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Mackiernan stopped the caravan just long enough to bury two of the embassy’s radios, rather than risk having them fall into Communist hands. Three days after Mackiernan set out from Tihwa, on October 1, Mao Zedong stood triumphantly above the gate to the Forbidden City in Beijing and proclaimed the People’s Republic of China.
    But that was half a continent away. For two weeks Mackiernan and his men—Bessac, the White Russians, and the Kazakh guides—encamped in yurts on the southwest shore of Lake Barkol. Who could blame Mackiernan for being reluctant to leave the relative safety and comfort of the lake? The journey that lay ahead of him, even under the best of circumstances, was grim. Between Lake Barkol and the Chinese-Tibetan border lay a no-man’s-land, more than one thousand hostile miles of the Taklimakan desert, known as White Death.
    On October 15 they soberly set out “marching at night to avoid being seen,” Mackiernan penned in his log. All along the way he would record landmarks, latitudinal and longitudinal readings, and the availability of game and water. It was a carefully detailed escape route for those who might come later. As a check against his compass, Mackiernan converted a camera, long since ruined by sand and grit, into an octant.
    Seldom were there roads. Mostly they crossed open desert, their feet crunching through the salty crust of its surface, sinking six inches or more into the powder-fine sands. It was an exhausting routine that repeated itself day after day. The monotony was broken only by the occasional sighting of a gazelle or lone wolf eyeing their tedious progress. Their course was set for south-southwest. With each passing day the elevation increased. Among themselves Mackiernan and his men spoke an odd mix of languages—Russian, Chinese, and Kazakh—but little English.
    In the midst of the desert Mackiernan and his men and horses went three days without even a swallow of water. Then they came upon a brackish well and fell upon their bellies unable to resist. Like wild animals, they gulped down the warm waters. For hours afterward they and the horses were racked with diarrhea and abdominal cramps.
    The one constant of their odyssey was Mackiernan’s insistence on stopping to radio his position to Washington. Each time, Zvonzov would set up the radio antennae while Mackiernan sent or received encrypted messages. No sooner completed, the message would be burned on the spot. Zvonzov never asked and was never told the content of those messages.
    The rigor of the trek occasionally yielded to unexpected comforts. Mackiernan’s log records that on November 14, at an elevation of 9,850 feet, they put in with desert nomads and feasted on mutton. Mackiernan traded gold for additional horses and camels, observing that the traders would likely spend it buying opium from the Kazakhs at one ounce of bullion per six ounces of opium.
    But the journey was already taking its toll. Increasingly Mackiernan was being felled by gastrointestinal pains and diarrhea. At each stop along the way they would put in with Kazakhs who shared their yurt with them and fed them biscuits called
bursak—
a favorite of Mackiernan’s—and thick fried steaks of bighorn sheep. Most of these nomadic peoples had never before seen a foreigner.
    By late November, as the temperature began to drop, the terrain had become even more hostile. “Cold as hell—no water, no grass, no fuel,” wrote Mackiernan in his log. “Country absolutely barren. Many skeletons of men, horses, and camels.” It was not until the morning of November 29 that Mackiernan reached a place known to him as Goose Lake, where he and his men received “a royal welcome.” His Kazakh hosts had prepared for Mackiernan and his men the largest yurt they had ever seen, and set aside a dozen sheep for them to consume. And there Mackiernan would spend the long winter, waiting for the mountain