by Joe Poyer
Within an hour, they were climbing up through the jumble of ice and rock that led to the northern reaches of the Subarcho Glacier. No one in his right mind would have attempted this climb in the darkness, but both men knew only too well that they had no other choice. They traveled as carefully as was possible, testing for hidden crevices and faulty snow bridges, and a small amount of luck remained with them. Temperatures had been low enough in recent weeks that the winter's accumulation of snow had frozen into solid neve that at least provided firm footing. It would have been different, Gillon knew, if temperatures had been even a few degrees higher, as this would have been sufficient to increase the internal movement of the ice to twist and wrap the surface into dangerous configurations, opening up chasms in the ice that the heavy snows of winter could not have bridged.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the darkness thinned as they struggled across the rugged surface with its great blocks of ice, twisted and smashed by the passage of the glacier across the stubborn rock of the mountains. It was well toward midmorning before they were finished with the glacier and clambered down —onto the wind-packed snow of the high slopes once more. Here the travel was faster – or would have been if their reserves of strength had not been exhausted. The sun was a pale ghost of silver light gliding through the ice cloud. On the one hand, Gillon was grateful for the concealment offered, while at the same time he cursed the bitter, strength-sapping touch of the mist. While it remained, there was no chance that the Chinese would be able to spot them from the air.
Within an hour, they had both become shrouded in suits of frost whose coldness penetrated the insulation of their clothing, even without benefit of wind. Gillon stared around at the mountains, half hidden in the frozen mist. They were climbing up through a narrow pass, or col. On either side, the peaks closed in around them the higher they climbed, funneling their route into a pass which the map indicated was less than two miles ahead. The oppressive silence held sway for a moment more: then he heard, faintly in the distance, a booming begin to grow into a steady roar, sounding very much like the roar of jet aircraft engines being run-up prior to takeoff. For a moment he was puzzled by the sound and he and Leycock exchanged half-puzzled, half-apprehensive glances as the booming sped toward them. A barely seen shadow, like the forward wall of a high-explosive bomb concussion, swept down the pass toward them, and seconds later the wind struck in full fury, screaming through the rocks and ice. They half turned and crouched, shielding themselves against the wind.
Only once before had Gillon encountered such a wind and that had been deep into the High Sierras of California, years before. He had heard the same distant booming then, far off among the peaks, and the wind had come sweeping down through the passes at thirty and forty miles an hour. That night it had rained with all the fury of a hurricane and before morning the storm had become one of the worst summer blizzards that he had ever experienced. As they struggled forward, Gillon could only hope that this wind did not presage another such storm for them.
All through the interminable day, Gillon and Ley-cock struggled upward against the mountains, the temperature and now the wind, taking what advantage the covering mist offered. They stopped briefly for rest every
hour and for fifteen minutes at noon to eat. More time than that, they both knew they could not spare.
By midafternoon, the mist was beginning to dissipate somewhat under the repeated onslaught of the wind; but it remained a thick layer of cloud above the twentythousand-foot level. A dare-devil pilot, one who aid not care the least about his own life, could have flown in to search for them . . . but even so, visibility was so poor that one moment'
s inattention, and the mountains would destroy the aircraft.
They reached the top of the pass at 18,000 feet three hours before dark. The cloud-wreathed peaks of the central Tien Shan lay before them, clothed in majestic robes of newly fallen snow and highlighted on their higher slopes by the pale sun. Heavy snow clouds clung tenaciously to the peaks, wrapping them in angry rolls of gray and black.
The sight of the peaks and their coverings of snow and cloud sloping down into the deep valleys below was breathtaking; a sharply etched lithograph done in grays, whites and steel blues. To the north of where they stood reared the fortress-like Pobeda Peak and beyond was the Tengri Khan. Both peaks were enmeshed in a battle with the snow cloud that surmounted their 24,000-foot masses. Gillon turned away from the twin peaks to examine the valley directly below them when Leycock grabbed his arm and pointed back down the pass. Gillon swung around and peered into the mist.
At first, there was nothing to be seen but the sun-brightened mist and snow. Then the movement of two unsubstantial black specks riveted his attention. Gillon shrugged out of his pack and quickly dug his binoculars out of his pack.
Through the glasses, the dots resolved into the figures of two men struggling toward the top of the pass but the mist was still too thick and the distance too great to discern details. Gillon tapped Leycock on the shoulder and motioned to the rocks along the side of the crest. Leycock nodded and wordlessly the two men picked up their packs and carbines and climbed up into the rocks to a point where they would be invisible from below. Gillon laid his carbine across the top of his pack and settled himself to wait, watching the figures below through his binoculars.
Within thirty minutes, the two men below them had moved close enough for them to be identified as Dmietriev and Stowe. He and Leycock exchanged surprised glances and Gillon continued to watch through narrowed eyes as the two men came on slowly, stopping to rest often on the last, six-hundred-foot climb up the col. The tracks that he and Leycock had left Would be plainly visible and Dmietriev and Stowe seemed to be following the same, exact route. Painfully, the two men struggled up the last steep stretch and slumped exhausted into the snow below where they were crouched.
