Frost of Heaven Read online

  Frost of Heaven

  Junius Podrug

  Copyright 1992, 2017 Junius Podrug

  REVIEWS OF FROST OF HEAVEN

  “This absorbing debut thriller set in remote lands offers penetrating character studies along with colorful, nonstop action . . . Podrug deftly depicts his diverse locales from modern London and contemporary, ageless Calcutta to Tibet and Mongolia, providing rare texture for his plot of violence and danger.” Publishers Weekly

  “Podrug is a talented writer with a knack for startling images and a real gift for capturing the seamy downside of cities . . . The author has a fine reporter’s eye . . . he’s captivating and dour in his descriptions of the Tibetan landscape or in a harrowing account of contemporary Calcutta.” Kirkus Reviews

  An “old fashioned novel of romantic adventure in the trackless wastes of the Himalayas . . . a good Hitchcockian hero . . . plenty of action and intrigue . . . a lot of color, panoramic shots of locales ranging from Calcutta to Tibet . . . It’s intended to entertain and that’s what it does.” Locus Magazine

  “A compelling thriller . . . “ Cardiff Western Mail (Britain)

  “A savage thriller . . . recalls Raiders of the Lost Ark or Rider Haggard’s adventures.” Liverpool Daily Post (Britain)

  “Fast and entertaining . . . an accomplished first novel.” Rocky Mountain News

  “If this thriller doesn’t entertain you, you’re dead . . . spectacular debut . . . it’s fast, raw and compelling . . . and damn intriguing . . .” David Morrow, New York Times bestselling author

  Best First Novel Award from the Unreal Worlds Fantasy, Science Fiction and Horror Awards

  PROLOGUE

  Out of whose womb came the ice?

  and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

  Job 38.29

  The plane sped toward the pass like a dog running for a closing gate. Avalanches triggered by the rasp of its engine rushed down the sides of mountains as he steered toward the opening. Racing between Titanic peaks, the plane had no more significance than a fly in the Grand Canyon.

  Suddenly he was at the right altitude, and he nursed the joystick to keep the nose up as the plane shot into the pass.

  The engine coughed and the nose turned down. He fought the control stick as the plane dived for the bottom of the icy jaw. With thoughts of love and hate—the girl he left behind, the bastards who sent him to nowhere in a crippled plane—he was a drowning man seeing himself in that slippery moment between life and death. The plane turned up reluctantly, the metal fuselage trembling as if it had tasted the fear and sweat of the hands directing it.

  The plane broke out of the pass and a gasp of relief escaped from him. The plunge had raised the hair on his soul.

  He gritted his teeth. Bloody bastards. Risking his life without even letting him in on the secret. They were all puffed up with self-importance about the mission. They even had a priest at the briefing. Who ever heard of a priest at a top-secret briefing?

  At the end of the briefing the priest had hurried to him and started talking about how important the mission was to God. He had almost laughed. The man reeked of holy fervor and moldy wine. The priest had started to tell him something about a skull when a security officer pulled the man away.

  Smoke and flames burst from the engine and the controls shook in his grip. He started losing altitude, limping like a wounded bird. In the distance was a great peak, a snowcapped giant, utterly majestic with lines as dramatic as the facets of a diamond. The big mountain—he couldn’t keep the plane’s nose up. He’d never clear it! The plane shuddered again, the death rattle of the Phoenix, as he stoked the burning engine. He screamed as the mountain rushed at him.

  Driven by nervous energy, he crawled away from the crash, a rush of adrenaline fooling him into thinking he had survived when all he had probably achieved was a prelude to death. He was injured, hurt badly, his path in the snow marked by his blood. Places where his flight suit had been torn were not just rips in cloth but tears to his body. The wounds quickly froze. It was the bitter chill that would kill him.

  He made one more mindless effort to get on his feet but managed only to roll over onto his back. His brain still functioned, but the ice pack was freezing his life’s blood, creating rigor mortis while he still had a few breaths left.

  He saw the movement out of the corner of his eye, what appeared to be an animal coming toward him, but he was too weak, too frozen, to turn his head. As it got closer he realized it was walking erect, like something human, and he imagined it to be a yeti, the legendary abominable snow creature said to haunt the mountains.

  He wanted to get up and run but the joints of his arms and legs were frozen and his brain was slowly closing down. His mind screamed as the creature knelt beside him. He couldn’t see what it was doing but sensed that hands were examining him.

  It began taking off his clothes!

  Soon he lay naked in the snow, his numbed brain reeling in the horror that the thing had undressed him.

  Then the creature stood up and slipped out of its own furry coat. It was a woman, not an animal but a woman wearing a red robe under the hooded coat. She had dark-honey skin, black hair and molasses eyes, and an almost otherworldliness about her that transcended race. A silver pendant carved in the image of a snow leopard hung from a chain around her neck.

  She tucked the furry coat under him and stood and slipped off her red robe. Her body was smooth and firm and seemed impervious to the bitter cold. She pressed her naked body against his, her breasts pushing on his bare chest, her legs wrapping around his, drawing them together, sealed by the warmth of her thighs, the fire in her blood flowing from her flesh to his . . .

