Year Zero by Jeff Long Page A

high mountains, but had come to hate the dangers. Fatherhood had made him a chicken.
    He picked his way across the scree field. The slope steepened. Scree gave way to shelves shingly with the fossils of small sea animals. The Chago Glacier gaped two thousand feet below.
    As conceived by an ambitious curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Man, their plan involved locating the body, if it truly existed, then carrying it several miles to the south, well into Nepal, safely away from the border and any claims by the People’s Republic of China. Everyone in the museum business recalled the pitched battle between Italy and Austria over the Iceman found on their alpine border. The Smithsonian wanted no such complexities.
    Two days downvalley, Nathan Lee had found a cave used by Buddhist hermits over the centuries. It was empty now. They’d cached all their supplies there for the trek out and agreed it would be the perfect spot to replant their own iceman, then “discover” him. Besides averting an international tug of war, it would allow the Smithsonian to negotiate with Nepalese ministers who were even more corrupt than the karaoke commies, as Ochs called the Chinese generals controlling Tibet. Ochs was going to use his part of the take to purchase a Hockney painting. Nathan Lee’s part was going to go to Lydia and lawyers. All in the family, he thought.
    After a half hour, Nathan Lee started a handline for Ochs and the Khampa. It would help get Ochs up. More importantly, it would help get the body down. He unknotted his coil of hot-pink perlon, tied one end to a rock, and the other to his waist. The rope was light and thin, only seven millimeters, but very strong and almost five hundred feet in length.
    He lost sight of the ledge with the body, but followed his landmarks. There was the snapped pinnacle, here the dark streak. Rounding a bend, he mantled up onto a flat ledge. And there it was.
    For some reason, he had expected a male. Certainly the jaw was massive enough, and the enormous hands and feet. But there was no questioning the exposed breast, even shriveled to an empty pale pouch. She didn’t belong here. No one did really, but especially not her, and not because she was a woman. When the rumor of a body had first arrived, the Smithsonian thought this would be just another quick-frozen neolithic stray. She was different.
    No one could have predicted the body would turn out to be a Neandertal woman thirty or fifty millenia old.
    Homo neandertalis had never been found in this part of the world. A complete specimen had never been found anywhere in the world. Nathan Lee stood very still, as if she might flee. Perfectly mummified, she sat slumped against the wall, facing Makalu.
    Strangely, the goraks—ravens with huge black wings for the thin air—had not taken her eyes. They were milky and mineralized beneath half-closed lids with long sun-bleached lashes. Her lips had stretched back to the gum. She was intact except for the windward side where some of the scalp and one cheek had been polished away. A breeze sifted through her long black hair.
    Nathan Lee remembered the rope at his waist. He untied himself and anchored the handline with a figure-eight loop over an outcrop. He faced the body again, almost shy with awe. The find was incredible. The flesh was still on the bones!
    Dazed by the enormity of the event, the archaeologist in him stirred. A thousand questions flooded in. What on earth had a Neandertal been doing in the high Himalayas? Exploring? Migrating? Searching for gods? He couldn’t get over it. Her remains implied that an isolated pocket had survived in some mountain sanctuary, a lost race in Shangri-la.
    Besides her total displacement in time, something was strange here. Her presence in this place didn’t make sense. It was too damn hard to get here. He’d seen and read about ice men and maidens found in the Andes, and she didn’t fit. For one thing there were no outward signs of violence,