The Abominable: A Novel

7.

We saw the glow from the flames and heard the gunshots when we were still more than a mile of glacier travel away from Camp III.

“Damn!” said the Deacon. I knew he was afraid that Reggie and J.C. had arrived there just in time to be caught in a massacre.

The pistol shots echoed down the long glacier valley, and they sounded strangely benign—like those last few kernels of corn popping randomly in a pan—but then the volume of shots increased. Mixed in with discrete pistol shots, there suddenly came a sound like someone ripping a long strip of thick fabric.

“What on earth…,” I whispered.

The Deacon held up one finger, silencing me as we listened. None of us had gone on oxygen, and we were all panting and wheezing after trying to move so quickly here at 21,000 feet. The ripping sound came again.

“It could be a Bergmann-Schmeisser submachine gun,” the Deacon said at last. “God help the Sherpas and Jean-Claude and Reggie if it is.”

“How fast can it fire?” I asked even while not really wanting to know.

“Four hundred fifty rounds per minute,” said the Deacon. “And the rate is limited only by the time it takes for the gunner to slap on a new thirty-two-round snail drum magazine. That bulky round magazine makes the Schmeisser MP-18/I awkward to carry, aim, and fire with any accuracy, but you don’t really need accuracy with that rate of fire. You just keep spraying. The Germans loved their damned Schmeissers for close-in trench fighting.”

“Jesus,” I gasped.

“Let us move more quickly,” said Pasang and broke into a trot, his crampons flashing in the lowered beams of our headlamps.

“I assume…no more…pretend yetis,” gasped the Deacon as he ran along beside the long-legged Sherpa. We were still each carrying more than thirty pounds of oxygen rigs and other stuff in our rucksacks.

“No,” agreed Dr. Pasang. “It is just men murdering men now.”

I trotted faster to keep up with the two, but the sense of something caught in my throat had returned and from time to time I had to stop, lean over with my hands on my padded knees, and cough until I retched. Then I would run faster in an attempt to catch up. Neither man waited for me in the dark.

The flames lit up the entire valley, including the face of Changtse and the ice wall to the North Col. We were less than two hundred meters from Camp III when two dark shapes suddenly stepped out in front of us as if to block our way.

My hand came up and I almost fired my mini-Very pistol at the closer silhouette before the Deacon cried “No!” and batted down my arm.

It was Reggie with J.C. close behind her.

“This way,” hissed Jean-Claude, and we followed him off the deep-printed trail as he led us north along a line of snow-covered ice pinnacles and iced-over seracs. After a few seconds of crunching along, I realized that J.C. had chosen this place to get off the main trail because the ice crust here was so thick that we left no boot prints.

“We need to get to Camp Three immediately,” whispered the Deacon with a pained urgency audible in his voice. The firing had stopped several minutes earlier. The Deacon was carrying Bachner’s two-shot 9-millimeter Luger in his gloved hand rather than the full-sized Very pistol.

J.C. and Reggie led us about two hundred meters north along the line of penitentes and seracs, then east through that icy maze until we reached a spot where we could look down on Camp III. Those of us who had binoculars in our rucksacks got them out.

“Oh…God…damn…it,” whispered the Deacon.

The tents at Camp III were all ablaze. Bodies of Sherpas were sprawled everywhere—we counted at least nine made visible by the flames—and those stacked crates and heaps of supplies that had not been burned had been hacked to bits with axes. There were no fake yetis visible, but whenever the fog shifted high enough, I could see bloody boot prints leading into the forest of ice pinnacles to the south of the camp.

The five of us slumped below the ice ridge and sat staring at one another.

“We arrived too late to help,” whispered Jean-Claude. “And it is all my own être damné par Dieu fault!”

“What happened?” asked the Deacon.

Jean-Claude emitted a stifled noise that could have been either a sob or a gasp. “I fell into a damned crevasse. Moi! The great Chamonix ice and glacier expert!”

“Were you using lights?” I asked.

