Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  A figure leaped forward from the dark to grab him by both shoulders and pull him headlong into the room.

  The shaft of the ice axe smacked violently down a second time, hitting Quinn across the back as he fell forward.

  His face smashed into the floor, and the hands on his shoulders forced him down into the funk of the carpet as the side of the ice axe slammed across his back, again and again.

  Every time the flat side of the axe’s metal head beat on his spine, bolts of white lightning flashed up through his body and into his brain.

  The Englishman squirmed, trying to free himself, but the weight of the man holding him down kept him hard against the floor as more blows from the old axe beat his body.

  Amidst the explosions of pain, Quinn had crystal-clear images of Dawa helping him down from the Second Step. With all his might, he responded to them by twisting his body up from the floor, thrusting his left arm wildly upward at the unseen attacker restraining him.

  He felt the ice screw that hand was still gripping push into something soft.

  The man to the front of him howled horribly, immediately releasing him.

  As the man pulled away, Quinn felt the motion tugging the ice screw.

  He let it go, still lodged in his attacker’s right eye socket.

  Freed, Quinn scrambled to get up only to see the head of the ice axe, this time with its sharp pick facing downward, hurtling toward him.

  He rolled to his side just as the axe crashed down, scraping across his chest in a rending tear, hooking the fabric of his shirt and sticking point-first deep into the carpet and wooden floor beneath.

  The figure above tried to pull the axe back up, but it was stuck fast. He lifted a foot to stomp down on Quinn’s head only to be knocked backward by the other assailant making crazily for the door.

  Screaming in agony, the figure ran out, holding his blood-spurting face from which the long, steel ice screw still protruded.

  The other attacker released the embedded ice axe and chased after him.

  Quinn blacked out as another heavy monsoon rain started to hammer on the flat concrete roof of the hotel.

  Part II

  AN EXPOSED TRAVERSE

  EIN AUSGESETZLER QUERGANG

  33

  Wewelsburg Castle, NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA, Germany

  February 15, 1939

  8:30 a.m.

  Josef was almost finished preparing his pack for his daily training march when Pfeiffer entered the guardroom. Immaculately dressed, as always, but with the hint of a rare smile on his face, he appeared to be holding something behind his back. Probably his damn SS dagger, Josef thought, looking up without bothering to hide the hatred that came naturally to his face whenever he saw or even thought about the SS officer.

  Pfeiffer had been absent since Josef had returned to Wewelsburg. The last time they had met was when Pfeiffer collected him from four weeks’ basic training with the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler at Berlin-Lichterfelde only to deliver him for a further month’s combat and survival training with elite Waffen-SS troops in the Harz Mountains.

  Josef wondered what the murderous man wanted; his appearances were never casual. He moved to get to his feet to find out, but the officer stopped him. “Continue. I have no wish to interrupt your training regime,” Pfeiffer said, looking down at Josef kneeling on the cold flagstones and cinching his heavily weighted pack.

  Beyond the heavy oak and iron door, the castle grounds had been blanketed with a thick covering of snow since the winter solstice, the New Year bringing a persistent, freezing north wind that had encased everything with ice. As he studied the man preparing to head out alone once more into that frozen world, Pfeiffer approved of what he saw. Although reportedly sullen and silent throughout, Becker had been classified as “excellent” at both Lichterfelde and Bad Harzburg, despite the instructions to single him out and push him to his very limits. Since his return to Wewelsburg, Becker’s guards reported that every day, whatever the weather or temperature outside, the man hiked for six or seven hours with a pack that weighed forty kilos, pounding himself up and down the steep sides of the hills that surrounded the castle. After, he would shower and change, eat like a horse, and spend the rest of the day in the library studying everything he was given about the mountain they wanted him to climb. Even if he said little to anyone other than the librarian, Josef Becker gave every appearance of having wholeheartedly followed every order Pfeiffer had given.

