Kirinyaga

by Joe Gores

  KIRINYAGA

  by Joe Gores

  Something different from Joe Gores, and “clear and convincing” proof of his writing versatility … an adventure-crime story about mountain climbing in East Africa, with as authentic and chilling a background as you have ever read… You won’t forget Kendrick’s heroics for a long time …

  The climber looked like a fly at this distance, Kendrick thought. Because of the anorak he wore, like a bright red fly. Clinging to a rack face of vertical slabs and deep horizontal sections which together formed a massive staircase with hundred-foot risers.

  The fly had reached the top of a trough-like diedre in one of the risers. Broken rock there. Brought up closer, the fly began working toward a niche in the edge of the step above. Not a bad show for a man recovering from his annual bout of malaria, Kendrick thought.

  Closer yet. He could see the three-color zigzag design of the knitted balaclava helmet. Hesitating at the foot of a bulging rock face split by a shallow groove. Get on with it, Kendrick thought.

  Right up through the bloody overhang to the stance above. You know you have to do it.

  Good show. Tight on the head and torso now. Fingers groping above for purchase. It was coming now. Head turning so that sunlight struck off smoked goggles. Unshaven, teeth clenched, sweat rivuleting the cheek and line of jaw even in the subfreezing temperatures of 17,000 feet. Now. Just here.

  The climber slipped, swung free of the rock, only the fingers of the right hand still holding their grip. A gasp went up. Kendrick grinned. Yes. A good bit, that. Unexpected.

  The image disappeared and the lights of the stuffy crowded viewing room came up to the clearing of throats and muttered comments. Kendrick paused in the hallway, sweat starting to dry on his lean muscular body, made leaner by recent illness. A couple of inches under six feet, with straight, prematurely white hair and a deeply tanned mid-thirties face.’

  Morna tucked a proprietary arm through his as the production people and distributors’ reps and studio flacks flowed around them.

  “Don’t you think it’s wonderful footage?” Her clear, very blue eyes smiled up into his. Morna was his ex-wife. “Aren’t you glad I got you on as guide and Kenya technical adviser?”

  “I can use the money,” Kendrick agreed. He said, “You look wonderful yourself, luv. London must agree with you.”

  He still had her note from two years before, when she had packed it in. This bloody damn country … He had found it when he’d returned from a fortnight on staff at the Outward Bound Wilderness School on Kilimanjaro. Hadn’t been strong enough to hold her.

  “You look awful,” she said. “Thin and”

  “The annual bout of malaria. It’s finished now.”

  She tugged at his arm, skin like satin and untouched by the sun, auburn hair worn long and straight and parted in the middle like an Asian’s. “Let me buy you a drink. I’m meeting Burke at The Thorn Tree.”

  Let her buy, Kendrick thought. She’d have plenty of pence now, living with the great Burke Hamlin. He felt a stab of jealousy.

  They went out into bright Kenya sunshine, then under the colorful umbrellas shading The Thorn Tree’s sidewalk tables. Hamlin was already there, surrounded by the usual sycophants, newspaper and media people; three tables gad been pulled together to accommodate them. Perkins, the young reporter on the East African Standard, was asking a question. Kendrick knew Perkins from the Kenya Mountain Club.

  “How did you get that superb climbing footage? I’ve been on scrambles up Kenya myself, and that camera angle”

  “Two cameras, both set up on the edge of that glacier on Point Lenana.” Art Kaye, the hulking bespectacled chief cameraman, had taken it as a technical question on the difficulties of location shooting over three miles above sea level where cameras would want to freeze up. “What you saw was put together out of both magazines. Aeroflex 35mm’s, one with a 120mm zoom for the loose stuff, the other with a Questar for in tight.”

  A woman reporter put the focus back on Hamlin. Morna had sat down next to the actor and had an unconsciously familiar hand on his thigh with Kendrick’s drink forgotten.

  “Mr. Hamlin, when you slipped and were hanging by only one hand, was that deliberate? Or”

  Burke Hamlin leaned back in his chair and sipped thoughtfully at his drink, a faraway look in his pale blue eyes. A grin split his craggy features. He had a rolling masculine voice that went well with the six-three physique and fifty-inch chest.

