by Bob Mayer
Neeley was amazed how quickly he retraced his path down.
The young man stuck out his hand. "I'm Mitch."
Neeley took it, feeling the powerful grip. "I'm Sue." She pointed at Hannah. "That's Sara."
Mitch smiled. "Sue and Sara. How interesting."
Neeley pulled a sling off her rack and handed it to him. He looped it over his shoulder. She then split her rack, giving him some of the pieces he would need.
Mitch looked up. "Thin Air?"
Neeley nodded. "All the way. I need you to bring up the rear and give Sara a hand. She's kind of new at this." Neeley slapped Hannah on the shoulder. "Just do as I told you.”
Neeley turned toward the rock and reached up, her fingers curling around a small ledge. She slid one of her feet up, feeling through the thin toes of the climbing shoes and she was on her way.
After fifteen feet, Neeley hit a small crack in the rock face. She put a nut in, and then hooked a snap link to the nylon loop attached to the nut. She pushed the rope through the gate in the snap link, then put a second snap link through the rope-nylon juncture, making sure the gate on that one was facing the other way. Then she continued up.
On the ground, Hannah's neck was hurting from looking up and watching Neeley climb. As soon as the second piece of protection was in, Neeley halted and looked down. "I've got belay."
Mitch swept an arm toward the rock. "After you."
Hannah didn't see how she could possibly get two feet off the ground. She put one of her hands on the rope and was ready to give it a tug when Mitch gently put his hand over her hers. "Don't do that. You might pull your friend off the wall. The rope is only for protection, not to climb on."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard," Hannah muttered. “The rope is here, why not use it?”
"There with your left hand," Mitch pointed.
Hannah reached up over her head. Mitch kneeled and grabbed her right foot. "Put this here," he said, guiding it. He placed her other foot and suddenly Hannah realized she was off the ground and on the wall. Mitch was right beside her, pointing out new holds. Neeley pulled up the rope, making sure there was very little slack until Hannah was there, right next to her.
"Very good," Neeley said. "Now you wait here."
Mitch did something to Hannah's harness, hooking her into the protection itself, and taking her off the rope. He then belayed as Neeley climbed up.
And that's how they went up. Neeley leading, a spider clinging to the rock, putting in protection every ten or fifteen feet. Then belaying Hannah up to her. Mitch was also hooked in to the rope but he didn't seem to need it. Hannah appreciated him being close to her, hovering right next to her skin, his hands moving her feet and hands to the proper places.
Halfway up, there was a long stretch of bare rock. No cracks, no crevasses and almost vertical. Neeley used everything she had ever learned in climbing to get up the twenty feet to a small ledge. By the time she got there, sweat was pouring down her back and her fingers and forearms were sore from the holds she'd used. She put in two pieces of protection: a bolt into a vertical crack just above the ledge right at her feet and a loop of nylon over a rock spur just above her head. She hooked in to both. Then she slid the rope over the figure 8 in the front of her harness.
"On belay."
Hannah couldn't believe Neeley expected her to traverse the stretch above. As far as she could tell, it was a sheer rock wall.
"Left hand, there," Mitch said, pointing.
Hannah looked in the direction his finger indicated. "There's nothing there."
"There's a small knob," Mitch said.
Hannah looked again and shook her head. "I don't see it."
Mitch edged around her, his body pressing against her. "Here." He took her left hand in his and extended it. Hannah felt something hard pressing against her rear. Probably one of his snap links, she thought.
Her fingers felt the slightest protuberance from the rock. "You've got to be kidding me," she said. "I'm supposed to use that?"
"Try it," Mitch said. "Move your left foot up about eight inches. Push slightly away from the rock and let the rubber toe grip."
Hannah did as she was told and was amazed to find that she could actually move up the eight inches. Slowly, she continued up until she was in the middle of the twenty foot stretch. But at that point, the next hold was just out of her reach. Neeley with her extra height had been able to make it, but for Hannah, her fingers came up an inch and a half short, no matter how she stretched.
