On the Edge

by Michael Ridpath

  Calder had assumed skiing would involve lifts and busy slopes packed with skiers where he would be safe. But he was going to be dropped in the middle of nowhere with Martel, whom he knew, or thought he knew, had been trying to kill him. Perhaps he should have been more careful and driven away when he still had the chance. But there was no way out of it now.

  He looked down. This was going to be difficult skiing, Calder thought, very difficult skiing. For a Briton who took the occasional holiday to the Alps, Calder considered himself competent. He had skied down many black runs in France and Switzerland at high speed. But he knew he would be nowhere near as skilled as Martel. The important thing was not to allow Martel to tempt him into overreaching himself. He felt the awkward bulk of the pistol under his jacket. If this was some kind of trap he would not be afraid to use it.

  After twenty minutes or so, the helicopter hovered over a narrow ridge before lowering itself on to a flat plateau no more than twenty yards square. Calder admired the skill of the pilot. Mountain flying was treacherous even at the best of times, with unexpected downdraughts and turbulence threatening to surprise the unwary, but this man clearly knew what he was doing.

  Martel and he climbed out and put on skis and goggles. The view was breathtaking. Every way he looked, there were mountains, and to the north the forbidding peak of the Grand Teton itself. The valley of the Snake River was out of sight and there was no sign of habitation anywhere. He was alone in the wilderness, alone with Jean-Luc Martel. He patted his pocket and felt the comforting shape of Pohek’s gun.

  The Bell rose into the air and powered off over the ridge just above them.

  ‘Normally the helicopter would stay with us and take us back up when we finished the run,’ Martel said. ‘But it’s already nearly four o’clock. We don’t have that much time until it gets dark. So we’ll ski down the whole mountain from here, and a car will meet us at the bottom. Believe it or not, there is a road down there.’

  He surveyed the gentle bowl beneath them. ‘Don’t worry, I know this mountain very well. But you must be careful to stick with me. There are some, how do you say, dead ends, where you go down and come to a cliff with no way back up. Also there are avalanche risks here. You see this bowl?’ He pointed to the smooth, pristine snow beneath them, lined on three sides by ridges like the one they were standing on. ‘If you go to the left, you start an avalanche. If you go to the right, it is not so steep, no avalanche. I know that. For you, it is not so obvious. So you stay with me, OK?’

  ‘OK,’ Calder nodded. He thought of Perumal who had blundered in his ignorance into an avalanche. Calder had no intention of making the same mistake.

  Martel set off down the ridge. He skied fast but with terrific grace, especially for a man so large. Calder followed, and managed to keep up, although his turns were not as tight or as graceful. The snow was the purest powder, a delight to cut through. Calder felt a sense of intense elation as he carved his way through the bowl, sun and wind on his face, the swish of snow beneath his feet, and all around the beautiful emptiness of the Rockies.

  Martel led him down to the bottom of the bowl and gathered enough speed to make it most of the way up the slope on the other side. Calder didn’t quite have Martel’s momentum on the downward run and so had to walk up the slope crab fashion on his skis. Martel was fast uphill as well as down and Calder found it impossible to keep up with him. But fortunately he saw Martel wait for him at the crest of the ridge.

  The tall man turned and grinned. ‘How do you like it?’

  ‘It’s wonderful,’ said Calder, his suspicion almost gone. ‘Truly wonderful.’

  ‘Ready for some more?’

  Calder nodded, and Martel set off down another bowl. This one was slightly steeper and Martel picked up the pace, but Calder kept up. The slope seemed to flatten off before a steep edge, but Martel didn’t slow up and so neither did Calder. He was keeping his eye on Martel, copying his every move, knowing that Martel would take the best line down the slope.

  Suddenly Martel seemed to soar into the air over the edge. Calder had a split-second to decide whether to try to stop or to follow him. Stopping might be more dangerous, he thought, and a second later he too was in mid-air. He landed on a slope that seemed to be little more than a cliff pointing straight down. Martel in front was somehow weaving from side to side in the powder, putting some brake on his downward speed, dodging patches of bare rock. Calder realized he would have to do the same thing or he would simply hurtle down the slope in little more than a glorified fall. Somehow he managed to control his skis, jumping from side to side in an unsteady rhythm.

