High Time To Kill

by Raymond Benson

  “Wait, I’ll get the Gamow Bag,” Bond said.

  He left the tent as she mumbled, “Why the hell didn’t I think of that?”

  Bond retrieved Major Boothroyd’s modified device from the Sherpas and brought it back to the tent. She climbed into it and sealed it up after thanking Bond and telling everyone to let her be for a few hours. Since the bag had its own generator to pump air into it, it was inflated within minutes.

  A Gamow Bag artificially reproduces the pressure of a lower altitude. It temporarily cures symptoms of AMS, but the victim normally has to descend anyway to recover fully.

  Bond looked up through his goggles and saw that the sun was still high in the sky, so there was possibly time for her to get down before nightfall, as descending wouldn’t be as time-consuming as the trip up. He then found Paul Baack and asked to use the satellite linkup. The Dutchman gave him the privacy of his tent.

  Alone, Bond phoned London. After several rings the voice-messaging service kicked in.

  “You have reached Helena Marksbury. I’m sorry that I am away from my desk …”

  It was almost a surreal experience. Here he was, halfway around the world, on the side of a fierce mountain and isolated from civilization, yet he was able to hear the voice of a lover, albeit a former one.

  “I’m halfway up Kangch,” he said after the beep. “Camp Three. Where are you? I’ll switch over to Bill. It was nice to hear your voice.”

  He quickly pressed the code sequence that transferred him to Bill Tanner’s office. Christ, Bond thought. He was thankful that she hadn’t picked up after all. It would have been awkward. He hoped that she was not still upset about their relationship.

  There were a few pips, and Tanner picked up. “James?”

  “Hello, Bill. I’m calling from sixty-six hundred meters. Nothing on Schrenk?”

  “No, but we received some interesting intelligence from our new man in India. His name is Banerjee. He’s Zakir Bedi’s replacement.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They intercepted Union communications to Kathmandu. The man who tried to kill you there was indeed employed by the Union. An accomplice was snatched, a go-between apparently, and he confessed that the Union have infiltrated your expedition. It’s someone in your party, James.”

  “I’ve suspected that all along. Thanks for confirming it.”

  “Any idea who it might be?”

  “I’ve been thinking it’s Schrenk.”

  “If we find anything that ties him to the Union, I’ll certainly get a coded message to you. We also learned that the Russian expedition is being financed by certain military authorities in Moscow who have files in our offices a mile long. They have strong ties to the Russian Mafia. There can be only one reason they’re up there.”

  “Thanks for the tip. I had better go. I don’t want the Ministry of Defence complaining about the phone bill.”

  “There’s one other thing, James.”

  Bond detected hesitation in his voice.

  “What’s that?”

  “Helena is missing. She’s been gone for two days and hasn’t phoned in. As you know, our security procedures are such that when someone in her position doesn’t call in, we—”

  “I know,” Bond said, “you send someone to her flat. And?”

  “She wasn’t there, either. The flat had been ransacked.”

  Oh, no. Bond squeezed his eyes tightly shut.

  “James,” Tanner said. “We concluded our investigation into the leak at MI6.”

  Bond said it before the Chief of Staff could. “It’s her.”

  Tanner’s silence confirmed it.

  “She’s probably in trouble if she’s mixed up with the Union,” Bond said.

  “James,” Tanner said gently. “She’s probably dead. But we’ll keep looking. Try not to worry about it. Concentrate on the job at hand.”

  Right. Bond gripped the phone tightly and said, “Keep me informed.”

  “Watch your back, James.”

  Bond rang off and stepped outside the tent. Paul Baack was standing there, shivering.

  “All done?” he asked.

  “Yes, thanks. Better get inside and get warm.”

  “I will. You might tell the same thing to our illustrious leader over there.” Baack gestured toward Marquis’s tent, then went inside his own.

  Bond found Marquis throwing his ice ax at a solid boulder of ice. He seemed to be in a trance. He threw the ax, walked over and retrieved it, returned to his position, and threw it again. And again.

  Bond felt like joining him but decided not to bother.