“No,” said the despondent J.C.

“Were you roped up?” I asked.

“No.” He took a long, ragged breath. “I was leading, trying to keep Reggie and me on or near the path through an icy patch. Suddenly the snow opened up and I fell about twenty-five feet into the glacier until my ice axe wedged above me where the crevasse finally narrowed. I hung onto the shaft of the axe. Then I started cramponing my way back up and Lady Bromley-Montfort dropped me a rope. She pulled and I Prusiked. But it took me almost fifteen minutes to extricate myself, and I almost dropped my heavy pack into the abyss. I fell into a crevasse like some novice.”

“You can’t blame yourself, Jean-Claude,” whispered the Deacon. “It’s just too damned dark tonight and we’re all exhausted. No one got more than an hour or two of bad sleep on Monday night at Camp Five and we’ve been on the go since then. We climbed to twenty-seven thousand feet and above on Sunday and Monday, spent the nights high too many times, haven’t had enough water to keep a hamster alive, descended almost ten thousand feet in one day, and tonight climbed almost five thousand feet again. It’s a miracle that any of us can function at all.”

“The Sherpas here at…,” began Jean-Claude and stopped. He was sobbing.

“They never had a chance,” said the Deacon. “And it’s all my fault. I’m climbing master on this expedition, responsible for everyone’s safety. Now all of the Sherpas may be dead, and it’s my fault. I was in command.”

“We see only nine bodies,” whispered Reggie. “There were fourteen Sherpas at Camp Three if all the porters got back safely from Camp Two after we sent them up the glacier. And Nawang Bura came with us and then disappeared. We can hope he made it safely out of the valley.”

“With his meat cleaver against Bergmann-Schmeisser machine pistols and Luger semiautomatic pistols,” the Deacon said bitterly. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek.

“How were the two who almost got away from Base Camp killed?” asked Pasang.

“Long-range rifle shots,” whispered the Deacon. “From our stolen rifles is my guess.”

“I know the hunting rifles that Lady Bromley-Montfort and I brought,” Pasang said. “We both used nineteen twenty Mannlicher-Schönauer bolt-action rifles for hunting. What did you bring, Captain Deacon? It was a modified Lee-Enfield, was it not?”

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Fitted out with an offset Periscopic Prism Company ’scope. The telescopic sight is offset about three inches to the left because of the bolt action. You sight with your right eye, but can switch to your left eye while firing and working the action. I used it at the Front. It looks clumsy—it was clumsy—but it worked well enough.”

“You were allowed to keep that after the War?” I asked.

“It was illegal, but I did,” said the Deacon. “I’d paid for the telescopic sight myself.”

“But Ree-shard…” Jean-Claude paused for several seconds. “You were an officer, no? Your only weapon was the Webley revolver that you lent to Semchumbi tonight, yes?”

“Yes and no,” said the Deacon in heavy tones, as if he were a Catholic confessing a very dark secret indeed. “Even though I was an officer, I volunteered to be trained as a sniper. I grew very good at it during our weeks in the trenches between attacks.”

I didn’t know how to feel about this revelation. Everything I’d heard after the War suggested that both sides hated snipers on the battlefield. Even their own.

“A Buddhist sniper,” said Reggie, breaking the silence at last. “Which means that we have to regain one of those rifles for you to use.”

“We tried,” said Jean-Claude. “Reggie suggested, and I agreed, that we should set an ambush here at these icy seracs for the yetis—these German-climber yetis—when they came back along this part of the glacier trail. Her idea was good. Fire flares at those carrying our rifles or the Schmeisser machine pistol, try to grab one of those weapons in the darkness and confusion, and then retreat into the ice maze here.”

“They would have killed you both,” said the Deacon.

Jean-Claude shrugged. “We need real weapons, mon ami. Did you succeed in getting the dead yeti’s pistol?”

The Deacon showed the black Luger. “Two rounds, none in the breech. I think Bachner was never a soldier.”

