The Abominable

by Dan Simmons

  I crawled over to where Pasang stood, winded and gasping—he hadn’t been using the oxygen rigs at all, reserving all the tanks for my use—as I described what I’d seen.

  “Ahh,” said Pasang. “We’ve accidentally stumbled upon the crevasse that Herr Sigl and his friends used for the mass grave of our Sherpa friends at Camp Three.”

  I started shaking and had trouble stopping. Pasang produced a blanket from one of his overstuffed carryall bags and laid it over my shoulders.

  “Don’t you want to…go see?” I asked.

  “Is there a chance that any of them might be alive?” he asked. Our headlamp beams danced upon one another’s chests in the dark.

  I thought for a moment of the blue faces, frozen eyes, and frozen hands and bodies I’d seen piled down there. “No,” I said.

  “Then I do not want to see,” said Dr. Pasang. “I believe I was some yards off the proper path. Would you care to lead for a while, Mr. Perry, the better to avoid more crevasses?”

  “Sure,” I said and, setting my oxygen mask back in place, took the lead on the rope. Most of our marking wands were gone, but Sigl’s Germans had left readable boot prints where the original safe trail through the crevasses had been. I lowered my head to play the beam along ahead of me and concentrated on route finding and on forgetting everything else for a while. I knew that if I wandered off the true path, Jean-Claude would come back to set things right.

  Camp II at 19,800 feet and Camp I at 17,800 feet were simply gone. Whatever the Germans had done with the remaining tents and caches, Pasang and I could find no trace with our headlamps. Because of our careful descent—and more due to my slow pace—it was approaching the false dawn now as we did the last mile or so from Camp I down to where Base Camp used to be at 16,500 feet. If there were a couple of Germans waiting for us down here as the Deacon had feared, our Welsh miner’s lamps would be a dead giveaway in a literal sense, but Pasang and I found that—as exhausted as we both were—we couldn’t stop until we got out of this damned valley.

  Again and again I imagined Reggie and the Deacon alone, perhaps ill or injured, stuck far up there at Camp VI or Camp V—a different universe from this one in the glacier valley—stuck and ill or injured and awaiting rescue from Pasang and me.

  There’d be no such rescue. I was having so much trouble breathing that I could barely stand and was staggering more than striding down the long moraine slope between looming penitente pinnacles and ice walls on either side. I couldn’t have climbed back up to Camp II if my life depended on it, and that didn’t even entail any glacier travel.

  We came carefully out of the moraine ridges and pinnacles to where Base Camp had been. There was nothing left. All of the bodies had been removed, all the tents taken somewhere and most probably burned. It was as if the Deacon-Bromley Expedition had never been here at all.

  The sky was getting lighter now—the black of night giving way to the slight gray glow of the predawn. Taking a wide half-circle around where the tents and sangas of Base Camp used to be, Pasang and I—still roped up for some reason—came out onto the gravel flats beyond the last of the moraine ridges. We clicked off our headlamps and put the leather rigs in the carryalls that we’d shifted to carrying on our backs, over the oxygen rigs. I had four of the heavy gas mask bags back there, bulging with everything from an Unna cooker we hadn’t used to extra pots and pans we’d brought along.

  “What now?” I whispered painfully. “Can I take off these last two oxygen tanks?”

  “Not yet, Mr. Perry,” Dr. Pasang whispered back. “You are still having great trouble breathing because of your inflamed and swollen throat. I really do not wish to do a tracheotomy unless I must.”

  “Amen to that.” Even my whispers sounded ragged. “Which way, then? It’s eleven miles to the Rongbuk Monastery and we can ask for help there, but I doubt very much if I can make it beyond the monastery to Chobuk or Shekar Dzong.”

  “Herr Sigl may have left friends at the monastery,” observed Pasang.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Precisely,” said Pasang. “But let us try to walk those last miles to the vicinity of the monastery and then, dressed in a pilgrim’s cloak I’ve brought with me, I shall reconnoiter Rongbuk while you wait in the rocks at the base of the approach. If there are no Germans there, we shall place ourselves under the care and protection of the reincarnation of Padma Sambhava, Guru Rinpoche, the good Dzatrul Rinpoche, Holy Lama of the monastery.”

