by Dan Simmons
“What is it, Dr. Pasang?” asked Jean-Claude.
“It is…was…the mucous membrane surrounding his larynx,” said Pasang.
“But it’s as solid and spiky as a crab,” said the Deacon.
“It’s been frostbitten for days,” said Dr. Pasang. “Frozen solid. Filling his throat and esophagus more and more as it expanded until it completely blocked his airway.”
“Can he live without it?” asked the Deacon. To my ear, he sounded only mildly curious. I made a mental note to ask him about that later.
“Of course,” said Pasang, smiling. “It will be painful breathing for some days for Mr. Perry, and we’ll have to get him down to thicker air soon, but he should be fine.”
It bothered me that they were talking about me as if I weren’t even there; as if I’d died after all. With only a little help, I struggled to my feet. God Almighty, my friends’ goggled faces and the amazing Summit Pyramid and deep, deep blue sky behind them and the white peaks and amazing curve of the earth beyond that were beautiful. I almost wept with joy.
“Do not move,” said Bruno Sigl from just six or eight feet behind us. I glanced over my shoulder just long enough to see the black pistol aimed at us, the Luger held steady in his right hand and the Lee-Enfield rifle slung over his left shoulder. He stood atop the limestone bench where I’d tied off the climbing ropes, his legs apart, his body perfectly balanced, too far away for us to try rushing him, towering over us with the Luger held steady. Victorious.
“If anyone moves the slightest bit,” said Sigl, “I will at once shoot all of you. I do not need any of you alive any longer. And thank you, Herr Perry, for the helpful fixed rope up this interesting Second Step.”
22.
The wind shoved at our backs. We stood now roughly in a line atop the rock of the Second Step, all facing Bruno Sigl, our hands raised as ordered.
The Deacon still has Bachner’s Luger, was my frantic thought. And so he did. But he’d fired both shots and the pistol was empty now. Sigl’s Luger, on the other hand, was almost certainly fully loaded. How many rounds had the Deacon said a Luger held in the box magazine in its pistol grip? Eight? Enough to shoot all of us, reload quickly, and apply any coups de grâce that were necessary.
We’d come a long, long way for this absurd and pathetic ending. And all because my choking fit distracted everyone from pulling up the 100-foot belay line that was still anchored to the limestone bench there atop the Second Step. My mind flitted like a crazed moth from one possible trick to another; none would work.
“Please tell me where the photographs are,” said Sigl. “To save me the time and effort of searching your bodies and rucksacks.”
“What photos?” asked Jean-Claude.
Sigl shot him. The report seemed very loud, despite the wind. J.C. dropped to the snowy rock. I could see blood flowing from his right side, but it didn’t seem to be geysering…didn’t seem to be arterial. But what did I know? Other than the Himalayan climber’s hard-earned certainty that any serious injury or illness at this altitude meant death?
We all started toward the fallen J.C., but stopped at a wave of the Luger, our hands going back up. Pasang said, “May I look at him and treat him, Herr Sigl? I am a doctor.”
Sigl laughed. “No, you may not. You’re an Indian nigger and your hands should never touch Aryan flesh…even that of a dead Frenchman.”
I ground my molars. But I did not move. I did not lunge for my rucksack eight feet away to dig for my pathetic, unloaded Very pistol. I did not lower my hands. Even if only for just a few more minutes, I found that I very much wanted to live.
“I watched through my field glasses while you took the photographs from the bodies,” said the German. “Five envelopes. Do not insult my intelligence again.”
“Herr Sigl,” I rasped. “May I spit?”
“What?” He aimed the Luger at my face.
“Blood, Herr Sigl. I’m ill. May I spit this blood out of my mouth before it makes me sick?”
The German said nothing so I turned sideways, careful that the wind would not carry it toward Sigl or anyone else, and spat out a glob of blood that had been building up in my ravaged throat. “Thank you,” I said to Sigl. Thank you for not shooting me, sir. Pathetic.
“That does not look good, Herr Perry,” said Sigl with another laugh. “You might be suffering a pulmonary embolism.” He waggled the pistol at us. “Everyone strip naked, please. Drop your clothes at your feet, then step away. Do nothing stupidly heroic or you all die now.”