  “Let’s just say it makes damned good theater.”

  Kendrick used that as an exit line, sliding backward out of the crowd as Morna’s lips formed the words: Call me. Behind him, Hamlin’s voice, beautifully projected, was explaining that Kenya was a corruption of a much older Kikuyu word, Kirinyaga which meant, literally, mountain of whiteness. The house of god, home of Ngai, the creator.

  Kendrick had told him that himself a few days before.

  Over their first drink Morna said, “A few days in Nairobi and I remember why I left East Africa.”

  “Thanks for them few kind words, ma’am.”

  Kendrick had felt a suppressed masculine excitement ever since picking her up at the hotel. They’d been good together, and he’d found single-life sex unexpectedly conventional and bland, like British cooking. Morna laughed and laid a warm hand on his.

  “Present company excepted. You don’t much care for Burke, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  “Beyond the machismo bit, I mean. After all, isn’t he the sort you’ve always professed to admire? A real man who can come out here to your world and excel”

  It slipped out drily before he realized it. “You mean like he did in that climbing footage?”

  “Exactly.” She pushed aside the ruins of her steak. God, she was beautiful, face alight, eyes sparkling, perfect lips curved.

  Small wonder he’d not been man enough to hold her. She said, “Catch-up time.”

  Not much to tell. White hunting, what was left of it, had become a black man’s game by government fiat, so he’d drifted into the Kenya Game Department as a park warden. And spent his spare time climbing, of course Kili, Kenya, the Aberdares, the Ruwenzoris.

  “The Mountains of the Moon!” he exclaimed. “Took us three weeks to get in and up to the top of Rarasibi, and it rained every bloody day. Except near the top, where it snowed.”

  “I’ll take Carnaby Street.”

  She had literally, in fact, returning to the mannequin’s job from which Kendrick’s whirlwind courtship during a long leave in England had snatched her. It was in Carnaby Street that Burke Hamlin also had found her, modeling a wardrobe for his latest dolly who’d quickly become ex-dolly.

  “It’s permanent with you and Burke?”

  “I leave decisions to him, he’s superb at them.” The hotel elevator bore them upward. “I enjoy the sex-object role.”

  Sex-object for Hamlin, thought Kendrick a bit bitterly over the brandies in her room. If he’d been a stronger man, more self-confident like bloody Hamlin, she’d still be his. Then she surprised him with that special look he’d never been able to forget, was kicking off her shoes and unzipping her dress with one flow of sensuous movement. Her eyes were enormous and dark and unfocused in the dim room.

  “Just between us, darling,” she said. “Old times.”

  It was better than old times. It was better than anything else would ever be, Kendrick thought as he dressed by the soft glow from the open bathroom door. She was lying on the bed, watching him with solemn, sated eyes.

  “I’d forgot,” she said, “just how” She stopped. “Burke will be busy again on Thursday night.”

  To his own surprise Kendrick said, “I’ll be back upon Kenya by then.” It came out rougher than he wanted. But if he remained in Nairobi he wou
ldn’t be able to stay away from her, and he didn’t want that. She was another man’s woman now.

  “You just came down off that bloody mountain,” she said curtly.

  There wasn’t any answer to that. He kissed her and let himself out. He was glad he hadn’t told her the truth about that climbing footage of Hamlin. Hamlin was right for Morna, the strong, aggressive individual she’d always wanted and hadn’t found in Kendrick.

  By the time he reached the summit of Point Lenana, only an hour up the ridge from Top Hut, it was snowing again and the two major peaks, Nelion and Batian, had been blotted out. It was . just a scramble, nothing more strenuous than kicking steps in each day’s new snow. He’d been up to Lenana each morning for the past three days, waiting for a window of decent climbing weather to try the twin central peaks.

  Going down, the snow-blanketed breadth of the Lewis Glacier lay to his right, the clouds now pouring up over it and across the ridge like smoke off dry ice. It was snowing in earnest when he swung open the door of Top Hut, itself at 15,730 feet, and stomped his feet clean. Only then did he realize two more climbers had arrived.

  “We wondered where you’d got to, with all your climbing gear still here,” said Perkins. The reporter from the Standard was a slightly built youth, pale-skinned and pale-haired and, right now, looking white and drawn around the mouth. The other climber was Burke Hamlin.

