The Abominable: A Novel

11.

The Germans came for us around five o’clock that afternoon. They’d been chopping their way up the slope below the caver’s ladder—their lack of 12-point crampons and of the fixed ropes we’d brought up with us slowing them down some for almost three hours before they reached the base of the ladder.

The Deacon still thought that their plan was to rush up the ladder, keeping us pinned down with rifle and automatic weapons fire as they came, boil out onto the North Col—our guess was that, with Karl Bachner dead and buried in his crevasse, there were no more than ten of the white-garbed Krauts—shoot us all, burn our camp and kick the ashes (and our corpses) into the nearest crevasse, and be back at their unseen camp in the ice pinnacles below our old Camp III before dark. By their dinnertime.

That, said the Deacon, was their plan.

The early part of their plan had gone like clockwork. They were out of our two-cartridge pistol range as six of them chopped their steps up the slope where we’d had our fixed ropes—the Deacon wasn’t going to take his two measly shots at that range anyway—and before long all six of the white-garbed men below were clustered at the base of the rope ladder. We knew this because I’d been sent out to burrow spy holes through the snow ridge about twenty yards east of the ledge, and Jean-Claude had done the same about twenty yards west of the ledge. Now we both had good views east and west; at least no one was going to sneak up on us by carving steps somewhere else on the 1,000-foot slope to the North Col.

J.C. whistled, I saw the Deacon’s white-hooded head pop up—behind a berm of snow at the edge of the precipice, out of sight of those below, even snipers in the ice pinnacles or on the glacier—and Jean-Claude held up both gloved hands, flashed six fingers, and then made the sign for climbing.

They were coming up, all right. Six of them. All armed, of course.

The five of us hadn’t exactly been lazy this long day. Pasang and Reggie, working on the Deacon’s instructions—or at least on the plan they and the Deacon had come up with that morning—had struck camp, packed essentials in our five rucksacks there at Camp IV, and then taken the heavy loads and one more load consisting of the main Whymper tent from the camp to find a suitable crevasse up on the Col. There they lowered the pack loads we’d dragged up the night before and the folded, tightly tied tent and its poles down into the darkness of the crevasse, covering over the anchoring stakes with kicks of snow. The cache could be found by someone hunting hard for it and following all of our boot prints on the North Col, but they had no reason to search—we’d left decoy gear and two of the Meade tents at the site of Camp IV for them to burn with their Teutonic efficiency—and we’d left a lot of boot prints atop the Col.

When I’d asked the Deacon about what Pasang and Reggie were doing and why, he’d said only, “We’ll need food, gear, clothes, and cooking stuff if we come down this way after we find Percy’s body.”

If?? I’d thought with some inner urgency. This way??? What other way off Everest was there?

I saved such questions for later.

At the present moment I was burying my face and body in the snow as the three stolen rifles and what sounded like one Schmeisser submachine pistol opened up on us. The Germans were unsure of precisely where we were, so their rounds slammed into the ice wall and snow berms all along a 60-yard front on either side of the point where the rope ladder ended at the ice ledge. Other bullets came whistling through the air overhead.

I found it astonishing that no one had ever told me—or that I’d never read—the simple fact that bullets flying close to you sound very much like bees humming by on a summer’s day in some farmer’s field of white wood beehives.

Being shot at for the first time in my life, even though none of the rounds were striking that close to where I hid behind the berm, created odd and interesting physical reactions: I had the tremendous urge to hide behind something or someone else, even behind myself; and my primary urge, which I began working on, was to burrow down into the snow and rock of the North Col until I was somewhere else completely.

This is what war feels like, I thought. And this is what a coward does in wartime.

I quit burrowing, forced myself to raise my head a bit, and watched.

J.C., the Deacon, and I had been busy all day as well: besides keeping an eye on the Germans below—and we’d handed that job over to Pasang and Reggie when they joined us in late morning—we’d been staying low and rolling the largest blocks of ice we could find to a place right behind the snow berm above the ice ledge where Mallory and the previous expeditions had pitched their Camp IV tents. And where our rope ladder now terminated on the ice ledge.

The night before, with clouds still filling the valley, the Deacon had taken quite a while to splice on another ten feet of his Miracle Rope to each of the staked ends of the caver’s ladder, then pulled out the old stakes after pounding in new ones near the rear wall of the ledge. It had been incredibly hard work for one tired man, even disregarding the debilitating altitude; the Deacon had been the only one lifting, loading, and tying on the hugely heavy loads that we had been pedaling up on J.C.’s bicycle apparatus.

