by Dan Simmons
We were in luck; there were six as yet unused rucksacks and a heap of canvas carryalls in the cache. There were no more oxygen rigs, but there was a Primus stove, two Unna cookers, and twelve bars of Meta fuel. We loaded one Primus with the rest of the stuff into an empty rucksack, even though we’d already discovered the hard way that Primuses often didn’t work well at altitude. But it was worth hauling the additional weight to have that extra chance of being able to melt snow for drinks.
At this point I still saw no reason to climb to the North Col and every reason in the world to head north and east to Windy Pass—the Lhakpa La, that point where the Deacon had finally led Mallory to see the East Rongbuk Glacier as the obvious approach four years ago during the ’21 expedition. If we avoided these killer Germans until we reached the Lhakpa La, we could then head east along the Kharta Glacier (which the 1921 expedition had carefully mapped) and then up and over the almost 20,000-foot-high Karpo La and down into northern Tibet, turning eastward again immediately to avoid the treacherous Kangshung Glacier that ran up to the base of the near-vertical (from its southern side) North East Ridge. The Karpo La was by all accounts a treacherously dangerous pass, with its no-warning blizzards, terrible winds, and deep summer snowfalls—which was why British expeditions hadn’t tried to save time by coming north into Tibet and the Everest region that way—but it seemed to me like a good (and fast) avenue of retreat for us now.
And I desperately wanted a way out. If I could come up with a good one, I was sure that I could convince Reggie and the Deacon, whatever “facts” they knew that they hadn’t shared with us yet. The central fact was those men with guns who had murdered most or all of our Sherpas and who were now looking for us.
Another possibility—a less drastic way home, but one requiring a slightly longer trek in Tibet—was for us to wait till morning and climb high on the shoulder of the East Rongbuk Glacier until we could cut east to Windy Pass, get over Lhakpa La, and then traverse along the base of the great wall that was the Himalayas for some miles, and then get over the frequently traveled Serpo La down into the verdant Teesta Valley and then lower to Gangtok and straight on to Darjeeling. It would be a bitch of a trek—I wasn’t sure that any white men had ever done it—but it had to be safer than facing crazy German killers with automatic weapons.
There was one other wild chance we could take. Lho La Pass to the west was closer—just behind Mount Changtse, which bordered our East Rongbuk Glacier—but it would mean a long traverse climb around Changtse, a descent of unknown difficulty, then a steep ascent again to Lho La, only to have the five of us almost certainly rotting for years in a Nepalese jail for entering the country without permission…and Nepal never gave permission for entry by foreigners, Mr. K. T. Owings was the only exception I could think of. But the Deacon was friends with the man; maybe Owings could help us out…
So I’d argue hard for either risking the weather on high Karpo La or trekking farther east to the relative safety of Serpo La—both east of the killing ground that had been Base Camp—as far as I was concerned. I dug into the cache with a will and filled every empty rucksack we’d found there.
The tent fires had died to mere embers by the time we started our northern circle route back to the west of the camp where Pasang and Reggie waited. Less than halfway there, the Deacon said, “Dump the loads here.”
This made no sense at all. We were near the part of the ice wall to the Col where we’d laid fixed ropes and—far, far above—the caver’s ladder. But there was no way on earth that I was jumaring up those ropes or climbing that ladder again, not even if the Germans showed up in hot pursuit. It was the ultimate dead end. To climb to the North Col meant certain death. There was no escape from there, since the south side was a sheer drop of several thousand feet to a deep valley behind Changtse. And to go higher on either Everest or Changtse—which had never been climbed, even though it was “just” 24,878 feet high (lower than our Camp V)—only meant prolonging the inevitable. I started to voice a protest, but the Deacon said aloud, “Trust me, Jake. Dump the stuff here. Trust me. Please.”
All thirty of our Sherpas trusted you, Captain Deacon, and they’re all dead now, I almost said aloud. I was that tired. But I didn’t speak. And because of my silence, our friendship, if that’s what it was—and I’ve had more than sixty-five years to decide it was—remained intact.
