“Well, here’s something you might not have thought of,” Nellie challenged. “Getting to Mount Everest is one thing. Getting to the top is another. You can’t just walk up and start climbing. Even if the mountain doesn’t stop you, the altitude will. People spend weeks acclimatizing. You go up too soon and it’ll kill you!”
Amy smiled uncertainly. “I think I might have an idea about that.”
In the search for the 39 Clues, Dan Cahill had been manhandled, half drowned, blown up, buried alive, and poisoned. But this was the most perilous of all.
He was being bored to death.
A thousand-mile journey on the slowest train in Asia, creeping across the continent one rattle at a time.
It had started out pretty well at the station in Xian. While the passengers were loading up the front coaches, Dan had managed to slip into a boxcar and hide behind sacks of rice. There he cowered, barely daring to breathe as a crew carried on more cargo.
Don’t get caught. If they threw him off the train, there wasn’t another one until tomorrow. He had no time to waste. This trip took long enough as it was.
Soon, though, the train was underway, and reality set in. Thirty hours stuck in this car, in the company of rice, a sleeping dog in a carrier, and — what was that over there? Oh, man, a coffin! His traveling companion was a dead guy.
With the passage of time, the casket became less creepy and more intriguing. By the fourth hour, Dan had convinced himself that he owed it to the dear departed to pay his respects by looking inside.
Empty. He was first relieved, then disappointed, then bored again. He checked his watch. Twenty-five and a half hours remained in the journey.
The worst part — even worse than the crushing boredom — was the fact that, while he was going out of his mind on the Turtle Express, the Holts were climbing Mount Everest in search of the Clue.
As the trip progressed, the train made a gradual ascent onto the Tibetan plateau. Dan could not actually feel himself going up, but he did sense it in other ways — a splitting headache, fatigue, and a roaring thirst. The railway’s website had warned about this. Lhasa, Tibet, the end of the line, was above eleven thousand feet. That took some getting used to for a Boston native who had lived most of his life at sea level.
He was also starving — to the point where he reached into the cage and stole a biscuit from the sleeping dog. It was disgusting — a meat-flavored cookie, with tons of salt, which parched him even further.
The slow ride became even slower, and the train squealed to a halt in yet another station. A second later, he heard voices and someone fumbling with the lock on the sliding door.
It left him with no time and no options. In a panic, he crawled into the coffin, pulling the lid shut after him. He was just in time. The boxcar door screeched wide, and footsteps and conversation filled the car. He lay there in abject misery, praying that he wouldn’t have an asthma attack.
It was really no more than a few minutes, but it felt a lot longer. Finally, the heavy boxcar door slid shut and the train started off again. He pushed against the lid.
It didn’t budge.
They locked me in here!
CHAPTER 21
Blind panic surged through him. He scrambled to his knees and began to push against the top with the strength of his entire body.
All at once, there was a clunk, and the resistance was gone. Dan exploded out of the casket as if he’d been fired from a missile silo. He landed in a heap on top of the rice bag that had been leaning on the coffin lid.
He tried to laugh it off. It wasn’t funny.
He took stock of his surroundings. The dog was gone. No more meat cookies. In the pet carrier’s place stood three tall stainless steel canisters. Something was sloshing inside of them. If it wasn’t sulfuric acid, he was going to drink it.
He pried off the seal. Milk. Probably goat’s, maybe even yak’s. Definitely unpasteurized. Gross.
Nothing had ever tasted better.
At an altitude of 26,000 feet, the South Col of Everest was already higher than all but a handful of the world’s mountains. This barren, rocky, storm-swept platform in the sky was formed in the place where Everest met its neighboring peak, Lhotse, creating the loftiest, coldest, least hospitable valley on the face of the earth.
It was a typical night on the Col — eighty below zero, with sustained winds that would have counted as a category two hurricane anyplace else.
“Isn’t it beautiful, Ham?” shouted Eisenhower Holt over the howling of the gale. “A wind like this would toss an Ekat or a Lucian clean off the mountain! Finally the clue hunt comes around to something we Holts are good at!”