Gillon nudged Leycock and they slid down out of the rocks to confront the surprised pair. Dmietriev saw them first and jumped to his feet, fumbling for his carbine. Stowe, emaciated and barely conscious, glanced up slowly and the relief in his face was clearly visible.
The four men stared at each other for a long moment until Dmietriev said hoarsely, 'They wiped out the entire caravan.' He turned then to stare off down the far side of the pass toward the magnificence of the twin peaks, his expression one of indescribable sadness.
'We watched them from the top of the ridge,' he continued quietly. 'Troops came in by helicopter and they rounded up anybody left alive, then shot all the animals. The helicopters carried the survivors out and left the troops to start after us.'
Stowe nodded absently as if in confirmation.
'Yeah, we saw some of it,' Leycock said. 'We didn't think that you two had gotten out of the valley.'
There was a sense of unreality in the scene, Gillon thought, of four men quietly discussing the massacre of dozens of people while they themselves sat only a few miles from the scene of their own probable deaths at the border.
'It was very close,' Dmietriev admitted. 'We were almost taken once, near the crest. But we shot at two of the soldiers and were able to hide in the trees until dark. We did not think to catch up with you on this side of the border.'
'You knew that we had gotten away?' Gillon asked sharply.
Dmietriev nodded. 'He saw you go' – he hooked a thumb at Stowe – 'but we did not know about Mr. Ley-cock . . .' Again, that feeling of unreality. For nine days now they had depended every second of their lives on one another, and yet they were not on a first-name basis.
Gillon nodded. So Stowe had seen him going up through the trees. Just where in hell had.
they all been when the Migs had started their runs? he wondered. He remembered that Stowe had been behind him, which explained why he would have seen him climbing up through the trees. Leycock had pushed on ahead as he often did, as if the pace of the caravan were too slow for him. But he had not been out of his sight . .. he never was. He did not recall where Dmietriev had been at that moment, only
that he had been near the end of the caravan, some fifty feet behind him the last time he had checked. Dmietriev, then, had been the one out of sight for a few minutes, just before the Migs struck.
Of a sudden Gillon remembered one final item that had not registered until now – from the crest he had seen a red smoke marker streaming upward from the trees to the rear of the caravan. But the Migs had struck from the northeast at an angle to the caravan's line of march, from behind the ridge, where the sound of their engines would be obscured. He had automatically assumed that the flare had been dropped by one of the aircraft, but now that he thought about it, he remembered that the smoke marker had come from the trees several hundred yards behind the caravan. If the marker had been dropped from an aircraft, it would have to have been during the third pass at the earliest. The first had taken them on the flank. The second pass had been made from directly ahead as the aircraft turned to run back along the length of the column. And by then no marker would have been necessary because of the smoke from the bombs. And Dmietriev carried the remaining explosives in his pack, plus four smoke markers which they had intended to use to mark the landing site for their own pickup aircraft.
Almost stunned by the sudden realization, Gillon
stared at the three men crouched with him in the rocks, sheltering from the wind. Now it all fitted together completely; the smoke marker was the key to the puzzle. Dmietriev had to be the Chinese agent; he must have called in the Migs with that marker, figuring that they would either be killed by the Migs or captured by the Chinese troops being helicoptered in. Either way, the Chinese would have had the packet of information.
Those damnable markers could be seen for miles, miles which the Migs and copters could cover in minutes. And the aircraft exploding prematurely – Dmietriev had checked the explosive pack one last time before they jumped. And it would have been easy enough to change just one timer, reset it to explode a few minutes sooner than Rodek had planned. That had brought Chinese troops into the exact area hours sooner than they had expected. Jack Liu had been right after -all. Those troopers he had killed in the forest on the third night had been moving to an ambush site when they had accidentally stumbled onto them; otherwise they would have all – Jack Liu and his people included – been taken the next day. Not daring to look at Dmietriev for fear his thoughts were written too plainly on his face, he glanced down at the snow-covered ice beneath his boots. Any doubts he had about Liu's analysis were resolved now. There was no doubt in his mind that the big Russian had betrayed them all.
The western side of the pass and the line of peaks were beginning to emerge from the shroud of ice and cloud. What the hell did he do next? he wondered. What did he do about Dmietriev?
His head ached with the effects of exhaustion and altitude and he found it impossible to think clearly. And he needed to do so, needed time to think this out clearly and concisely, to be absolutely sure that he was correct.
'It's clearing off,' he said tightly. 'We can make the border tonight and we'll try and cross in the dark, after the moon rises.'
While the others murmured assent, he went on. `There's a ledge about a quarter of a mile down into
the pass. I saw it earlier. I think we would be better off waiting there than up here.'
-
Leycock nodded. 'With the sky clearing, they'll be desperate to get search planes in '
before dark. We heard one an hour ago.'
Stowe seemed to have regained a measure of strength during the brief rest and he flared up immediately.
'For Christ's sake, how the hell can they know where we are? There are a dozen different ways we could have gone. I say, let's get to the border as fast as possible while we have enough light to climb down.'
