Jeff Long - The Descent_玖贝云文库

'Jeff Long has achieved something that has so far evaded both high-caste genre

writers and literary colonisers: he has returned science fiction to its original vigour

and – while maintaining all the headlong readability we associate with the form –

made it a worthwhile moral tool again. The Descent is SF for the 2000s, from a writer

who simply won't be told what he can't do. There should be more like it' M. John

Harrison

'A tour de force. A subterranean realm so expertly realised and credible, we feel it has

existed all along. A dark, pervading, benighted beauty. If Kim Stanley Robinson's

Martian colonists had headed down instead of up, this is the world they would have

found' James Lovegrove

'Without question, the best thing I've read so far this year. Long proves himself to be

a wonderful storyteller. A stunning tour de force' Peter Crowther

'This flat-out, gears grinding, bumper-car ride into the pits of hell is one major

takedown of a read. Long writes with unearthly force and vision. What emerges is a

War of the Worlds against a world that can't lose. A page-burner of a book' Lorenzo

Carcaterra

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Fiction

Angel of Light

The Ascent

Empire of Bones

Non-fiction

Outlaw: The Story of Claude Dallas

Duel of Eagles: The Mexican and US Fight for the Alamo

THE DESCENT

Jeff Long

The right of Jeff Long to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in

accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This edition published in Great Britain in 2000 by Millennium

An imprint of Victor Gollancz

Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin's Lane,

London WC2H 9EA

To receive information on the Millennium list, e-mail us at: smy@orionbooks.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 85798 929 5

Printed in Great Britain by

Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For my Helenas,

A Chain Unbroken

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a fairy tale that writers are recluses quietly cohabiting with their muse. This

writer, anyway, benefited from a world of other people's ideas and support. Ironically,

ascent informed important moments in The Descent's genesis. The book began as an

idea that I presented to a climber, my friend and manager, Bill Gross, who spent the

next fifteen months helping me refine the story. His genius and encouragement fueled

every page. Early on he shared the project with two other creative spirits in the film

world, Bruce Berman and Kevin McMahon at Village Roadshow Pictures. Their

support made possible my 're-entry' into New York publishing. There a mountaineer

and writer named Jon Waterman introduced me to the talents of another climber,

literary agent Susan Golomb. She labored to make the story presentable, cohesive,

and true to itself. With her sharp eye and memory of terrain, she would make a great

sniper. I thank my editors: Karen Rinaldi for her literary candor and electricity,

Richard Marek for his dedicated grasp and professionalism, and Panagiotis

Gianopoulos, a rising luminary in the publishing world. I want to add special thanks to

my nameless, faceless copy editor. This is my seventh book, and I only learned now

that, for professional reasons, copy editors are never revealed to writers. Like monks,

they toil in anonymity. I specifically requested the best copy editor in the country,

and whoever he or she is, my wish was granted. My deep appreciation to Jim Walsh,

another of the hidden minds behind the book.

I am not a spelunker, nor an epic poet. In other words, I needed guides to penetrate

my imaginary hell. It was my father, the geologist, who set me roaming in childhood

mazes, from old mines to honeycombed sandstone structures, from Pennsylvania to

Mesa Verde and Arches national monuments. Besides the obvious and well-used

inspirations for my poetic license, I'm obliged to several contemporary works. Alice K.

Turner's The History of Hell (Harcourt Brace) was stunning in its scope, scholarship,

and wicked humor. Dante had his Virgil; I had my Turner. Another instructor of the

underworld was the indispensable Atlas of the Great Caves of the World, by Paul

Courbon. 'Lechuguilla Restoration: Techniques Learned in the Southwest Focus,' by

Val Hildreth-Werker and Jim C. Werker, gave me a 'deeper' appreciation of cave

environments. Donald Dale Jackson's Underground Worlds (Time-Life Books) never

quit amazing me with the beauty of subterranean places. Finally, it was my friend

Steve Harrigan's remarkable novel about cave diving, Jacob's Well (Simon and

Schuster), that truly anchored my nightmares about dark, deep, tubular realms.

