The Abominable: A Novel

10.

We slept relatively well, despite everyone’s headaches and the return of my terrible coughing. My guess is that none of us dreamt of Germans machine-gunning our tent with their Schmeissers. We should have, probably, but I don’t think any of us did. We were just too damned tired.

When I woke in the cold night, I would turn a valve, enjoy a little foot- and finger-warming oxygen, and drift back to sleep. The others were doing likewise, except for Pasang, who I believe slept straight through without any English air. I didn’t truly awaken until almost seven a.m. according to the watch my father had given me.

Pasang and Reggie were heating coffee and a pot of something to eat on the Unna cooker just outside the tent vestibule. The day was sunny. The air was cold but still. The sky above the North and North East ridges was a heart-stopping blue.

“Where are J.C. and the Deacon?” I asked, alarmed.

“They went to stand guard near the top of the rope ladder around four thirty this morning,” said Reggie. “Before it started getting light.”

“I’ll check in with them and then come back for coffee and breakfast,” I said between coughs. I was busy strapping my crampons on.

“Oh, the Deacon asked me to tell you to wear your Finch duvet jacket on the outside of everything else,” said Reggie. “If you must use the Shackleton anorak, he said to put it under the goose down jacket. Oh, and keep the goose down trousers I made for you on the outside as well, and, he said, keep your goose down hood up at all times.”

I noticed for the first time that both Reggie and Dr. Pasang were dressed that way, hoods up and tied tight. “Why?” I said.

“The Deacon says that we’re within range of the three rifles,” answered Pasang. “Especially his own Lee-Enfield with the telescopic sight. The balloon fabric on the Finch jackets is a dull white—harder to see against the snow of the North Col and the first part of the North Ridge than our gray Shackleton jackets.”

“Okay.” We were dressing in winter camouflage now. I wondered what other new wonders this day would bring.

“Here,” said Reggie. “Two thermoses of moderately hot coffee. You can share them with J.C. and Richard.”

The thermoses in the large pockets of my down jacket, long ice axe in hand, mini-Very pistol in my free hand, I hurried across the North Col to the ice ledge, remembering to keep my head down most of the time. It felt foolish to waddle along that way, but the idea of being a sniper’s target made my testicles want to crawl back up into my body.

J.C. and the Deacon weren’t on the ice ledge but were lying prone against a wall of snow and ice on the North Col proper about 40 feet from the head of the ladder. I plopped down beside them and handed out the thermoses.

“This is very welcome, thank you, Jake,” said the Deacon, accepting one thermos and setting it in the snow while his hand returned to steadying the large pair of binoculars. I’d forgotten to bring my own glasses from Camp IV. J.C. handed me his.

“They’ve been moving around since dawn,” Jean-Claude said. “Burying the dead and scattering or burying the ashes of the tents.”

“Burying the…,” I said and looked through the binoculars.

Down at the remnants of Camp III, eight men, their faces mostly hidden behind white scarves or handkerchiefs, all wearing white overparkas, were indeed dragging away the last bodies of our murdered Sherpas. Others were shoveling ashes and detritus from the previous night’s destruction onto large flat tarps.

“I would give a thousand pounds to have my ’scoped Lee-Enfield back right now,” whispered the Deacon.

“Why are they…,” I began.

“The Germans don’t know if another British Everest expedition might be coming next year or the year after that,” said the Deacon, finally putting his glasses down and unscrewing the lid on his thermos. Jean-Claude was already drinking his steaming coffee and had handed me the cup to share with him. “But they don’t want evidence of the slaughters,” continued the Deacon. “The Germans are usually very good about covering such things up.”

“Where are they burying them?” I whispered. I was trying to think of the names of all our Sherpas.

“Probably in that deep crevasse at the edge of the moraine on the west side, beyond the ice pinnacles there,” said the Deacon. “This coffee tastes good.”

“So when they finish with burying and dispersing the…evidence,” I said, “they’ll come up to get us?”

“Almost certainly,” said the Deacon.

I craned my neck to look at the blue sky and clear, still air. The North Face of Mount Everest loomed over us like some impossible stage prop. “We’ve lost the advantage of the wind and clouds.” I’d inadvertently said what I was thinking.

“Yes, we have,” said the Deacon. “But it’s a beautiful day for a summit attempt.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was joking. But I wasn’t amused.

“They have both of the hunting rifles we had at Base Camp plus your rifle,” I said. “And you said that your modified Lee-Enfield is effective up to five hundred and fifty yards, with a maximum range of more than a thousand yards.”

“Yes,” said the Deacon.

“Well, this North Col is only a thousand-some feet above them,” I said angrily. “Everything up here is well within the thousand-yard maximum range of the rifle. And so will we be if we try to climb up the North Ridge.”

