The Abominable: A Novel

13.

The single two-man Meade tent that Reggie had set up as our Camp VI was invisible during the climb and much further out on the North Face than I remembered, but Reggie led us right to it. There were some spare oxygen tanks and a small cache of food we’d left there before fanning out to look for bodies on the North Face that seemingly long-ago Monday, as well as our two sleeping bags from Sunday night. We were now hauling water, tea, coffee, and other tepid liquids with us after the boiling of snow we’d done at Camp V before departing the North Col.

“Looks very comfortable,” the Deacon said as he stared at the tiny tent pitched atop one boulder at a 40-degree up-angle and almost absurdly wedged between two other large boulders. Much of this part of the climb on the North Ridge, not far below the Yellow Band, had been through rock gullies and mazes of larger boulders. But Reggie had decided to pitch our Camp VI four days ago—eternities ago—at this site hundreds of feet off the ridgeline. There hadn’t been any near-flat places on the ridge, either, even if the high winds there had allowed us to consider it.

The pre-dawn indirect sunlight was slowly brightening the entire sky behind the North East Ridge—which was not so far above us now—and it wouldn’t be long until direct sunlight struck Everest’s summit just a mile or so west and some 2,000 feet above us.

We took our rucksacks off for the first time since Camp V and collapsed onto them, each of us taking care not to let either the pack or ourselves go tumbling down the steep-roof-slate slabs of the face. We were all very tired, and I felt both the codeine and Benzedrine wearing off. The coughing had returned with a vengeance.

Only J.C. was currently carrying his binoculars outside his many layers, so I took turns looking through his glasses for the men who wanted to kill us today. We scoped what we could see of the North Col and of the North Ridge up to the slight glimmer of collapsed but still visible green tent that was Camp V. I couldn’t see any figures moving anywhere.

“Maybe they gave up and went home,” I said between gut-wrenching coughs.

Reggie shook her head and pointed, her arm extended almost straight down. “They’re just leaving Camp Four, Jake. I see five men.”

“I also see five,” said the Deacon. “One of them seems to be carrying a pack and my rifle slung over his shoulder. There’s a chance that could be Sigl, unless he brought a more experienced sniper with him…which is a real possibility.”

“Merde,” whispered Jean-Claude.

“I agree completely,” I said. I realized that the Deacon was no longer training his glasses below, but had turned them and was studying something beyond the North Summit—the highest and true summit of Everest. “Looking for that mythical traverse?” I said, regretting my sarcasm as soon as I’d aired it.

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Ken Owings said that there’s a very nasty step in the ridgeline between the two summits—he could see it from as far away as Thyangboche in the Khumbu Valley, where he lives. It’s a damned rock step, like our supposedly unclimbable Second Step here on the North East Ridge above us, but Ken says that this rocky step between the summits is about forty to fifty feet high from the downhill side.”

“That would be unclimbable at such an altitude, Ree-shard,” J.C. said.

“Perhaps,” said the Deacon. “But we don’t have to climb it, Jean-Claude. If we get past this summit, we’ll be heading down. We just have to rappel down the damn step and then down-climb to the South Summit and lower.”

No one said anything, but I suspect the other three were thinking what I was: I didn’t have the energy to climb another single step, much less a mile of the North East Ridge and two major steps—the Second Step above and to the right of us supposedly the “impossible” one—much less the steep Summit Pyramid and actual corniced summit. It simply wasn’t going to happen.

“Do we have to worry anytime soon about Sigl or whoever’s carrying your rifle taking potshots at us?” I asked, if only to change the subject.

“I think the chap carrying my rifle will be careful about when and where he shoots at us,” said the Deacon.

“That’s reassuring,” I said. “Why should he be?”

“Because he’s looking for the same thing we are,” said the Deacon.

“Escape from crazy Nazis?” I said.

The Deacon shook his head. “Whatever Meyer and Bromley had with them. I believe that Bruno Sigl made the mistake one year ago of shooting either Meyer or Bromley or both—I’m sorry, Reggie, but I do think that’s the case—at a place where the bodies fell or avalanched beyond Sigl’s ability to reach them.”

“I agree,” said Reggie. “That fits with what Kami Chiring saw last year from near Camp Three using the Germans’ binoculars. He thought he saw three figures up on the North East Ridge…then, suddenly, only one. And he heard what could have been the echo of pistol shots.”