The Descent was informed by many other people's work and ideas, too many to list

without a bibliography. However, Turin Shroud, by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince

(HarperCollins), provided the basis for my own Shroud chapter. 'Egil's Bones,' by

Jesse L. Byock (Scientific American, January 1995), provided me a disease to go with

my masks. Unveiled: Nuns Talking, by Mary Loudon (Templegate Publishers), gave

me a peek behind the veil. Stephen S. Hall's Mapping the Next Millennium (Vintage)

opened my mind to the world of cartography. Peter Sloss, of the Marine Geology and

Geophysics Computer Graphics at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

Administration, generously displayed his state-of-the-art mapmaking. Philip

Lieberman's The Biology and Evolution of Language (Harvard) helped me backward

into the origins of speech, as did Dr Rende, a speech language pathologist at the

University of Colorado. Michael D. Coe's Breaking the Maya Code (Thames and

Hudson), David Roberts's 'The Decipherment of Ancient Maya' (Atlantic Monthly,

September 1991), Colin Renfrew's 'The Origins of Indo-European Languages' (

Scientific American, October 1989), and especially Robert Wright's 'The Quest for the

Mother Tongue' (Atlantic Monthly, April 1991) gave me a window on linguistic

discovery. 'Unusual Unity' by Stephen Jay Gould (Natural History, April 1997) and

'The African Emergence and Early Asian Dispersals of the Genus Homo' by Roy Larick

and Russell L. Ciochon (American Scientist, November-December 1996) got my

wheels seriously spinning and led me to further readings. Cliff Watts, yet another

climber and friend, guided me to an internet article on prions, by Stanley B. Prusiner,

and gave medical advice about everything from altitude to vision. Another climber,

Jim Gleason, tried his damnedest to keep my junk science to a minimum, all in vain

I'm afraid he'll feel. I only hope that my plundering and mangling of fact may pave

some amused diversion.

Early on, Graham Henderson, a fellow Tibet traveler, gave my journey direction

with his observations about The Inferno. Throughout, Steve Long helped map the

journey, both on paper and in countless conversations. Pam Novotny loaned me her

Zen-like patience and calm, in addition to editorial assistance. Angela Thieman,

Melissa Ward, and Margo Timmins provided constant inspiration. I am grateful to

Elizabeth Crook, Craig Blockwick, Arthur Lindquist-Kliessler, and Cindy Butler for

their crucial reminders of a light at the end of the tunnel.

Finally, thank you, Barbara and Helena, for putting up with the chaos that finally

came to order. Love may not conquer all, but happily it conquers us.

BOOK ONE

DISCOVERY

It is easy to go down into Hell...; but to climb back again, to retrace one's

steps to the upper air – there's the rub....

– VIRGIL, Aeneid

1

IKE

The Himalayas,

Tibet Autonomous Region

1988

In the beginning was the word.

Or words.

Whatever these were.

They kept their lights turned off. The exhausted trekkers huddled in the dark cave

and faced the peculiar writing. Scrawled with a twig, possibly, dipped in liquid radium

or some other radioactive paint, the fluorescent pictographs floated in the black

recesses. Ike let them savor the distraction. None of them seemed quite ready to

focus on the storm beating against the mountainside outside.

With night descending and the trail erased by snow and wind and their yak herders

in mutinous flight with most of the gear and food, Ike was relieved to have shelter of

any kind. He was still pretending for them that this was part of their trip. In fact they

were off the map. He'd never heard of this hole-in-the-wall hideout. Nor seen

glow-in-the-dark caveman graffiti.

'Runes,' gushed a knowing female voice. 'Sacred runes left by a wandering monk.'

The alien calligraphy glowed with soft violet light in the cave's cold bowels. The

luminous hieroglyphics reminded Ike of his old dorm wall with its black-light posters.

All he needed was a lash of Hendrix plundering Dylan's anthem, say, and a whiff of

plump Hawaiian red sinsemilla. Anything to vanquish the howl of awful wind. Outside

in the cold distance, a wildcat did growl...

'Those are no runes,' said a man. 'It's Bonpo.' A Brooklyn beat, the accent meant

Owen. Ike had nine clients here, only two of them male. They were easy to keep

straight.

'Bonpo!' one of the women barked at Owen. The coven seemed to take collective

delight in savaging Owen and Bernard, the other man. Ike had been spared so far.

They treated him as a harmless Himalayan hillbilly. Fine with him.

'But the Bonpo were pre-Buddhist,' the woman expounded.

The women were mostly Buddhist students from a New Age university. These

things mattered very much to them.

Their goal was – or had been – Mount Kailash, the pyramidal giant just east of the

Indian border. 'A Canterbury Tale for the World Pilgrim' was how he'd advertised the

trip. A kor – a Tibetan walkabout – to and around the holiest mountain in the world.

