The Kingdom

“It’s the thin air. We’re around nine thousand feet. It’ll be better tomorrow.”

Sam had both food packets ready in minutes. Once they finished eating, Sam brewed a couple cups of oolong tea. They sat before the fire and watched the flames dance. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted.

“If the Theurang is what King is after, I wonder about his motivation,” Remi said.

“There’s no telling,” Sam replied. “Why all the subterfuge? Why the heavy-handedness with his children?”

“He’s a powerful man, with an ego the size of Alaska-”

“And a domineering control freak.”

“That too. Maybe this is how he operates. Trust no one and keep an iron thumb on everything.”

“You may be right,” Sam replied. “But whatever is driving him, I’m not inclined to hand over something as historically significant as the Theurang.”

Remi nodded. “And, unless we’ve misjudged his character, I think Lewis King would agree-alive or dead. He’d want it handed over to Nepal’s National Museum or a university.”

“Just as important,” Sam added, “if for whatever twisted reason King had Frank kidnapped, I say we do our level best to make sure he pays for it.”

“He won’t go down without a fight, Sam.”

“And neither will we.”

“Spoken like the man I love,” Remi replied.

She held up her mug, and Sam put his arm around her waist and drew her close.

They were up before dawn the next day, fed and packed and back on the road by seven. As they gained altitude and passed through hamlet after hamlet with names like Betrawati, Manigaun, Ramche, and Thare, the landscape changed from green stair-step fields and monochromatic hills to triple-canopied forest and narrow gorges. After a brief lunch at a scenic overlook, they continued on and reached their turnoff, an unmarked road just north of Boka Jhunda, an hour later. Sam stopped the Rover at the intersection, and they eyeballed the dirt road before them. Barely wider than the Rover itself and hemmed in by thick foliage, it looked more like a tu

“I’m having a bit of deja vu,” Sam said. “Weren’t we on this road a few months ago, but in Madagascar?”

“It bears an eerie resemblance,” Remi agreed. “Double-checking.”

She traced her index finger along the map, occasionally checking her notes as she went. “This is the place. According to Selma, the mining camp is twelve miles to the east. There’s a larger road a few miles north of here, but it’s used for camp traffic.”

“Best to sneak in the back window, then. Do you have a signal?”

Remi grabbed the satellite phone from between her feet and checked for voice messages. After a moment she nodded, held up a finger, and listened. She hung up. “Professor Dharel from the university. He made some calls. Evidently there’s a local historian in Lo Monthang who is considered the national expert on Mustang history. He’s agreed to see us.”

“How soon?”

“Whenever we get there.”

Sam considered this and shrugged. “No problem. Providing we don’t get caught invading King’s mining camp, we should make Lo Monthang in three or four weeks.”

He shifted the Rover into drive and pressed the accelerator.

Almost immediately the grade steepened and the road began zigzagging, and soon, despite an average speed of ten miles per hour, they felt like they were on a roller-coaster ride. Occasionally through the passing foliage they caught glimpses of gorges, surging rivers, and jagged rock outcroppings, soon gone, absorbed by the forest.

After nearly ninety minutes of driving, Sam came around a particularly tight bend. Remi shouted. “Big trees!”

“I see them,” Sam replied, already slamming on the brakes.

Looming before the windshield was a wall of green.

“Tell me it isn’t so,” Sam said. “Selma made a mistake?”

“No chance.”

They both climbed out, ducking and weaving their way through the foliage surrounding the Rover until they reached the front bumper.

“And no valet, either,” Sam muttered.

To the right, Remi said, “I’ve got a path.”

Sam walked over. As promised, a narrow, rutted trail disappeared into the trees. Sam dug out his compass, and Remi checked their bearing against the map.

“Two miles down that trail,” she said.

“So, translated to Nepalese distances . . . ten days, give or take.”

“Give or take,” Remi agreed.

The trail took them through a series of down-sloping switchbacks before bottoming out beside a river. Flowing from north to south, the water crashed over a series of moss-covered boulders, sending up plumes of spray that left Sam and Remi dripping wet in a matter of seconds.

They followed the path south along the river to a relatively calm section, where they found a wooden suspension bridge barely wider than their shoulders. The canopy from both banks spa

Sam shed his pack and, with both hands clenched on the rope side rails, crept onto the bridge’s head, probing with his foot for cracks or loose planks before transferring his weight. When he reached the bridge’s midpoint, he tried a test hop.

“Sam!”

“Seems sturdy enough.”

“Don’t do that again.” She saw the half smile on his face, and her eyes narrowed. “If I have to jump in after you . . .”

He laughed, then turned and walked back to where she was standing. “Come on, it’ll hold us.”

He do

For the next hour they followed the trail as it weaved up and down forested slopes and across gorges until finally the trees began to thin ahead. They topped a crest and almost immediately heard the rumble of diesel engines and the beep-beep-beep of trucks backing up.

“Down!” Sam rasped, and dropped to his belly, dragging Remi with him.

“What?” she said. “I didn’t see anything-”

“Directly below us.”

He gestured for her to follow, then turned his body left and crawled off the trail into the underbrush. After twenty feet he stopped, glanced back, and curled his finger at Remi. She crawled up beside him. Using his fingertips, Sam parted the foliage.

Directly below them was a football-shaped earthen pit, forty feet deep, two hundred yards wide, and nearly a quarter mile long. The sides of the pit were perfectly vertical, an escarpment of black soil dropping away from the surrounding forest as though a giant had slammed a cookie cutter into the earth and scooped out the center. In the center of the pit itself, yellow bulldozers, dump trucks, and forklifts moved to and fro on well-worn paths, while along the edges teams of men worked with shovels and picks around what looked like horizontal shafts that disappeared into the ground. At the far end of the pit, an earthen ramp led up to a clearing and, Sam and Remi assumed, the main service road. Construction trailers and Quonset-style huts lined the sides of the clearing.

Sam continued to look around the site. “I’ve got guards,” he muttered. “Stationed in the trees along the rim and in the clearing.”

“Armed?”

“Yes. Assault rifles. Not your run-of-the-mill AK-47s, though. I don’t recognize the model. Whatever it is, it’s modern. This isn’t like any exploratory mine site I’ve ever seen,” Sam said. “Outside of a banana republic, that is.”

Remi stared at the steep slope of the pit. “I count thirteen . . . no, fourteen side tu

The bulldozers and trucks seemed to be skirting the edges of the pit. Occasionally, however, a forklift would approach one of the tu

“I need the binoculars,” Remi said.

Sam dug them out of his pack and handed them over. She sca