“So that’s where we search,” said the Deacon. “Along the ridgeline. The North East Ridge—where few people save for Mallory and Irvine have ever gone.”

“And, if you are correct in your theory, mon ami,” said J.C., “Sigl and Reggie’s cousin Percival and this young Meyer fellow.”

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “I don’t think Sigl will make the same mistake twice—or allow his sniper to, if someone else is carrying my Lee-Enfield. If they’d shot us anywhere on the North Ridge or during this climbing traverse to Camp Six here, our bodies might easily have fallen—probably would have fallen—down one of the gullies toward the main Rongbuk Glacier or all the way down and over the North Face onto the East Rongbuk Glacier six thousand feet below. The chances of whatever they’re looking for surviving such a fall in one piece, even if it’s just a document, would be very small.”

“What an encouraging thought,” said J.C.

“So they’ll be reluctant to shoot unless they know we won’t fall far,” continued the Deacon, undeterred. “So my suggestion is that we just keep outclimbing the bastards.”

Reggie rubbed her pale forehead. I wondered if her head ached as abysmally as did mine. At least she didn’t have my terrible cough.

“What do you mean, Richard?” she asked. “We’ve come pretty far. We’re very tired.”

“I mean we keep climbing until dark,” said the Deacon, turning his goggles up toward the Yellow Band and North East Ridge above us. The wind was blowing spindrift along that ridge and out away from the two impossibly distant but strangely near-looking Steps and the Summit Pyramid. There was snow underfoot—or I should say “undercrampon”—everywhere now. We were moving into a different world. And one that tolerated almost no forms of life.

“We either climb or traverse around that First Step—we could even bypass it by traversing along that narrow ridgeline atop the Yellow Band—and then climb back up toward the ridge and get the best of that damned Second Step,” continued the Deacon. “We stay just below the ridgeline on this side so we don’t show ourselves in silhouette to the shooter below, then set up Reggie’s Big Tent in the first-ever French-Anglo-American Camp Seven somewhere below the final Summit Pyramid.”

“What does this achieve, Ree-shard? Does it not merely postpone the inevitable? I need not remind you that les boches are armed, and we have…Very pistols.”

“First of all,” says Reggie, speaking for the Deacon, who was out of breath, “getting to the North East Ridge is the best way to look for my cousin Percy and whatever Kurt Meyer spent months sneaking out of Europe. That’s important. That’s the real reason we’re here.”

“But the odds of actually finding them…,” I began.

“You found George Mallory,” said Reggie.

I sighed. “In that huge open area down there. And I literally almost stumbled over him. I’ve been looking through my binoculars for ten minutes, but I can’t even see his body from here. I know where it was.”

I still felt bad about our not taking the time to bury Mallory.

“Well, there’s always the chance that we shall stumble over Herr Meyer or my cousin,” said Reggie. “At least if we climb to the North Ridge, we shall be walking where Kami Chiring last saw him. But camping above the Second Step, Richard…if the usual wind rises, I don’t think even my domed tent could survive it. And it will be very cold up there so near to twenty-nine thousand feet.”

“You’re all forgetting something,” I rasped between coughs.

“What, Jake?” said the Deacon.

“You and Norton compared the Second Step to the prow of a battleship,” I managed to say before coughing again. “A hundred feet of near-vertical rock. No man alive—not even Mallory—could climb that. Not at that ungodly altitude. And the North Face below that Second Step looks too steep to traverse.”

“You’re wrong, Jake,” said the Deacon. “There’s one man alive who can do that vertical rock free climb of the Second Step.”

I mentally scrambled to think of all the great European and American rock climbers who might be up to the challenge of free-climbing the Second Step at this debilitating altitude, but could think of no one.

“You, Jake,” said the Deacon. “You, my friend. Let’s go.”

He pulled the straps of his heavy rucksack on again. This time, I noticed, he clipped his oxygen face mask in place. All the rest of us did the same. The Deacon put the two heavy, full oxygen bottles we’d left cached there at Camp VI in his already overloaded backpack. Then he led the way up the boulder-strewn face toward the very steep rock gullies that would lead us up and through the Yellow Band and out into more such gullies and rock mazes before we could reach the windswept North East Ridge.