Swift was already climbing into the SCE suit.
‘I’m coming with you,’ said Jack.
‘You’ll only slow me down,’ she said, lifting her mane of red hair and tying it with an elastic band. ‘You’re hardly recovered from your last journey.’
Jack recognized the truth of this, but still reluctant to let her risk her life alone, he suggested Mac go instead.
‘What about it, Mac?’
The Scotsman shrugged.
‘The suit doesn’t fit me,’ he said. ‘It’s too bloody big.’
‘What about the one Hurké wore?’
‘She’s wearing it,’ he said.
‘Look, Jack,’ said Swift. ‘Jutta’s got her hands full here. Byron’s too slow. Link’s not acclimatized to anything above four thousand metres. Mac’s too small. Hurké’s injured, and so are you. That leaves me, in a hurry, with no time for all this bullshit.’
Jack nodded and then embraced her.
‘Okay, but there’s one thing I’ve got to explain to you. And that’s laybacking.’ He told her about the curling slope at the end of the shelf, where the handhold was to be found, and how to use it.
‘Look, be careful,’ he added. ‘Remember what Boyd said. He’s a professional. He’s been trained for this kind of work.’
‘What will you do,’ asked Mac, ‘if you do catch up with him?’
‘Do? What do you think I’m going to do?’ Swift’s tone was almost scathing. ‘I’m going to try to kill the sonofabitch.’
Twenty-nine
‘...we shall eventually get to love the mountain for the very fact that she has forced the utmost out of us, lifted us just for one precious moment high above our ordinary life, and shown us beauty of an austerity, power, and purity we should never have known if we had not faced the mountain squarely and battled strongly with her.’
Emerging from the ice field — a hazardous experience that would have left him considerably unnerved but for the yeti’s tracks, for much of the original route marked by the Sherpas had been obliterated by the storm — Boyd toiled up the slope toward the Rognon and Camp One.
This was going to be easy, he told himself. A lot different from the several weeks he had spent at the NRO as CIA liaison officer on the satellite recovery program, codename Bellerophon. That had been like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Harder than that. He remembered the complaints of one of the desk analysts who was supposed to be putting him on the track of the fallen bird:
‘Worse than a needle in a haystack,’ the guy had said. ‘This isn’t proverbial. This is metaphysical. This is like trying to find angels on the head of a pin. A country the size of Florida. Eight hundred kilometres of mountains, most of them unclimbed. Whole valleys completely unexplored. Shit, this was a closed country until 1951.’
Boyd pushed his ice axe deep into the snow and stopped to take a breather. That he had found the satellite at all now seemed even more remarkable. Especially when he considered how inadequate to the task had been the NRo’s much vaunted technical systems. He smiled to himself and glanced around for any sign of pursuit, uncertain as to how equal to his task Ang Tsering would be. But the ice field blocked his view. He would take another look when he reached the top of the Machhapuchhare Rognon.
He was hardly new to this, having established what the Director of Field Personnel, Chaz Mustilli, had termed ‘a hallmark of accomplishment’ in this kind of operation.
A hallmark of accomplishment. Boyd had liked the sound of that. When he had destroyed the satellite, that would be another hallmark. Maybe even a medal. Certainly he would be paid a generous bonus and promoted a grade or two. The Agency was nothing if not grateful to its successful operatives. Eventually, when they saw the situation on the ground as he had seen it, they would surely understand why it had been necessary to kill one of the scientists, contrary to the order that he had been given. It was the kind of order you could make only if you were behind a desk back in Washington. Not the kind that applied in the field if you wanted to get the job done. That was all that mattered here, and if they didn’t understand that then they had no business being in charge of his mission in the first place. Sending him down here with a gun in his hand, what did they expect? There was no point in having a dog and wagging its tail yourself.
He pushed on, slowly and steadily, managing a reasonable speed, but still nothing to compare with Rebecca. Boyd was carrying only a light load. Just his rifle, a handheld radio wave detector to help him pinpoint the location of the satellite, some C4 plastique and some fuses, and the Satcom transceiver with which he was going to radio in his own rescue helicopter. But the climb up to Machhapuchhare was still a hard, almost cathartic experience that made him appreciate the capabilities of the yeti, whose tracks lay clearly ahead of him Like a series of tiny craters on some cold and forgotten planet.
It was too bad, he thought. Too bad if they would be poisoned by the effects of the exploded isotope, as Warner had said. But he could not see any alternative. If the satellite was not destroyed, then someone else — the Chinese probably — might find it and use the information and the technology it was carrying against the U.S.A. What were the lives of a few apes — albeit ones as rare as the yeti — against the national security of the United States? No one back at ABC understood that. For that matter, no one back in Washington understood that.
He was beginning to feel the effect of the altitude. It was not that he felt breathless. It was just a general lassitude that worked on his legs like one of Jameson’s immobilizing drugs, so that he had to force himself to keep climbing when his body wanted to take a rest. And after a while, conscious that the lengths of his rest periods were growing longer than the work periods, he had to discipline himself, taking fifty steps before taking a rest. Finally he reached the top and collapsed into Camp One as exhausted as if he had climbed Machhapuchhare itself. Crawling into one of the tents, he closed his eyes and dropped into a light doze.
The physical effort of pursuit helped Swift to deflect her mind from the danger Boyd posed to the yetis and to her own person. For a while she reproached herself for taking him at face value, for not being more suspicious of him from the very beginning. Was he really a geologist? A climatologist? He had seemed to know something about what he was supposed to be doing.
She was also aware of the irony of her situation. Just as she and Jack had concealed the true intention of the expedition from their sponsors, so Boyd had concealed his real intentions from her and everyone else. No wonder the expedition had been so well equipped. It was the U.S. military that had been their supplier. And all of it in the name of national security and a missing spy satellite.
But it did not seem so strange to her that it should have landed in the Himalayas. Eight kilometres north of Khatmandu, near the small village of Budhanilkantha and the walled compound that marked the ancient site, was a recessed water-tank where lay the five-metre-long statue of an Indian god known as the Sleeping Vishnu. Even when she had first seen it. Swift had been struck by how much like some cryogenically suspended alien spaceman the Sleeping Vishnu had looked. Now even more so that she was aware of a missing spacecraft. It was almost as if Vishnu might have fallen to Earth from the stricken satellite.