"Come on, Hannah," Neeley called out. "You can make it."
Hannah glanced down. Mitch was pulling out the protection from the place they had just left. Then her eyes traveled past him. The ground was suddenly a long way down. She had been so caught up in moving inches she hadn't realized that she was ninety feet off the canyon floor.
"Hannah!" Neeley called out, her voice concerned.
Hannah quickly looked back up. She wanted off this bare stretch. She looked at the small indentation in the rock that she knew was the next hold. Then she moved, pulling her right hand off, left hand extended, pushing up hard with her left leg, her right one dangling in space. And then she was holding nothing but air.
Hannah fell eight feet, then the slack in the rope was gone. She bounced off the rock wall and went down another six feet as the rope did as it was designed and stretched, keeping her from experiencing an instantaneous braking, which was as dangerous as falling. Hannah slowly bounced against the rock wall like a pendulum, almost twenty feet below Neeley. Mitch was to her right and slightly below.
"Hang on," Mitch said.
"I've got nothing to hang on to," Hannah shot back, her hands desperately searching for a hold.
Up above, Neeley could feel the pull through her harness, going out to the two pieces of protection. She glanced up. "Oh shit," she muttered. The nylon loop had popped up during the fall and was now hanging by just an inch, still caught at the very top of the spur. And that was taking all the weight of Hannah and herself. The nylon strap leading to the lower protection was slack since it was angled down. If the top loop went, Neeley wasn't sure the bottom nut could take the impact. She dug her heels in tighter to the small ledge.
"Come on, Hannah!" she called out.
Hannah shook her head to clear a lock of hair and the helmet slid down over her face. "Great!" her muffled voice came out through the small holes in the helmet. She felt a pair of hands grab her thighs, slowly pulling her to the right. Then the hands slid down her legs until they reached her feet. Mitch placed her feet on some small support and Hannah was no longer hanging.
Neeley breathe a deep sigh of relief. She leaned back against the rock and carefully snapped the slack in the upper nylon loop. It went back down over the spur.
"I'll give you some support with the rope," Neeley said. As Hannah traversed the rest of the bad pitch, Neeley left no slack in the rope. In fact she aided Hannah as much as she could, straining her arms to help pull her partner up. Soon Hannah was at her side and Mitch soon followed.
"I'd like to go down now," Hannah said.
"We're almost there," Neeley reassured her.
"The more we go up," Hannah pointed out, "the further away the ground gets."
"That's the concept," Neeley said and then she began the next pitch.
Before Hannah had completely recovered from her fall, Neeley was in place, beckoning her up. Hannah climbed.
Soon even Hannah could begin to see that they were going to make it. The top was only twenty feet away. Neeley climbed up and then disappeared over the top, the rope trailing her. Hannah followed, Mitch at her side. Then Mitch smiled at her. "Race you to the top." He unhooked from the tail end of the rope.
"You win," Hannah immediately said.
Mitch shot up and was over the top in twenty seconds. It took Hannah that same amount of time to find her next hold.
Finally, as Hannah pulled herself up the last overhang, she could hardly contain her enthusiasm. She slid ov
er onto a rocky ledge, ten feet wide. There was another rock wall in front and the ledge disappeared to the left. To the right the ledge widened and a bunch of large boulders were tumbled there, caught from falling further. Neeley and Mitch were nowhere to be seen. Just the rope, locked in to several anchor points in the rock at the very edge and then disappearing behind the boulders to the right.
Hannah turned and looked back down the way they had come. "This is incredible. Wow, look at the view," she called out. "Hey, where is everybody?" she asked as she turned her attention back to her own altitude.
Hannah dropped her backpack and walked toward the boulders, following the rope. Neeley came from behind the nearest boulder, holding a small waxy packet. "Congrats on the climb, Hannah. Good news, bad news."
"What do you mean?" Hannah asked. "Where's Mitch?"
Neeley nodded. "Oh, the bad news. Mitch is right behind me."