Now the six Germans climbing the rope were using their free hands to fire pistols—mostly Lugers, I could see through my peephole, but also a few other semiautomatic weapons I couldn’t identify—up at the berms and ledge near the head of the ladder. They knew how precarious their position was, but with snipers covering them and with their own suppressing fire keeping anyone from getting to the top of the ladder, they must have felt fairly safe.

I thought of enemy knights clambering up siege ladders against a castle wall in the Middle Ages. The North Col was our castle, all right, but these Nazi Party Germans coming up the rope ladder were no damned knights. More like barbarian Huns.

Jean-Claude was using his hands to indicate to the Deacon, Reggie, and Pasang, where they crouched behind the berm directly above the ledge and ladder, how high the Germans were getting. Five fingers and a fist meant 50 feet. Six fingers and a fist…eight fingers and a fist.

We had set in place 115 feet of caving ladder. They were getting close to the top, firing at any imagined movement as they came. The snipers were directing their rifle fire at the berms near the top of the ladder ledge now. I had no idea where the Schmeisser’s slugs were going, but the ripping sound of its near-constant firing made me almost sick with fear. I could hear the Deacon’s former sniper rifle slowly firing from somewhere on the glacier further away.

I confess that I was terrified.

Not too terrified, however, to do what I had to do when the Deacon whistled twice. Jean-Claude and I crouched low, took a few steps back deeper onto the Col, and ran as quickly as we could to the place where Pasang and Reggie were waiting amidst the huge blocks of ice we’d rolled up to the berm above the ledge.

J.C. stopped just short of that berm to peer through a gopher spy hole he’d dug earlier. A pumped fist showed us that the Germans were still climbing and eight fingers showed us that they were within 20 feet of the top of the ladder.

Now the hard part for me—I really wasn’t sure I could do it until after I did. I threw my body up and over the berm and rolled down onto the ice ledge, immediately half-rolling, half-crawling on my belly toward the back wall of the ledge.

Bullets slammed into that wall five or six feet above me, knocking painfully sharp ice chips into my face. More slugs struck the icy lip of the ledge in front of me. But the Deacon had been correct; even the sniper with the ’scoped Lee-Enfield couldn’t get an angle on me here if I kept low. Of course, I thought, I’ll have to leave this fucking ledge sometime.

But that was planned for as well.

“Come on,” gasped the Deacon, shifting over behind Jean-Claude’s giant heap of bolted metal load-lifter with its bicycle seat, handlebars, pulley, flanges, and long metal support post. “We only have seconds.”

I nodded, and we both set our backs against the ice wall behind us as we planted our cramponed boots right where we’d practiced, coiled our legs tight, and pushed with all our might.

The massive bicycle pulley machine slid across the ice between the two guide furrows we’d dug with our ice axes. We’d even used four thermoses of our precious melted-snow water earlier to spill between those lines in the snow, creating an icy skidway.

The hundreds of pounds of bolt-assembled metal moved easily enough, and the Deacon actually stood at the rear section to steady the disappearing last support leg, risking getting shot in order to guide it down the ice wall. We shoved the mass of metal over the edge.

The Deacon dropped back down seconds before a fusillade of bullets slammed into the rear wall of our ledge and splatted into the snow berm above.

Men were screaming yards below us. The screams Dopplered away from us. The bullets kept coming, but fewer men were firing at us now.

J.C. held up three fingers. His beloved bicycle pulley device had taken three Germans off the ladder with it. It was one hell of a long fall from that ladder—not merely the vertical 100 feet of the ice face, but hundreds of feet of very steep slope below that. The screams of the falling Germans stopped, and the sudden silence seemed almost violent to me. But a quick flash of another three fingers meant that there were at least three more Germans climbing toward us. Unless they’re retreating down the ladder was my sudden thought, which felt strangely like a prayer to me.

Jean-Claude pumped his fist from his peekaboo position.

The three other Germans were still coming up, obviously using both hands to climb now since the pistol fire from the direction of the ladder had fallen to nothing.

“Ankles,” said the Deacon.

I dug my crampons into the ice of the ledge as deep as I was able and grabbed Richard Davis Deacon’s ankles as hard as I could—and my hands and wrists were very strong from my years of rock climbing. Still, it had seemed easier when we’d practiced on the flat snow and ice further up on the Col as the Deacon propelled himself forward like some circus acrobat, the belly of his off-white Finch jacket sliding across the almost smooth ice slide we’d created for J.C.’s bicycle pulley.

