Operation Snake

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I looked down and winced as the airliner flew low over the top of the world. Mountains, huge, forbidding, frightening, fantastic peaks garnished with ice and snow. Sheer sheets of ice dipped down into mist-shrouded glaciers, and the cold reached up to grab me through the plane's windows. The top of the world was a good phrase for the place. On maps it is called Nepal, a small, independent kingdom, a tiny monarchy of isolation, a paradise for mountain climbers, a stretch of land between Tibet and India, and a thumb stuck in the mouth of the Chinese dragon. I recalled how Ted Callendar, an AXE agent who'd spent some years there when it was under British domination, described Nepal: "A place where the certain is uncertain. Where the probable is improbable. It's a land where faith and superstition walk hand in hand, where delicacy and brutality share the same bed, where beauty and horror live as twins. It's no place for Western man who believes in logic, reason and probability."

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