  “A scramble up Lenana.” Kendrick stripped off outer clothing.

  “Touch of mountain sickness?”

  Burke Hamlin made a grandly dismissive gesture. He looked immense in his climbing clothes. “Not me. Young Perkins.”

  “You want some aspirin or Panadol for the head?”

  “Some of the Panadol, if I may,” said Perkins.

  Kendrick watched him down the pills with water and fought a rising anger. What the hell were these two doing up here? Perkins, easy of course: hero-worship of Hamlin, and a possible feature in one of the big London dailies. But why Hamlin? A talkative bellhop at the hotel?

  “Want to check the peaks,” grunted Kendrick.

  He left the hut without looking back, knowing the actor would follow. Bloody fools. Hamlin, even Perkins, had never seen Kirinyaga frown. Now, with the wet season pushing the snow line down, that frown could be deadly to climbers. He turned when he heard Hamlin’s boots crunching behind him.

  “Neither of you is a good enough climber for any real rockwork.”

  Hamlin gave him that wide and famous grin that celluloid villains saw just before the choreographed mayhem began. “Maybe I want to revise that estimate for you. Or maybe I want to say I don’t mind your sleeping with my woman, but why did you tell her the truth about that climbing footage?”

  Morna herself must have told Hamlin of their coupling. Why?

  “I didn’t know there was any bloody great secret about that footage, Hamlin. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t tell her.”

  “She says you did.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe Kaye mentioned it. I didn’t have to.”

  In a surprisingly mild voice Hamlin said, “You’re rather a louse, aren’t you?”

  “Listen, Hamlin, any fears you might have that I’ll get Morna away from you are purely make-believe. Just for the effect. But this mountain is real. Take the boy back down tomorrow. His sickness gives you a good excuse.”

  “While you stay up here? Mighty mountaineer turning back the lowly actor because the mountain is too dangerous for him? No, thank you.”

  “For Pete’s sake,” said Kendrick in a pained voice.

  He went back inside. Perkins was lying on one of the bunks with a forearm over his eyes. Kendrick knew the symptoms of oxygen starvation vividly himself, headache, loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting. But he also knew Perkins, hero-worshipping all the way, would struggle up the peaks if Hamlin did, unless he could deflect the youngster himself. Hamlin couldn’t very well try it alone.

  “That film you saw of Hamlin climbing,” he told Perkins. “That was me. Hamlin’s no better climber than you are, doesn’t know a damned thing about any really tricky rock or ice-work. Standard III, maybe. You’ll be facing Standard V pitches up there, and ice and snow.”

  Perkins sat up, swung his feet to the floor. He said, hesitantly, “You’re saying we’d be fools to go on?”

  “Bloody fools. Rest here the night and head down in the morning. Will you do that?”

  Perkins finally nodded. He looked very ill. Kendrick stood up.

  “I’ll spend the night at Two-Tarn Hut,” he said. “Neither Hamlin nor I would be comfortable if I dossed here.”

  He settled into the shabby wooden hut that crouched near the bleak shore of Hut Tarn well before dark. He found himself fighting a vague uneasiness. He finally isolated it: Hamlin wouldn’t be fool enough to try for the peaks alone, would he?

  Golden sunlight slanted through the window to wake him. It was late, nearly 6:00 A.M. Kendrick yawned, sat up, began pulling on layers of clothing. The hut was icy. When he opened the door, the dazzling white and black peaks towered starkly above, surely close enough to touch across the miles of snow and ice fields flanking the glaciers.

  Kendrick hurriedly lighted the primus and set water heating in the sufuria. Amazing to get a window of weather this far into the season, he ought to make the most of it. He poured boiling, water over the tea leaves, sugar and dried milk in his cup, and to the remainder in the sufuria added white corn meal, dried milk, and salt to make ugali. Porter’s rations, that, not European fare; but he could subsist on ten pounds of food a week up here.

  He ate at the window. As he had thought. Already wisps of cloud were forming in the cleavage between Nelion and Batian, where the Diamond glacier sparkled. The cloud falling on the ice made it gray and cold-looking. Kirinyaga’s usual rainy season tricks. Sunshine, then

  Kendrick’s spare hard body tensed. He never would have seen them if the window hadn’t framed them. given them scale.