And the Deacon—Captain Richard Davis Deacon, the man who had given thousands of commands to his men during four years of the worst war the world had ever known—had just said “please” to me.
I left all my logical arguments for retreat over the passes unspoken and dumped the load into the snow, and we continued postholing around and up onto the glacier to rejoin Pasang and Reggie.
At Camp Fort, as we’d dubbed it, we sat on our rucksacks in a rough circle, to keep our butts from freezing, and tried to talk things through. Even though the Deacon had ordered us each to take some English air at the 2.2-liter flow rate for three minutes—he kept time with his watch—our voices sounded slurred or drunken or just plain stupid. We were all beyond the point of absolute exhaustion. Merely trying to form words in my brain reminded me of newsreel film I’d seen in a British cinema of RAF fliers forced to do mathematics problems in a barometric chamber with the pressure lowered—as if they were in planes gaining altitude—until somewhere around or below this altitude we’d all been at for seventy-two hours and more. Each pilot not only quit doing arithmetic but went face forward onto his desk.
But they had the advantage of scientists and doctors watching them, ready to bring the pressure back up in their sealed chamber the moment they passed out.
The outside of our particular “sealed chamber” was either outer space or a firing squad of crazy Krauts.
My chin had dropped onto my chest and I was snoring softly when the Deacon gently jostled me awake. J.C. was saying something.
“Jake was right, my friends. Unless there’s something that he and I don’t know, the only sensible course of action is to start climbing out of this accursed valley at first light and head for the nearest pass into Tibet or Nepal. Since I value my freedom as well as my life, I suggest Karpo La or Serpo La into Tibet. Nepal does not treat intruders very nicely.”
“There are things that you and Jake don’t know, mon ami,” said Reggie. “The Deacon may not know the precise details, but I think he’s guessed some…or perhaps he does know. It’s hard for me to tell. Pasang knows only the general outline.”
“What the hell are we talking about?” I managed to say.
“Why we have to climb onto the North Col tonight,” said the Deacon.
“Tha’s absurd,” I slurred. “I’m too tired to climb into anything but a sleeping bag.” We’d recovered five more eiderdown bags at the Camp III cache. They were lashed to the outsides of the rucksacks we’d stupidly left a quarter of a mile from here in deep snow, back at the base of the North Col.
“I also agree that we should climb to the North Col tonight, Mr. Perry,” said Pasang. “Allow Lady Bromley-Montfort and Captain Deacon to explain.”
She turned her tired face to our former infantry captain. “Do you want to explain, Richard?”
“I’m not sure I know enough,” he said, and his voice sounded almost as tired as mine had. “I mean, I know the who and when and why, but I’m not certain about the what.”
“But you admitted to knowing—and perhaps working for—our friend who writes a lot of cheques but who prefers gold,” said Reggie.
The Deacon nodded wearily. “Knowing something about what he’s up to, yes,” he said. “I work for him—with him—only from time to time.”
I said, “Would you two mind speaking in goddamned English?” Perhaps it came out a little sharper than I’d meant it to.
Reggie nodded. “My cousin Percival had the reputation, as I presume you have all heard, of being a wastrel, a disappointment to his family, a discredit to his country during the War—he never enlisted, never fought, and spent all
of the War in Switzerland or other safe places, including, his mother was ashamed to admit, the peaceful parts of Austria. Cousin Percy seemed only one short step away from being an active traitor to Great Britain. And as a final touch, Percival was known both in England and on the Continent as being a debauched playboy. And a deviant. A homosexual, to use that new word.”
There was nothing to say to that, so we all kept our mouths shut.
“All those appearances were false,” said Reggie. “Artificial. Prepared. Deliberate.”
I looked to the Deacon for an explanation—severe mountain lassitude with delusions for Reggie, perhaps—but his gray eyes were intent on her face.
“My cousin Percival was an intelligence agent before, during, and after the War,” said Reggie. “First for His Majesty’s Secret Service, then for British Naval Intelligence, and finally for…well, for a private network of agents run by someone very high up in our government.”