  At the bottom there seemed to be a brief run-out, too narrow to stop on, and then another drop. Martel reached the run-out and sped on over the next precipice. Through his peripheral vision, Calder noticed that Martel seemed to twist in the air to the left.

  As he hit the edge, he leaned to the left as he had seen Martel do. Once more his skis abandoned the snow. Beneath him was a sight that filled him with panic. Twenty feet below was an even narrower run-out, little more than a ledge, and far too narrow to stop or even slow down on. Beyond that was sky. Wide open blue sky. As he had been trained to do in the RAF, he channelled the instant surge of energy released by the panic into a reaction, tucking up his skis, which were still pointing to the left, and bracing for impact. He hit the snow, slid and one ski dangled over the edge. Fortunately his weight was sufficiently far back on the other ski to maintain some grip, and he shot off to the left along the ledge. It became a chute down between a boulder and the cliff face and then he hurtled out into a wide expanse of gently sloping snow.

  Half-way down was the gangling figure of Martel, looking back up at him.

  Calder drifted down to him, breathing heavily.

  ‘You are a good skier,’ Martel said with grudging admiration.

  Calder gasped for air. He was shaking. He looked back at the cliff he had just avoided. There was a fall of at least two hundred feet to a field of boulders. If he hadn’t twisted to the left, as he had seen Martel do, he would surely be down there now. Dead.

  It was clear that was exactly what Martel had hoped would happen.

  Martel turned and sped off down the slope. Calder followed. His only hope was to keep up with him. He was sure Martel wasn’t bluffing when he said there were many dead-ends on the route down. He suspected that Martel had counted on him missing the last turn and hurtling off into space, so he hoped there would be nothing quite as difficult to come.

  He was right. But his muscles were tiring and the concentration was taking its toll. He did fall eventually, at a relatively easy traverse, which he took too fast. One ski caught in thick powder and spun him around. He went over the edge and fell perhaps twenty feet, snow, rock and sky spinning, before landing in a deep drift. The impact of the snow knocked the breath out of him, but he neither felt nor heard anything breaking.

  He lay there motionless for a minute or so, and then struggled to clamber into an upright position, which was very difficult. One ski remained attached to his boot. The other had spun off somewhere. He looked around and couldn’t see it. Above him was some snow, then ten feet of rock face and the traverse. Below was twenty feet of snow and then air. Another cliff face. The ski must have gone that way.

  He looked around for Martel and couldn’t see him.

  He took off the one ski and struggled up the slope trying to carry it. The snow was deep and fine, his poles plunging far down into it at every step, and it was hard work making progress. At one point he sank to his chest, and he had to swim to keep himself above the snow. It took him ten minutes of struggling just to reach the rock face. His back hurt around the base of the spine where he had damaged it ejecting. That was worrying: his doctors had warned him that any further injury to his spine could do permanent damage to his nervous system. That was why they had forbidden him to ski, Naturally, he had taken no notice.

  It was only ten feet up to the traverse, and the rock was cracked and
broken with plenty of handholds, but try as he might, he couldn’t climb up in his ski boots. He slumped, defeated, against the rock face.

  In normal circumstances, the thing to do would be to wait for help. Perhaps Martel was already down by the car that was meeting them at the bottom of the mountain, raising the alarm. Or perhaps he wasn’t. Calder glanced at the sun, slipping ominously down towards the mountains to the west. He only had an hour or so until it was dark. Already the patch of snow he was stuck in was in shadow, a shadow stretching twenty miles from a mountain ridge far off to the southwest. Without the sun, it was cold. It would only get colder.

  He pulled out his mobile phone and switched it on. No signal. No surprise.

  He was going to have to get himself down the mountain. No one else would do it for him.

