Wiping his brow he allowed himself a small smile of contempt for the people back in Washington. What did they know about the people in the camp below? He was the man on the ground. He should have never told HUSTLER in the first place. He should just have gone ahead and told HUSTLER afterwards. This was his call. He was best placed to read the situation. When you perceived a threat, you didn’t wait for it to develop. You took action.
From his rucksack he removed a couple of small explosive charges and placed them carefully and at regular intervals along the ridge above the Chinese camp. He found himself singing:
CASTORP trudged back down the valley onto some safe ground and, hardly hesitating, detonated the charges with a small remote control. Snow muffled the sound of the little explosions, each of them sounding no louder than a hand clap. At first the snow hardly moved, and he wondered if he might have miscalculated. But gradually the whole slope, one enormous slab of snow and ice, began to move, like soup pouring out of a pot. Quickly it increased in speed and volume until it was a deafening tidal wave, a mushrooming tonnage of cloud and cold debris, like a tall building from which the foundation had been blown away.
When the avalanche was over and the airborne powder had cleared, the moonlit valley looked as peaceful as a Christmas card scene, and it was as if the Chinese camp had never existed. The man turned away and heading back toward ABC he sang again:
‘Brightly shone the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel,
When a poor man came in sight,
Gathering winter fuel.’
Seventeen
‘Of all the wonders, none is more wonderful than man.’
Bitterly cold. Swift awoke to find Jack’s gloved hand held over her mouth. It was still dark and she could hardly see his face, only felt his hot breath, still smelling of whisky, as he whispered:
‘We’ve got company.’
She sat up abruptly, almost bumping heads with Mac or Jameson — she wasn’t sure which — and, with breath held, listened carefully.
It had stopped snowing. Even the wind had dropped. Outside the tent, the snow had frozen solid under the Himalayan night’s hard frost. She could hear the snow crunching underfoot as whatever it was moved around Camp One.
‘Is it someone from ABC?’ she whispered hopefully.
‘Too far and too dangerous,’ said Jack. ‘It would be suicide to try to come up here in the dark.’
‘What about those Chinese?’
‘Ditto. They’re just as far away. No, this is something else.’
Jameson had found his pistol and was trying to load it with a syringe dart. The footsteps were coming closer to the tent.
‘This isn’t so easy in the dark,’ he whispered.
‘Take the gun,’ said Jack. ‘It’s still loaded.’
‘Too powerful. Can you and Mac handle the flashlights? I’ll only have a chance for one shot and I want to make it—’
Jameson stopped to listen to a loud sniffing noise as the creature outside the tent inhaled the cold night air.
‘The stew,’ Swift whispered. ‘It smells the beef stew.’
‘Connoisseur, eh?’ said Jameson. ‘Good for him.’ He slid the syringe into the barrel of the pistol and closed the breech. ‘Ready.’
Something batted the wall of the tent, which then bulged as a large body pressed up against it. Swift felt her heart miss a beat as she detected a pungent animal smell.
Now the creature struck the wall again, only this time the sound was accompanied by the rattle of some mess tins. It had found what it was looking for: the remains of the beef stew.
Swift would hardly have thought it possible to feel a chill of fear on top of the cold she already felt, but her hair was rising on her scalp as if her skin had recognized first what her ears and her brain were slower to register. There really was a big animal out there.
‘I’d better go first,’ said Mac, swallowing loudly. But he did not move. He was held back by a loud ripping sound. Claws. The creature was tearing open the back of the tent next to Swift’s head with claws that were as sharp as razors. Swift thought back to the sirdar’s description of the yetis. She could not remember him saying anything about them having sharp claws. Was it possible that these higher anthropoids might have long and sharp fingernails? By Hurké Gurung’s account, they seemed to lack nothing else in aggression.
‘I don’t think you’ll have to go outside,’ she hissed back at him. ‘Whatever it is is coming in.’
‘It’s coming in,’ Jack repeated. ‘Christ, she’s right.’
The ripping sound grew louder as the creature’s claws scored several wide tears in the orange material of the Stormhaven tent. Swift caught sight of something through a slash and, as coolly as she was able, said:
‘Better let it make a decent hole first. Miles. You wouldn’t want to shoot the tent.’
‘Get ready to turn on those flashlights,’ said Jameson.
Moonlight slashed into the tent, followed by a wave of cold air — and then something animal hit Swift’s nostrils, only more powerfully this time.
‘Hold it,’ she said through teeth that were chattering with fear and cold. Her heart felt as if it had stopped pumping blood to her head. She tensed herself, waiting for the inevitable moment when the creature would be inside.
A low growl rumbled through the tent, then followed another, more furious rip of claws, and a gaping hole appeared in the slashed-to-ribbons nylon wall, big enough to have allowed Swift to crawl out. Or something else to crawl in. For a moment she could see nothing but the snow on the ground outside the tent. In the moonlight something moved, slowly at first and then picking up speed. There was a louder growl and the shadowy form became something more substantial as what looked like a head pushed through the pennants of nylon that trailed across the hole in the tent. Suddenly, an almost luminous yellow eye met Swift’s own.
‘Now,’ she said, ‘now,’ and dropped her head flat against the groundsheet so as to avoid being shot herself.
Flashlight filled the tent a second before Jameson pulled the trigger. There was a short coughing noise, like the sound of a crossbow being fired, as the carbon dioxide cylinder in the pistol discharged its chemical restraint, then a loud, inhuman roar as the creature recoiled first from the light and then from the dull pain of the dart. Then they heard something running lightly over the frozen crust of the snow.