The Deacon nodded. “But they don’t have a good angle on us, Jake. I suspect that the German with my sniper’s rifle is up on the glacier below Camp Three right now—at the highest point on the glacier, actually—trying to get a clear shot. But the North Col is just high enough that they can’t see us up here—especially when we stay back away from this edge. Not while they’re anywhere close to being within firing range. As long as we don’t poke our heads up along this ridgeline, I don’t think they’ll try to take a shot.”

“But aren’t we all doing that right now?” I asked with a little too much excitement in my voice. “Poking our goddamned heads up like ducks in a shooting gallery, I mean! Won’t they catch a sun glint on the lenses of the binoculars?”

The Deacon pointed east. “Not anytime soon, Jake. The sun’s still climbing over the North East Ridge and the summit, all behind and to the right of us. In the evening, we’d have to be very careful about where and when to use the glasses. As for seeing our heads poking up…you may have noticed these little snow-and-ice tunnels that Jean-Claude and I have constructed. It restricts our width of vision but keeps us in the shadows here and more or less invisible to anyone not staring straight at us.”

“You seem so sure of yourselves,” I snapped.

“We’re not,” said J.C. “But I think the Deacon is right that the odds are in our favor in terms of being targets for their rifles—at least until we begin climbing up the snowfield on the North Ridge toward Camp Five.”

“Why didn’t we do that during the night if showing ourselves in the daylight is going to be so dangerous?” I demanded of the Deacon.

“Because,” he said in soft, deadly tones, “we want to kill some Germans before we abandon the North Col.”

I almost laughed at this. “How! By using the two rounds in your stolen Luger against eight or ten Germans? By firing our Very flares down at them as they come up the ladder that we’ve so conveniently left behind for them?”

“Not quite,” said the Deacon.

“What are we going to do, then, ‘to kill some Germans’?” I said. “Drop rocks on them?”

“You’re getting closer to the plan there,” said the Deacon.

I could only stare. Suddenly a thought made my stomach muscles clench. “While you’re peering out your little snow-and-ice tunnels here, how do you know that the Krauts aren’t chipping ice steps up the whole wall to the North Col a few hundred yards east of here?” The image was so clear I could almost see it.

“We would hear them chopping steps,” said Jean-Claude. “Also, they have been very busy cleaning up the evidence of their crimes. Carrying and burying bodies, even with a crevasse handy, is hard work at twenty-one thousand–some feet. And they also have the slaughter at Base Camp to conceal, not to mention the wrecks of Camps One and Two. Ree-shard and I think it will take them all until sometime this afternoon to finish hiding the evidence of their crimes.”

“But a sniper’s still out there watching and waiting for us to show ourselves,” I said.

“Yes,” said the Deacon.

I looked him straight in the eye. “If you were that sniper, what would you have done? Where would you be now?”

The Deacon removed his pipe from his pocket and stuck it between his white teeth. He didn’t light it. I’d never seen him actually smoke his pipe at real altitude.

“I would have started climbing the slope of Changtse in the middle of the night,” he said calmly. “Find a concealed shooting point at or near the summit at twenty-four thousand eight hundred–some feet. Come first light, all of us here on the North Col would have been in his range and in his sights. My Lee-Enfield has an attached magazine of ten rounds. I would have picked off all of us without ever having to change clips.”

I thought I might suddenly vomit. My head jerked upwards and my eyes scanned the high, snowy slopes of Changtse looming above us immediately to the west.

“How do you know the fucker’s not there now, taking aim?” I asked.

“Because we were out here before four thirty this morning watching for lights ascending Changtse,” Jean-Claude said. “There were none. And even Herr Hitler’s German supermen cannot climb that treacherous slope in the dark.”

“But since dawn…,” I began.

“We have been watching,” said J.C. “Nothing. We saw one of les boches—the tall man carrying Ree-shard’s rifle with the odd scope—disappear back into the penitentes, headed in the direction of the glacier path. The rest have been busy carrying off the bodies of our friends they killed and shoveling and sweeping up ashes and the remnants of our tents and crates.”

I shook my head. I’d never been a soldier, so I didn’t understand tactics, much less strategy. But I also had never felt as afraid as I did at that moment—not even during the most dangerous moves I’d made on mountains or ice. As if reading my thoughts—or expression—the Deacon set his hand on my shoulder again.

“We have a plan, Jake. I promise you. Remember, these are Germans. They’re arrogant people. They’re going to come at us straight-on sometime today—straight up the ladder we left for them, feeling safe in their near certainty that we don’t have any weapons that can really hurt them—and then we’re going to kill as many of them as we can. Only then will we begin our tactical withdrawal up the mountain.”

I did laugh this time. Easy and loud enough probably to be heard down at Camp III, where men in white anoraks were dragging away the bodies of our friends. But it wasn’t a hysterical laugh.

“What?” asked Jean-Claude.

I stifled the laughter but still had to grin. “Only my friend Richard Davis Deacon, current Earl of Watersbury whether he wants to be or not, could call climbing to the summit of Mount Everest a ‘tactical withdrawal.’”