Snowman

by Norman Bogner

  With Pemba at the head belaying them with the rope, they gradually circled an outlier which had been concealed by the storm. The minor peak extending out beyond the principal summit enabled them to climb in a traverse so that they could avoid the main path of the storm.

  When Bradford looked back, the sangar they had left was no longer visible. A blanket of snow cloaked it, and gale-force winds lashed it unremittingly. They had moved south of the summit. The route to the top would not go, for the sheer face collapsed into an acute angle of perhaps twenty degrees. If they were to make an assault they would have to retrace the same path, and in these weather conditions it would be impossible.

  Pemba seemed to glide along the depression of granite ice. When he finally stopped, they were just above a long, undulating couloir which had been formed when the glacier changed direction. Twisted spears of ice grew out of the mountainside like thorns, concealing the entrance to the cave. But mountains held no mysteries for Pemba. He deciphered signs which a mountain concealed from strangers.

  They shone their flashlights into the mouth of the cave. It was like entering a frozen womb which contained the secrets of the earth's birth. The cave had been limestone when the mountain was a seething volcanic mass, spewing forth gases and molten lava. From its roof icicle-tortured masses of multicolored stalactites hung, like a cripple's contorted fingers. Growing up from the cavern floor, stalagmites joined them, creating a bizzare convoluted shape. Where the two met, solid pillars of ice were established. Spider was more frightened and tentative than he had been on the mountain; he shied away from the entrance.

  "It isn't safe," he protested. The horns of ice were ominous and beautiful, suggesting a primeval temple of worship, at once inscrutable and forbidden. "I'm not going in."

  "Okay with me," Bradford said, his voice echoing like a church bell.

  Pemba and Bradford worked their way into the belly of the cave. Where it widened there was ample room to set up the primus and stretch out in comfort. Pemba lit the stove, then unwrapped the provisions he carried in his pack. He threw salt pork and thick strips of bacon into a frypan, adding beans and frozen potatoes.

  Spider inched his way toward them as though spying on his enemies.

  The bacon crackled in the frypan, sending up shafts of warm smoke which teased their noses. Soon Spider was crouched over the frypan. "What if there's another avalanche and we're sealed in here?" he asked.

  "We hadn't considered the possibility," Bradford replied. "When I was a Boy Scout I learned that it was a fucking good idea to get inside—anywhere—when my ass was getting wet."

  "But what if the Snowman finds us here?" he insisted.

  "We'll be killed," Pemba observed.

  "I got claustrophobia," Spider said, staring at the colored burrs of ice which hung on the stalactites like a pattern of knobs.

  "Spider, you've got problems."

  The bacon crisped and the ragout was dexterously dished out by Pemba on the aluminum mess plates.

  Spider still balked, and circled them nervously. "Have you got a damned thing to say about Jamie?"

  Bradford placed his spoon on the edge of his plate. "We tried to save him, didn't we? It could have been any of us. We've still got to eat. Now stop behaving like a righteous asshole. This is called survival. Right now it's the three of us against the Snowman. The odds stink, the weather's a son of a bitch, and griping isn't going to solve our problems."

  "Do you think you could've killed him?" Spider asked, helping himself to a plate of steaming food.

  "I wouldn't count on it," Bradford said. "When you wound a lion he becomes more dangerous."

  "That's reassuring—we're never going to get down alive."

  Chapter Twenty

  Spider insisted on taking the first watch. The cave gave him the horrors, so he sat vigilantly at the mouth, muttering to himself, while the other two slept inside. His frustration grew more intense as the minutes ticked by.

  The night was clear; he felt that he could almost touch the stars. He was absolutely convinced that if he could establish some communication link, Monte Dale would send up a chopper to rescue them. He'd seen choppers land on a pinpoint in Laos on terrain that was as impassable as this mountain. All they needed was a few hours of good weather. Monte and the authorities must be deeply concerned about the team; once they had a fix on the climbers' position they would mount an evacuation operation. But how could they even begin to plan a rescue if they couldn't locate them?