It was almost time for them to begin their push for the summit. On Everest, a team headed for the top in the middle of the night in order to arrive around midday with plenty of time to get back down again in daylight.
The Holts were looking forward to this with the joy of true athletes anticipating a monumental physical challenge. For most of the contest, they’d been out-maneuvered and outsmarted by their competition. Yet the Tomas had long known that George Mallory had been in cahoots with Emperor Puyi when the legendary mountaineer disappeared on Everest in 1924. What none of those smarty-pants branches had ever figured out was that Reginald Fleming Johnston, Puyi’s tutor, had not been just a Janus scientist but also a cunning Tomas spy. Too cunning — Johnston had never revealed to anybody, not even his Tomas handlers, what Mallory had been carrying to the summit. It had taken some Holt-style persuasion, but Johnston’s grandson had finally spilled the beans about what was up there. This prize would be more than enough to catapult the Holts into first place in the Clue hunt.
“I’m pumped!” Hamilton barked, and father and son bonked climbing helmets. “Reagan!” he bellowed at their tent. He switched on his flashlight and shone it in through the flap.
His sister Reagan, nearly as big and brawny as he was, crawled out onto the Col, zipping her wind suit. “Let’s do this thing!” she cheered, and choked up momentarily. “I only wish poor Madison could be with us tonight.”
“No, you don’t!” Eisenhower boomed. “You’re tickled pink that your sister got altitude sickness so you can hold it over her head forever!”
“She’s not dead,” Reagan defended herself. “A couple of days in a hyperbaric bag, and she’ll be good as new.”
“Save your breath,” Eisenhower advised. “You’re going to need it. They call it the Death Zone up here. Above twenty-five thousand feet, you’re slowly dying — one cell at a time!”
It brought a cheer from his son and daughter. The Holts were all about living on the edge. And you couldn’t get much more edgy than the Col, where, if you missed a step, the next one was more than a mile straight down.
“Oxygen!”
The three of them put masks over their noses and mouths and started toward Everest’s looming summit pyramid, their crampons scraping on the barren rocks.
Greatness awaited above. The windchill was unimaginable; the altitude made every step a gasping, painful effort. But Eisenhower Holt might as well have been dancing through a garden of hyacinths. Gone was the humiliation of washing out at West Point. Gone was the myth that the Holts lacked the smarts to keep up with their illustrious family. Tonight, they were reaching for the sky. And nobody, Cahill or otherwise, stood between them and the top of the world.
They had not yet even reached the slope of the summit pyramid when another team passed them by, moving quickly across the Col. Four of the members were Sherpas — the stalwart Himalayan climbing guides who lived in the Khumbu Valley, the region around Everest on the Nepal side. They were accompanying a figure wearing what looked like a space suit.
Accompanying? They were practically carrying him! As the incline began, they were actually hoisting him under the arms as he moved forward. His high-tech costume pumped in oxygen and maintained the atmospheric pressure of sea level. Without it, anyone not acclimatized to Everest’s thin air would have passed out in minutes
.
The space-suited climber turned and waved at the thunderstruck Holts. His face was clearly visible through the Plexiglas of his helmet.
Ian Kabra.
The Lhasa airport was only a fraction the size of Beijing’s, and certainly not state of the art. It was even a lot smaller than Chengdu’s, where Amy and Nellie had spent a miserable night trying to sleep on rows of benches, waiting for their travel papers for Tibet.
There was no jet bridge. The passengers exited the aircraft down portable stairs directly onto the tarmac. By the time they reached the terminal building, Nellie was out of breath, puffing from the effort of lugging her backpack and Saladin’s pet carrier.
“Man, when this contest is over, I’ve got to get back to the gym. I’m way out of shape!”
“That’s not it,” Amy told her, a little breathless herself. “It’s the altitude. Lhasa’s over eleven thousand feet. And Tingri is even higher than that. It’s not deadly like Everest, but we’re going to feel the effects.”