I’d driven my ice axe as deep into the ice at the junction of the back wall and the ledge as I could, and my right arm was around it. I was still almost pulled forward and off the ledge, until my crampons found deeper grip and the muscles and ligaments of my right arm tried to tear free, but I stopped the Deacon’s wild forward slide with the entire upper half of his body hanging horizontally out over nothing.

Taking his time, he aimed the black Luger, took another two or three seconds—I could imagine that first white German face, probably with blue eyes, turned up to the Deacon only 20 feet or so above him—and then the Luger fired. Rifle bullets were striking the ice wall near the Deacon now—the snipers obviously nervous about hitting their own men, two of them left on the ladder—but still the Deacon waited another few interminable, terrifying seconds before firing his second and last round down and inward along the vertical ice wall.

“Back!” he cried and I madly pulled his ankle, then his powerful calf muscles under the high wool stockings, then his thighs and rump, until he was back at the base of the wall with me.

“Both men fell,” he gasped. Then, more loudly, “The snowballs!”

Each “snowball” was a block of ice that must have weighed at least thirty or forty pounds. We’d had a hell of a time through the long day’s wait finding them and rolling them over to the “ammo dump” of ice blocks we’d built up just behind the berm.

The Deacon and I slowed each block’s impact on the ledge as much as we could—we didn’t mind if some of the ice broke off—and then we got behind each ice clump snowball and kicked it down our frozen sluiceway. Reggie and Pasang fed us another big chunk of ice every time we shouted, and we halted its slide, got behind it, aimed it, and kicked it out.

We had twelve such ice blocks in the ammo dump. We kicked them all over. The 900-and-some feet of steep slope beneath the point where the rope ladder started was very prone to avalanche.

Jean-Claude sprinted low to his peephole. The Schmeisser had stopped firing—the Deacon had said that their barrels heated up fast on full automatic—and only slow, deliberate rifle shots were spoiling the calm of the Himalayan late afternoon.

“Four more Germans down for good. One guy self-arrested and ran back to the rope and is climbing again,” shouted Jean-Claude. “Moving fast. About halfway up. Closer now…two-thirds of the way up the ladder.”

The Deacon nodded, reached for the fire axe he’d planted along the base of the rear wall of the ledge, counted to ten, and then, in two swift, sure movements, cut both ropes that now anchored the ladder.

The scream from below was very long and very satisfying.

“Now!” said the Deacon, and I ran for the west end of the ledge, leaping up into the low burrow we’d hollowed out there, rolling behind the berm even as shots rang out. A few seconds later the Deacon jumped into the low furrow we’d dug out at the east end.

Rendezvousing behind the tall berm with J.C., Pasang, and Reggie, the Deacon and I gestured to show that neither of us had been hit.

“I was watching,” said Dr. Pasang. “Five men, including the one who fell with the ladder, are dead. One man was still writhing, but I’m all but sure that his back is broken. Others were injured, but the German with the Schmeisser and another German hurried out of the ice pinnacles to help them back to cover.”

“If they started with the dozen we thought we saw last night,” said the Deacon, “they’re down to five now—counting out Bachner, whom Reggie removed from the game last night—and some of those five aren’t feeling all that chipper right now.”

“Do you think they’ll give up and leave?” I asked, my heart pounding so loudly that I could barely hear the words I’d just spoken.

The Deacon looked at me as if I’d just broken wind.

Reggie answered. “They won’t quit, Jake. They don’t know if we’ve already found Percy and Meyer and recovered what they had, but they can’t take the chance that we have. They could never return to Germany if they fail again…nor to Europe. Their own Nazi Party would have them killed. Their would-be Führer, from what Percival told me, is not a man who ever forgets or forgives. These top Nazi-German climbers will all be marked men if they fail.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “What was Meyer handing off to your cousin, Reggie? Some sort of revolutionary bombsight? A piece of the True Cross?”

“I don’t know what it was, Jake,” she said. “But I do know that it is far more important to Bruno Sigl’s political faction than any bombsight or the Holy Grail would be.”

“Les boches will try to climb again,” said Jean-Claude. “Climbing at several places along the face of the North Col, most probably. There may well be more than five of them left. They obviously came in force this year. The sniper will stay behind again, covering them, as they cut steps up the face. It is a very formidable rifle with a very formidable telescopic sight, Ree-shard.”