  Bloody stupid idiots! He glassed the distant figures with his binoculars. Hamlin in the lead, Perkins behind, trying the southwest ridge of Batian. He should have known Perkins’ acquiescence had been the mountain sickness working. When that had lessened, and with Hamlin whispering in his bloody ear “The blind leading the blind,” Kendrick said in a vicious voice.

  The southwest ridge. A tough ascent even during the climbing season. On the south side a snowfield, where they’d have to cut steps across. At the head of that, a rock bulge that would be treacherously verglassed this time of the year.

  He jerked on sweaters, anorak, knitted mitts with split palms, stuffed balaclava and waterproof gauntlets into pockets, jammed a soft floppy-brimmed army fatigue hat on his head.

  To the snout of the Darwin glacier he moved at a slow trot, then angled up the true right bank of the ice floe, reversed himself, went left up snow-sheathed rocks to the southwest ridge notch. He followed their tracks across the snowfield, his cheeks burning with cold. The sun had gone, the wind was moaning at him from the east. He paused to don the balaclava, saving the gauntlets for the real cold ahead. He had always hated heroics, and now he was involved in those of a posturing ape.

  They had somehow made it up and over the rock bulge, verglassed as it was with frozen rain. He felt a spurt of adrenalin-like hope; that had taken nerve and strength. But ahead, between him and the main ridge, lay a hundred yards of steep black broken rock. And beyond that A sudden shrill scream cut through the wind’s low moan. He needed no clatter of falling rock to confirm it; he’d heard men fall before. He went up the hundred yards of tumbled rock in a single ferocious sustained rush that left him on the narrow ridge panting and nauseated. The screams had cut off. Dead? In shock? One or both?

  He hallooed. No answer. He was aware of intense cold stinging his nostrils and lungs. Of thin air pushing his pulse to 160. And of fatigue. Bone-chilling fatigue. The annual fever bout was not as far behind as he had thought.

  Kendrick hallooed again. This time a weak voice answered.

&nb
sp; They’d come to grief at the crux of the climb, a two-hundred-foot buttress of exposed rock dismally bare of good handholds. His eyes searched the swirling, snow-laden clouds above. There! A dark shape clinging to the sheer wall.

  One dark shape.

  “Are you all right?” he called.

  “Help! For God’s sake, help!”

  The rock bulged out toward Batian’s west face, so his weight was carried by his arms and the strain of thighs and knees against the rock. Up, and up. The face mercifully eased to merely vertical. Thirty feet. Forty. Burke Hamlin was clinging spread-eagled to good holds, face white and strained, eyes absolutely wild.

  “Get me down from here,” he said hoarsely.

  Kendrick was well to the side. Terrified climbers were like terrified swimmers, they’d take anything within reach down with them.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t know. For God’s sake, man”

  Kendrick’s fingers were numbing with cold; he regretted the gauntlets. Snow swirled around them. The actor’s safety rope had parted a couple of feet below his belt. Kendrick had to find Perkins, but before he could he had to get Hamlin down the ledge formed by the ridgetop and the base of this exposed buttress.

  “Move when I tell you, where I tell you,” he said in the voice of someone calming a spooked horse. “Don’t look down. Okay, left hand down six inches … good! Now, left foot … “

  It was a bad twenty minutes. Hamlin collapsed on the four-foot width of the ridgeline. Kendrick followed the ledge, found the safety line with Perkins still attached to it. He’d been probably twenty feet below Hamlin when he’d fallen and the rope had parted, had struck the ridge, and had kept going over and down the sheer face.

  Kendrick crouched on the ledge. Visibility was so bad he could barely see the blond youngster’s limp body hooked around a knob of rock fifteen feet below. Three feet to either side, Kendrick thought, and he’d still be bouncing.

  He belayed around an out-cropping, then roped down to assess the damage. One leg was shattered just below the hip, so the jagged white end of femur was thrust out through a rip in the flannel trousers. The red meat exposed by the tear was already freezing. Internal, Kendrick could only guess. A pulse, yes, but The eyes suddenly opened in the deathly pale face a yard away.