Remi scooted over to Sam’s side, and they peered out the window at the aircraft.
“Who is it?” Remi asked.
Hosni called back, “PLA Air Force. A Z-9.”
“Where’s the Tibetan border?”
“About two miles on the other side of them. No worries, they always send up eyes to watch helicopters out of Kathmandu. They are simply flexing their muscles.”
“Anywhere else and that would be called an invasion,” Sam observed.
“Welcome to Nepal.”
After a few minutes of paralleling the Bell, the Chinese helicopter peeled away and headed north toward the border. They soon lost sight of it in the clouds.
Twice in the afternoon they asked Hosni to land near a rock formation that looked promising, but neither panned out. As four o’clock approached, Sam put a red grease pencil X through the last point on the day’s map, and Hosni headed for Kathmandu.
The morning of the second day began with a forty-minute flight to the Budhi Gandaki Valley northwest of Kathmandu. Three of Karna’s coordinates for the day lay within the Budhi Gandaki, which followed the western edge of the Annapurna range. Sam and Remi were treated to three hours of beautiful scenery—thick pine forests, lush meadows exploding with wildflowers, jagged ridgelines, churning rivers, and tumbling waterfalls—but little else, aside from a formation that, from above, looked mushroom-like enough to warrant a landing but turned out to be merely a top-heavy boulder.
At noon they landed near a trekker’s stop in a village called Bagarchap, and Hosni entertained the local children with tours of the Bell while Sam and Remi ate sack lunches.
Soon they were airborne again and heading north through the Bintang Glacier and toward Mount Manaslu.
“Eighty-one hundred meters high,” Hosni called, pointing to the mountain.
Sam translated for Remi: “About twenty-four thousand feet.”
“And five thousand less than Everest,” Hosni added.
“It’s one thing to see these in pictures or from the ground,” Remi said. “But, from up here, I can see why they call this place the rooftop of the world.”
After lingering so Remi could take some pictures, Hosni turned the Bell west and descended into another glacier—the Pung Gyen, Hosni called it—which they followed for eight miles before turning north again.
“Our friends are back,” Hosni said over the headset. “Right side.”
Sam and Remi looked. The Chinese Z-9 was indeed back, again paralleling their course; this time, however, the helicopter had closed the gap to only a few hundred yards.
Sam and Remi could see silhouettes staring back at them through the cabin windows.
The Z-9 shadowed them for a few more miles, then veered off and disappeared into a cloud bank.
“Next search area coming up in three minutes,” Hosni called.
Sam and Remi got situated near the windows.
As had become routine, Hosni lifted the Bell’s nose over a ridgeline, then banked sharply into the target valley, bleeding off altitude as he went. He slowed the Bell to a hover.
Sam was the first to notice the valley’s surreal landscape below. While the upper slopes were thick with pine trees, the lower reaches looked as if they had been carved by a rectangular cookie cutter, leaving behind sheer cliffs plummeting into a lake. Jutting from the opposite slope and encircling one end was an ice-covered plateau. A runnel of churning water sliced through the shelf and cascaded to the waters below.
“Hosni, how deep do you think this is?” Sam asked. “The valley, I mean.”
“From the ridgeline to the lake, perhaps eight hundred feet.”
“The cliffs are half that at least,” said Sam.
Honsi eased the Bell forward, following the slope, as Sam and Remi scanned the terrain through their binoculars. As they drew even with the plateau, and Hosni came about, they saw that the plateau was deceptively deep, narrowing for a few hundred yards before ending at a towering wall of ice bracketed by vertical cliffs.
“That’s a glacier,” Sam said. “Hosni, I didn’t see this plateau on any maps. Does it look familiar?”