  Spider left the cave, convinced that his mission was to lead them all to safety. A windbreak wall diverted the heavy, crashing winds; for the first time in days he felt secure. He flashed his light around to be sure that the footing was secure. A flat ice platform extended beyond the cave, and Spider circumspectly walked along it. He stopped when he heard muted shouts and strangled cries coming from below. There was a girl's nerve-rending helpless wail, followed by a boy's pathetic whine. Then he could've sworn he heard the Kodiak's agonized roar resounding through the enclosed valley adjacent to the cave. It couldn't be the wind. The sounds were too distinct and well defined to be gusts of air trapped in a chimney.

  The mountain was alive with trapped, wounded people, pleading for assistance. He'd been right to come out and investigate.

  He took out his flare gun and fired a flare. There was a dull report, and the sky was lighted with a majestic flash of red-orange, which comforted him. The cries rang out again, and he shouted, "Hang on, they'll be coming up for us!"

  The thought virtually guaranteed the act, and he congratulated himself for taking the lead. Bradford was insane and the Sherpa was too ignorant to understand the meaning of life. They were savages. The flare died. He fired another one, then another, and the sky was turned into a small man-made galaxy of light. Of them all, Spider knew that he was behaving with true courage—heroically. He waited for more responses from the trapped people, and when the new flares sputtered, he reloaded his gun, poised and expectant.

  "Don't give up. I'm with you," he called out to give them fortitude. "You're not alone."

  The wound was so piercing that for a moment he wasn't aware of it. But the warm, gushing blood began to spurt, and when he covered it with his gloved hand he realized that he had a hole in his side. His legs became numb and the stars appeared to move on a reckless collision course, like planes in a midair crash.

  He reeled dizzily, expecting to fall to the ground, but he was lifted up, defying gravity. The stab wounds were becoming more frequent, and he was being forced into a cave in which sparks flew as though from a black-smith's anvil.

  The cries of the girl and the child and the bear were mingled with his own, and the cave became a massive bed of gnashing spikes which gave off the intense heat of a blast furnace, searing his skin. Teeth dug into his face.

  Dark patches of frozen blood laminated the snow outside the cave. Pemba held the flare gun in his hand and in a futile angry gesture flung it down the side of the mountain. He had tears in his eyes and strode toward Bradford, who looked impassively at the signs of death. Bradford embraced him; then, when Pemba had regained his calm, he pointed upward.

  "We're going for the summit. It's our only chance."

  The mountain was an unbroken white cataract. The earth that existed for the two of them was an unyielding ocean of filmy ice. The silence was intolerable, a deadly pall of frost which enveloped them, slowly crushing the life out of them.

  "Spider panicked," Bradford said regretfully. "The cave spooked him."

  "Dan, let's head down. We can double the ropes and rappel." Pemba looked at him hopefully. His breath was crystallized by the brutal cold. The summit with its treacherous ice towers loomed above them in clear outline. At the source of the glacier the snow had hardened to firn. The granules were as sharp as broken glass. Ridges of snow, sastrugi, as impenetrable as concrete, had been built up by the virulent winds.

  Pemba's body shrieked with the agony of the cold. He had known such a sensation only when he cros
sed the Geneva Spur from Nuptse in the Himalayas and a freak storm had dropped the temperature to fifty degrees below zero.

  It seemed colder now.

  "I'm going up," Bradford said with finality. "Alone if I have to."

  Penaba shook his head ruefully and pressed his palms together.

  "I won't leave you. We should have died on Lhotse with the others. God gave us ten years and our destiny is the same."

  "I don't want to die."

  Pemba laughed. "We have no choice."

  They climbed methodically across the terminus of the glacier. It was too cold to use the conventional prusik knots on the ascent; they switched to Jumar ascenders, mechanical clamping devices that enabled them to push up. The cam gripping the rope had a mouth of blunted teeth to prevent slippage. If there was any upward motion of rope beyond the cam, the Jumar would automatically grip the rope and prevent it from sliding.