  “A man, a plan, a canal…,” I rasped, not even amusing myself. “But first I think we should…”

  I didn’t hear the shots until after the bullets struck.

  The first impact made Pasang’s head snap forward in a mist of blood that covered my own face and lowered oxygen mask. An instant later I felt the second slug tear through my packs and O2 rig and hit me high in the back, above and to the right of my left shoulder blade.

  Pasang had already fallen forward, apparently lifeless, onto the sharp rocks beneath our crampons. Before I could open my mouth to shout, there was that impact against my upper back and I fell forward next to him, not even staying conscious long enough to break my fall with my forearm.

  There was the pain in my back and throat and encroaching blackness; and then only the blackness.

  26.

  I came partially conscious sometime later to the sound of two men talking loudly. They were about ten feet uphill and upwind of us—the wind was roaring down the Rongbuk Glacier valley with a renewed ferocity—and the two were speaking in German loudly enough for me to make out the words over the wind.

  Pasang was lying dead, also on his belly, so close that our faces were only inches apart. He’d had no part in his black hair before, but now his leather cap and woolen top cap had been knocked off and a terrible white streak of what I assumed was exposed skull or brains ran down the top of his scalp. His face was completely covered with blood. I started to raise a hand from my side to touch him—to shake him to make sure he was really dead—when Pasang whispered without moving his bloody lips, “Don’t move, Jake.” The whisper was almost inaudible to me six inches from him, so I was sure the two Germans arguing ten feet away against the wind could not hear him.

  “I’ll translate,” whispered Pasang.

  “Your head…,” I whispered back.

  “Scalp wounds always bleed dramatically,” was his whispered response. “I will have a headache—if we survive—nothing more. They did not search us. Let me translate, Jake, so we know when to reach under our outer jackets for our pistols.”

  I’d almost forgotten the Webley revolver tucked in a pocket in my Finch duvet and the fully loaded Luger that Pasang had put in the pocket of his goose down jacket.

  Amazingly, I recognized the voices from Munich. The heavier, deeper voice belonged to that right-wing German radical’s bodyguard…what was the bodyguard’s name?…Ulrich Graf.

  The other voice belonged to another man at the table that night—he’d said little but I recognized his near-lisp—Artur Wolzenbrecht.

  Ulrich Graf was saying, almost whining, “SS-Sturmbannführer Sigl…hat gesagt, dass ich sie aufhalten soll, und ich habe sie aufgehalten.”

  In a burst of surreality, Pasang’s bloody mask of a face, his eyes still closed and caked with pooled blood that all but concealed his moving lips, whispered a simultaneous translation. If I’d known that he spoke German, I’d forgotten it.

  “SS-Sturmbannführer Sigl said to stop them, so I stopped them.” It took me a second to realize that he was translating what Graf had said and another sickening second for me to realize that the “them” being stopped and shot was “us.”

  “Idiot!” barked Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannführer Sigl hat gesagt, dass du sie aufhalten sollst, bevor sie das Tal verlassen können. Aber nicht, sie zu erschiessen.”

  Pasang whispered the translation. “Idiot! Sturmbannführer Sigl said to stop them before they left the valley. Not to shoot them!”

  Ulrich Graf’s voice came down the
wind to us in the tone of a stupid, sulking child. “Na ja, mit meinen Schüssen habe ich sie doch angehalten, oder?”

  “Well, my shooting them stopped them, didn’t it?” translated Pasang through blood-caked lips.

  I heard Wolzenbrecht sigh. “Sturmbannführer Sigl hat befohlen, sie zu verhören und sie dann nach Fotos zu durchsuchen. Aber keiner von ihnen sieht so aus, als ob wir sie noch verhören könnten.”

  “Sturmbannführer Sigl ordered us to interrogate them, then search them for the photographs. But neither one looks alive enough to interrogate.” This gave me a second’s hope. But I’d fallen with my right hand under my body and that hand never stopped moving—millimeter by millimeter—first under my Shackleton anorak, and then to the right pocket of my Finch duvet, where the Webley revolver painfully pressed against my lower ribs.

  “Was sollen wir jetzt machen?” said Graf. “Warten, bis einer wieder zu sich kommt?”

  I caught a hint of movement from Pasang and realized that he was moving his hand to the Luger in his down jacket. His whispered translation was almost inaudible even to me—“What shall we do, then? Wait for one of them to regain consciousness?”