  “I bring good news,” Pfeiffer said. “Ernst Schäfer’s team has finally been permitted to cross into Tibet. It is now an official and internationally accredited Reich expedition. Legitimate diplomatic contact with it therefore permits us to also secretly furnish you with everything you will need when you arrive at the foot of the mountain as I have always envisioned. Given that things will soon be accelerating, I am here to review progress and advise you of the next steps. We will talk further when you return from your training session. In the meantime, I have brought you some things in recognition of the efforts I hear you have been making.”

  With a deliberate flourish, Pfeiffer pulled his arms from behind his back. He was holding Becker’s ice axe, his Gebirgsjäger mountain cap, and his army identification tag, Ganzler’s edelweiss ring still attached to it.

  “I understand that these were taken from you when you were first arrested. I think you have earned the right to have them back. I have taken a small liberty with your cap, as you will see.”

  Becker stood up and said nothing as he pulled his heavy backpack first up onto his knees and then up and around onto his back. Reaching for his axe, he gave its metal head a sweep with his gloved hand before spinning the wooden shaft back over his right shoulder. He inserted its point between the pack and his back, letting the axe slide down until the head hooked. It always lived there when he wasn’t using it. It felt good to have it back. Still silent, he took the tag, the ring, and the cap from the SS officer.

  The tag and the ring he retied around his neck and pushed back down under his clothes. Touching the ring, he felt no luck in it now, only shame and loss. Bending the peak of his cap in a little on both sides, as was always his habit before wearing it, Josef saw what Pfeiffer had been talking about. The small colored roundel beneath the German eagle to the front had been replaced. He looked at the new, polished metal badge in its place.

  It was the totenkopf, the death’s-head insignia of the SS.

  Death. Yes, that, rather than the edelweiss, is the correct talisman for me now.

  Josef put the cap on, pulling it down tight over the woolen scarf that already bound his ears and chin. He then covered his eyes with black-lensed snow goggles that pushed Pfeiffer into the dark shadow where he belonged.

  Pulling the hood of his white jacket up and over his head, Josef said only, “I will start now, if I may, Herr Oberst.”

  “Of course,” Pfeiffer replied, opening the heavy door to the outside. The bitter cold instantly slammed them both, Pfeiffer gritting his teeth against it to watch Becker step out into the monochrome winter morning without the slightest hesitation.

  “Halt!” Pfeiffer commanded. Josef did so, turning to look back at the SS officer, the freezing draft racing around him to invade the castle through the still-open door. “You hate me, Obergefreiter Josef Becker, I know. But understand that is good. Hate is a strong emotion. It makes us capable of anything and, for what lies ahead of you, that is going to be very necessary. We will meet again later. Until then, berg heil!”

  Josef shook his head, feigning an inability to hear through the layers of his headgear, but he understood every word, acknowledging even the promotion from gefreiter in the title Pfeiffer used. That man said nothing by mistake.

  Striding away from his captor without a second look, feeling remote from the world within his many layers, Becker concentrated instead on the huge weight of his loaded pack bearing down onto h
is back, pushing the shaft of his returned ice axe hard against his spine, cutting its straps into his shoulders. Usually he would ignore it, savoring instead the relief of at least a temporary escape from the castle, but that day he welcomed its burden, letting it squeeze pain, anger, and, yes, utter hatred into every part of his body. Quickening his pace, he crossed the castle bridge, hobnailed boots clattering over the rounded, icy cobblestones.

  At the cleared roadway beyond, he quickly turned down into the steep-sided wood. His legs immediately sunk into snow up to his shins, feet slipping and sliding under the pack’s weight as he began to descend, forcing him to grab at small evergreen bushes and naked saplings to stay upright. They shook their coverings of new snow onto him until he arrived, as he did each morning, at the spot below the castle where Kurt’s body must have landed. There, shaking off the snow and ice, Josef stopped, calling to mind the thudding sound of his friend’s death fall, the silent passing of Gunter before, the terrified faces of the nine Jews he had guided to execution, particularly the tiny girl he pushed into her own stone sepulchre. He said no prayer, just remembered what he had done and contemplated what their murderers now wanted him to do.