Eight thousand per head, incense included. The problem was, somewhere along the

trail he'd managed to misplace the mountain. It galled him. They were lost. Beginning

at dawn today, the sky had changed from blue to milky gray. The herders had quietly

bolted with the yaks. He had yet to announce that their tents and food were history.

The first sloppy snowflakes had started kissing their Gore-Tex hoods just an hour

ago, and Ike had taken this cave for shelter. It was a good call. He was the only one

who knew it, but they were now about to get sodomized by an old-fashioned

Himalayan tempest.

Ike felt his jacket being tugged to one side, and knew it would be Kora, wanting a

private word. 'How bad is it?' she whispered. Depending on the hour and day, Kora

was his lover, base-camp shotgun, or business associate. Of late, it was a challenge

estimating which came first for her, the business of adventure or the adventure of

business. Either way, their little trekking company was no longer charming to her.

Ike saw no reason to front-load it with negatives. 'We've got a great cave,' he said.

'Gee.'

'We're still in the black, head-count-wise.'

'The itinerary's in ruins. We were behind as it was.'

'We're fine. We'll take it out of the Siddhartha's Birthplace segment.' He kept the

worry out of his voice, but for once his sixth sense, or whatever it was, had come up

short, and that bothered him. 'Besides, getting a little lost will give them bragging

rights.'

'They don't want bragging rights. They want schedule. You don't know these people.

They're not your friends. We'll get sued if they don't make their Thai Air flight on the

nineteenth.'

'These are the mountains,' said Ike. 'They'll understand.' People forgot. Up here, it

was a mistake to take even your next breath for granted.

'No, Ike. They won't understand. They have real jobs. Real obligations. Families.'

That was the rub. Again. Kora wanted more from life. She wanted more from her

pathless Pathfinder.

'I'm doing the best I can,' Ike said.

Outside, the storm went on horsewhipping the cave mouth. Barely May, it wasn't

supposed to be this way. There should have been plenty of time to get his bunch to,

around, and back from Kailash. The bane of mountaineers, the monsoon normally

didn't spill across the mountains this far north. But as a former Everester himself, Ike

should have known better than to believe in rain shadows or in schedules. Or in luck.

They were in for it this time. The snow would seal their pass shut until late August.

That meant he was going to have to buy space on a Chinese truck and shuttle them

home via Lhasa – and that came out of his land costs. He tried calculating in his head,

but their quarrel overcame him.

'You do know what I mean by Bonpo,' a woman said. Nineteen days into the trip,

and Ike still couldn't link their spirit nicknames with the names in their passports.

One woman, was it Ethel or Winifred, now preferred Green Tara, mother deity of

Tibet. A pert Doris Day look-alike swore she was special friends with the Dalai Lama.

For weeks now Ike had been listening to them celebrate the life of cavewomen. Well,

he thought, here's your cave, ladies. Slum away.

They were sure his name – Dwight David Crockett – was an invention like their

own. Nothing could convince them he wasn't one of them, a dabbler in past lives. One

evening around a campfire in northern Nepal, he'd regaled them with tales of Andrew

Jackson, pirates on the Mississippi, and his own legendary death at the Alamo. He'd

meant it as a joke, but only Kora got it.

'You should know perfectly well,' the woman went on, 'there was no written

language in Tibet before the late fifth century.'

'No written language that we know about,' Owen said.

'Next you'll be saying this is Yeti language.'

It had been like this for days. You'd think they'd run out of air. But the higher they

went, the more they argued.

'This is what we get for pandering to civilians,' Kora muttered to Ike. Civilians was

her catch-all: eco-tourists, pantheist charlatans, trust funders, the overeducated. She

was a street girl at heart.

'They're not so bad,' he said. 'They're just looking for a way into Oz, same as us.'

'Civilians.'

Ike sighed. At times like this, he questioned his self-imposed exile. Living apart

from the world was not easy. There was a price to be paid for choosing the

less-traveled road. Little things, bigger ones. He was no longer that rosy-cheeked lad

who had come with the Peace Corps. He still had the cheekbones and cowled brow and

careless mane. But a dermatologist on one of his treks had advised him to stay out of

the high-altitude sun before his face turned to boot leather. Ike had never considered

himself God's gift to women, but he saw no reason to trash what looks he still had.