“I’ll start,” said Reggie, taking a single step forward. In a few seconds she had set down her rucksack—out of her easy reach—and had pulled off her anorak and Finch duvet and goose down trousers, holding them in place with her foot as the wind at her back blew hard on her. In another fifteen seconds, she was down to a wool blouse over what looked to be silken underwear. Sigl was watching her and chuckling, but he also never took his eyes off the rest of us, the Luger steady. If it had been Reggie’s plan to distract Sigl to give the Deacon or me a chance to rush him, the plan wasn’t working. The distance was still too great to cover without being shot. None of us was in front of another, blocking the German’s shot, so Sigl had us all covered with that ugly pistol.
Reggie dropped her shirt, kept it from blowing away with a quick stab of her booted foot back onto the growing pile of garments. She pulled off the cotton and silk layers beneath that shirt. Now she was in wool knickerbockers from the waist down, and nude except for her brassiere on top. She reached around and undid the brassiere.
I felt like weeping. Delicate parts of Reggie would be frostbitten within minutes, more probably within seconds. Jean-Claude continued to writhe on the snowy rock, the blood continuing to spread.
“I’m sorry, Frau Bromley-Montfort,” laughed Bruno Sigl, “but I’ve seen English women’s tits before. Sogar die Titten von englischen Mädchen! And larger. But when you are naked, I will kill you last…perhaps leave you for my men to look at and play with while you are still alive.” His face seemed to transform into something beastlike then and he snarled, “Where are the photographs, you English cunt?”
“In my rucksack,” began Reggie. “I can get them if…”
Sigl started shaking his head.
Then Jean-Claude catapulted to his feet, not even holding his bloodied, wounded side, and rushed Sigl.
The German took half a step back and fired twice. Both slugs hit home somewhere in J.C.’s chest or gut. Jean-Claude kept staggering closer.
Sigl took two steps to his left, toward the South Face but still yards from the rotten snow cornice there, and fired twice more. The fourth 9-millimeter slug tore out through J.C.’s back, passing through the oxygen tank still in his rucksack and sending a hissing stream of English air up and out into the wind, enveloping both men in a hissing fog of ice crystals.
We all moved now, but it was Jean-Claude who had his arms around Sigl in a bear hug, forcing the larger man back one step, then two, then four…
“Nein, nein, nein!” screamed Sigl, hammering at Jean-Claude’s head with the black steel of the Luger’s grip. They both staggered another three steps back onto the snow at the cornice.
“Bâtard boche!” gasped Jean-Claude, coughing great amounts of blood all over the chest of Sigl’s pristine white anorak. Even with five bullets through him and oxygen hissing white and freezing in the air around them, J.C. continued flailing away with his bloody right hand at Bruno Sigl’s left side.
The cornice broke beneath them. They both dropped out of sight through the hole in the snow. Everyone but Reggie rushed as far to the south edge of the Second Step as we could. Sigl was screaming for a very long time, the scream Dopplering away from us as the two entangled men fell and tumbled over and over and then fell and then fell some more. No miracle crags to break their fall as one had with Percival and Meyer, and Sigl and J.C. weren’t roped together anyway—just bound by the iron vise of Jean-Claude’s one-armed bear hug. Eventually they were both lost to sight, dots and
then less than dots disappearing against the background of the Kangshung Glacier 10,000 feet below.
I heard not a single scream from Jean-Claude. I believed then and choose to believe to this day that he was dead before he really knew he was falling, although falling through the cornice with Sigl had been his plan from the first.
The Deacon looked down, not at the drop but at the edge of the rock, and I saw the reason for J.C.’s flailing with his free hand.
He’d wrested the Deacon’s Lee-Enfield rifle off Sigl’s shoulder and dropped it behind them a second before they fell.
I picked it up. “The telescopic sight was broken on the rock,” I said dully.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the Deacon and took the rifle from me. He snapped the trapezoidal metal magazine free from its place in front of the trigger guard and quickly emptied into his hand and counted the long, brass-bound cartridges. Then he quickly reloaded them into the magazine, using his thumb. I’d counted ten rounds. The lead nose of the bullets looked very heavy and very pointy.
