects. But no one focused on a more immediate motive. The victims were also officials. And they were all old."

"Old?"

"They were the senior officials in their offices. Very powerful offices. Among them, they ran most of the county. And below each of them, next in line, was someone much younger, a member of the Bei Da Union." He stood behind the console. Kincaid was calling up the log of map orders.

Rebecca Fowler's mouth opened but she seemed unable to speak. "You mean the Union was like some sort of club for murderers?" she finally asked.

Shan paced along the long table. "Li was successor to Jao. Wen took over the Religious Affairs Bureau when Lin died. Hu took over at the Ministry of Geology. The head of the Long Wall collective didn't have to be replaced, because it was dissolved due to its criminal activities. Maybe they didn't even know about it when they started the killing. But when they discovered it generated huge revenues as a drug supplier, how could they resist?" What was it Li had said the first time they had met? Tibet was a land of opportunity. He picked up one of the glossy American catalogs and slid it toward Fowler. "Most of the things in here cost more than they make in a month on their official salaries."

Kincaid still sat staring at the computer monitor. He had stopped blowing into his harmonica. His knuckles, gripping the edge of the table, were white. "You showed him," he whispered. "You showed Shan the maps. There were none in the files so you actually transmitted them down for him. You never order maps on your own."

Fowler turned toward him, not understanding. "I had to, Tyler, it was about Jao's murder. Those water rights we never understood."