Nellie looked worried. “Couldn’t we still get — you know — really sick?”
“Hopefully, we won’t be here long enough for that to happen. The guidebook said it helps to drink a lot of water. Dehydration is a big part of it.”
“I’ll do my best,” Nellie said sourly. “But good luck explaining all this to Saladin. He’s such a crab anyway. This’ll probably put him over the edge.”
Their only stop was at a pay phone — no new message from Dan — before they trudged to the taxi line to ask about a very nonaverage ride.
Amy had been afraid it would be hard to find transportation to the village of Tingri, about three hours away. But the airport was crawling with taxis in search of business. When Nellie offered three hundred US dollars for the trip, it ignited a price war among the drivers, which brought the fare down to two hundred twenty-five.
Soon they were off with the lowest bidder, a perpetually smiling young man who spoke a little English. According to the ID certificate on the dashboard, his name was thirty-one letters long, but he introduced himself as Chip.
“Tingri. No problem. Near Chomolungma. You call Everest. Go climbing?”
“I hope not!” Nellie mumbled fervently. She turned to Amy. “You have a plan, right? We’re not going all the way to Everest so we can stare at the top where the clue is, but not get there?”
“It’s kind of a long shot,” Amy admitted.
“That’s not what I wanted to hear,” the au pair put in.
“One of the reasons Everest is so dangerous is because most of the mountain is too high to be reached by rescue helicopter. The air is so thin that the rotor blades can’t get any lift. But in 2005, the French developed an ultralight chopper, the A-Star, that landed for a few minutes on the summit. That helicopter is parked at an airfield outside Tingri.”
Nellie regarded her with a mixture of admiration and wonder. “You’re crazy — even for a Cahill! Who’s going to fly the thing?”
“You have a pilot’s license. I was thinking that, between the two of us, we could figure it out.”
“I fly airplanes!” Nellie exploded. “Not some experimental Star Wars helicopter up Mount Everest!”
“I know it sounds nuts,” Amy pleaded, “but I think this was meant to happen. Back in 2005, when the French landed that chopper on the summit, Grace made a huge deal out of it. She took Dan and me for the weekend, and we spent the whole time talking about the A-Star, reading about the A-Star, and watching the clips on YouTube. She knew we might have to do this one day. And when it came to the thirty-nine clues, Grace was never wrong.”
“Except once,” Nellie amended in a sober tone. “She thought she’d live longer so you poor kids wouldn’t have to go through this alone.”
CHAPTER 22
The yak cart creaked down the dirt lane on the outskirts of the village of Tingri in Xigaze Prefecture. It contained twigs for kindling, dried yak manure for heating fuel, and Dan Cahill.
He got out of the cart and handed over his last few coins to the driver. He was puffing on the thin air; his legs were so stiff they would barely support him; and he was flat broke in the middle of nowhere.
But he had made it! After a thirty-hour train ride, four hours on a smelly bus, and twenty minutes in the company of sticks and yak poop, he was actually at the helipad his grandmother had told him about.
The hangar was just an old barn. Only the French flag that doubled as a windsock hinted that this remote field was the home of the Ecureuil/A-Star 350, the helicopter that had landed on top of the world.
Everest. The peak towered over Dan as he approached the barn. Here it was only one feature in a titanic skyline, but it was the mightiest, the lord and master. The sight of it took his breath away — and breath was hard to come by at this altitude.
He peered in the window of the barn, knowing a brief moment of panic. What if it wasn’t there? He’d come an awfully long way to find out that the helicopter was — God forbid — in the shop or something.
But no — there it was, looking just like the pictures Grace had shown him, futuristic and spare. The bubble was up, and someone was peering in at the instrument panel.
Why is it so dark in there? Why doesn’t he just turn on a light?
Dan was about to knock on the door when he spotted the smashed padlock dangling from the hasp.
That guy’s stealing my ultralight!