Hannah saw the gun the same moment she saw Mitch appear and the nasty look that covered his face.
"Oh for crying out loud," Hannah muttered. "Where'd you get the gun, Mitch? There's barely enough room in your shorts for your testicles."
Mitch shook his chalk bag. He pointed at the rock wall and walked toward the edge. The maneuver got the sun out of his eyes and gave him a nice target of both the woman against the wall.
"Give me the package and I promise I won't kill you. A shot in the legs should do for now."
Neeley glared at him. "Who are you working for?"
Hannah snorted. "What a stupid question. He's working for the guy who paid him six hundred dollars, of course."
“Racine requires that I acquire the tape and papers. Beyond that, I am free to let you go.”
The gun focused on Neeley's left knee. She held up the package. "All right. It's yours." She tossed the package onto the rocky ground near the edge to Mitch's right.
"Nice try," Mitch said. "Pick it up. Give it to her," he said, gesturing at Hannah, "and she gives it to me."
Neeley stepped forward. She bent down to pick the package up, and then suddenly threw herself forward and off the ledge into space.
Hannah screamed and Mitch turned to follow Neeley with the gun. The rope that was tied around Neeley's waist quickly ran out of slack and snapped tight into Hannah's harness, in the process whipsawing Mitch in the thighs. He staggered and held against Neeley's weight on the rope for a second and then he was gone, tumbling out into space.
Hannah was dragged to her knees by the taut rope, sliding toward the edge.
"Hold on!" Neeley cried out from twenty feet down, where she was swinging back and forth on the end of the rope.
"Hold on," Hannah muttered to herself as she looked around.
"Grab the protection!" Neeley yelled.
Hannah looked at the anchor points that Neeley had put in. She reached out with her right hand and grabbed hold of a sling attached to cam jammed into a small crevice.
"Now what?" she gasped.
"I'm climbing up," Neeley said.
Hannah felt the weight lessen on the rope. Soon Neeley's hands appeared and then she was up. Hannah stood. They both looked over the edge. Mitch had fallen all the way to the bottom, his broken body lying on top of a boulder. She looked around; there were no other climbers in sight and no one on the ground in the immediate area.
Hannah shook her head. "That poor boy. What a waste."
"Oh yeah," Neeley said. "He's one of Nero’s people. Don't waste any tears on him."
Hannah shook her head. “He said Racine. Not Nero.”
“Same thing.”
“No, it isn’t,” Hannah disagreed.
“It doesn’t matter,” Neeley said.
Hannah thought it did, but didn’t say anything. "Why the hell did you jump over the side?" she demanded, changing the subject.
"It was the only way to stop Mitch," Neeley said. "Rule fourteen. Desperate times call for desperate measures."
"'It's a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things,'" Hannah quoted in turn.
Neeley looked up from the package. "What?"
"Shakespeare. Beats Gant hands down in my book."
"Oh, shut up," Neeley said. She ripped open the waterproof wrapping and pulled out a small square of paper.
"So where's the tape?" Hannah asked.
"Damn," Neeley exclaimed. "It's only half a cache report."
"Cache report?" Hannah dully repeated.
"It's a format that gives directions to where something is hidden. In this case, it must be the tape."
"So where is the tape?"
"This only gives the IRP," Neeley said.
"IRP?" Hannah wearily asked.
"Immediate reference point," Neeley said. "It's the final fixed point from which you go to recover the cache. In this case it’s a bridge abutment. The only problem is we don't have the FRP, the far reference point and the area which tell us where the hell in the world the FRP is, which in turn leads us to the IRP."
"I don't have a clue what you're talking about." Hannah sat on a rock and leaned forward, putting her face on her knees. "Why wouldn't he leave the whole report here? For that matter, why didn't he leave the tape here? Hell, he could have left it all at the house in the closet with the climbing gear."
Neeley used a handkerchief to rub the sweat out of her eyes. "Come on Hannah, think about it. Gant had to make it hard to find the tape. The only reason I knew about this place is because I lived with him for over twenty years and climbed this route with him. But he couldn't put all his eggs in one basket. We need to find the other half of the cache report."