Reggie was getting dressed again with Pasang’s help. She was shaking uncontrollably with the cold and her lips were blue. Despite Bruno Sigl’s sneering at her, she’d distracted him just enough for Jean-Claude to do what he did.
I crossed the top of the Second Step with the Deacon to the limestone bench at the top of the 90-foot drop. He went to one knee behind the bench, supporting his elbows and the rifle on the stone. I took a knee next to him and accepted the binoculars he’d just pulled from his rucksack.
“Be my spotter,” said the Deacon.
“I don’t know what that means, Richard.”
“It means keep looking and tell me if I’m shooting low or high, too far left or too far right,” he said. “If I miss, tell me in which direction I missed and how many yards left, right, up, or down. I’ll correct according to your calls.” His voice was so calm that we might have been discussing railway timetables in Paddington Station.
“Got you,” I said and raised the heavy field glasses to my eyes.
The four other Germans were only halfway between Mushroom Rock and the Second Step. They must have taken a break on the east side of the bollard, somewhere out of the roaring wind, while Sigl—the fittest and best climber in the group—had gone on ahead without a rest.
Before Reggie and Pasang could come up to join us, the Deacon—using only the iron sights on the rifle, ignoring the off-kilter telescopic sight on the left—had taken a breath, held it, and fired his first round. The sound of the shot made me jump and deafened me for a moment.
The first German in the line on the ridge dropped backward as if someone had jerked his legs out from under him. Through the binoculars, I could see the crimson stain spreading across the chest of his white anorak and into the white snow.
“Down,” I said. “Direct hit in the chest.”
Two of the other three Germans turned to run, forgetting that they were roped together and still tethered to the man who’d just been shot. The bloody body of the dead German was dragged some yards east behind the running men. The Keystone Kops aspect of the scene might almost have seemed funny to me if absolutely everything else right then hadn’t been so fucking sad.
Then two of the running Germans tripped and went down in a pile while the third man, still standing, whirled our way, took a pistol from his anorak pocket—I couldn’t tell if it was a Luger or some other sort of gun—and began blazing away in our direction. I heard one distant bee buzz, but other than that, nothing came near us. The sound of his shots was almost lost in the wind.
The Deacon took another breath, held it, and shot that German in the face. I saw the explosion of blood, flesh, and skull fragments all too well through my wavering binoculars. The pistol fell out of his dead hand, and he dropped and lay on the snow and rock, his long legs still twitching from random nerve impulses. But through my binoculars, I could see the lumpy gray stream of his brains fanned out behind his leather-helmeted head.
“Dead,” I said. “Head shot.” I didn’t know if such announcements were part of a spotter’s job, but I’d have done anything right then to help the Deacon.
The other two men struggled to get to their feet. One was still looking toward us, his head cocked back to see us on the top of the Second Step; suddenly the German thrust both arms and hands in the air in the universal sign of surrender.
The Deacon shot him twice, both times in the chest above the heart. Watching through the glasses, I realized that my spread hand would have covered the tight cluster of the bloody death wounds on that man’s chest.
The last man simply threw back his hood and tugged down his oxygen mask and balaclava—showing a bare face that looked very German and very young indeed, not even any chin stubble visible through my glasses—and appeared to be weeping while crouching on all fours. I wanted to say He’s not much older than a boy!
I didn’t say a word. Kurt Meyer had not been much older than a boy.
The Deacon shot him three times, once before the man in the white combat anorak tumbled over and twice more until he stopped wriggling.
Nothing and no one was moving on that part of the North East Ridge now, other than the occasional flap of torn fabric in the wind.
Reggie and Pasang stood behind us, looking down at the ridge. No one said anything. As if motivated by a single, shared thought, we all turned and took the few steps to the south, stopping well short of the collapsed cornice. The glacier so far below still seemed empty.
“Fuck,” the Deacon said very softly.
“Yes,” whispered Reggie.
