The Goddess of Kunlun

1

"C'mon, give me something to see," Rick Montana muttered under his breath. He peered intently out the windshield, as if he could burn a hole in the cloud cover with his eyes.

"Altitude eighteen-five," reminded Andy "Ace" McNally from the copilot's seat.

That meant they'd dropped five hundred feet in the last few minutes. Back home in California, that would be high flying, but up here ground level was around fifteen thousand feet. Up ahead, hidden from view, there were mountains upwards of twenty-five thousand. The plane's service ceiling was around twenty-two. That gave them a narrow window for maneuvering.

This was how it happened, Montana knew, how your number came up. He'd flown through enough mountainous terrain in his time. You broke through the clouds to come face to face with a mountainside, seconds from impact.

He could come down a little, hope to drop below the clouds. But that high plateau down there was anything but flat. There were ridges and hills and lakes strewn about, a labyrinth of obstacles to surmount before that magnificent mountain that was their ultimate destination.

"Mary, how long now?" he called back.

Mary Matsushita, seated directly behind Ace, quickly ran through the calculations again: the three hours and forty-five minutes since they'd left Lhasa, the heading, airspeed, and distance. There were no aeronautical charts of this area. They best they could do was a very general map of the region that Raleigh had provided from the Royal Geographical Society. They were flying over some of the most remote terrain on the face of the earth. "About fifteen minutes, maybe ten," she told Rick.

"I'm throttling back to one-eighty, buy us a little more time," Montana told his passengers. "And I'm dropping it to seventeen thousand. Everybody keep a watch out the windows. Let me know the second you see anything."

"Nothing to port," said Viktor Petrovich from the seat behind Rick.

"And nothing to starboard," affirmed Raleigh Royce, the only other one aboard. "Nothing out there but bloody pea soup."

Montana was at least thankful that the clouds hadn't closed in earlier. They'd spent two months preparing for this expedition, including setting up the refueling cache four hundred miles out on the plateau. This morning, if he would have had to rely on IFR-instrument flight rules-it would have been dicey indeed. Like Amelia Earhart missing Howland Island. He'd named the plane in honor of Amelia; it was a Lockheed Electra Model 12, the little sister to Earhart's Model 10. He made the adjustments and stared out into the cold white nothingness. A bit of irony came to him: that mountain they were going to climb, Kunlun, in the local language translated to "mountain of blinding darkness." But to approach it meant battling a blinding whiteness.

Rick felt the slight shudder in the wingtips. "Wind's picking up," he said. "Maybe it'll blow these clouds out for us." Indeed, the cover did seem to be lightening. Just for an instant, he thought he saw a hazy speck of blue.

As they edged to seventeen thousand feet, wispy tendrils began to alternate with clear sky. Then, one more nebulous mass, one more moment of flying blind, and they broke free . . . to come face to face with another airplane, passing from left to right, on a descending angle, dead ahead, seconds from impact. A swastika was clearly visible on the tail.

"Look out!" yelled Mary.

"Whoa, Nellie!" Rick took immediate evasive action, wheel and rudder hard left and throttled up. Amelia banked steeply, threatening to spill its occupants from their seats. "Hold on!" he called out.

"Crazy Germans," he said, as he evened the plane back out. "They got the whole Tibetan Plateau to land in, and they have to come down right on top of us?"