The Abominable: A Novel

by Dan Simmons

  I set the empty whisky glass on the inlaid leather of the mahogany desk—what years later I would read had been Churchill’s father’s desk—but I did not set down the heavy book he’d given me. The larger part of my mind wanted to lash out at this fat little man, sting him with words the way my memories of my three friends were stinging my heart, but another part of me only wanted to get away from here and think about what Churchill had just said. Reject it in the end, I was sure, but think about it nonetheless.

  “Do you wish to leave this morning—when it gets light, of course, and the morning trains start running—or stay at Chartwell for the rest of the weekend so that we can chat again?”

  “Leave,” I said. “I’ll have my things packed and ready to go by eight a.m.”

  “I’ll have a breakfast laid on for you by seven and my driver take you to the station at your convenience,” said Churchill. “I’m afraid I shan’t see you in the morning since I sleep rather late and then do much of my day’s work in bed before rising for the day. Will you be in London for a while, Mr. Perry?”

  “No. I’m leaving London and England as quickly as I can.”

  “Back to the Alps, perhaps?” said Churchill with that red-cheeked baby’s smile.

  “No,” I said sharply. “Home. To America. Away from Europe.”

  “I wish you a safe trip, then, and I thank you for the extraordinary things you’ve done and for all you’ve sacrificed, along with our dear mutual friends,” said Churchill and finally extended his hand.

  I paused only a few seconds before shaking it. He had a surprisingly firm and even calloused grip, perhaps from all that bricklaying, pond digging, and dam building.

  As the car flowed almost silently down the long lane carrying me away from Chartwell later that morning—away from, what had he called it? The “Cosy Pig”? God, the Brits could be insufferably cute—past the giant old oaks and elms, the laurels and cut-back rhododendrons, then past the final thick clusters of conifers near the entrance gate, all gleaming from dew in the morning light, I resisted the impulse to turn and look back.

  30.

  In the second week of May in 1941—with America still seven months away from Pearl Harbor and our entering the war that had been going on in Europe for the better part of two years—I was climbing in the Grand Tetons with an American physician-climber friend, Charlie, and his newlywed wife, Dorcas (our joint campsite at Jenny Lake was Charlie and Dorcas’s honeymoon suite), when I read that Rudolf Hess, the so-called Deputy Führer and second most powerful man in Germany’s new Third Reich after Hitler (and also the beetle-browed silent man who’d been at our dining table at the Bierhall in Munich, sitting next to SS Sturmbannführer Bruno Sigl), had stolen a German Air Force plane and flown to England, bailing out over Scotland.

  The facts in the newspaper were sketchy and seemed to make no sense.

  Hess’s Messerschmitt Bf 110D had been specially rigged out with long-distance drop tanks, but he’d flown alone. Picked up by British radar and with Spitfires and other fighter aircraft vectored to intercept him, Hess had flown very low—evading the radar and eluding his pursuers—but had seemed to be flying an illogical course over Scotland: low over Kilmarnock, climbing up and over the Firth of Clyde, then banking inland again, ending up over Fenwick Moor. British interception radar—still top-secret apparatus at that point—then reported that the solo fighter had crashed somewhere south of Glasgow, but not before Rudolf Hess had parachuted from the plane, coming down in the village of Eaglesham, where he injured his ankle on landing.

  Hess was taken into custody and thrown into some British prison and that’s all we learned about his strange flight to England that spring of 1941.

  After Pearl Harbor, my climber friend Charlie enlisted to become an Army Air Force doctor. Being 38 years old, and having no special skills other than lots of travel and some mountain climbing under my belt, I ended up being rejected by several branches of the service but finally accepted into a very ad hoc American intelligence group with the alphabet soup name of OSS—the Office of Strategic Services. There I was taught Greek and eventually parachuted onto Greek islands with names like Cephalonia, Thassos, Kos, Spetses, and—my favorite—Hydra. There my modest job was to help organize and arm the partisans and to create as much mischief for the German occupiers as we could.

  I’m ashamed to say that “creating mischief” mostly consisted of laying ambushes for German generals or other high-level officers and assassinating them. I’m both ashamed and proud to say that I became rather good at that job.

