Exiles (23 page)

“Sorry so steep,” he said, over his shoulder, when the rotors had slowed. “Important not to run out of fuel! Walk around while we gas up, if you like.” He lit a cigarette and stepped out onto the concrete pad. According to a hand-painted sign on a corrugated tin building nearby, they were in Pokhara.

Alex unbuckled herself, opened her door, then stumbled out and vomited. Peter squatted beside her and patted her back.

“You okay?”

“Not really, no,” she said, and threw up again. Peter got her a water bottle, then looked into the cockpit and went over to Krishna.

“The gauge reads a quarter of a tank,” he said angrily. “You think you could take it a little easier?”

Krishna pulled his cigarette from his mouth and exhaled, blowing smoke all around them in the mountain breeze. “Believe me,” he said, “it is necessary to fly this way.”

“Why?”

“Let us hope you do not have to find out, sir.”

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Krishna lifted up just enough to clear the fueling shed, then made a long, low run over the valley at treetop height. When they’d cleared the town and were approaching the foothills, he yanked back on the stick, and the chopper climbed fast. Alex swallowed and closed her eyes, and Peter’s gut was churning. They cleared the first ridge and continued northwest through a series of valleys toward Annapurna. All around them, the mountains spewed great plumes of snow into the jet stream.

A half hour later, with the great mountain looming before them, they dove again, down into valleys. After a few minutes there was smoke and a little village below, and Krishna leveled off just over the ground and set down in a dry rice paddy. The villagers came running as soon as the prop wash died down, then led Peter and the girls to a small house where the sherpas had carried the climbers.

There were three of them—not two, as they’d been told—an American and two Australians, and they were in bad shape. Peter examined the first guy as Alex and Devi stood by. There was a bulge in the right pants leg. Peter felt it gingerly, and the guy screamed.

“Compound fracture, right femur,” Peter said. He felt for a pulse at the ankle. “The artery’s intact. We won’t try to set it here.” He told Alex to start an IV, then hang a bag of saline and a morphine drip. When the morphine had cut in, he’d come back and splint the leg.

The American had broken a forearm and a foot in the fall, and his fingers were badly frostbitten. The other Australian had acute mountain sickness with pulmonary edema, and possibly cerebral edema as well; it was hard for Peter to gauge the source of his disorientation, given everything he’d been through in the past day. He would be dead within hours if he didn’t get to a hospital.

Peter gave the one with mountain sickness a shot of a diuretic, then got them all on oxygen and started IV rehydration. The villagers
helped carry them to the chopper. Peter was supposed to ride with them, then catch a lift back to pick up Alex and Devi the next day. But the three stretchers took up the whole cargo area.

“Is there some way to squeeze me in?” he asked.

Krishna shook his head. “Too much weight,” he said. “I will return for you tomorrow.”

They secured the doors and got out from under as Krishna revved the engine and lifted off. He headed across the river, then climbed the ridge and continued up before banking sharply southeast.

A fine needle of white smoke shot up with a hiss from the trees near the top of the ridge, in the wake of something fast and metallic. As Peter watched, the glinting dart converged on the chopper, which exploded in a brilliant orange burst. Alex screamed, and the villagers were suddenly shouting and running. People were pulling at them insistently, speaking fast in Nepali. Peter looked back toward the ridge. Tiny pieces of metal, some of them still burning, spiraled down into the trees.

Devi yelled that the guerrillas had come. Peter grabbed Alex with one hand, Devi with the other, and hauled them back toward the village. A man came up to them and pointed to the hill behind the town. Peter nodded, and the villagers led them up a trail to a small cave, then got them inside and ran back down the hill. Peter and the girls hunkered behind some rocks at the cave’s entrance. Alex was weeping with fear, and Devi just lay there by her side, her eyes big, watching. Soon they saw movement in the trees.

The guerrillas appeared out of the jungle, carrying rifles and grenade launchers on their shoulders. They waded the shallow river and approached the town. There were maybe twenty of them, men and women both, dressed in camo and T-shirts, one or two in jeans, wearing boots or running shoes or even flip-flops. They were young—most of them looked sixteen or seventeen—and they appeared to be in no hurry. They laughed and called back and forth to one another as they sloshed out of the water and onto the bank.

Peter understood now why Krishna had flown the way he had. Even so, it hadn’t been enough.

Down below, the guerrillas talked to the villagers. Soon they started up the hill.

“Should we try to run?” Alex said.

Devi shook her head. “They will shoot us if we do,” she said. “Better to wait and see if we can talk to them.”

“Devi, get chummy, then,” Peter said. “Let them know you’re local. Alex, you do not speak a word of Nepali, understand?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want them to say whatever they want around you. Keep your eyes down and don’t give anything away. You’re the only way we’ll have of getting information.”

A couple of minutes later, a grim-faced girl about Alex’s age stood at the entrance to the cave and leveled the barrel of an AK-47 at them.

They hauled them down the hill to one of the houses and ransacked their packs. They took Peter’s wallet and watch, Devi’s flashlight, Alex’s water bottle and Luna bar. One of the boys patted Peter down and went through all his pockets. He seemed happy to get the Swiss Army knife, a special promotional model given away by Pfizer that contained a corkscrew, a no. 7 scalpel blade, a folding reflex hammer, and a tracheotomy tool. The knives had prompted speculation among Peter’s colleagues about the proper order for using the tools (most favored starting with the corkscrew) as well as sarcastic consternation over the omission of a Lexus key.