  Hate, indeed.

  From there, every day he would push himself as hard as he could up and down the steep slopes of the river valley beyond the castle’s promontory. He would do it for hours, punishing himself under the backbreaking load, forcing himself on until his lungs heaved and he could taste blood in his mouth. With every step he would fight the urge to just keep going in one direction. If it would have meant a single sniper’s bullet for him, there were days when he would have gladly taken it. But he knew there would be more bullets for his mother and sisters and that thought would reel him back to the castle as effectively as a fishhook through his cheek on an unbreakable line.

  However far he went, he could always feel the building’s sinister presence. It brooded over the surrounding countryside as if it alone were responsible for the desolation of winter that lay on the barren, hard-frozen land. Josef knew a lot about the SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg now. The only person within the dark castle that he regularly spoke to was the librarian, a captain called Waibel, charged by Pfeiffer with providing everything Josef needed to plan the climb ahead and supervise his studies.

  A nervous man in his late fifties, Waibel hid behind a well-tailored SS uniform and medal ribbons that told of time, and wounds, in the trenches of Flanders. In breathless, lyrical sentences, he described Wewelsburg as part university, part fortress, the spiritual “axis mundi” of the SS, a new Camelot for the reichsführer’s Teutonic order of Black Knights that was going to conquer the world and never grow old, not even in a thousand years. With eyes misting, he eulogized the reichsführer, describing him as a mystical man, a spiritual man who understood more than anyone why the Aryans were the master race destined to rule all others. He whispered of a prison camp nearby that held only Jehovah’s Witnesses, the best builders, engineers, and architects deliberately selected to restore the castle, compelled by their beliefs to work to the best of their abilities and not even try to escape. Jews could never be allowed to touch such a hallowed place. The castle, he said, doomed them to death instead.

  Yes, that is what they do to them now.

  Josef shut the horror of the place and its inhabitants from his thoughts as he did everything: by thinking of climbing instead. It was not so difficult to do. Ever since Pfeiffer had turned over that photograph and given his next climb a name, Mount Everest, he could let it rise up before him at will. Never-ending and colorless, it was as if the black-and-white images Josef had been poring over for months were now developed directly onto the inside of his skull. Its vast size could easily fill his mind to push everything else aside, and he let it. With every leaden step of his training, he would mentally tackle the details of a route he had now learned by heart. Whenever exhaustion stopped him in his tracks, he permitted the thought of what it would be like to take that final magnificent step to the very summit to push him forward again.

  The desire to climb the mighty mountain grew stronger every day, however much he told himself that to do so served his enemies and betrayed his friends. Even when he thought of his own family and told himself that he had no choice in the matter, Josef knew that it was no longer as simple as that. Everest was beginning to possess him as much as the invisible bonds that held him within the dark, almost medieval world of the castle. He risked losing his soul in the contradictions of its companionship.

  34

  Entering the castle library that afternoon, Josef was immediately met by Waibel stuttering, “G … g … guests. You have guests.”

  Looking across to the table to where he usually sat, Josef saw the backs of two black-uniformed officers sitting before the many maps, books, and photographs that covered his reserved study area. As Becker approached the table, one stood and turned to face him. It was Pfeiffer, of course.

  “Good. You are here precisely when Waibel said you would be. Come and sit with us, Obergefreiter Becker.”

  The other officer remained seated. He was signing letters and orders, each sandwiched between the pink blotting pages of a large, black leather-bound folder. With a wave of his fountain pen, he motioned to Josef to sit down but said nothing, continuing to study and sign each document with his spiky signature. Every time, it was identical, an even row of jagged points that cut across the page like teeth:

  Turning the last page of the blotter to reveal no further letters, the reichsführer closed the folder and slowly screwed the top back on his fountain pen. Satisfied that it was properly closed, he put it inside his black jacket, passed the leather folder to Pfeiffer, and looked directly at Josef. His slightly puffy, undistinguished face—despite the small Y-shaped dueling scar Josef could see on his left cheek—twitched slightly as he spoke.