  Wolzenbrecht’s reply sounded to me like a rough imitation of a German shepherd gargling gravel. “Nein, vergiss das Verhör. Töte sie erst, und dann durchsuchen wir sie. Aber mit Kopfschuss, nicht auf den Körper zielen.”

  “No. Forget the interrogation,” Pasang interpreted in a fast whisper. “Kill them first, then we will search. But fire into their heads, not into their bodies.”

  That convinced me to run the risk of pulling the Webley free of my jackets and lying on it. My finger found the trigger guard, then the trigger. My thumb found the hammer. I remembered the Deacon telling me that a revolver had no safety. I could see the slight motion as Pasang freed the Luger beneath him.

  “Warum denn?” demanded Graf.

  “Why?” whispered Pasang, and I realized that the semi-retarded bodyguard wasn’t questioning why Dr. Pasang and I should be shot, only why we should be shot in the head and not the body.

  “Damit wir keine Fotos beschädigen, falls sie welche bei sich haben, du Trottel,” snapped Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannführer Sigl kommt sicher bald aus den Bergen zurück. Stell die Schmeisser auf einen Schuss ein.”

  Since their boots were already crunching in our direction before Pasang whispered his translation, I already had the gist of what Wolzenbrecht was saying.

  “So that we don’t damage the photographs if the pictures are hidden on their persons, shithead,” whispered Pasang. “Sturmbannführer Sigl should be coming down from the mountain very soon, so set your Schmeisser to single-fire and let’s get it over with…”

  Schmeisser! That goddamned submachine gun! These Nazi fuckers were going to shoot us in the head just to avoid punching holes in the obscene photos each of us was carrying—me in my carryall, Pasang in a large pocket in his wool jacket. They were content to search our corpses after shooting us in the next few seconds. Time was up.

  Pasang and I rolled in opposite directions in the same instant and came to our knees with our pistols raised.

  What happened next is still not clear to me. There had been two Germans striding toward us, now there were blurs of gray motion all around them. Massive figures. Glimpses of gray fur in the swirling snow. Hair everywhere.

  I saw Ulrich Graf’s head flying through the air, suddenly removed from its body. I had time to see and hear Artur Wolzenbrecht scream shrilly as something looming very gray and very large in the snow flurries rose over him.

  Then something hit me in the side of the head, I fired one shot from the Webley—hitting nothing, my aim knocked high—and only had time to see Pasang also falling forward from where he’d risen to his knees on the moraine rock, the Luger already dropped from his hand, his eyes closed again in that bloody face—before I went down face-first onto the stones and blackness again.

  27.

  I came to lying in a fresh-smelling silken tent, tied facedown onto many not-so-fresh-smelling silken pillows. My wrists were tied to stakes driven into the ground between an array of elaborate Persian rugs that covered most of the floor of the tent. My head hurt terribly. My upper back hurt quite specifically—I could feel where the German bullet had entered when Pasang and I were first shot. I moved my head to look in both directions—more rugs, tall tentpoles, more tent, more pillows, no Pasang. Maybe he was dead. Perhaps I was.

  But I hurt too much to be dead. I noticed that I was shirtless in the cold—I’d accidentally dislodged blankets when I’d first stirred—but there was something bulky and sticky on my back. I wondered idly if the bullet was in my lung or spine or near my heart. My head hurt too much for me to work on that problem with the mental effort it deserved.

  I heard something behind me and I swiveled my head quickly enough to send so much pain coursing through my skull that I almost fainted, but I did manage to see a very Asian-looking Tibetan, or perhaps Tibetan-looking Mongolian, step into the tent with a steaming bowl in his hands, see him notice that I was conscious, and then he beat a hasty retreat.

  Bandits, I realized. I could only hope that it was the band that Lady Bromley-Montfort was friends with and had already bribed with pistols and chocolate. What was the name of that band’s leader…??

  Jimmy Khan. How can one forget that?

  The little Asian-looking man in furs and still carrying the steaming bowl came back through the tall tent entrance with Pasang and the bandit Jimmy Khan walking next to him. Pasang had obviously bandaged his own head and also washed the blood from his face. He did not look dead any longer. I could see the end of the bullet furrow as a white scar raised against the dark skin of Pasang’s left temple.