  So it was in the OSS during the war that I stumbled upon more information, still classified then (as it still is now), about Rudolf Hess’s seemingly insane 1941 solo flight to England.

  When he was first questioned by officers of the Royal Observer Corps in Giffnock after his capture near Eaglesham, Hess insisted that he had a “secret and vital message from the Führer, Adolf Hitler,” but that he—Hess—would only speak to the Duke of Hamilton.

  Hess was taken to the Maryhill Barracks in Glasgow, where he did indeed get a private audience with the Duke of Hamilton. Immediately after that conversation, the duke was flown by the RAF to Kidlington near Oxford, then driven to London, where he met secretly with Prime Minister Winston Churchill at Ditchley Park.

  Remember that this was during the darkest days of the Battle of Britain. The British Army had been soundly defeated during its retreat to Dunkirk and was literally driven into the sea, leaving most of its heavy weapons and far too many dead Brits on the beaches behind it. With France totally defeated and occupied by early summer of 1940, Germany gathered more than 2,400 barges to bring German troops and panzer divisions across the Channel. The battle plan called for hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to invade England, with Fallschirmjägern—paratroopers—landing near Brighton and Dover just hours before destroyer- and Luftwaffe-protected barges and specialized landing craft were to be launched from Boulogne to Eastbourne, Calais to Folkestone, Cherbourg to Lyme Regis, Le Havre to Ventnor and Brighton, and Dunkirk and Ostend to Ramsgate.

  But, it was whispered, Winston Churchill had sent some private ultimatum to Adolf Hitler that spring through the former King Edward VIII, who had abdicated so that he could marry the American divorcée Mrs. Simpson. By 1940 the ex-king was being called the Duke of Windsor, and he and the ever-sulking duchess lived in the Bahamas—and I knew through the OSS that English intelligence services and Churchill’s government so distrusted the couple’s pro-Nazi tendencies that they hadn’t allowed them to stay in France or Spain right before the war broke out. It was understood by all intelligence agencies (including our various American agencies) that, even stowed away in the Bahamas, the Duke of Windsor and his circle of friends and official retinue were lousy with German intelligence agents from half a dozen Nazi services and departments.

  The rumor I heard in 1943—on the island of Thesprotia, where we were busy targeting Italian, Bulgarian, and German officers for assassination, as well as rubbing out the Cham Albanians and the Greek National Socialist Party (the Elliniko Ethniko Sosialistiko Komma), who were aiding and abetting the occupiers—was that Churchill had sent evidence to Hitler, via the Dupes of Windsor in the Bahamas, that His Majesty’s Government had some very incriminating and embarrassing photographs of young Adolf, but were willing to refrain from publishing them to the world in exchange for the Führer’s simply calling off the imminent and otherwise inevitable invasion of England.

  According to my OSS link—who’d just finished a tour in London, Cuba, and the Bahamas, and who knew everyone involved in this elaborate operation (including, he said, the American writer Ernest Hemingway in Cuba, who, while playing spy himself, had stumbled upon some of the negotiations and was under close scrutiny by the FBI, OSS, and U.S. Naval Intelligence)—Hitler had been so panicked by this threat that he’d secretly dispatched his Deputy Führer and ultimate lackey, Rudolf Hess, to England on this secret and definitely one-way trip. Hitler’s offer, reported my
OSS control officer, was simple: no publication of the photos (whatever they might contain), no invasion of England.

  No one was sure exactly how Churchill’s acceptance of those terms was transmitted to Berlin—not through the Duke or Duchess of Windsor in the Bahamas this time, was all my friend and OSS boss knew—but transmitted it was. Late that summer, Unternehmen Seelöwe, Operation Sea Lion—with all of Hitler’s elaborate and fully ramped-up plans and logistics and new weapons for the invasion of England by sea and air—was canceled. The official explanation from His Majesty’s Government was that the Germans had backed down after Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe had failed to crush the British air defenses, even though German air superiority over the Channel was very close to being established and destruction of RAF aerodromes was almost complete when Hitler gave the stand-down order. Thus the Battle of Britain in the air, and not the existence of seven incriminating photographs from 1921 along with seven negatives delivered from Austria by way of China, Tibet, and India, has always been given the credit for saving England from German invasion.

