Eliot Pattison - Bone Mountain

The three men halted half a dozen paces from the mound. It was covered in black nylon cloth, and beside it was a yellow nylon vest. A red wool cap nearby was singed black by the fire. Shan and Winslow exchanged a grim glance. The black mound was in the shape of a body.

Dremu tossed a pebble onto the black cloth, with no effect. Then the Golok spun about and studied the slope intensely. His hand closed around the hilt of his knife.

Shan stepped forward reluctantly and lifted one end of the black nylon. It was a sack of some kind, a long bulky sack, and extremely light. He lifted the end to his waist with a sigh of relief. There was no body, only the sack, stuffed like a quilt.

"Sleeping bag," Winslow said with a confused tone, and bent to pull the yellow vest from the ground. It was large enough to fit Shan and looked new. Under it, in a pile at the head of the bag, was a pair of blue denim pants with an American label. In a small nylon pouch were a black metal compass with a red cross and a dozen bars of something called high energy protein, labeled in English and Chinese.

"There's no campfire." Shan gestured toward the scorched bowl. There was no ring of rocks, no cleared circle, no stones stacked for cooking. No campfire that had gone out of control. "And if lightning struck there would be a gash in the earth, some sign of a violent burst of heat."

Winslow nodded slowly. The brush had been set on fire deliberately. "To burn the whole damn plain, you think? To keep someone away, maybe scare off pursuers? But air doesn't circulate in the bowl. The flames crept down and smoldered away."

Shan bent and broke off one of the grey-green plants from a patch at the edge of the bowl and held it to his nose, detecting the same smell that hung in the air. As he pushed the sprig into his pocket Winslow bent over the bag and vest. "Expensive stuff," the American observed. "And all the labels are American, not just the jeans."

"Your geologist?"

"That's what I'm thinking," Winslow said as he examined the pockets of the jeans and vest. In the vest pocket was a government issued map of the region. The jeans yielded a plastic cigarette lighter, a pencil stub, a metal whistle on a lanyard- a device field teams might use to stay in contact when radios were not available. The American stuffed the vest, jeans, and singed hat into the sleeping bag, rolled it all into a tight bundle and tied it to his horse.

They rode halfway up the slope, along a trail that arced along the ridge into a maze of huge boulders that soon became impassable for the horses. Dremu produced short lengths of rope and hobbled their mounts, letting them forage in the thin growth, then pointed out a goat path leading up the mountainside he would scout while Shan and Winslow explored the field of rocks.

They searched futilely for half an hour, then climbed onto one of the boulders to scan the long plain again with their glasses. In the middle of the rolling green landscape was a blurred line of color. The caravan was moving northeast, as Lhandro had suggested, toward the grove of trees on the opposite side of the plain.

"Sometimes in Tibet," Winslow said, "when it gets really quiet, in a place like this, I hear things. Like a groan or a shudder. Only bigger. My grandfather would have said it was giants talking in the mountains."

Shan said nothing, but studied the landscape; first the plain again, then the slope around them. He couldn't shake the feeling of being watched.

After a long silence the American sighed. "You don't trust me, do you, Shan?"

"I don't believe you are what you say."

"Call the embassy. Call Washington. I'll loan you my passport for verification."

"I know something about working for governments. The Foreign Service is a career job. You should be halfway through your career."

"Right."

"And you are sent to collect the bodies of dead Americans? It's the job of a very junior officer at best."

Winslow offered no reply.

"And looking for the missing woman, that's a law enforcement job. Your government would ask the authorities in Beijing to find her. You say you came for that woman's body, but there is no body."

Winslow silently stared over the plain. "I guess you could say I've been reincarnated into a lower life form by Foreign Service standards." He lifted a pebble and tossed it from one hand to the other, then glanced back at Shan with a frown. "Two years ago I was Deputy Commercial Attachein Beijing, engaged to be married to another Foreign Service officer, a cultural attache in Beijing. I had always been a high achiever, collected languages like some people collect coins. Marked for fast advancement because I was the only one who spoke all the major languages of China. I had an apartment outside the embassy compound.

"There was a Chinese woman who did my cleaning. Over sixty years old, a real delight. Like the gentle old grandmother I never had. My fiancee and I started going to her home after we knew her a year, took her family out of the city for picnics at the Ming Tombs and the Summer Palace. After a while we noticed she wouldn't eat much of the food we brought for her and she always asked if we minded if she would take her share away. Eventually we found out she was giving it to orphans at a school run by one of those religious groups the government hates so much. The government support for the school had been dropped because the group had publicly demonstrated for freedom of religion. So the children were living on two bowls of rice a day. One day she didn't come to work and I found out that she had been arrested, along with all the teachers at the school. It took me a week before I could find her in a jail. They had beat her and ruptured her spleen, trying to get her to disavow her belief in her religion." When he looked at Shan there was pain on the American's face. "I never had much religion, but like my fiancee said, people have a right to find their god, and worship it in their own way," he said quietly, looking into his hands now.

Shan nodded. In the end it was all that the Tibetans wanted to do.

"I used my diplomatic credentials to go to the Ministry of Justice and make inquiries about her, ask for her release. The Ministry told the ambassador and the ambassador ripped off my stripes and broke my sword."

"I'm sorry?"

"Did everything but fire me, because I had no authority to make such inquiries, because the U.S. keeps its hands off the way China treats her citizens. Said I'd be cleaning embassy bathrooms for the rest of my career. So my fiancee and I decided to quit. She left and got a teaching job in Colorado, and I went back on leave to get married and buy a house with her. Two months later I returned to interview for a job at the same university."

"But you didn't quit," Shan pointed out.

"No," Winslow said heavily, and looked out over the plain again before speaking. "It was winter when I flew back, in a bad snowstorm. The house was up in the mountains. On the way to the airport to pick me up she slid off the highway and into a river. Took them two days to recover her body. The morgue called me to ask if I knew she was two months pregnant." Winslow watched a hawk fly overhead. "I hadn't, but by then I had gone to the house. She had bought a set of baby furniture and had tied balloons all over it, to surprise me."

Shan studied the American's face. Winslow didn't seem the same ebullient man he had seen riding the yak the day before.

"I had nowhere to go, no roots anywhere, no family left alive. So I came back. Started volunteering for every shit job nobody wanted. Just to get away. Recover all the bodies for shipment home. Clean up after the ambassador's poodles."

Shan felt an emptiness welling within. Somehow the American's words made him remember his father, who had been taken from him by the Red Guard, after stripping him of his beloved job as a professor because he taught Western history and had friends in Europe and America.