He'd lost two of his back molars to Nepal's dearth of dentists, and another tooth to a

falling rock on the backside of Everest. And not so long ago, in his Johnnie Walker

Black and Camels days, he'd taken to serious self-abuse, even flirting with the lethal

west face of Makalu. He'd quit the smoke and booze cold when some British nurse told

him his voice sounded like a Rudyard Kipling punchline. Makalu still needed slaying, of

course. Though many mornings he even wondered about that.

Exile went deeper than the cosmetics or even prime health, of course. Self-doubt

came with the territory, a wondering about what might have been, had he stayed the

course back in Jackson. Rig work. Stone masonry. Maybe mountain guiding in the

Tetons, or outfitting for hunters. No telling. He'd spent the last eight years in Nepal

and Tibet watching himself slowly devolve from the Golden Boy of the Himalayas into

one more forgotten surrogate of the American empire. He'd grown old inside. Even

now there were days when Ike felt eighty. Next week was his thirty-first birthday.

'Would you look at this?' rose a cry. 'What kind of mandala is that? The lines are all

twisty.'

Ike looked at the circle. It was hanging on the wall like a luminous moon. Mandalas

were meditation aids, blueprints for divinity's palaces. Normally they consisted of

circles within circles containing squared lines. By visualizing it just so, a 3-D

architecture was supposed to appear above the mandala's flat surface. This one,

though, looked like scrambled snakes.

Ike turned on his light. End of mystery, he congratulated himself.

Even he was stunned by the sight.

'My God,' said Kora.

Where, a moment before, the fluorescent words had hung in magical suspense, a

nude corpse stood rigidly propped upon a stone shelf along the back wall. The words

weren't written on stone. They were written on him. The mandala was separate,

painted on the wall to his right side.

A set of rocks formed a crude stairway up to his stage, and various passersby had

attached katas – long white prayer scarves – to cracks in the stone ceiling. The katas

sucked back and forth in the draft like gently disturbed ghosts.

The man's grimace was slightly bucktoothed from mummification, and his eyes were

calcified to chalky blue marbles. Otherwise the extreme cold and high altitude had left

him perfectly preserved. Under the harsh beam of Ike's headlamp, the lettering was

faint and red upon his emaciated limbs and belly and chest.

That he was a traveler was self-evident. In these regions, everyone was a pilgrim or

a nomad or a salt trader or a refugee. But, judging from his scars and unhealed

wounds and a metal collar around his neck and a warped, badly mended broken left

arm, this particular Marco Polo had endured a journey beyond imagination. If flesh is

memory, his body cried out a whole history of abuse and enslavement.

They stood beneath the shelf and goggled at the suffering. Three of the women –

and Owen – began weeping. Ike alone approached. Probing here and there with his

light beam, he reached out to touch one shin with his ice ax: hard as fossil wood.

Of all the obvious insults, the one that stood out most was his partial castration. One

of the man's testicles had been yanked away, not cut, not even bitten – the edges of

the tear were too ragged – and the wound had been cauterized with fire. The burn

scars radiated out from his groin in a hairless keloid starburst. Ike couldn't get over

the raw scorn of it. Man's tenderest part, mutilated, then doctored with a torch.

'Look,' someone whimpered. 'What did they do to his nose?'

Midcenter on the battered face was a ring unlike anything he'd ever seen before.

This was no silvery Gen-X body piercing. The ring, three inches across and crusted

with blood, was plugged deep in his septum, almost up into the skull. It hung to his

bottom lip, as black as his beard. It was, thought Ike, utilitarian, large enough to

control cattle.

Then he got a little closer and his repulsion altered. The ring was brutal. Blood and

smoke and filth had coated it almost black, but Ike could plainly see the dull gleam of

solid gold.

Ike turned to his people and saw nine pairs of frightened eyes beseeching him from

beneath hoods and visors. Everyone had their lights on now. No one was arguing.

'Why?' wept one of the women.

A couple of the Buddhists had reverted to Christianity and were on their knees,

crossing themselves. Owen was rocking from side to side, murmuring Kaddish.

Kora came close. 'You beautiful bastard.' She giggled. Ike started. She was talking to

the corpse.

'What did you say?'

'We're off the hook. They're not going to hit us up for refunds after all. We don't

have to provide their holy mountain anymore. They've got something better.'

'Let up, Kora. Give them some credit. They're not ghouls.'

'No? Look around, Ike.'

Sure enough, cameras were stealing into view in ones and twos. There was a flash,

then another. Their shock gave way to tabloid voyeurism.