  “So you are our Sisyphus? I see you the mornings I am in my office in the North Tower. I watch as you slowly move up and down the sides of the river valley under your heavy backpack. I find it somewhat inspiring, a daily reminder of cold determination.”

  He stared intently at Josef before turning to Pfeiffer.

  “Obersturmführer, please update me on the progress of this operation.”

  Pfeiffer reached down into his attaché case resting on the floor and put in the leather folder. His hand returned with a buff-colored file and a small package. Placing them on the table in front of him, he opened the file and looked at the typed notes and memoranda bound within. Josef could see, clipped to the inside cover, Pfeiffer’s photographs of him, his mother, his sisters, and the mountain.

  “Certainly, Herr Reichsführer. Obergefreiter Becker has been our guest at Lichterfelde, Bad Harzburg, and here at Wewelsburg for four months now. From his very first briefing on the objective of our operation, I am pleased to say that he has embraced the possibilities for preparation we have offered. He has impressed our training officers and exceeded their requirements. He has worked diligently on his fitness, as you have witnessed, and studied the mountain in detail. In addition, we have enabled him to become fully conversant with modern photography so that he might properly record his actions. He has also learned some English so that he can at least understand a bit of the dominant international language of the countries he will be passing through. With still a few weeks before he leaves, I consider that he will be more than adequately prepared for what lies ahead.”

  Himmler looked back at Josef as if considering him anew. “Good. Refresh my memory as to how he is going to get to the mountain undiscovered.”

  “He is joining a climbing expedition to Sikkim under the auspices of Professor Markus Schmidt, who is to lead a group of seven climbers and scientists in tackling some of the lower peaks of the Kangchenjunga as well as studying the geology and fauna of the area. The expedition has been Schmidt’s dream for some years, and, in order to assist our own objectives, we have facilitated it. Given that its mountaineer
ing objectives are relatively modest, it has the full approval of the local British authorities. That is not to say that it won’t be monitored by the presence of one of their army officers, but that should not cause us too many difficulties.”

  “Does Schmidt know the objective of Operation Sisyphus?”

  “Professor Schmidt is within our confidence. A long-standing party member and member of the Freundeskreis Reichsführer SS, he is utterly loyal and will do everything in his power to assist Obergefreiter Becker until the first ascent of his expedition. Following completion of that climb, Obergefreiter Becker will be deemed to be suffering from ‘mountain sickness’ and ruled unable to continue. He will then, with a local porter already identified as suitable, be ordered to return to Germany. In reality, however, they will instead secretly make their way into Tibet. Once they arrive at the mountain, they will be met by a member of Schäfer’s Tibet expedition, who will furnish additional equipment and give support for Obergefreiter Becker’s climb of the mountain. As you know, we favor the solo climb as by its very audacity and lack of huge resources, it will show the entire world what one determined German can do. Such an achievement would also be an even greater humiliation for the English, who always send armies of people when they try to climb it.”

  “It sounds thorough. When do they leave?”

  “The second of March on the SS Gneisenau from the Port of Venice to Bombay. It’s the same ship that Schäfer’s team took to India.”

  “That is quite soon.” Turning back to Josef, Himmler asked, “It is said you have the ability to climb anything. Do you feel honored to have such a chance to prove it?”

  Josef looked back at the glass lenses of Himmler’s omnipresent pince-nez seeing only multiple reflections of the mountain and his family from the inside of the open file on the table.

  “I do, Herr Reichsführer. I look forward to placing a flag on the summit knowing that it will bring pride and happiness to my family for years to come.”