  Three hours later Hope Kendall emerged from the Gamow Bag and announced that she was going down to Camp Two for a couple of days. Bond offered to accompany her, but she said it wasn’t necessary. Marquis knew better than to volunteer, but he insisted that a Sherpa go with her.

  Two days later Bond was in his own tent, having just completed reading the criminal profiling book, when Paul Baack stuck his head inside.

  “I must show you something, James,” he said. Bond got up and followed the Dutchman back to his tent. There was a blurry photograph displayed on the monitor of his laptop.

  “It’s a satellite photo,” he said. “It’s the north face of the mountain as seen from space, but magnified many times. Look, this is our camp here.” As he pointed to objects on the screen, Bond began to comprehend what he was looking at.

  “Over here is something that wasn’t there yesterday.” He pointed to another mass of dark objects, slightly east of them. “Those are the Russians.”

  “We knew they were close, but what is that, a thousand meters?” Bond asked.

  “Less. Maybe eight hundred. They set up their equivalent of Camp Three there. To get there you would have to climb up and over the Bergschrund, see?” He pointed to a deep slit that delineated a glacier’s upper terminus. It was a phenomenon that formed as the body of ice slid away from the steeper wall immediately above, leaving a gap between glacier and rock.

  Bond nodded. “We have to cross that to get to Camp Four,” he said.

  “But then, to get to the Russians, you have to go down this way here. That’s quite a hike, at least an eight-hour journey. I don’t think we have to worry about them making a sneak attack on our camp.”

  They’re probablywaiting for us to make the next move, Bond thought.

  “Thanks,” Bond said. “Keep an eye on them. If they show signs of activity, let me know.”

  “Will do.” Bond started to leave, but Baack stopped him. “James?”

  “Yes?”

  “What was Roland talking about the other day when he said you were on a secret mission? I mean, I know you’re on a secret mission. I have known all along. They wouldn’t have given me all this stuff. Ministry of Defence … a Gurkha assistant … I mean, what’s going on? I have a right to know, I think.”

  Bond sighed and clapped the big man on the shoulder. “Sorry, it’s classified, but I appreciate your hard work. Let’s just say I have to find something on that plane and bring it back to England.”

  Baack nodded and said, “Well, you can count on me to help however I can.”

  “Thanks. You’re doing a great job already,” Bond said, then he left the tent.

  The news about Helena still hung heavy on his heart. He had done his best to put it aside, but there was no denying that he was worried. What he needed was a different sort of distraction.

  On the way back to his quarters, he saw Hope Kendall.

  “Well, hello. When did you get back?”

  “An hour ago,” she said. She pointed to her new tent. “I’m over there.”

  “You sound much better.”

  “I feel a lot better,” she said. “I guess I needed the extra two days at Camp Two before coming up here. This time the ascent didn’t bother me at all. I did it in less than four hours.”

  “I’m glad you’re back,” Bond said.

  “Hey, and thanks for that Gamow Bag. It saved my li
fe.”

  “Don’t mention it. Can I buy you dinner? I know a great little Nepalese takeaway in the neighborhood.”

  She laughed. “You never give up, do you?”

  Not now, Bond thought.

  Roland Marquis finally deemed the Lead Team adequately acclimatized to ascend to Camp Four. Marquis, Glass, Léaud, and Barlow had all made practice runs and reported that it would take two, maybe three days, one pitch at a time, to get to Camp Four.

  The first day went relatively well. On the second day they had to cross thirty-degree snow slopes that ended at the rock wall over the Bergschrund. The Sherpas had hauled an aluminum ladder that could extend across the crevasse. Roland Marquis, belayed by more than one person, carefully crossed the ladder and fastened anchors on the opposite side. He looked back at the others, then saw something in the Bergschrund.

  “There’s a person down there,” he called, pointing. One by one they all crossed the ladder and were in a position to see. It was indeed a corpse, a woman, with a blanket wrapped loosely around her. Bond thought that she looked well preserved.