  In the cave in the mountains of my little Greek island in 1943, I smiled and I wept a little and I lifted my cup of Basbayannis Plomari Ouzo—an anise-flavored drink that I usually despised—in honor of thirty brave Sherpas, a certain brave and very young Austrian Jew named Kurt Meyer, Lord Percival Bromley, Lady Katherine Christina Regina Bromley-Montfort, Dr. Sushant Rabindranath Pasang, Richard Davis Deacon, and Jean-Claude Clairoux, four of whom had been the best friends I had ever had or ever would have.

  Epilogue

  April 1992 Note to Dan Simmons: I’m still enough of a reader to know that an “epilogue,” especially one with the quaint “ue” at the end, went out of style in novels around the same time that spats went out of men’s sartorial style. But, still, I wanted to mention a few things that really weren’t part of my story from 1925, so I’ll use this clumsy “Epilogue” to share these short additions with you and trust you—should you ever read this far into my endless stack of notebooks—to exclude them if you ever share my story with anyone and find the epilogue cloying or irrelevant. Or both.

  After my return to America in the autumn of 1925, it took me a few years before I even thought about resuming any real mountain climbing. When I did finally climb again, I tended to stick to the Colorado Rockies—there was a reclamation job there in the mountains west of Colorado Springs where I worked for two years—where the highest peaks are in the 14,000-foot range, and then in the Grand Tetons, which may be the most beautiful string of sharp peaks in America. I met Charlie and his wife there in Jackson Hole long before Jackson Hole became a destination for the rich and famous. All three of us shared a love of skiing.

  When I did start climbing outside the States again in the late 1920s, it tended to be in the South American Andes. There were many peaks there that no one had even attempted yet. I would work my way to whichever country I wanted to climb in by serving as an able seaman on a freighter or on some rich man’s yacht, and that background helped me get the job I mentioned to you in person when you and I met—the job in the mid-1930s, when I spent my two years in Antarctica with Admiral Byrd.

  But it was in 1929, roughly four years to the last days I’d spent on Mount Everest with my departed friends, when I received a postcard from Nepal.

  First, I should mention that after 1928 it became increasingly difficult to get a permit to enter Tibet or make an attempt on Everest, and the first British expedition after Mallory and Irvine’s in 1924 was Hugh Ruttledge’s in 1933. They climbed high enough to find Sandy Irvine’s ice axe where I’d left it on a boulder before and below the First Step, but they hadn’t seen it as an arrow pointing downhill to Sandy Irvine’s body as I’d hoped they would. Or perhaps by then the long flow of loose rock where we had left Irvine’s corpse—frozen hands still folded together between his locked, frozen knees—had slid much further down, or even off, the mountain.

  Anyway, the fourth British Everest expedition under Hugh Ruttledge’s leadership in 1933 didn’t reach even the altitude Teddy Norton had in 1924. Nor did Eric Shipton’s 1935 expedition, which followed Ruttledge’s route, although they did find and photograph more yeti tracks. Many of the same climbers, including Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, returned to Everest again in ’36 and ’38, with the 1936 attempt being a simple “alpine style” attempt of the sort that the Deacon had planned for us in 1925, but Shipton and Tilman and their men were kept low by bad weather.

  The Dalai Lama did not officially ban outsiders from Tibet until a horoscope he had cast in 1947 informed him that his country would be threatened by foreigners. He closed Tibet to all foreigners until 1950, turning it into the “Forbidden Kingdom” that Nepal had been for us in the 1920s, but this did not stop the Chinese from planning their aggressions: aggressions that would end up with five million murdered Tibetans and more than thirty thousand holy Buddhist shrines and monasteries—including our Rongbuk Monastery—deliberately destroyed by the Chinese, the Buddhist priests and nuns (or at least the ones who didn’t flee to India in time) hunted down like wild animals by the Chinese Army.

  But at the same time that Tibet was shutting down to foreign climbers, Nepal was opening up.