Neeley shook her head. “I don’t buy that. Gant could have cached it—as you call it—somewhere and told only you where it was. He has—had—another reason to make you go through all this.”
Once more Hannah’s words struck a chord of truth in Neeley, especially as she hadn’t told Hannah about the second note in the packet.
Hannah stared at Neeley. “How old are you?”
“Is that important?”
“It’s just a question.”
“Thirty-two.”
“You don’t look it.”
Neeley shifted uncomfortably.
“Maybe there’s something be said for living a life on the edge,” Hannah said. Sensing the other woman’s uneasiness, Hannah looked over at the wide expanse of plains to the east and the towers of Denver on the horizon. "So where else did he tell you to go?"
Neeley held up the second piece of paper from the packet.
"Not another climb."
"No, this is on flat ground."
"All right."
"It's in France."
"Oh." Hannah considered that piece of information. “France? Really?”
“Yes.” Neeley motioned for Hannah to follow. "We have a lot to do. Let's go. Hey, come on, don't you feel good about yourself knowing you got up here? Do you realize how difficult that climb was? It's a miracle really that you made it with no experience at all."
Hannah retrieved her backpack. "How come at the bottom you told me it was so easy and how anybody could do it? Does this mean I can't trust you?"
Neeley paused. "No, Hannah, it means you can trust yourself."
Neeley turned and made for the rappel point. She figured with luck they'd make it back to town before dark and Mitch's body wouldn't be found before the next day.
Neeley looked at the piece of paper and shivered at the thought of returning to Strasbourg and all the memories there. The ‘Goose Girl’, was all Gant had written on the paper. Neeley knew exactly what that meant. She had told Gant many times about the statue in Josephine Park in Strasbourg. Even about her niche in the rock wall where she hid her treasures as a child. Could it be that Gant had had the piece Nero thought she had? And he had put it there along with the video?
Looking behind her, she gave Hannah what she thought was an encouraging smile as she hooked up the rope. Hannah was looking down at Mitch’s body.
“Let’s go,” Neeley said.
The desk in Nero's office was now covered with Braille folders. Racine had said the women wanted a trade. Nero had been right so far. She had Gant's videotape or knew where it was. It’s exactly what Nero had predicted Gant would do. The tape and papers had been sitting for over ten years; a few more hours would be inconsequential. Indeed, what was difficult was reining in Mister Racine. He had apparently put the women on his ever-growing personal vendetta list. Nero wondered again how such an emotional man could have functioned so long in his profession.
While all appeared to be developing the way he had planned, there was an aspect about this that bothered Nero. He had thought he’d known the full story so many years ago. But he considered one of his greatest strengths to be the ability to admit that he was wrong. Maybe something had escaped his notice. He was disturbed by the Racine-Collins connection. The Senator would not have pulled Racine out of a hat to do the job in Baltimore. That indicated a prior relationship; perhaps one outside the province of the chain of command of the Cellar at even an earlier date. He had thrown the Sudan connection at the Senator to probe for more. What else had the two done together? Had the Senator been riding his own agenda for the past couple of decades, and if so, what was the agenda, and was it good for the country or just Collins?
Had they been together as early as the Sudan or even before? Nero had never considered the possibility before recent events because things had turned out the way they should in the long run from that event. Until 9-11 that was.
Nero saw a definite connection between what happened in Mogadishu and 9-11. Even Bin Laden had admitted as much, saying on record how he had felt seeing the Americans turn tail and run after a handful were killed in Somalia. Nero now felt there was more to Collins being in the Sudan and Racine disappearing for several months around that time. He had to wonder if an extension could be drawn to Mogadishu.
This angle was why he had brought Racine in on this operation, rather than another operative. He’d always found that thrusting someone into a crisis tended to expose their true nature. If Mogadishu had not been as he thought, then many subsequent events that had wavered from the path Nero had aimed for could be explained.