The Deacon grunted. I knew that he blamed himself for leaving the rifles at Advance Base Camp.

“Do you think they will come again soon, Mr. Deacon?” asked Pasang.

“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. We’d been passing around a single oxygen tank with mask that we’d left here for just this recuperation time, and he took his turn getting a few deep breaths of English air before he spoke again. “Cutting steps on a virgin ice slope anywhere down there is going to take them hours—until well after sunset. And they’ll still have to solve the last hundred feet or so of vertical ice. I’m not sure if they’d want to try this last vertical pitch of the climb several hours after dark.”

“Les boches probably do not know that Ree-shard had only two cartridges in Herr Bachner’s Luger,” said Jean-Claude. “The gunfire probably surprised them, no?”

“All the more reason for them to climb at night,” I said. I kept alternating hits on the English air tank with sips of water from one of the thermoses. After my first battle, modest as it was, I felt…strange. I hadn’t known that after a battle a man could feel both elated and strangely depressed and deflated at the same time. But I was aware of my strongest reaction: I was just damned glad to be alive.

“But they’d have to use electric torches strung around their necks for the hard parts of that climb,” said the Deacon. His voice was almost as husky as mine. “If I were still waiting with eight rounds left in the magazine of Karl Bachner’s Luger, that would be bad news for eight of them.”

“You’re that good a pistol shot?” asked Reggie. “Shooting straight down into the darkness, at only a flickering chest lamp, while you’re hanging out over the edge of the abyss in the cold?”

“Yes, I am,” said the Deacon.

I saw a strange smile pass between them. Something was being said, or acknowledged, that I wasn’t privy to. I felt a stab of jealousy and then mentally kicked myself in the ass.

“So are we sticking to the plan?” asked J.C.

“We are…unless anyone objects,” said the Deacon.

No one objected.

“The rucksacks and extra gear for above are all ready, correct?”

“Correct,” said Reggie.

“Then we’ll get the loads and head for Camp Five now,” said the Deacon.

I held my hand up like a student asking permission to go to the lavatory. “It’s not dark yet. The German down there who’s been firing your ’scoped Lee-Enfield has shown some talent. Won’t he pick us off one by one when we get to the snowfield on the North Ridge and become visible to anyone out on the glacier?”

The Deacon looked at the summit and ridges of Everest blocking the sunset—the Yellow Band and highest boulders and the North Ridge glowing brightly, the rest of the mountain and all of our North Col now in shadow.

“It will be almost dark by the time we’re on the North Ridge snow slopes,” he said softly. “We won’t be roped up. As we discussed this morning, we’ll be moving erratically—different paces—zigzagging up the slopes until we get to the fixed ropes, using no lights, not even our headlamps.”

“What about when we’re on the fixed ropes?” I said. “We’ll have to use the headlamps then—it will be too dark to climb and check our footing without them. Won’t we still be in range of the German sniper on the glacier?”

“Extreme range, yes,” said the Deacon. “But we’re not going to use our headlamps when we’re on the tough pitches where the fixed ropes are waiting, Jake. We’re going to use starlight and body memory and J.C.’s jumars.”

“Great,” I said.

“It will be great, mon ami,” said Jean-Claude. “Except for your constant cough, we all seem to feel well. We’ve acclimated—at least for this part of the climb. And climbing Mount Everest by starlight has to be the apogee of any climber’s lifetime.”

“So long as it isn’t the end of that lifetime,” I managed between coughs.

“I shall give you a little more of the anti-cough mixture, Mr. Perry,” said Dr. Pasang. “But not too much. We don’t want you getting sleepy and careless from the codeine. Luckily, I also have a pill that can help you stay awake.”

“We all may need that pill before the night’s over,” said the Deacon.

“And we’re climbing all the way to Camp Five in the dark?” I asked, feeling how tired I was from the day of constant coughing mixed with adrenaline rushes.

“No, Jake, my dear,” said Reggie, taking my gloved hand in hers. “Remember? We’ll pause to brew up and collapse the Big Tent at Camp Five, but we’re going all the way to Camp Six before dawn.”

Now I remembered the whole plan. Holy shit and fuck me, I almost said. But because there was a lady present and because I was a Harvard graduate and a gentleman—but mostly because it was 1925—I didn’t say it aloud.

Leaning against one another for support, keeping our heads low, we slouched our way toward Camp IV and our waiting loads and an absolutely unprecedented climb.