  At its most precipitous point the great facade of the glacier revealed white granite rock that appeared to be translucent, volcanic glass formed hundreds of thousands of years before. It was overlaid with a darker sedimentary rock border that looked like a massive wound that had hemorrhaged. A rock needle hung precariously from the slope. They were climbing on a forty-five degree angle. If any of the steel pitons holding the rope loosened, they would both fall into the enormous cwm below them. The enclosed valley at the foot of the glacier was some eight thousand feet below them. A drop from this height would last an eternity of four minutes.

  It began to snow; wave-shaped masses of firn blasted in their faces. Exhausted, they stopped some two hundred feet below the summit and clung to the mountain like monkeys. A sudden thunderous crash of ice blocks shook the mountain, sending slopes of stones tumbling down.

  Through the veil of snow, the Snowman appeared. He swung his single arm like an ax, hacking through the glacier. The ground under the men rumbled.

  The speed at which the Snowman moved was alarmlng. He thrashed at the ice face in a frenzy, dislodging the pitons they had hammered in, cutting them off from their route down. Bradford hugged the flank of ice and set himself in firing position. The Snowman was coming into range.

  Bradford scraped the ice from the telescopic sight with his teeth; it was still too heavily caked to see through. His fingers were numb; he threshed them hard against his side to regain some feeling.

  "Pemba, fire, damn it, fire!" he implored.

  Pemba stood transfixed, frozen with shock. He fell to his knees, shuddering.

  Relentlessly the Snowman carved out a path on the sheer incline. Now he was only twenty yards away. His head was the size of a boulder. His breath hissed, searlng the ice. Bradford's fingers twitched, and with his little finger he managed to release the automatic trigger.

  The arrow lodged in the Snowman's side. A squall of whining, bleating, tormented, incoherent sounds scattered from the monster's throat. Half of the massive body was demolished, and he fell backward, crashing onto the icefall.

  The ice below Bradford was smoking, blackened by fire. The ridge became a bed of smoldering purple-red lava. The slopes below were fissuring; masses of granite ice were dropping into the enclosed valley.

  Bradford struck Pemba across the face with his gloved hand; the blow shook the Sherpa out of his state of shock. He began climbing again toward the summit, followed by Bradford. When they reached the top, the storm ceiling had dropped; they could see the mountain boring open as though it had been bombed. It had become totally unstable. Huge séracs were tipped off, tumbling down thousands of feet. Sections of the glacier were penetrated so deeply that underground springs fed by boiling gases escaped, sending geysers of smoking water straight up in the air.

  "We've done it. He's dead," Bradford whispered in awe.

  But the Snowman had destroyed them in the process. We're alive but we're trapped, Bradford told himself. One canceled out the other. Radio communication was impossible from that altitude. He and Pemba lay prone, unable to move. The cutting boreal cold made them listless. They knew that unless a rescue helicopter had been sent out they would freeze to death, but they could not help themselves.

  Cut off from both camps, with most of their provisions gone, there was no way for them but the northern slopes; yet arctic winds from that direction would tangle their ropes. They could not climb. Even standing was an effort. The cold had captured them. They would die its prisoners.

  He roused Pemba, and the two of them struggled to a crested eave of ice, which shielded them from the corruscating sunlight. They built a small fire and huddled against the ice wall. Beneath them the scarred belly of the mountain still emitted noises of protest.

  Under the frozen slush of the glacier which had shattered at the terminus, a piercing light flashed intermittently. Digging deep in the jungle expanse of underground ice, the Snowman writhed in agony. His claws raked over the rock covered with feldspar crystals. He battered down dense wails of ice and worked the throbbing mass of nerve ends against the fallen ice to relieve the horrible burning sensation.

  Some preconscious memory of survival informed the effort. He whined shrilly in these opaque caverns under the surface. The sounds oscillated, carrying through the twisted angles of the glacier and fragmented weak sections which burst through the ground, altering its course. Pumice showered from black obsidian domes and was flung into the air, and the effect from the helicopter circling the mountain was of some cataclysmic malevolent force of nature that had erupted from the bowels of the earth.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Ashby searched the mountain with binoculars from the helicopter, then handed them to Cathy. The deep pockets under his eyes and the nervous tic below his heart revealed the unbearable strain of the three-day search for Bradford and his men. There was no sign of them. Camp One had vanished. The second camp had been ravaged. They had been swallowed up by the mountain, and Ashby knew that he was to blame. If he had acted responsibly, confided in Garson and brought in the National Guard at the beginning, the slaughter which had occurred on the mountain need never have happened. Two more people had died that morning. His ambition had seemed to him innocent, but had made a mass murderer of him.