  He took off his gloves and boots and plunged his stockinged feet into the snow. Instantly his socks were wet. It would be impossible to carry poles, boots and skis while climbing the rock face, so he flung the boots in a high arc up on to the ledge above. That was relatively easy. The single ski was much more difficult, because every time it reached the snow above, it just slid down again, and Calder had to catch it before it continued on its way down the mountain to join its partner an unknown number of feet beneath him.

  Finally, on about the tenth attempt, he threw it up and it stayed up, probably wedged against the boots.

  By now his hands were cold and his feet were wet and freezing. He began to scale the cliff face. The bare rock bit into his hands, and especially his feet. He found his toes were tougher than the soles of his feet and so he climbed on tip toe. He had to arch his back to stretch upwards for handholds, and his spine complained loudly. He quickly reached a point about two feet from the top, but those last two feet seemed almost impossible. He tried to propel himself upwards in a kind of leap. His right hand reached a hold at the top, but as he swung round his wrist twisted and he let go. He fell, cracking his head on a stone.

  The impact of hitting the snow beneath didn’t register on his consciousness. When he opened his eyes he found himself lying on his side in the snow. It was cold, very cold, and his head hurt. Despite the cold, the mattress of snow around him felt soft and comforting. He closed his eyes again.

  A weak but urgent voice somewhere deep inside his brain called to him, at first in an undistinguishable whisper, then louder. ‘Get up, you lazy sod! Get up! If you don’t get up in the next few minutes you never will!’

  With a supreme effort of will, Calder opened his eyes again. Moved his arms and legs. Wriggled and writhed and pushed and heaved until he was once more at the bottom of the rock face.

  His hearing registered a sound that had been in the background for a while. The thud-thud of a helicopter. He looked up. The sun had now completely disappeared behind the mountains to the west, but it was still light enough to see a yellow helicopter circling higher up the mountain back the way he had come. He stood up and waved, but the machine was circling too far away to see him.

  He waved again and shouted.

  Suddenly the helicopter quit hovering, pointed its nose northwards and sped over a ridge. Calder could still hear it, but he couldn’t see it. And it couldn’t see him.

  He set about the rock face again. Perhaps when he was back on the snow, he could ski down to a more open area where he would be able to see the chopper.

  He reached the same stretch of rock that had confounded him before. Once again he propelled himself upwards. This time as his cold fingers reached the handhold he pulled upwards, preventing the swing that had broken his grip the last time. He clutched at another hold with his left hand and pulled with both arms. Somehow he dragged himself up on to the ledge.

  He lay there panting, his feet numb, his arms exhausted and his head aching. But he could still hear the helicopter, just over a shoulder of the mountain. The gloom was deepening and it would be difficult for them to see him, but there was still a chance. He fixed the ski to his right boot, and gingerly slid along the traverse, following Martel’s tracks in the snow in front of him.

  The traverse curved around the shoulder of the mountainside and Calder saw the helicopter diminish into the distance. Giving up. Going home. Calder pushed off through the snowfield after it, waving as he did so, moving faster and faster, but not as fast as the helicopter. Eventually he fell over, in a tumbling, head-over-heels wipeout.

  He pulled himself to his feet. The helicopter was gone. Just as worrying, so were Martel’s tracks. Calder had no way of knowing the way down the mountain. He looked back. It was at least half a mile and several hundred feet higher to where he had taken off down the slope after the helicopter. He was exhausted. He couldn’t face trudging all the way back up there in his heavy ski boots.

  Below him, there seemed to be a benign snowfield down to some fir trees, silhouetted against the blue glimmer of the flanks of the Tetons on the other side of the valley. Calder skied down. He went slowly and carefully, pausing frequently to check the best line. He remembered Martel’s words about the risk of an avalanche. This bowl looked to be about forty-five degrees, similar to the one Nate had pointed out as being ‘prime slidin’’. Tough. There was nothing he could do about that. He carried on gingerly, listening out for a tell-tale creak of snow beneath his ski.