A couple of girls gave Alex and Devi the same treatment, but they didn’t have much on them except a few spare rupees, which were immediately confiscated.

Peter and Alex sat on the dirt floor untended, then, while the guerrillas took Devi into the back room and grilled her. Alex whispered what snippets she overheard. The guards had been coming downriver to take food from the village when they saw the RNA
chopper come in. They figured the village was harboring soldiers, so they sent a couple of guys up the ridge with a rocket launcher.

“They were ready to shoot everybody as collaborators when they came into the village,” she whispered. “Devi is explaining why we’re here.”

The guerrillas who were waiting joked around with one another and appeared to hold the villagers in vague contempt. They found a boom box in one of the houses and started an impromptu dance outside in the dusty square. Two or three of them seemed to be drunk. Others were directing the villagers to prepare a communal dinner.

The interrogators finished with Devi, brought her back into the main room, then went outside to join the others.

“They’re not going to kill us,” Devi said, but she was paler than Peter had ever seen her.

“Did you tell them who was in the helicopter?” Peter asked.

“They said if the pilot was RNA, they just did their jobs,” she said. “They figured the American and the Aussies were stupid to be out here in the first place.”

The woman who owned the house came in to get some food for the meal. She and Devi exchanged a few terse words, then she left.

“These guys are eating all their food, and the boom box is using up the batteries they need to get the weather report,” Devi said quietly.

Peter gathered that the guerrillas faced the classic dilemma: What do you do if your Popular Front is unpopular?

A half hour later, when dinner was ready, they herded everyone into the square so they could eat together. An older boy, apparently the squad leader, took the opportunity to hold forth loudly and at length on what Devi reported to be the glories of the revolution. A couple of the older village women used the distraction to whisper to her. When they discovered that her uncle was the cousin of someone’s now-deceased stepfather, they started sneaking extra
food to all three of them. The guerrillas either ignored this or didn’t notice, because they were partying like the teenagers they were. A couple of them fired their rifles into the air, until the leader—whose name was Ramesh and who looked three or four years older than the rest—scolded them about wasting ammunition. As the evening wore on, though, Ramesh kept making eye contact with Devi, and Peter began to nurse concerns.

They were put in a small hut that night, overseen by a guard who apparently spoke enough English to keep tabs. Devi said that the guerrillas expected the RNA to come looking for their pilot, so now that they’d stuffed themselves and filled their packs, they’d be leaving before dawn.

“Unfortunately,” she said, “that includes us.”

“They’re taking us with them?”

“Their boss is back up in the mountains, ten or fifteen miles from here, and he’s sick. They want you, mainly.”

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The first couple of miles, they marched upriver through icy, knee-deep water so they couldn’t be tracked. Ramesh led the way with Devi’s flashlight; someone else brought up the rear with another light. The banks were steep and covered in giant rhododendron bushes ten or twelve feet tall.

Shortly before sunrise, when the sky was just turning light, they left the river and started up a steep mountain trail to the north. At dawn, the sun ignited the high peaks and sent reddish light flowing down the snowfields like lava. This triggered a flood of frigid air, which convected down the valley and blasted them with a cold wind, bitter and lip-cracking dry. Around 8:30 they stopped to rest. Peter kept expecting to hear the
whop-whop
of chopper blades from down the valley, but it never came. They’d left in such a hurry that Krishna might not have filed a flight plan, and if Franz didn’t remember the name of the village, no one would know where to look for them.

Alex shrieked. She’d lifted her pants leg to scratch and found her calves and ankles covered with leeches.

They all had them, but the guerrillas viewed them as a minor occupational hazard and laughed at the American girl’s dramatic revulsion. They picked them off one another and started back up the mountain.

“Nobody seems to be searching for us,” Peter said quietly to Devi. “Any idea what’s going on?”

She snorted. “The RNA puts on a good show, but everybody knows how disorganized they are,” she said. “Their communication system is worthless.”

By what he guessed to be about 10:00, Peter was winded and getting tired, and it occurred to him that they were probably up near fifteen thousand feet—about the same as the summit of Mount Whitney, as high as he’d ever climbed. He was by far the oldest person here, and he felt like it. He knew what the dangers were, of course. The water almost certainly contained a terrifying array of microbes, amoebas, and protozoa, but there was nothing else to drink. He could develop mountain sickness, as could Alex, though Devi was probably safe since she’d grown up nearby. He could, if he was really unlucky, have a heart attack or pop a hole in his lung.

After another couple of miles Peter was stumbling and finally had to sit down. The guerrillas eyed him scornfully. His shirt was soaked and he was panting, but nobody else had even broken a sweat. He told Devi to explain to them that if they wanted to help their leader, they might want to be sure he arrived alive, which meant going slower.

They held a brief conference and decided that most of them would continue on. Ramesh was willing to bring them himself, Devi whispered to Peter, but another guard insisted on staying as well. There seemed to be some sort of rivalry between the two men, and although Peter couldn’t gauge exactly what it was about, he hoped it didn’t have anything to do with Devi or Alex. In any
case, the second guard brought up the rear, and the small band soon set out to guide Peter and the girls to the camp, which lay six miles ahead and two thousand feet up.