“Yes,” said the Deacon, “but we need to take some prisoners to see just what the hell is going on and who we’re up against. We’ll be careful, but we have to walk into their trap. Let us think of ourselves as a night patrol in no-man’s-land.”
“Did most of the men on night patrols in no-man’s-land survive their patrols?” I asked.
“No,” said the Deacon. He gestured for us to remove fifteen of the eighteen oxygen tanks and their attached valves and rubber hoses and face masks from the aluminum frames and to stick the rigs into our almost empty rucksacks. We did so with as little wasted energy and noise as possible.
Then the Deacon gestured and—the four of us still in single file behind him with J.C. bringing up the rear—moved in a half-crouching, almost running gait, crampons crunching against rock and ice, up through the maze of snow-shrouded ice pinnacles and out onto the exposed ice of the East Rongbuk Glacier.
6.
The red glow was coming from a forest of penitentes and abutting vertical ice sheets on the south side of the Grand Crevasse we’d first tried bridging with a ladder and then found a descend-and-climb route a quarter of a mile east after that ladder had sagged. The ice uplifts just east of our main route were more like high, thin, razor-sharp upright sheaths of almost transparent ice rather than the stand-alone pinnacles further down in the Trough, and it was from within this labyrinth that the unearthly red glow was emanating.
Deacon silently gestured Jean-Claude to the lead, and we followed our Chamonix Guide through a spiderweb of unseen snow-covered crevasses. We knew they were there simply because we’d seen them in the daylight every time we’d gone up or down the glacier between Camps II and III. I had no idea how J.C. managed to avoid the crevasses at night; the clouds were still low, the fog from them still curled around us in gray tentacles, and there was absolutely no moonlight or starlight. The Deacon had navigated to this point partially by feel, partially by sheer memory, and partially by strapping his Welsh miner’s lamp around his right ankle and switching it on for only seconds at a time, illuminating just a few feet of ice or snow or rock ahead of him. Uncannily, almost every time he’d switched on the small light, there’d been a red-flagged wand within ten feet of him.
He didn’t use his ankle light as we approached the red-glowing ice ridges, then led us around behind them to the south. The bright red glow was diffused by the shifting ice mist and had turned the very air crimson.
The Deacon gestured to us all to get down and we did, responding as quickly as well-trained war dogs. He pointed to Jean-Claude, pointed again to a low ice pinnacle to the left of the opening in the ice ridge, touched his own chest, and pointed to the ice ridge to the right. J.C. nodded. The two men moved in the same instant, running forward seemingly on the toes of their crampons, flying ice chips glinting for a second like chips of frozen blood in the cold night air.
The two leaned against their respective ice columns as if readying themselves to crash through a door into a dangerous room. Then, at the Deacon’s almost imperceptible nod, both men surged around the ice walls with their Very pistols extended.
No flares were fired. For a few heart-pounding seconds they were out of sight, but then J.C. stepped back into the opening and gestured us forward. Pasang went first, then me, and then Reggie bringing up the rear. We moved carefully in the red-tinted darkness, trying to follow the Deacon’s and J.C.’s footprints in the snow, and when we reached the opening in the ice ridge, we could see that the red glow was coming from a modern electric torch—essentially a black box with a bright, directed bulb in it—and that there was a red lens set over the usually transparent lens. The snowy floor of the room-like space within the cluster of ice pillars was crossed and crisscrossed by boot prints.
“A trap…,” began Pasang.
A tall form came whirling around a penitente pinnacle toward Reggie. I had time to get an impression of a tall figure covered with long gray fur and a sharp-edged gray-white face like a human skull turned inside out. Only later did I register the black steel object in his right hand.
I was frozen but Reggie was not. She dropped to one knee as the hairy form lunged in her direction, its shaggy right arm rising, and she fired her Very pistol—a red flare—directly into the figure’s chest from a distance of only seven or eight feet.
The flare struck the tall man’s chest, ricocheted upward into the soft flesh under his chin, the furry overjacket he was wearing caught fire, the skull-face was violently jarred up and to the side, and then a second, human mouth under the mask opened wide, emitting sputtering red flare flames rather than a scream. The tall figure whirled around once, twice, three times—its chest fur burning, the flare illuminating the contorted double face like a giant red candle set in a broken jack-o’-lantern, and then the figure just…disappeared.
It didn’t go behind an ice ridge or pinnacle; one second it was simply whirling and on fire and hissing sparks and the next second…it was gone.
Then I saw the red glow coming up from within the glacier. I ran to Reggie’s side. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, thank you, Jake,” she said, her visible breath glowing red in the flare light that seemed to be coming up through the ice under our feet. She was calmly loading a new flare cartridge into the breech of her Very pistol. Turning away, I started to run forward, toward that glow at our feet, but Jean-Claude stopped me with a strong hand on my chest.
“Crevasse,” he hissed. Then he handed me the end of the rope he’d lashed around himself and wormed forward across the ice on his belly. He stared down into the roughly circular hole in the snow, and I could see the fading red flicker of the dying flare reflected on Jean-Claude’s face.
“It’s firm to the lip,” he whispered over his shoulder and gestured us forward. The Deacon and I advanced on our bellies and elbows and stared down into the crevasse. The Deacon had brought along the heavy black box of his electric torch—which cast a much brighter beam of light than did the miner’s headlamps—and he held it at arm’s length down the abyss, presumably to shield it from being seen by others who might be on the glacier, and turned it on.
I almost pulled my head back and away, so shocking was the view of a white skull face that seemed to be staring up at us from 40 or 45 feet down. Then I realized that the mask the assailant had been wearing had been forced to the top of his head during the fall. Because his head was sagging forward, we couldn’t see his face from our vantage point. The long fur-covered jacket was still burning on his chest and around his neck, and the smell of burning flesh that rose with the smoke was sickening. I was glad that Reggie hadn’t scooted forward with the three of us.
The man had fallen backside first into the crevasse, which was almost seven feet across at the top and then narrowing to less than a foot and a half at the point where the assailant’s body had become stuck. It was obvious that his spine had been completely snapped; the hobnailed soles of his boots were staring at us on one side of the narrow gap, the top of his head with the crude yeti mask gave the illusion of his skull staring up from the other side, and by the flickering light of his burning fur jacket and in the flat glare of the Deacon’s electric torch, we could see that his glove-covered hands lay limp on his lap. And there on his lap was a black 9-millimeter Luger.
The compression of the fall had turned his body into an impossibly sharp V that had jammed solidly in the narrowest part of the crevasse; we could see that beneath his grotesquely misshapen body, the crevasse opened wider again into a black and seemingly bottomless abyss.