In no time the entire cast was blazing away with eight-hundred-dollar

point-and-shoots. Motor drives made an insect hum. The lifeless flesh flared in their

artificial lightning. Ike moved out of frame, and welcomed the corpse like a savior. It

was unbelievable. Famished, cold, and lost, they couldn't have been happier.

One of the women had climbed the stepping-stones and was kneeling to one side of

the nude, her head tilted sideways.

She looked down at them. 'But he's one of us,' she said.

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'Us. You and me. A white man.'

Someone else framed it in less vulgar terms. 'A Caucasian male?'

'That's crazy,' someone objected. 'Here? In the middle of nowhere?'

Ike knew she was right. The white flesh, the hair on its forearms and chest, the blue

eyes, the cheekbones so obviously non-Mongoloid. But the woman wasn't pointing to

his hairy arms or blue eyes or slender cheekbones. She was pointing at the

hieroglyphics painted on his thigh. Ike aimed his light at the other thigh. And froze.

The text was in English. Modern English. Only upside down.

It came to him. The body hadn't been written upon after death. The man had

written upon himself in life. He'd used his own body as a blank page. Upside down.

He'd inscribed his journal notes on the only parchment guaranteed to travel with him.

Now Ike saw how the lettering wasn't just painted on, but crudely tattooed.

Wherever he could reach, the man had jotted bits of testimony. Abrasions and filth

obscured some of the writing, particularly below the knees and around his ankles. The

rest of it could easily have been dismissed as random and lunatic. Numbers mixed

with words and phrases, especially on the outer edges of each thigh, where he'd

apparently decided there was extra room for new entries. The clearest passage lay

across his lower stomach.

'"All the world will be in love with night,"' Ike read aloud,'"and pay no worship to the

garish sun."'

'Gibberish,' snapped Owen, badly spooked.

'Bible talk,' Ike sympathized.

'No, it's not,' piped up Kora. 'That's not from the Bible. It's Shakespeare. Romeo and

Juliet.'

Ike felt the group's repugnance. Indeed, why would this tortured creature choose

for his obituary the most famous love story ever written? A story about opposing

clans. A tale of love transcending violence. The poor stiff had been out of his gourd on

thin air and solitude. It was no coincidence that in the highest monasteries on earth,

men endlessly obsessed about delusion. Hallucinations were a given up here. Even the

Dalai Lama joked about it.

'And so,' Ike said, 'he's white. He knew his Shakespeare. That makes him no older

than two or three hundred years.'

It was becoming a parlor game. Their fear was shifting to morbid delight. Forensics

as recreation.

'Who is this guy?' one woman asked.

'A slave?'

'An escaped prisoner?'

Ike said nothing. He went nose-to-nose with the gaunt face, hunting for clues. Tell

your journey, he thought. Speak your escape. Who shackled you with gold? Nothing.

The marble eyes ignored their curiosity. The grimace enjoyed its voiceless riddles.

Owen had joined them on the shelf, reading from the opposite shoulder. 'RAF.'

Sure enough, the left deltoid bore a tattoo with the letters RAF beneath an eagle. It

was right side up and of commercial quality. Ike grasped the cold arm.

'Royal Air Force,' he translated.

The puzzle assembled. It even half-explained the Shakespeare, if not the chosen

lines.

'He was a pilot?' asked the Paris bob. She seemed charmed.

'Pilot. Navigator. Bombardier.' Ike shrugged. 'Who knows?'

Like a cryptographer, he bent to inspect the words and numbers twining the flesh.

Line after line, he traced each clue to its dead end. Here and there he punctuated

complete thoughts with a jab of his fingertip. The trekkers backed away, letting him

work through the cyphers. He seemed to know what he was doing.

Ike circled back and tried a string in reverse. It made sense this time. Yet it made

no sense. He got out his topographical map of the Himalayan chain and found the

longitude and latitude, but snorted at their nexus. No way, he thought, and lifted his

gaze across the wreckage of a human body. He looked back at the map. Could it be?

'Have some.' The smell of French-pressed gourmet coffee made him blink. A plastic

mug slid into view. Ike glanced up. Kora's blue eyes were forgiving. That warmed him

more than the coffee. He took the cup with murmured thanks and realized he had a

terrific headache. Hours had passed. Shadows lay pooled in the deeper cave like wet

sewage.