“It was Bachner?” asked Jean-Claude. “The man who was with Sigl in Munich when you went there?”

“Who’s Bachner?” asked Reggie.

I whispered an explanation to her, and then the Deacon interrupted. “Did you see the Germans during this slaughter at Camp Three? How many attackers were there? Is there any chance some of our fourteen Sherpas did get away?”

“We saw at least eight Germans in their hairy jackets,” said Reggie. “They’d given up wearing the yeti masks once they were through slaughtering our people. After setting the tents and stores ablaze, they just tossed the masks and yeti-vests into the fires.”

“I believe that a few of our people dragged themselves into the serac forest wounded,” whispered Jean-Claude. “The boot prints show that the Germans followed them into the ice-pinnacle maze, following their blood trails. Finishing them off.”

“I was hoping that some of those blood trails belonged to the Germans,” I said. “Semchumbi had the Deacon’s Webley revolver. I forget—how many rounds did that hold?”

“Only six,” said the Deacon. “And it’s a double-action revolver. But it has an automatic extractor when you break it, so someone skilled in its use, with extra cartridges at hand, can get off twenty to thirty rounds per minute.”

“Was Semchumbi skilled in its use?” asked J.C.

“No,” rasped the Deacon.

“Did he have extra cartridges at hand?” asked Pasang.

“No.”

“Well, I still hope he shot a few of the bastards,” I said.

“Amen,” whispered Jean-Claude.

From time to time we popped up and looked over the ridge with our binoculars, but—save for the fires dying down—the terrible view remained the same. The Germans had not returned. None of the bodies in the snow had stirred.

“We have to go down there,” said Reggie. Her voice was steadier than mine could have been.

“Why go down there?” I asked. “Why risk it?”

“We need food, kerosene, a Primus or Unna cooker, Meta bars to burn, sleeping bags, extra clothing, anything useful the Germans didn’t destroy,” she said.

“Let’s just retreat down the glacier now,” I said. “It’s too risky to go near those flames. The Germans might be waiting for that. Waiting for us.”

“They probably are,” the Deacon agreed, “but Reggie’s right. We need to forage what we can from Camp Three—God knows there wasn’t anything left at Base Camp, Camp One, or Camp Two—and we need food, fuel, and a cooker to survive.”

“Why do you think there will be stuff left here?” My voice sounded desperate and a little panicked even to my own ears.

“Remember, Jake,” said the Deacon, “we had that tarp-covered cache here at Camp Three—about fifty yards west of the camp, where the boulders get jagged near the base of Changtse. Today’s snow may have hidden it more. And the cache was just far enough away that the Germans may have missed it—unlike at Base Camp and the other camps where they had the advantage of some daylight, they hit Camp Three after dark tonight.”

“Shouldn’t we decide what we’re doing next—which direction we’re going, what our plans are—before we try to salvage anything here?” asked Jean-Claude.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” I insisted. “The expedition’s over. It’s just a question now of whether to climb west over the Changtse Ridge to Lho La Pass into Nepal, or east over the North East Ridge—no, that won’t work—anyway, get out of the valley somehow and over Windy Pass, Lhakpa La, and then over Karpo La Pass down into Tibet. I think that way has to be the second choice.”

“We’ll discuss where and what after we forage,” said the Deacon, using his command voice. “There are factors that you, Jake, and you, Jean-Claude, haven’t yet heard about. First we have to get a cooker and some fuel and anything else we can scavenge. We’ll also look for survivors when we’re down there.”

“Sherpa or German?” I asked.

“Both,” said the Deacon. “But I’d give my left testicle to get one of the Germans as a prisoner.”

“I’d give your left testicle for that as well,” Reggie said at once.

Despite our precarious position near the glacier trail down to Camp II, we all laughed out loud. When we stifled the laughter, the Deacon said, “Who wants to come with me down to the camp?”

“I’ll go,” J.C. said at once.

“I shall stay here with Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Dr. Pasang.

“I’ll go down to the camp with you two,” I was amazed to hear myself say.