“Percy was a fucking spy?” I said, too exhausted even to notice my language.
“Yes,” said Reggie. “And young Kurt Meyer—who was not a mountain climber—was one of Percy’s most deeply embedded and most valued Austrian contacts. Eight months before the two met up in the Tibetan village of Tingri, northeast of here, Meyer had been forced to flee Austria. He fled east—then further east—eventually into China and then south, to Tibet.”
“This is a very long way to flee,” Jean-Claude said.
“He had a pack of German monsters after him,” said Reggie. “Tonight you’ve seen what those monsters can do.”
“What did Meyer have—and give to Percy in Tingri—that the Germans need back so badly?” asked the Deacon. “That’s the one part of the puzzle I don’t have.”
“Neither do I,” said Reggie. “All I know is that our national futures—France’s as well as Great Britain’s, Jean-Claude—may depend upon it.”
“It sounds like that leaves me and the United States out,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded almost angry.
Reggie looked at me. “It does, Jake. Leave you out, I mean. I’m sorry you ever got involved, but I didn’t know how to keep you from coming along with your English and French friends. Whatever the rest of us—or whoever joins me, that is—do next, I think you should curve around the glacier valley to the southeast and head for Serpo La into India. That is the safer and more direct of the two eastern passes. With a lot of luck and traveling light, you can be in Darjeeling in three weeks or so.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but no words came out.
“The Germans will not pursue you, Jake,” continued Reggie. “They have no interest in you. None whatsoever. They’ve come back here for the second straight year because they were unable to retrieve what Kurt Meyer had, what he gave to my cousin Percy, and because they think there’s one chance in a hundred that the five of us may have found it. Or that they can find it themselves somewhere up on the mountain.”
“They killed thirty Sherpas, thirty men,” I say, blinking away tears of sheer fury and frustration, “to get back…what?…some goddamned blueprints for a dreadnought or plans for some more effective reciprocating airplane machine gun or some such goddamned nonsense?”
Reggie shook her head. “These Germans, however many there are of them—I’m convinced there were only seven of them last year, under the command of Bruno Sigl, and that they did see, or even make, Percival and Meyer fall, somewhere on this mountain. But for whatever reason, Sigl and whoever was with him weren’t able to retrieve the item Meyer had been trying to get into British hands. Into my British agent cousin’s hands. Just remember that these Germans don’t represent the Weimar Republic, don’t represent Germany. Yet. But they may someday…all of these monsters who follow that monster named Hitler…and whatever Meyer was trying to give to Percy was something that can hurt them. Hurt him, their leader. And that’s all I care about.”
I was too tired to follow that.
“All I know,” I said, “is that if we climb up to the North Col again, we’re trapped. Like rats. Even if there are only four or five Germans, they have guns—we don’t. They have rifles. What’s the effective distance of your ’scoped Lee-Enfield, Richard?”
“Effective range is somewhere above five hundred yards,” said the Deacon. “Maximum range is somewhere around three thousand feet.”
“The better part of a mile,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “But not terribly accurate at that extreme range.”
I ignored his footnote. “Accurate enough to pick us off the North Col or even the low parts of the North Ridge without their shooter even climbing onto the Col,” I said.
The Deacon shrugged. “Probably. Depending upon wind and weather conditions.”
“Well, the goddamned wind and weather conditions haven’t exactly been friends to us so far,” I cried.
No one responded.
Finally Jean-Claude said to Reggie, “I agree with Jake that it would be folly to surrender our lives for the sake of a machine gun or dreadnought design that other spies will certainly steal someday anyway. Besides, we’re not currently at war with Germany. I have already given three brothers, two uncles, and five cousins to fighting les boches, Reggie. You would have to assure me that whatever Herr Meyer stole from the Germans or Austrians is, first of all, unique, irreplaceable, and, second of all, truly something which the survival of my country as well as yours might hinge upon.”