  CHAPTER I

  Who were you before your mother

  and father conceived you?

  LONDON

  Fog had settled on Whitehall, a weeping shroud chill-wet and unstirred as the breath of the dead. Peter shivered and pulled up the collar on his coat. He knew they were back there, knew he was being followed, that the thick night hid the men behind him.

  What would it feel like to get a bullet in the back? Ripping through me, exploding my lungs out of my chest?

  He kept walking, trying to listen to the night, but the fog seemed to distort every sound. Somewhere in the distance the bells of a church tolled. As if in answer a foghorn whispered on the River Thames, the coarse song suspended for a moment, melancholy, like the mort played on a hunting horn heralding that a kill had been made.

  What in God’s name was he supposed to know?

  He was threatened by the ghost of a man he had never met.

  What could his father have seen in a plane over the Himalayas that was still important thirty years later?

  Reaching a corner where a street lamp glowed, he stepped away from the light and listened for sounds. A car started up and accelerated somewhere . . . streets away? Would they come for him in a car? Pick him off the sidewalk, getting rid of him as quick and easy as spitting on a slate and wiping it clean?

  He walked in a direction where he thought he’d find the Thames and the tube station near Victoria Embankment. Keep moving. Harder to hit. The fog works both ways.

  He was in the heart of government row, surrounded by the citadels of British history—the Admiralty, the old War Office, Whitehall Palace where Charles I lost his head for high treason and other crimes.

  A few hours ago the area was bustling with people and cars and taxis. Now the night was thick, the streets deserted. He’d left freak tornadoes and violent rainstorms behind in sunny California—and stumbled into a near whiteout by the Thames in a city that hadn’t seen peasoupers in decades. The fog was scary. That’s why they let him off in the middle of it. To scare him. To kill him?

  They weren’t going to scare him away. They would have to kill him.

  It had all seemed so simple in the beginning.

  Down the River Thames, not far from where he was walking, was Waterloo Bridge. His mother, a young woman from California on vacation in Britain, had met a Scotsman named Duncan MacKinzie on that bridge over three decades ago. She was forced to return home pregnant and unwed after the handsome RAF officer disappeared in a forgotten flight over the loneliest place on earth—the Himalayas.

  “You look like your father,” his mother told him a thousand times, which told him nothing because he didn’t know what his father looked like.

  When he was twelve and other kids were out fishing with their dads, he stood in front of a mirror and mentally subtracted his mother’s looks from his own to construct his father from the leftovers. His brown hair was darker and thicker than his mother’s, his eyes greener than her hazel ones; he was tall as a kid and sprouted up over six one as an adult; muscular in a willowy way, lacking that pumped look many muscular men cultivate. He never knew if the image of his father he conjured up was accurate because there was no one to compare it with.

  His mother never lost her hope, her hopeless dream, that her handsome young RAF pilot would come back to her, to rekindle their love and claim his son. Married to a nice, solid, boring man, she committed emotional suicide and withered inside like a forgotten rose pressed between the pages of a book.

  Her unfulfilled romantic yearnings became part of the makeup of her child, passed along like a genetic defect.

  Peter left his job, his way of life, at the age of thirty, to find a missing piece of himself.

  And walked into what?

  His father’s last mission—what the hell had happened thirty years ago that seemed to
be putting his own life in jeopardy today?

  He had gone to the government building where personnel files of British war dead and MIAs were stored, “the paper graveyard,” he heard a clerk call it. Accessing his father’s service file was the quickest way to get a lead on his family, to let them know Duncan MacKinzie had a son and to get a peek at his own roots.

  It was his tenth trip to the paper graveyard to wade through red tape in an attempt to see the file, but this time two men burst into the room with a show of authority and muscle, shoving him up against the counter and cuffing him. The pretty file clerk went from being flirtatious to gawking as they hustled him out the back door.

  On the, rear loading dock one of the men tripped him, sending him down the concrete ramp with his hands cuffed behind. They jerked him off the ground, ignoring his curses, and shoved him onto the backseat of a waiting car. Blindfolded, he was taken a few blocks, through more doors and upstairs. He counted the steps, thirty-nine, with two landings in between.

  All because he wanted to see the file of a dead man.

  What was so important about his father’s flight? Had he been flying a spy plane? The geography was right: The Himalayas are between India and China, two nations rattling sabers at each other three decades ago. The time was right, too, an era that saw Gary Powers shot down while piloting a U2.

  But what could Duncan MacKinzie have seen in a spy plane over the icy world of the Himalayas that would be so important thirty years later that British Intelligence would haul his son in and batter him with hours of relentless questions and accusations?

  Cops is how he thought of them. Peter was a reporter, an investigative reporter, and had scrapped with the cops before. They told him they were MI5, but the men who interrogated him were pricks, more likely to spend an evening putting a bullet behind the ear of an IRA terrorist than enjoying high tea and scotch with foreign spies at the Dorchester.

  In the shabby interrogation room the two agents had taken turns at him like jackals ripping the flesh from a carcass while a third man hid and listened.