  “She has to be one of the plane survivors,” Bond said. “Look, she’s hardly dressed for climbing.”

  Both Marquis and Bond thought it best to attempt to retrieve the body. Using an elaborate system of belays and anchors, the Sherpas climbed down into the Bergschrund and tied a rope around the woman’s shoulders and upper arms. They gave the signal and she was brought up to the ledge.

  She was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, and the blanket. The woman had been a tourist in a comfortably pressurized plane. She had obviously survived the crash and had attempted to climb down the mountain. Now she was frozen stiff.

  Bond broke the ice surrounding the blanket and pried it away from her body. He searched her pockets and found an American passport.

  “Cheryl Kay Mitchell, from Washington, D.C.,” Bond read. “She’s the American senator’s wife.”

  It was also apparent that her skull was cracked and the head and shoulders were horribly misshapen. Her clothes were torn in some places, and there were cuts and bruises on exposed patches of skin.

  “Poor woman,” Léaud said softly.

  “She fell,” Marquis surmised. “From a great height, too. Her body must have bounced and bounced and slid all the way down here from the crash site. There is absolutely no way she could have survived this far. Look at the way her body has frozen. I would bet that she has a million broken bones.”

  “If she didn’t fall immediately, then I suspect she died within an hour or two after leaving the plane and then the body slid off the edge up there somewhere,” Bond said. “She was probably desperate to do something and knew she wouldn’t survive inside the plane.…”

  “We’ll take her back to Camp Three tonight. Let’s leave her here for now. There’s nothing else for us to do but press on.”

  The discovery cast a pall over the group, but they continued over the rock band in silence. It was the most technically difficult climbing they had done so far.

  Camp Four was finally reached, and the next day the group began the assault to the final stop—the Great Scree Terrace at 7,900 meters. They had to climb 250 meters of a rock band via a snow gully and 100 meters of rock wall to reach an upper snowfield at around 7,500 meters. Tom Barlow and Doug McKee began using oxygen, something the Sherpas liked to call “English Air.”

  On the thirty-first day of their journey, with five days left in the month of May, the Lead Team finally made it. The Great Scree Terrace was a bizarre, sparkling-white, gently sloping plateau that seemed to be out of place at such a high altitude. The remainder of the mountain, only 686 meters of it, towered over the plateau like a malevolent sentinel.

  The Sherpas began to set up Camp Five while Bond, Marquis, and Chandra examined the wreckage spread out before them. One broken wing was half buried in snow and ice. Forty meters beyond that were pieces of the tail. Sixty meters farther was the fuselage, remarkably intact. The other wing must have been completely buried or blown off the plateau. The cabin door was wide open. Any footprints that might have led from the plane had long been covered.

  “I have to go in there first, Roland,” Bond said.

  Marquis said, “Be my guest.”

  “Come on, Chandra,” Bond said as he trudged through the kneedeep snow toward the aircraft.

  TWENTY - ONE

  THE MISSING BODY

  BOND TURNED ON A FLASHLIGHT AND STEPPED INTO THE COLD, DARK CABIN. Light filtering in from windows had a ghostly, incandescent quality that was unnerving even to him. Ice and snow had built up through holes in the fuselage, so it appeared that the passenger seats had been built in snowdrifts. An eerie whistling sound echoed throughout the cabin.

  Nearly all the seats contained a body each.

  Bond shined the light at the cockpit. The pilot and copilot were slumped forward in their seats, frozen in a macabre still-frame of death. Another man was lying in the aisle between the cockpit and cabin. He didn’t appear to be dressed like the crew.

  “Help me pull this one up,” he said to Chandra.

  Together they tugged on the hard, stiff body and turned it so that they could get a good look at the man’s face. Ice had formed a grotesque transparent mask across half of it. There was a bullet hole in his neck.

  Bond recognized him from Station I’s mug shots. “This is one of the hijackers.”

  Chandra nodded. “I remember.”

  “Come on, let’s look back there.” Bond stepped over the body and moved back into the small main cabin. He counted the corpses.