  The bandit Jimmy Khan said something in Tibetan and Pasang translated. “Khan says, ‘Good, you are alive again.’”

  From our first encounter the month before, I remembered that Jimmy Khan spoke and understood some English. “Why am I staked out here, Pasang? Am I a prisoner?”

  “No,” said my tall Sherpa friend. “You were a bit delirious, Jake. I decided to remove the bullet from your back while you were unconscious, and the ropes were the only way to keep you from rolling over onto your dressings.” He produced the curved penknife from a pocket and cut the twine binding my hands.

  “I had a bullet in my back but I’m alive?” I said, head fuzzy and hurting.

  “Mr. Ulrich Graf—he had his identification on his body—appears to have shot both of us,” said Pasang. “The bullet that hit me just tore through scalp and left a groove in my skull. I was unconscious only a short while from that. The bullet that hit you high in the back passed—as far as I can tell—through both of your oxygen tanks, a steel fitting on your flow regulator, as well as through the Unna cooker and two of the cooking pots you were carrying in the gas mask bag slung over your back. Oh, and the slug also had to pass through the aluminum frame of the oxygen rig before it struck you. Most of its kinetic energy was spent by the time it reached your body, Jake. I removed it from beneath only about an inch of skin and a small layer of shoulder muscle.”

  I blinked at this. My back hurt but not as much as my head. I’d been shot! “How do you know that Graf was the one who shot us both?”

  “I found the mashed-flat slug that grazed me at the base of the boulder we were standing near,” said Pasang. “But it was the slug that I pulled from your back that settled the matter. Both were nine-millimeter Parabellum rounds…essentially you were struck by a pistol shot from long distance, otherwise you’d be dead.”

  “Artur Wolzenbrecht also had a Luger in his hand when he was coming toward us in that last second or two,” I managed to say. What did it matter which one of those Nazis shot us? was what I was really thinking.

  “He did,” said Pasang and held up a shortened bit of lead. “Evidently they paint the points of the Schmeisser nine-millimeter rounds black. Both of ours had black tips. Graf’s Luger carried that kind of ammunition.”

  I sat
up on the cushions and swayed a bit with dizziness. “So what happened to Graf and Wolzenbrecht?” I asked. I tried to remember through the throbbing blur, but all I could recall was starting to raise the Webley, blurs of gray and dark masses moving in the swirling snow, screaming.

  “That’s a good question,” said Pasang. There was some warning tone in his voice, but I was too preoccupied with pain to sort it out.

  “If you can stand, Jake,” said Pasang. “Let me help you outside so that you can see something before more vultures arrive.”

  “You explain,” said Jimmy Khan to Pasang and patted me on the back right where the dressing covered my wound. I managed not to scream.

  Over on the broad, flat boulder near where we’d been standing when we’d been shot from distant ambush—evidently the two Germans had been hidden behind a boulder only about twenty yards beyond the memorial pyramid of stones that had been raised last year for Mallory, Irvine, and the seven lost Sherpas in 1922—Ulrich Graf’s and Artur Wolzenbrecht’s decapitated heads were set on short stakes lined up very neatly next to one another. Their wide eyes—just beginning to glaze over thickly with the white caul of death—seemed to be staring at us in total surprise. Next to the heads were four severed arms complete with hands, two right arms to the left of Graf, two left arms to the right of Wolzenbrecht.

  “Jesus Christ Almighty,” I whispered to Pasang. Looking at Jimmy Khan standing and beaming a few yards away, I also whispered, “Khan and his boys really did a job on these poor devils.”

  Dr. Pasang looked at me without blinking. His voice seemed too loud when he spoke. “Mr. Khan explained to me that he and his fifty-five men arrived thirty minutes or so after whatever happened here. He and his men are very impressed with how four or five yeti, angered at the Germans’ presence, took care of our enemies.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I began. But then I finally sorted out the tone of warning in Pasang’s voice and gaze and shut up. For some reason, the bandits wanted us to buy the story that yetis, rather than fur-covered barbarian bandits on horseback, had killed the Germans amidst all that swirling snow. I had no idea why they’d want us to believe that, but I was finally conscious enough to know to keep my mouth shut. These bandits had already knocked me on the head once.