Chapter 21

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.