  It would be wrong to describe his feet, still wet in his boots, as numb, because they hurt. It was an urgent pain, but it was impossible to locate specifically where it came from. He couldn’t feel his toes, or any part of his foot below the ankle. It just hurt. Skiing slowly on one leg in his condition was tiring and his lower back shouted its own message of pain to add to the general assault on his nervous system.

  The light had gone by the time he entered the trees. He wasn’t really skiing, just sliding from tree to tree. It was dark in the wood and he felt very alone. The silence enveloped the mountain, smothering him with its dead hand. When he paused, all he could hear was the rasp of his breathing; when he held his breath, his blood thundered in his ears. The temperature was falling rapidly. He remembered that the high for the day had been forecast as twenty degrees. That was’ Fahrenheit, twelve degrees below freezing. He dreaded to think what the low for the night would be. He had to keep going. He didn’t like the idea of spending the night up on the mountain.

  Then, what he knew was bound to happen, happened. The trees came to an end. Another precipice. No way down. He could see descent was impossible to the left, so he slid along to the right for a hundred yards or so. Still no way down.

  He slumped against a tree. He wasn’t going to get down that night. He was going to spend the night on the mountain.

  He felt like sinking to the ground then and there. But he knew that his best hope was to be spotted in the morning by a helicopter. To do that he needed to be in the open. And the open was back up the hill through the trees.

  Somehow he struggled upwards, back to the upper limit of the tree line. Somehow he managed to pile up enough snow to make a rough shelter next to a couple of tree trunks. Somehow he managed to break off some branches to make a kind of a mattress. He pulled his hat over his ears, took off his wet socks and shoved his feet into the damp padded ski-boots and curled up into a ball.

  It was cold. So very, very cold. He shivered. He looked up at the stars. There were thousands more than there ever were over London and they were much closer. The peak of the Grand Teton glimmered against the starlit sky, watching over him. In his shelter the edge came off the cold, and his shivering ceased. He was tired, exhausted, beyond exhaustion. Worried about hypothermia, he fought to keep himself awake, fought and lost. At some point during the night he fell asleep. He was wakened by the sound of a helicopter.

  He was cold and dog-tired. He tried to stand up but his legs, or more accurately his feet, wouldn’t let him. So he crawled out of his ramshackle shelter and into the open snow. He stopped on all fours, craning his neck upwards, watching the helicopter circling half a mile away. The Tetons were ablaze with the glory of the dawn. Wi
thout his goggles, which he had left back in the shelter, the glare overcame his raw eyes. But he heard the thud of the helicopter coming closer. He could feel the downwash of the blades. And then the glare disappeared as the shadow of the machine hovered overhead and the great blades whipped up the powdered snow like a tornado.

  32

  ‘Merde!’

  Martel slammed down the phone. Cheryl had just relayed the message to him that Calder had been found on the mountain, exhausted and suffering from exposure, but alive. Martel scanned the floor of his office, still strewn with papers, found the tallest pile, took a run up, and gave it a blistering kick. Prospectuses, spreadsheets and research reports went everywhere. One booklet hit the opposite wall a satisfying six feet off the ground. Perhaps he should have played rugby after all.

  It had been such a good plan, a work of genius, and he had been so sure that it would succeed. No matter what notes Calder had left about Pohek, Martel could not have been blamed, at least for murder. It was a skiing accident, plain and simple. Certainly Martel would have had to apologize to Calder’s family, whoever they were, for his irresponsibility in leading a poor skier down a difficult hill; he would have to show public anguish and guilt. But a murder charge? No chance.

  Once he had realized that Calder was no longer following him down the mountain, Martel had dawdled. He delayed reaching the road where the car was supposed to meet them for as long as possible, thus giving the rescue effort little time before darkness closed in to find Calder. That, combined with some misleading information about where he thought Calder fell, had ensured that the helicopter hadn’t spotted him. But the bastard had survived, and Martel would now have to answer a further battery of tedious questions from the Sheriff’s Office.

  Still, at least Calder had divulged his knowledge of a link between Bodinchuk and Jennifer Tan’s death. That was just what Martel needed to get the Ukrainian involved. He picked up the phone and dialled the number.