  It was in October 1929—the week after the stock market crashed—that I received my postcard from Nepal; the small card had the exotic, never seen by most Brits or Americans Nepalese stamps on it, but overlaid with both Indian and British stamps, since it had been forwarded to me by officials in New Delhi and by the Royal Geographical Society in London, and on the back was a brief handwritten message:

  Jake—

  Hope you are well. The farm here in the Khumbu Valley is quite productive and we’re both very happy. Little Charles and Ruth-Anne send you their love.

  Your friends forever

  There were no names under that closing. Farm in the Khumbu Valley? The only Westerner I’d ever known of who had succeeded in living and farming in Nepal was K. T. Owings, but he had barely noticed my existence during his visit to our Sikkim camp in 1925, and certainly wouldn’t have closed a greeting with “Your friends [plural] forever.”

  Who else, then, but the Deacon and Reggie? If “little Charles and Ruth-Anne” were children born to my two friends since they’d disappeared on the mountain in late May of 1925, I could understand their naming the boy Charles; it had been the name of Reggie’s cousin, Percy’s older brother so terribly wounded in the Great War and the Deacon’s childhood friend—but Ruth-Anne? It took me some digging in old London records years later to find that Charles Davis Deacon had had a younger sister, Ruth-Anne, who had died a month after her birth in 1899.

  So I choose to believe to this day that Reggie and the Deacon married—or at least stayed together—and elected to live separate from the world in Nepal through the rest of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. But would the Deacon really have sat out the second war with Germany? Perhaps he felt he’d served enough.

  I had various real jobs, but my climbing—especially with my friend Charlie—included an Alaskan expedition (along with another Harvard alumnus, Brad Washburn) to Mount Crillon in 1933, and another to Alaska’s Mount Foraker in 1934. It was during a third expedition to Alaska in the late 1940s that I spent nine days pinned down with four other men in a tiny snow cave at 17,900 feet. Two of the men died of hypothermia; I was lucky—losing only the last two fingers on my left hand to frostbite.

  My first—almost reluctant—return to the Himalayas after my time with Byrd’s people in Antarctica was a reconnaissance of Nanda Devi, a beautiful mountain with a surrounding sanctuary protected by almost impenetrable cliffs, an amazing experience that I shared with my friend Charlie, Bill Tilman, Ad Carter, and other friends in 1936. In 1938 I also took a whack at K2—at 28,251 feet the second-highest peak in the world and, in my opinion, a far more dangerous one than Everest—along with some Harvard Mountain Club alums. (I believe I’ve mentioned that the club hadn’t quite come into existence when I was at school there.) No one summite
d that year.

  I’ve also mentioned my work with the OSS during World War II and shan’t bore you with more details of that, other than to say that I used some classified channels to hunt for any mention of Reggie and Richard Davis Deacon—or even of Lord Percival Bromley and Kurt Meyer and Bruno Sigl—but nothing new came to light.

  In 1953, at the advanced and decrepit age of 51 years, I accompanied my friend Charlie on my last Himalayan adventure—acting as support climber on their second attempt on K2. No one reached the summit that year either—K2 is an even harsher mistress than Everest and holds her secrets dear—but I did have the unique opportunity to watch one man, Peter Schoening, belay four of his fellow climbers (including my friend Dr. Charlie) who’d slipped and fallen on a fatally steep ice slope. To my knowledge, a four-man-belay save at such an altitude has never been done before or since.

  Unfortunately, one of the men with us—Art Gilkey—had been injured on the descent, and during our group’s attempt to get Gilkey off the mountain, the other members of what Charlie later called his “Brotherhood of the Rope” had securely tied Gilkey off—wrapped in his sleeping bag—on a steep slope while we crossed a dangerous spot by chopping steps, when either an unheard avalanche or Gilkey himself (for unknown reasons) slipped the secure anchors we’d left him tied to, and he slid to his death.

  I’ve mentioned before that such falls in the mountains are not antiseptic—they almost invariably leave behind a trail of blood, torn flesh, ripped clothing, rent limbs, brain matter, and more—and Charlie never really recovered from our down-climbing for hours past the blood and torn remains of his close friend. Years later, Charlie would have severe bouts of depression and hallucinations of the highway ahead of his car filling with blood, almost certainly a result of what doctors are calling, now in the implausible future of 1992, “post-traumatic stress disorder.”