The flames lit up the entire valley, including the face of Changtse and the ice wall to the North Col. We were less than two hundred meters from Camp III when two dark shapes suddenly stepped out in front of us as if to block our way.
My hand came up and I almost fired my mini-Very pistol at the closer silhouette before the Deacon cried “No!” and batted down my arm.
It was Reggie with J.C. close behind her.
“This way,” hissed Jean-Claude, and we followed him off the deep-printed trail as he led us north along a line of snow-covered ice pinnacles and iced-over seracs. After a few seconds of crunching along, I realized that J.C. had chosen this place to get off the main trail because the ice crust here was so thick that we left no boot prints.
“We need to get to Camp Three immediately,” whispered the Deacon with a pained urgency audible in his voice. The firing had stopped several minutes earlier. The Deacon was carrying Bachner’s two-shot 9-millimeter Luger in his gloved hand rather than the full-sized Very pistol.
J.C. and Reggie led us about two hundred meters north along the line of penitentes and seracs, then east through that icy maze until we reached a spot where we could look down on Camp III. Those of us who had binoculars in our rucksacks got them out.
“Oh…God…damn…it,” whispered the Deacon.
The tents at Camp III were all ablaze. Bodies of Sherpas were sprawled everywhere—we counted at least nine made visible by the flames—and those stacked crates and heaps of supplies that had not been burned had been hacked to bits with axes. There were no fake yetis visible, but whenever the fog shifted high enough, I could see bloody boot prints leading into the forest of ice pinnacles to the south of the camp.
The five of us slumped below the ice ridge and sat staring at one another.
“We arrived too late to help,” whispered Jean-Claude. “And it is all my own être damné par Dieu fault!”
“What happened?” asked the Deacon.
Jean-Claude emitted a stifled noise that could have been either a sob or a gasp. “I fell into a damned crevasse. Moi! The great Chamonix ice and glacier expert!”
“Were you using lights?” I asked.
“No,” said the despondent J.C.
“Were you roped up?” I asked.
“No.” He took a long, ragged breath. “I was leading, trying to keep Reggie and me on or near the path through an icy patch. Suddenly the snow opened up and I fell about twenty-five feet into the glacier until my ice axe wedged above me where the crevasse finally narrowed. I hung onto the shaft of the axe. Then I started cramponing my way back up and Lady Bromley-Montfort dropped me a rope. She pulled and I Prusiked. But it took me almost fifteen minutes to extricate myself, and I almost dropped my heavy pack into the abyss. I fell into a crevasse like some novice.”
“You can’t blame yourself, Jean-Claude,” whispered the Deacon. “It’s just too damned dark tonight and we’re all exhausted. No one got more than an hour or two of bad sleep on Monday night at Camp Five and we’ve been on the go since then. We climbed to twenty-seven thousand feet and above on Sunday and Monday, spent the nights high too many times, haven’t had enough water to keep a hamster alive, descended almost ten thousand feet in one day, and tonight climbed almost five thousand feet again. It’s a miracle that any of us can function at all.”
“The Sherpas here at…,” began Jean-Claude and stopped. He was sobbing.
“They never had a chance,” said the Deacon. “And it’s all my fault. I’m climbing master on this expedition, responsible for everyone’s safety. Now all of the Sherpas may be dead, and it’s my fault. I was in command.”
“We see only nine bodies,” whispered Reggie. “There were fourteen Sherpas at Camp Three if all the porters got back safely from Camp Two after we sent them up the glacier. And Nawang Bura came with us and then disappeared. We can hope he made it safely out of the valley.”
“With his meat cleaver against Bergmann-Schmeisser machine pistols and Luger semiautomatic pistols,” the Deacon said bitterly. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek.
“How were the two who almost got away from Base Camp killed?” asked Pasang.
“Long-range rifle shots,” whispered the Deacon. “From our stolen rifles is my guess.”
“I know the hunting rifles that Lady Bromley-Montfort and I brought,” Pasang said. “We both used nineteen twenty Mannlicher-Schönauer bolt-action rifles for hunting. What did you bring, Captain Deacon? It was a modified Lee-Enfield, was it not?”
“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Fitted out with an offset Periscopic Prism Company ’scope. The telescopic sight is offset about three inches to the left because of the bolt action. You sight with your right eye, but can switch to your left eye while firing and working the action. I used it at the Front. It looks clumsy—it was clumsy—but it worked well enough.”
“You were allowed to keep that after the War?” I asked.
“It was illegal, but I did,” said the Deacon. “I’d paid for the telescopic sight myself.”
“But Ree-shard…” Jean-Claude paused for several seconds. “You were an officer, no? Your only weapon was the Webley revolver that you lent to Semchumbi tonight, yes?”
“Yes and no,” said the Deacon in heavy tones, as if he were a Catholic confessing a very dark secret indeed. “Even though I was an officer, I volunteered to be trained as a sniper. I grew very good at it during our weeks in the trenches between attacks.”
I didn’t know how to feel about this revelation. Everything I’d heard after the War suggested that both sides hated snipers on the battlefield. Even their own.
“A Buddhist sniper,” said Reggie, breaking the silence at last. “Which means that we have to regain one of those rifles for you to use.”
“We tried,” said Jean-Claude. “Reggie suggested, and I agreed, that we should set an ambush here at these icy seracs for the yetis—these German-climber yetis—when they came back along this part of the glacier trail. Her idea was good. Fire flares at those carrying our rifles or the Schmeisser machine pistol, try to grab one of those weapons in the darkness and confusion, and then retreat into the ice maze here.”
“They would have killed you both,” said the Deacon.
Jean-Claude shrugged. “We need real weapons, mon ami. Did you succeed in getting the dead yeti’s pistol?”
The Deacon showed the black Luger. “Two rounds, none in the breech. I think Bachner was never a soldier.”
“It was Bachner?” asked Jean-Claude. “The man who was with Sigl in Munich when you went there?”
“Who’s Bachner?” asked Reggie.
I whispered an explanation to her, and then the Deacon interrupted. “Did you see the Germans during this slaughter at Camp Three? How many attackers were there? Is there any chance some of our fourteen Sherpas did get away?”
“We saw at least eight Germans in their hairy jackets,” said Reggie. “They’d given up wearing the yeti masks once they were through slaughtering our people. After setting the tents and stores ablaze, they just tossed the masks and yeti-vests into the fires.”
“I believe that a few of our people dragged themselves into the serac forest wounded,” whispered Jean-Claude. “The boot prints show that the Germans followed them into the ice-pinnacle maze, following their blood trails. Finishing them off.”