  “What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?” the chief heavy asked, a boozer who talked with a slight lisp, leaning close with Johnny Walker breath, staring at him with bloodshot eyes glazed with an unhealthy yellow film. Fine veins had pushed to the surface of his nose like tiny blue worms wiggling out.

  What’s the worst thing that could happen to you?

  “Everyone has fears, their worst nightmares,” the lisper told him, staring through the slits of Venetian blinds, talking to the gray night.

  They told him what he feared and it hit him like a kick in the balls.

  They had been watching him, had dug into his background, got under his skin and passed his life under a microscope.

  Because he wanted to see his father’s military file? He choked on his own laughter. They knew who he was but he couldn’t prove he was Peter MacKinzie. His driver’s license said Novak, his passport said Novak, hell, he didn’t know how to sign his name except as Peter Novak. But what’s in a name? A good man named Novak married a pregnant woman and allowed his name to be written on a birth certificate to keep a child from being labeled a bastard. The only evidence he had that he was Duncan MacKinzie’s son was the word of his mother. And she had been dead for five years.

  Footsteps shuffled somewhere behind him and he swung around, straining to see. There were things in the fog—like the images on a Rorschach ink blot, what the eye didn’t see, the mind imagined.

  The fog was getting to him. He picked up his pace, his ear tuned to the sounds of the night.

  No damn taxis. On a clear day the area was crawling with them. Nights like this, the gray damp of winterkill settling on the city, the streets reading like a Gothic novel, must have been what fed the Ripper and drove Poe to madness.

  Charming thoughts. “Keep it up, Peter,” he said aloud.

  He tried to get the dreary night off his mind by thinking of his hurts. His right shoulder ached from the tumble down the ramp, his head hurt from bouncing off the floor, but questions swirling in his head like bats in an attic kept him from focusing on the pain.

  Who was the third man? One side of the room had been partitioned off. He sensed someone behind the divider, someone listening as the other two took turns at him. He made a deliberately clumsy attempt to get off the chair with his hands still cuffed, turning it over, bouncing his nose off the floor to get a look under the divider at a pair of scuffed black shoes and black pants.

  Was he the one, the killer sent to put a bullet in his back in the fog or run him down with a car, another victim of big-city violence? The other two had dropped him off several streets back and stood by their car, a look passing between them as they told him to start walking.

  Maybe they’re just trying to intimidate me. Scare me a little. He shivered and tugged his coat collar higher. They sure as hell chose a fine night if they wanted to get under his skin. Nothing like a dark and dreary night with angry gargoyles glaring down from shadowy buildings. The British were civilized, weren’t they? Hell, he was half British. They probably just wanted to scare him off. Thought he was nothing but a nosy newspaper reporter, digging out dirt and putting it on the front pages like he did before he traded in a California tan for gray London. He thought about what an ugly bastard Lisper was and lost confidence in his “scare-off” theory. Lisper liked to hurt people.

  What the hell is it about that file that gets these bastards seemingly kill crazy? And who the hell was the guy behind the partition, the third man?

  He heard footsteps again, running steps, and he swung around. Nothing, just shadows in the fog, but now he was pissed. He was tired of being scared, finished with being bullied. He wasn’t going to turn his back again and worry that someone was to slip it to him.

  He stepped off the street and into the doorway of a building, losing himself in the shadows, listening to the night. Tense. Nerves on fire. He hadn’t thought about what he would do when his stalker showed up. But running wasn’t one of the options.

  He rubbed his cold hands. Where’s the best place to hit some son of a bitch with a gun before he blows my face off? Balls? Throat? Solar plexus? Grab the gun and butt the bastard in the nose with his head? Shit, that was all movie crap!

  Something touched his leg and he almost jumped out of his pants.

  A cat, a goddamn black cat!

  It brushed against his pants leg again and he stared down at it. He slowly took a breath and let his tensed muscles relax. He felt like laughing.

  Nothing but a damn cat.

  He had had it with lurking in doorways. He stepped out and bumped into someone.

  “What—!”

  A woman stepped back, startled. He thought she was going to run but instead she stared at him with searching eyes, as if she had been expecting someone whose face she didn’t know. Her face was partly cloaked by the hood of her coat, exposing only dark eyes and lovely cheeks.

  He got his own breathing under control and tried to smile. “Sorry, I didn’t see you.”

  She clutched a bag he thought at first was a large carryall but then realized it was an old-fashioned carpetbag.

  Surprise registered on her features as her eyes met his and he stared back, puzzled. He didn’t know her, but she struck a chord deep within him as if he should.

  “Do I know you?” he asked. Footsteps sounded from an alley to his left. She looked to the alley and tensed, as if ready to bolt. He fought back his own panic. “Is something wrong?”

  She backed away from him slowly.

  “Miss—”

  She turned and dashed into the street.

  “Watch out!”

  Headlights of an oncoming car bore down on her. He leaped after her, getting a handhold on her coat and jerking her back as the car screeched to a stop beside him.

  “You almost got killed.”

  A taxi sign glowed on the roof of the car and an anxious English face poked out of the window on the driver’s side. “Anybody ‘urt?”

  “Are you all right?” Peter asked the woman.