  “The plane has twelve seats for passengers. The crew consisted of the pilot, copilot, and an attendant.” He indicated a woman sitting in a single seat facing the other passengers. “Here she is. There were ten tourists booked on the flight, which would have left two empty seats, right? I count nine bodies.”

  “The woman we found near Camp Four would make ten,” Chandra said.

  “But Lee Ming and the three hijackers would have made fourteen. One hijacker is accounted for, making eleven. That means there should be eleven bodies in here. Where are the other three?”

  “Wait, here’s someone not sitting in a chair,” Chandra said, shining his light in the back of the cabin. It was another man, dressed similarly to the hijacker they found in the cockpit.

  “It’s one of them,” Bond said, examining him. “All right, that means there are two missing. Let’s see if Lee Ming is one of these people.”

  They each took a side of the plane and shined their flashlights on the faces one by one. The dead were all Caucasian men and women of varying ages. At least three had their eyes open, fixed in a frosty expression of fear.

  “He’s not here!” Bond said through his teeth. “Damn!”

  “Hold on, James,” Chandra said. “If that woman survived and got out, maybe Lee did, too. And the other hijacker. They couldn’t have got far. They must be in the vicinity.”

  “Unless they dropped off the face of the mountain like that woman did. They could be anywhere!”

  Chandra knew Bond could be right. “What do we do?”

  “Nothing to do except search the area. Let’s look at the ground outside again. Maybe there are some faint traces of footprints or something.”

  They came out of the plane and found Marquis and Glass waiting patiently. Paul Baack was standing anxiously nearby, and Otto Schrenk was not far behind him.

  “Well?” Marquis asked Bond.

  “He’s not in there,” Bond said quietly. “We’re going to have to search the surrounding area. Chandra and I will do that. You go on with the salvage operation.”

  “Not in there? Are you sure?” Marquis looked as if he might panic.

  “Quite sure.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Marquis said. He threw the ski pole he was holding against the side of the aircraft. “That’s just great.”

  “Why are you so concerned, Roland?” Bond asked. “You did your job. You got me up
here.”

  “I just … I just wanted you to succeed in your mission, that’s all. I want Skin 17 back in the UK as much as you do.”

  For a brief moment Bond thought that Marquis might be the Union operative. Could that be possible? Usually Bond’s instincts were sharp, but at such a high altitude all his senses and reflexes were numbed. He suspected everybody and anybody.

  “We’re going to see what we can find,” Bond said, and walked away.

  Marquis composed himself and turned to the others. “Right, let’s help set up camp.”

  By the second day Camp Five was completed and the rest of the parts had made it up to the site. The salvage operation began, with the first stage being the removal of the corpses from the plane and hauling them down to Camp Four, one at a time. The plan was to start a convoy, assembly-line fashion, with some workers stationed at each of the four lower camps. The sirdar arranged for a yak herd to pick up the bodies at the Base Camp and take them back to Taplejung for a flight to Kathmandu. It was an expensive, time-consuming, dangerous, and absurd thing to do, Bond thought. The families and governments paying for this needless operation should have left the remains on the mountain. It would have been a different story had they been alive. But to go to all this trouble for the dead? At least it made a somewhat feasible cover story. Bond was thankful that he had a different job, although it was one he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to complete.

  After three days Bond and Chandra had found no traces of Lee Ming or the other hijacker.

  The physical changes one experiences at 7,900 meters are remarkable. Bond felt that every move he made was in slow motion. It was quite like being underwater in a JIM diving suit. He was packed in solid warm clothing, every inch of skin covered, with an oxygen canister on his back and a hose running to his mouth. He was concerned that the team might not have brought enough oxygen to last for the next few days. Even with oxygen, the team still found that they were able to perform only a few seconds of work before having to stop and catch their breath.

  Bond sent a message to London via Baack’s laptop that Lee’s body wasn’t in the plane. Tanner came back with M’s instructions to keep looking until Marquis’s job was finished. If Lee wasn’t found by then, there was nothing to do but come home. Bond read between the lines of the coded message and saw her disappointment. He hated to let her down.