Without a moment’s hesitation, Dan burst into the barn and brought down the intruder with a flying tackle. The two fell to the concrete floor in a struggling heap. A flailing elbow hit Dan in the mouth, and he tasted blood. Enraged, he reached around and pressed the heel of his hand into his opponent’s face. He was encouraged to note that the intruder was not much bigger than he was, and about equal in strength.
Suddenly, pain shot through his hand, and he howled in shock.
He bit me!
They wrestled, rolling one over the other, until Dan found his face pressed against a metal grill, eyes staring in at—
“Saladin?”
His opponent’s grip disintegrated. “Dan?”
“Amy?”
“Oh, God!” Nellie dropped the crowbar she was just about to bring down on Dan’s head.
The two Cahills scrambled up, each one goggling as if the sight of the other was a mirage. Then they were together in an ecstatic bear hug.
“Cut it out!” Dan complained. “You’re strangling me!” But he didn’t loosen his grip on his sister.
Amy had been so worried for so long that the sudden evaporation of tension left her boneless. If she let go, she probably would have collapsed in a heap. “I thought I’d lost you! Just like we lost Mom and Dad!”
“Why didn’t you look for me?” Dan babbled.
“We did! We never stopped!”
“Oh, yeah? Then what are you doing here?”
“Well, it must have been exactly the right place!” Amy snapped. “You showed up, didn’t you?”
“I caught the Holts on TV!” Dan pulled away. “Stop yelling at me! I missed you so much! I thought I’d never see you again!” He scanned the hangar. “And if you lost my computer—”
Amy struggled to regain her composure. “You look taller,” she said finally, devouring him with her eyes.
“Don’t be an idiot. It was only five days.”
“I know …” There was a tremor in her voice. “But it was a very long five days. Dan, I’m so sorry—” And then his words percolated down to her. “Wait a minute! The Holts were on TV?”
“They’re climbing Mount Everest!” Dan exclaimed. “Like, right now! There has to be a clue up there!”
Amy turned back to the A-Star. “We can beat them to the top. Right, Nellie?”
“Wrong,” the au pair said sadly. “I’m sorry, you guys, but there’s no way I can fly this thing. It looks more like a cat’s cradle than an aircraft. I’d get us all killed for sure.”
Amy and Dan regarded each other with anguish. Had fate brought them to
the same spot in this tiny village in Everest’s shadow only to stymie them now?
At that moment, the lights flashed on and a sharp voice rang out: “Que faites-vous ici? What are you doing here?”
Startled, the three turned to face the newcomer, a short, gaunt, middle-aged man in pilot’s coveralls.
Shy Amy was tongue-tied. Not so Dan. “We need to go up Mount Everest,” he blurted.
The man laughed out loud. “I do not run a tourist service. If it is pretty pictures you want, they sell postcards in the village.”
Amy found her voice. “No, he means we have to go to the summit. Right away.”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Ah, so you know what the A-Star is capable of. Alors, this is impossible. Leave the property at once.”
“We’ll pay,” said Nellie.
The man scowled. “The A-Star is a piece of technology unique in all the world. You do not rent it like a Jet Ski for one hour at the beach.”
The Cahills’ despair was palpable. Up until now, they’d succeeded by thinking on their feet, improvising, and overcoming obstacles. This was different. There was only one quick way up Mount Everest — one that avoided the months of training, provisioning, acclimatizing, and climbing. It was this helicopter, period. The laws of science and nature provided no plan B. If the pilot refused to take them, what then?
Nellie indicated the satellite phone on the corner of the workbench. “Let me call my boss. Maybe we can work something out.”
Amy and Dan exchanged bewildered glances. As far as they knew, Nellie’s boss was their Aunt Beatrice, Grace’s sister, technically their guardian. Aunt Beatrice was so cheap that she wouldn’t spring for cable TV, much less a helicopter to the earth’s pinnacle.
The pilot was disgusted. “You Americans think everything can be bought with your money!”
“One call,” Nellie persisted.
There was a confidence and authority in her voice that Amy and Dan hadn’t heard before. Their au pair had always been helpful — occasionally a lifesaver. But she’d always taken a backseat in the Clue hunt. Something was different now.