  What had possessed him to hide the truth? Had the years of frustration, the routine of bringing out a weekly paper for a small community that seemed indifferent, forged him into the instrument of tragedy? There were no answers, and what made matters worse was that legally he could not be convicted of any crime. He would have to live in Sierra under the cold scrutiny of his former friends. Word would got around about his part, and the locals would pull their advertising, cancel their subscriptions. If only he could be out on the mountain under the ice with Bradford. He envied Bradford his hero's death.

  Cathy, beside him, put down the glasses. She moved away from the window, determined not to cry. It would be useless.

  Chuck reported to the three Army helicopters that he was going to make a final sortie around the summit, then come in. Sheriff Garson glared at Monte and Ashby.

  "Well, you got your way up to now. But I've made a few hard decisions, and I don't give two shits how I look. When we get down, I'm calling a press conference, and I plan to spill my guts. Sure, I'll seem a dummy to a lot of people, but at least I'll be able to live with myself."

  His words bounced off Cathy's ears. Bradford was lost. The sky was a pellucid blue; if there was any sign of them they would have been spotted by now.

  The chopper jumped wildly in air pockets, shaking them. The pilot turned apologetically and said, "Last look."

  "Cover the northern slopes before you call it a day," Monte said.

  Garson looked away from the window.

  "It's unbelievable—the mountain's exploding." He pointed out the window. "Do you see that light down there, Cathy?"

  She held up the glasses and studied the ground for a moment.

  "It's the sun reflecting," she said, unwilling to give herself false hope.

  "Nope. It's moving."

  The pilot p
eered out and said he would follow it.

  "Could they be trapped underground?" Monte asked.

  "I doubt it," Garson replied. "My guess is they were killed in the avalanche."

  The light changed colors, forming a rainbow in the ice matrix. What puzzled them was the way the area of light was concentrated, and its sudden, unpredictable motion. It changed direction inexplicably, bending across gulleys before resuming an upward, easterly path. The sun had already moved to the west. The source of light was coming from something else.

  The chopper climbed over a large cascade of peaks some distance below the summit. The rainbow traveled relentlessly. Cathy felt herself shiver. She did not want to begin to hope again.

  He's gone, she repeated to herself, and I've got to stop believing that there might be a chance that he's still alive. She gripped her seat belt hard, until her fingers were numb.

  At the summit, Bradford gnawed at soda crackers like a starving rat. Pemba had gained control of himself, was exploring the summit, refusing now to accept their predicament. They still had their ice axes, rope, and enough pitons so that they could climb the difficult ice pitches belayed to the rope.

  "Dan, there's something out there!" he shouted, standing at the ledge of precipice. Bradford pretended he did not hear and curled farther into the wall, hugging it. "Dan!"

  Bradford finally roused himself and staggered to his feet. He was very tired. The cold had lacerated his face raw, and the wounds were deep and scaly. He would wait until dark, then share the sleeping pills with Pemba.

  He would die like a philosopher, proudly and without regrets. He would yield, and that would be his ultimate victory. A holistic welding together of body and spirit.

  The enormous frozen void of the mountain embraced him, and he welcomed it like a lover.

  "Do you see that?" Pemba pointed to the rainbow lighting the glazed torn ice of the slopes.

  "It's light refraction," he said, surveying the great barren expanse, the connoisseur of death. And yet he wasn't satisfied with the facile explanation. Light did not move in this manner. "A storm's building. Put on your goggles or you'll go snowblind," he added, as though such considerations were still relevant. The image of himself foundering on the mountain, crying for help, offended him. Sheets of snow flew dervishly on the summit now.