I wasted no time resting there in midair, but whirled around, planted the crampon points of my right boot on the west ice wall, dug the points of my left boot into the east ice wall, extended both arms for leverage—and began working the crevasse as a chimney climb after tugging three times on the rope. I could feel the two strong men above me keeping the rope taut, but I dug points in while spread-eagled and worked to lift myself. Any of the killers could show up at any second on the glacier above, and I damned well didn’t want to be uselessly stuck in this crevasse if and when they did.
Then I was up and out of the bone-deep chill of the glacier’s guts and rolling out into the open. For a second as I kept rolling, I felt under me the wood of Pasang’s embedded ice axe that had kept the rope from cutting into the ice lip of the glacier. Getting to my knees, I retrieved the two anchor axes and stood, carefully backing away from the crevasse hole, still turned away from my two waiting friends. Both were panting; belaying a man who weighs a little over two hundred pounds is hard work at any altitude, but absurdly hard work there above 20,000 feet.
I let them gasp; I just bent over, put my hands on my knees, and tried to cough my guts up and out onto the glacier.
“That cough has been getting worse, Mr. Perry,” said Pasang. He moved away in the flickering red gloom and dug into his rucksack and doctor’s bag.
“We certainly aren’t going to sneak up on any more yetis if you keep hacking like that,” the Deacon said. “Did you get the pistol?”
I reached into my shirt to where the cold metal seemed to be burning me through several silk and cotton layers, removed the gun, and handed it to the Deacon.
He hefted the semiautomatic as if he knew how to handle the thing—I had little doubt that he did—and then he clicked a button near the trigger guard (which I later learned was the safety…the dead man in the crevasse had clicked it off), grabbed the little cylinder that tucks into the tops of Luger semiautomatic pistols, ratcheted it up and back until it locked in place, checked the now open breech, and then touched something that made the magazine that was in the stock drop into his palm.
“God damn it!”
The Deacon thumbed two 9-millimeter rounds out of the magazine, but that was it…two rounds.
“You couldn’t feel any extra cartridges in his pockets?” asked the Deacon.
“No. Nor under that yeti jacket. But I couldn’t reach his back pockets.”
The Deacon shook his head. “Unless they’ve used up all their ammunition shooting everyone at Base Camp, there must be more cartridges around here somewhere—perhaps in this yeti’s rucksack hidden somewhere here in the ice pinnacles or the ridges. What kind of total fool sets up an ambush for five or six people and keeps only two rounds in his magazine and none in the spout?”
I couldn’t answer that question, so I didn’t try. I wasn’t even sure where or what the “spout” of such a pistol was.
“He probably had more rounds in his rucksack. All three of us will look around this immediate area—you can use your headlamps, I’m going to use the big electric torch—but we can’t take more than five or ten minutes at the most. We don’t want to fall too far behind Jean-Claude and Reggie.”
I bent almost double as I started coughing and hacking again, straightening up eventually to feel Pasang’s big hand on my shoulder, steadying me.
“Here, drink this, Mr. Perry. All of it.”
He handed me a small bottle. I swallowed all of the fluid, which burned like liquid fire going down, sputtered but kept it down, and handed the bottle back to Dr. Pasang. Within thirty seconds I no longer had the compulsion to cough, and for the first time in almost forty-eight hours my throat didn’t feel as if it had a turkey wishbone stuck in it.
“What is that stuff?” I whispered to Pasang as we followed the Deacon out of the rough circle of red light from our yeti’s ambush torch.
“Mostly codeine,” Pasang whispered back. “I have more for you when the coughing returns.”
We turned on our lights and searched for close to fifteen minutes, but while we found boot prints behind ridges and ice pillars, there was no sign of a rucksack with ammunition in it. Finally the Deacon called us back together and we left. I could feel the Deacon’s frustration burning like a blue flame in the dark. What good was a German semiautomatic pistol with only two rounds in it?
Better than no pistol with no rounds, I told myself. I think I was trying to convince myself that my efforts down in that god-awful crevasse had been worthwhile.
Once we were back west of the crevasse and the red light and on the trail up the glacier, the Deacon turned, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Jake—I didn’t want to tell J.C.—but mostly I wanted you going down there because I thought you might recognize our chum minus his yeti face. Did you?”
“I think so. Maybe. Yes…I think.” Dead men’s faces, I’d learned, looked different from their alive faces.
“Well, who is it, for heaven’s sake?”
“Karl Bachner,” I said. “Bruno Sigl’s German climbing pal—the older, famous one, the one who was the president or founder of all those German climbing clubs—the older man who was at the table with us the night we met Sigl in Munich last autumn.”
The Deacon was close enough for me to make out his features in the dim light; he did not look surprised.
7.
We saw the glow from the flames and heard the gunshots when we were still more than a mile of glacier travel away from Camp III.
“Damn!” said the Deacon. I knew he was afraid that Reggie and J.C. had arrived there just in time to be caught in a massacre.
The pistol shots echoed down the long glacier valley, and they sounded strangely benign—like those last few kernels of corn popping randomly in a pan—but then the volume of shots increased. Mixed in with discrete pistol shots, there suddenly came a sound like someone ripping a long strip of thick fabric.
“What on earth…,” I whispered.
The Deacon held up one finger, silencing me as we listened. None of us had gone on oxygen, and we were all panting and wheezing after trying to move so quickly here at 21,000 feet. The ripping sound came again.
“It could be a Bergmann-Schmeisser submachine gun,” the Deacon said at last. “God help the Sherpas and Jean-Claude and Reggie if it is.”
“How fast can it fire?” I asked even while not really wanting to know.
“Four hundred fifty rounds per minute,” said the Deacon. “And the rate is limited only by the time it takes for the gunner to slap on a new thirty-two-round snail drum magazine. That bulky round magazine makes the Schmeisser MP-18/I awkward to carry, aim, and fire with any accuracy, but you don’t really need accuracy with that rate of fire. You just keep spraying. The Germans loved their damned Schmeissers for close-in trench fighting.”
“Jesus,” I gasped.
“Let us move more quickly,” said Pasang and broke into a trot, his crampons flashing in the lowered beams of our headlamps.
“I assume…no more…pretend yetis,” gasped the Deacon as he ran along beside the long-legged Sherpa. We were still each carrying more than thirty pounds of oxygen rigs and other stuff in our rucksacks.
“No,” agreed Dr. Pasang. “It is just men murdering men now.”
I trotted faster to keep up with the two, but the sense of something caught in my throat had returned and from time to time I had to stop, lean over with my hands on my padded knees, and cough until I retched. Then I would run faster in an attempt to catch up. Neither man waited for me in the dark.