Gillon's patience snapped. The last thing he needed now was Stowe's continued sniping.
'You bloody bastard. How stupid do you think they are? Of course they know where we are . . . there's only one way to cross the border in this area without hiking twenty miles or more farther and that one place is through this col. They can get up here a hell of a lot faster than we did. They could have parachuted troops down onto the glacier or even into the valley here. They could very well be down there now waiting for us to come bumbling along.'
He snarled at them, 'You do what you want, all of you. If you want to try for the border now, you're welcome to. But I'm damned well going down to that ledge and wait.'
Without another word, he picked up his pack and trudged off, shrugging his shoulders into the straps. He did not look back; Leycock, ignoring the other two, followed immediately. Dmietriev and Stowe exchanged glances and Dmietriev got to his feet and started after them. Stowe watched the three of them go, and if Gillon had turned just then, he would have seen the big man's eyes narrow and his face take on an expression of suspicion, rather than anger, as he studied the departing backs of each in turn. After a moment, realizing that they could not afford to be separated at this point in the game, Stowe stood, hefted his pack over one shoulder and started after them.
It took them an hour to negotiate the steep slope to reach the ledge that ,Gillon had selected. It was a rocky
outcropping some twenty feet wide, jutting from the almost vertical rear wall, which curved slightly outward to form a shelter. The ledge dropped sharply for some twenty feet before it began to decline in a more gradual manner until it reached the valley floor.
Gillon and Leycock reached the ledge before Dmietriev, who had stopped to wait for Stowe.
The wind had stiffened to a force-eight gale by the time the four of them were safely down on the ledge. The bulk of the ridge behind them effectively cut off the pale, setting sun and although the valley floor was still light, on the ledge they were in deep shadow –a frigid shade made more intense by the wind. Gillon emptied his pack against the ridge wall and with his knife, sliced along the top seam of the tent fabric. With pegs, he fastened one end to the ledge and the other to the cliff itself, forming a shelter against the wind. While Leycock followed his example, he, Stowe and Dmietriev each went through their packs discarding everything but canteens, ammunition and skis. They would have no further need for the snowshoes that had served them so well during the long days and it was with some regret that Gillon abandoned the lightweight polyester-strung aluminum frames.
The two tents, fastened side by side, formed an effective wind shelter and they heated and ate the last of their rations. Stowe argued that they should conserve some of the food until they were certain that the Soviets were waiting for them on the other side of the border.
Gillon laughed at him over the loud snapping of the tent fabric in the wind. 'If they aren't, we're dead.. Unless there is at least half a division of Soviet troops waiting for us, nothing will stop the Chinese from coming across after us . . . and if they do, they'll catch us. This is it, buddy. It's tonight or never ...'
He took a perverse pleasure in seeing Dmietriev nod in agreement.. He had made certain that the explosives Dmietriev had emptied from his pack had been moved to his side of the ledge. And he had not been surprised to notice that one of the smoke flare canisters was missing.
After they had eaten, he picked up his binoculars and
went out onto the ledge. He had decided on his course of action and as he studied the valley floor and the mountain slopes on the other side in the fast-fading light, he went over the plan one last time, looking for any flaws.
They had laid their collective plans for crossing while eating the last of the meager rations. Moonrise was due for midnight. Until then, they would get all the rest they could for the final dash. As soon as the moon was high enough to shed sufficient light to see by, they would ski for the border as fast as possible. There was no other choice but a direct push for the wire and hope to God the Russians were waiting for them, alerted by the Red Chinese activity in the area, and could provide any covering fire required.
Gillon's plan was as simple as he could make it. Following Liu 's advice at last, he would l
eave an hour before moonrise, purposely leaving the others to make their way across as best they could. If the three of them made it, they could deal with Dmietriev afterward. If not, then the problem would have taken care of itself. For a moment, but a moment only, Gillon had supposed himself half-insane even to contemplate abandoning Stowe and Leycock, but savagely he had thrust the thought away. At this point in time, the morality and sanity of the situation were the least of his considerations. That packet of information was going to the Russians and nothing more was standing in his way.
A few minutes later, Stowe crawled out of the shelter, binoculars in hand. Wordlessly, he joned Gillon and in strained silence they both watched the valley below.
The final hour to sunset dragged on and on. Gillon watched the sky fade from gray to blue, a hard, clear blue as the sun made its final bow toward the horizon. Aircraft had appeared in the last remaining minutes of light to cruise back and forth, searching for any trace of their quarry. Gradually their sound faded as the sky turned black, leaving only the incessant wind whining around them to break the utter stillness of the mountain night.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As the evening ran sluggishly into night, the crystal clarity of the sky disappeared behind an overcast that grew steadily darker and more angry-looking by the hour. The wind had increased in velocity as well and it flapped the make-shift wind shelter they had constructed from the tent panels with vicious force. Just as the last remaining light faded from the valley, Stowe nudged Gillon and pointed across the valley to a point centered between the shallow slopes where a very thin line of barbed wire was barely discernible above the snow. A tiny black speck moved along the fence and as they watched, several others came into view.