Reggie sighed deeply. It was the only time I ever saw her close to tears. “I can’t be certain of the second thing, Jean-Claude. But I can guarantee that whatever it was that took the better part of a year for Meyer to try to hand off to Cousin Percy, it was unique. That much Percival himself assured me of before he headed off to his death here last year. It was not anything as banal as the plans for a new machine gun or bomb.”
“So Percy admitted to you last year that he was a British spy,” I said. I didn’t know if it was a question or not.
Reggie smiled slightly. “I’d known that for years, Jake. Percy loved me. I’ve told you that we were more brother and sister than mere cousins. We’d played together as children, climbed in the Alps and the foothills of the Himalayas together as adults. He had to let me know that he was not a traitor to England…or even a decadent playboy, for that matter.”
“But you don’t even know,” I pressed, “what Meyer had and carried with him across all of eastern Europe, the Middle East, and China…all the way into Tibet? Something so important that your cousin was ready to give his life for it, but you don’t have a clue as to what it is?”
“No, only that it was very portable,” said Reggie. “That’s all Percy would let me know. He was supposed to have returned to Darjeeling by early July…with the thing, whatever it was. Sir John Henry Kerr, the acting governor of Bengal, and Sir Henry Rawlinson, currently the CIC and head of British Intelligence in India, both have been briefed by London—at least to the extent that Percival was trying to retrieve something of vital importance—and both are still awaiting word from me.”
“I don’t understand,” I said dully. “Why would anyone choose the slopes of Mount Everest for such an exchange? That’s nuts. There’s no way off once you’ve gone up—if someone’s waiting for you, I mean.”
Reggie looked at me. “Percy and Meyer didn’t choose Everest, Jake. They met up in Tingri Dzong. But Bruno Sigl and his thugs were close behind Meyer. In the end, Percy must have gone up the ladder that Mallory’s expedition left behind—first onto the North Col, and then, according to Kami Chiring, much higher, perhaps even to the North East Ridge. He must have prayed that the Germans couldn’t climb as high, couldn’t follow Meyer and him that far up the slopes—perhaps Percy thought that with the extensive caches of food that the Norton-Mallory Expedition had left behind on the mountain they could outwait the Germans below, or slip away in the imminent monsoon storms. Percy guessed wrong. Sigl must have brought some of Germany’s best climbers with him…all political fanatics. And now they’re back.�
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There was more silence, broken only by the ever-lessening sound of wind through the ice walls around us.
Finally the Deacon said to Reggie, “But you’re willing to risk—even give up—your life to retrieve what your cousin Percy died to get.”
“Yes.”
“I’m going up the fixed ropes to the North Col with you tonight,” the Deacon said flatly. “We’ll keep climbing until we find Percy or until…” He stopped, but we all heard what came after the “until.”
“I’m going as well,” said Jean-Claude. “I hate the goddamned boches. I’d like nothing better than to plant a thumb in their eye.”
Before I could say anything, Reggie said, “I’m serious about you slipping away over the Serpo La and heading straight for Darjeeling, Jake. As an American, you’re neutral in all this.”
“The hell we are!” I said. “‘Lafayette, we are here!’ The Battle of Belleau Wood. The Battle of Cantigny. The Second Battle of the Marne. The Battle of Château-Thierry. The Meuse-Argonne. The…the…” I was so tired that I’d run out of American battles. “Tippecanoe and Tyler, too,” I added irrelevantly. Well, it had sounded good in my buzzing head.
“I’m going with you guys,” I said. “Just try to stop me.”
No one said anything or patted me on the back. Perhaps we were all too tired.
“One thing,” said Jean-Claude. “Do the rest of you think we have enough energy left to get up that thousand-foot snow wall and climb the rope ladder to the North Col, then cross the Col to Camp Four? Tonight?”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” said the Deacon.
Far below us and behind us, somewhere in the Trough forest of seracs and penitentes and 60-foot-high snow-shrouded ice pinnacles, came the echoing sound of three pistol shots. Then silence.