We stepped back from the edge and moved around to sit on our rucksacks on the leeward side of the low bench—now littered with seven empty brass cartridges that the Deacon policed out of habit, picking them up and setting them in one of his outer pockets—and, the remaining four of us all hunkering lower from the wind, we started talking over what we were going to do next.
23.
We huddled low on the east side of the bench rock at the top of the face in order to talk, but first we all indulged in five or eight minutes of English air, on full flow. It helped a little, and I didn’t cough anything else up while inhaling or exhaling.
Finally we put down our masks and got down to business.
“I can’t believe that Jean-Claude is gone,” Reggie said. We leaned closer to hear her, but the high winds seemed to be moderating somewhat, as if Everest were allowing us a brief moment for remembrance of our friend.
But despite that lull in the wind, no one else said anything for a long minute or two. “It’s decision time,” said the Deacon.
I didn’t understand. “What decision? A dozen Germans, including Sigl, are dead, including the one Reggie shot with her flare pistol and the ones who fell from the ladder on the North Col. There’s nothing stopping us from going back down the mountain, back to what’s left of Base Camp, and then getting the hell out of here. Back to Darjeeling.” That was a long speech for a man with such a sore throat, and I was sorry my three friends had been forced to hear the rasp and scrape of it.
“I think Herr Sigl came in force this year,” said the Deacon. “A dozen of them may be dead, but I’d be surprised if someone with Sigl’s cunning didn’t leave one or two on the glacier, in the Trough, or down by Base Camp. Just to make sure none of us get away.”
“We have to get those photographs and negatives back to London,” said Reggie. “That’s our highest priority. That is what Jean-Claude and all our Sherpas died for, whether our Sherpa friends knew it or not.”
The Deacon nodded and then nodded some more but then shook his head. Then he looked up, over the top of my head to the west, and said, “I want to climb the mountain. But I’ve never abandoned a fellow climber in need and I won’t start now, Jake.”
I was stunned at this. “If you want to keep climbing, I’m fit to come with you,” I lied. It felt like the bloody trilobite I’d coughed up had eaten out my insides—the way the goraks had got at Mallory
and hollowed him out.
“No, Mr. Perry, you are not fit to go with him,” Pasang said quietly.
I blinked angrily at him. Who was he to deny me my life’s dream?
A doctor, responded the oxygen-supplied remnant of my brain.
“The summit should be about two hours’ climbing from here—maybe two and a half with slow going and breaking trail in deep snow on the Summit Pyramid,” said the Deacon. “But we have oxygen for the entire round-trip.”
“No, we don’t,” I rasped, confused again. “We’ve barely one full tank apiece.”
“Jake, didn’t you notice the tanks on Sigl and the other Germans we just shot?” said the Deacon. “They’re our rigs—Jean-Claude’s rigs. The Germans must have looted them from our reserve cache at Base Camp. They probably didn’t use more than two full tanks each in their climb to the North East Ridge…that should leave at least eight extra tanks for us. Full tanks.”
I understood then that we were in a unique position to try for the summit—a far stronger chance than Mallory and Irvine’s on their last day. They’d had to climb all the way from Camp VI at 27,000 feet on two or three tanks each. And their carrying rigs were much heavier. We were already above the Second Step—two hours away from the summit and only about 800 vertical feet below it. And we had not only a surfeit of oxygen rigs but also Reggie’s Big Tent, which we’d hauled up with us…something we could use if we were forced by sudden bad weather to bivouac up here. For every expedition before ours, a bivouac above 27,000 feet meant certain death. For our expedition, with Reggie’s tent, our goose down clothing, and ample tanks of English air, it would be just another first. One of many for the Deacon-Bromley-Montfort-Pasang-Perry-Clairoux Expedition.
The thought of J.C.’s name and the memory of his joyous drive to climb this damned hill made tears freeze on my lashes.
“I want to go, too,” I rasped. “We’ll all go. Step onto the summit at the same time.”
“No,” said Pasang. “Mr. Perry—you must excuse me, sir—you didn’t bleed too much when you coughed up the frozen mucous membrane to your larynx. But further climbing, more hours or even days at altitude, might cause a pulmonary embolism at the very least. Another night at this altitude would almost certainly be fatal.”