Ike saw a small group squatting Neanderthal-style around a small Bluet gas stove,

melting snow and brewing joe. The clearest proof of their miracle was that Owen had

broken down and was actually sharing his private stock of coffee. There was one

hand-grinding the beans in a plastic machine, another squeezing the filter press, yet

another grating a bit of cinnamon on top of each cupful. They were actually

cooperating. For the first time in a month, Ike almost liked them.

'You okay?' Kora asked.

'Me?' It sounded strange, someone asking after his well-being. Especially her.

As if he needed any more to ponder, Ike suspected Kora was going to leave him.

Before setting off from Kathmandu, she'd announced this was her final trek for the

company. And since Himalayan High Journeys was nothing more than her and him, it

implied a larger dissatisfaction. He would have minded less if her reason was another

man, another country, better profits, or higher risks. But her reason was him. Ike had

broken her heart because he was Ike, full of dreams and childlike naïveté. A drifter on

life's stream. What had attracted her to him in the first place now disturbed her, his

lone wolf/high mountains way. She thought he knew nothing about the way people

really worked, like this notion of a lawsuit, and maybe there was some truth to that.

He'd been hoping the trek would somehow bridge their gap, that it would draw her

back to the magic that drew him. Over the past two years she'd grown weary, though.

Storms and bankruptcy no longer spelled magic for her.

'I've been studying this mandala,' she said, indicating the painted circle filled with

squirming lines. In the darkness, its colors had been brilliant and alive. In their light,

the drawing was bland. 'I've seen hundreds of mandalas, but I can't make heads or

tails out of this one. It looks like chaos, all those lines and squiggles. It does seem to

have a center, though.' She glanced up at the mummy, then at Ike's notes. 'How about

you? Getting anywhere?'

He'd drawn the oddest sketch, pinning words and text in cartoon balloons to

different positions on the body and linking them with a mess of arrows and lines.

Ike sipped at the coffee. Where to begin? The flesh declared a maze, both in the way

it told the story and in the story it told. The man had written his evidence as it

occurred to him, apparently, adding and revising and contradicting himself, wandering

with his truths. He was like a shipwrecked diarist who had suddenly found a pen and

couldn't quit filling in old details.

'First of all,' he began, 'his name was Isaac.'

'Isaac?' asked Darlene from the assembly line of coffee makers. They had stopped

what they were doing to listen to him.

Ike ran his finger from nipple to nipple. The declaration was clear. Partially clear. I

am Isaac, it said, followed by In my exile/In my agony of Light.

'See these numbers?' said Ike. 'I figure this must be a serial number. And 10/03/23

could be his birthday, right?'

'Nineteen twenty-three?' someone asked. Their disappointment verged on childlike.

Seventy-five years old evidently didn't qualify as a genuine antique.

'Sorry,' he said, then continued. 'See this other date here?' He brushed aside what

remained of the pubic patch. '4/7/44. The day of his shoot-down, I'm guessing.'

'Shoot-down?'

'Or crash.'

They were bewildered. He started over, this time telling them the story he was

piecing together. 'Look at him. Once upon a time, he was a kid. Twenty-one years old.

World War II was on. He signed up or got drafted. That's the RAF tattoo. They sent

him to India. His job was to fly the Hump.'

'Hump?' someone echoed. It was Bernard. He was furiously tapping the news into

his laptop.

'That's what pilots called it when they flew supplies to bases in Tibet and China,' Ike

said. 'The Himalayan chain. Back then, this whole region was part of an Oriental

Western Front. It was a rough go. Every now and then a plane went down. The crews

rarely survived.'

'A fallen angel,' sighed Owen. He wasn't alone. They were all becoming infatuated.

'I don't see how you've drawn all that from a couple of strands of numbers,' said

Bernard. He aimed his pencil at Ike's latter set of numbers. 'You call that the date of

his shoot-down. Why not the date of his marriage, or his graduation from Oxford, or

the date he lost his virginity? What I mean is, this guy's no kid. He looks forty. If you

ask me, he wandered away from some scientific or mountain-climbing expedition

within the last couple years. He sure as snow didn't die in 1944 at the age of

twenty-one.'

'I agree,' Ike said, and Bernard looked instantly deflated. 'He refers to a period of

captivity. A long stretch. Darkness. Starvation. Hard labor.' The sacred deep.

'A prisoner of war. Of the Japanese?'

'I don't know about that,' Ike said.

'Chinese Communists, maybe?'

Jeff Long - The Descent

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: