"Back in America you can't hardly go a day without hearing it."
"Journalist?"
"I'm with the Socialist Workers' Weekly."
The driver spit.
"But I'm really a CIA agent," Remo added.
The driver gave his chest a pound that made his earflaps dance. "CIA good. Kick Communist behind. Why you go Lhasa? Much trouble there."
"I got a date with the Bunji Lama."
"Tashi delek."
"What does that mean?" asked Remo.
The driver laughed. "Good luck. Good luck to you and Bunji Lama. He-he-he-he."
The road was a snake track. Every road in Tibet, it seemed, was a snake track winding in and around towering mountains, scarps and snowcaps and then dropping into valleys that were yellow with mustard and lush green gorges.
Mostly, however, Tibet was a place of mountains. Every time they put a mountain behind them, up ahead loomed three or four new snowcaps. It was like driving through a video-game landscape of repeating horizons, except these were not monotonous but breathtaking in their sheer endlessness.
Remo had never been a big fan of mountains, but he couldn't take his eyes off these.
The driver double-clutched like a madman, taking hairpin turns with a reckless joy. Several times Remo was sure the wheels on his side were spinning over thin air. He kept one hand on the door handle in case they went over and he had to jump free.
The road degenerated to gravel, and in other places was a narrow passage through the remains of a longago rockslide. The wreckage of abandoned cars and trucks rusted along the side of the road. The ones that had gone over a too-narrow mountain pass lay smashed among the boulders.
The terrain became barren, windswept, inhospitable.
The air grew thinner. Remo adjusted his respiration rhythms. In Sinanju, breathing was all. Correct breathing, which Chiun had taught him, powered the human machine, turning every cell in the body into a miniature furnace of limitless potential.
Remo slowed the cycles of his breathing, extracting more oxygen with each slowed-down breath. He had dealt with high altitudes before, in Mexico City and elsewhere. But Tibet was the roof of the world. Its mountains were higher than any others. He hoped he could function normally on the lean mixture of Tibet's thin air.
After two hours the throbbing in his oxygen-deprived brain subsided. It was a good sign.
"When do the mountains stop?" Remo asked at one point.
The driver gestured vaguely in the direction of the incredibly blue sky. "Mountains never stop. Go up to sky. Go on forever."
From time to time the driver had to slow to allow a yak herder and two or three black hairy yaks to pass by. Once they flew around a corner and ran into a knot of goats. The goats scrambled up the mountains, jumped off the cliff and dodged every which way.
The driver laughed as if he thought it was the funniest thing on earth.
Looking back, Remo saw, miraculously, no goat roadkill. They had all survived. Even the ones that had jumped had landed on ledges and were now pulling themselves up again.
"How many I get?" the driver wanted to know.
"None."
The driver slapped his steering wheel so hard it should have broken. He grinned. "I best damned driver in Tibet."
"That's what scares me," Remo said glumly.
THEIR LUCK RAN out as night fell. Up ahead flashes illuminated the mountains, throwing them into momentary relief. It was as if God were taking flash pictures.
"Maybe Chinese tanks," the Tibetan muttered.
But it wasn't, they saw as they drew into a valley. It was an electrical storm. The sky blazed and sizzled. Thunder came cannonading toward them, bouncing off mountains that acted like natural amplifiers.
Then the rains came, falling in drumming sheets that made the windshield swim and driving impossible for any reasonable person.
In response, the Tibetan driver pressed the accelerator harder.
"Pack it in!" Remo shouted over the engine roar. "Pull over!"
The Tibetan shook his head. "No. River ahead. We can make."
"Are you crazy? Even if you can see the river, it's gotta be choked by all this rain."
Before Remo could stop him, the driver bared his teeth like a wolf and gunned the engine.
The truck roared ahead-and suddenly the color of the water on the windshield turned sloppy brown. The vibrating chassis abruptly settled down.
"We reach river," the driver said, pleased with himself.
The wheels were throwing up muddy water and complaining. Then all of a sudden they stopped.
Remo cracked his window and stuck his head out. His hair was immediately plastered to his head.
He saw that they were floating downstream. The truck was turning a slow circle as the torrent bore them along.
"We're afloat," he told the driver after getting the window cranked up.
"Good. Save gas."
"What if we sink?"
"Can you swim?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I cannot. You must rescue me."
They floated along two or three miles until they struck a rock and the truck reeled and tipped over.