The thought that he would be firing at least two shells of those pellets today made his belly flutter so loosely that he was afraid he might wet his pants; but he felt an aching tightness in his chest, as if his lungs were struggling against his closed throat for fresh air while he was submerged far under water. I’m forty-one years old, he thought as he took deep breaths of the frigid air to try to dispell the feeling. I didn’t die at Ain al’ Abd three weeks ago-will I really finally do it today?
Pot’s right, no more bets, showdown.
He remembered his dismay at finding himself committed to a hand of cards without having honestly looked at the stakes, fourteen years ago. Had he been doing it again? But if the stakes were too frightening to consider, and the game was already lost, what value could there be in clear comprehension?
“All I can do is play out the hand,” he whispered. “I can’t change anything at forff-forfeit-forty-at my age.”
He stood up, still breathing deeply of the thin, icy air, and used his teeth to tug tight the wrist strap of the left mitten. The ten Spetsnaz commandos had filed out of their larger tent, and for the moment Hale avoided looking at them. Even seen peripherally they did look bulky, and he had to assure himself that a 7.62-millimeter round would easily penetrate even the thickest layers of leather and nylon weave and kapok fiber. He tugged his bulky parka hood over his head and trudged forward behind the rocking white rifle-barrels slung on the backs of Philby and Mammalian.
One of the Spetsnaz commandos pointed at Hale and barked some syllables in Russian. Hale forced himself simply to pause, and not to shuck his right hand free of its mitten to grab the Kalashnikov stock.
Mammalian turned around to face Hale-his black beard below the gleaming snow-goggles was already powdered with ice dust, but was still a conspicuous spot in this white sky world-and he called, “He says you will kill someone accidentally, holding your gun that way. Sling it the way they do.”
“Da!” yelled Hale obediently. But when he pulled the sling off over his head and then put it on again, the rifle barrel was pointed down, so that one yank on the barrel would bring it back to the Bedu position. The Spetsnaz seemed to be satisfied.
West of the tents the white slope climbed toward the tumbled chunks of ice at the foot of the Abich I glacier wall, and down here at the level of the tents one of the Russian commandos had begun axing out a square, yard-wide step in the snowpack. Another was lashing three snap-link carabiners at fifteen-foot intervals on a long white rope, and when he had finished he beckoned to Philby, Hale, and Mammalian.
He clicked the carabiners one by one onto similar links at the fronts of their climbing harnesses, so that the three men were attached to the rope.
The Russian muttered something, and Mammalian laughed and translated: “Our borscht-blooded friend says we are three babies that must be leashed.”
Neither Philby nor Hale had any funny rejoinders.
The Russian who had chopped out the step in the slope was now crouched in front of it, digging at the vertical wall of snow he had exposed. When he stood up and began speaking to one of his fellows, Hale could tell by the man’s tone that he was not happy. Hale peered at the exposed surface of snow, and saw that the Spetsnaz had scooped loose snow and ice out of several horizontal layers-apparently the snowpack was not uniformly dense.
Hale was the last man on the rope, and he walked up to where Philby stood, dragging the slack behind him. “Is that bad, do you suppose?” he whispered to Philby.
“This is all bad,” Philby muttered. “Our father has doomed us both.”
The Russian was speaking, and Mammalian waved backward at the two Englishmen; then he turned and said, “The ice is subject to shearing, sliding. Avalanche is a-real possibility.”
“Well, we knew that, for heaven’s sake,” snapped Philby.
“Uh,” Mammalian went on, translating, “it will be more dangerous when we are moving across the slope, above-rather than straight up it, as here. Make no noise-tread lightly, not stomping-and-don’t speak.”
One of the Spetsnaz, whose white machine gun was equipped with a folding stock and a collapsible bipod at the muzzle, walked downhill past Hale and knotted a lighter line onto the trailing end of the rope and clicked his own harness carabiner onto the bight of the knot. The three amateurs were now bracketed at either end. The rest of the Spetsnaz had attached their harnesses along the far half of the long rope with similar knots, and now the procession had begun to move up the white slope, in single file.
After Mammalian and then Philby had begun plodding forward, Hale took up the pace, hearing the crunch of the Spetsnaz’s boots start up behind him.
Hale could feel the grade of the hill in his calves, for with the crampon-spiked boots it was not possible to walk on his toes; but the mild ache was pleasant for now.
Soon the men at the front of the rope had stopped at the foot of the thirty-foot glacier wall, and after Mammalian and Philby and Hale had walked close enough for the rope to lie slack on the ground between them they halted too. The Abich I glacier was gray-white in cross-section, and Hale was staring up at the overhanging cornices of snow and ice when he noticed that the leader had begun to climb the bumpy, gullied wall.
The man moved upward in a contorting but graceful series of moves, like slow-motion bullfighting; at one point he would stretch out a leg to hook an outcrop with his instep, at another he would wedge his forearm or elbow into a gap in order to reach higher with the other hand, and once he simply pulled his whole weight up a yard like a man doing chin-ups. He paused near the top to hang a loop of slung rope on the face, and then after climbing up another yard he stopped below a gap in the overhanging cornice, unslinging his ice-axe to reach up and prod the surface with the pointed butt end of it.
At last he climbed up to the gap and jackknifed through it and out of sight; and a moment later another man was moving up the face, in rapid scrambles, and the line had begun moving again.
Hale was dizzy at the thought of making that ascent himself. There wasn’t enough slack between himself and Philby for him to hope that the men at the crest could simply lift them up like sacks of coal-clearly some climbing, some supporting of his own weight, would be required. Under all his clothing he could feel sweat on his chest, and suddenly his mittens seemed as clumsy as the fins of a fish. Was one supposed to take them off?-they were thonged together through a loop at his collar.
But when Mammalian went flexing and reaching away up the face, Hale saw that although the man was climbing, he was at the same time giving some of his weight to the rope, which was being tugged up from the top-and his mittens were off, swinging loosely behind his belt. I can do that much, Hale thought, shucking off his own and flexing his hands in the liner gloves; and when Mammalian had disappeared over the cornice and even Philby was halfway up the face, puffing and grunting and scrabbling with his crampon spikes at the ice, Hale stepped gamely up to the face and found that it was not difficult. With the rope taking his weight at his waist and tugging upward, he even found several times that he had to pause before stepping up to the next hand-hold to allow the rope to come taut again.
Then he had rocked over the lip in the cornice gap and was crawling across snow, the drogue stone swinging below his chin. Only one of the Russian commandos was hauling the rope up now, and the others were squatting on this new slope.
They were on the Abich I glacier now. It was more steeply inclined from south down to north than the Cehennem Dere had been, and it was mostly bare ice, with pockets of snow clinging to the face only where cracked, compacted sections of ice had been pushed up to make steps.
The air stung the inside of Hale’s nose, too cold at this height to carry any smells except a faint tingle like sulfur. Hale pulled his mittens back onto his aching, numbed hands, and the exposed patches of his face stung as if with a burn. He shifted around to look southward up the mounting slope to the peak, still three thousand feet above, and he quailed at the lunar remoteness of it, and of the white streamers of snow that trailed away from the peak across the gray sky.