“I was hoping that some of those blood trails belonged to the Germans,” I said. “Semchumbi had the Deacon’s Webley revolver. I forget—how many rounds did that hold?”
“Only six,” said the Deacon. “And it’s a double-action revolver. But it has an automatic extractor when you break it, so someone skilled in its use, with extra cartridges at hand, can get off twenty to thirty rounds per minute.”
“Was Semchumbi skilled in its use?” asked J.C.
“No,” rasped the Deacon.
“Did he have extra cartridges at hand?” asked Pasang.
“No.”
“Well, I still hope he shot a few of the bastards,” I said.
“Amen,” whispered Jean-Claude.
From time to time we popped up and looked over the ridge with our binoculars, but—save for the fires dying down—the terrible view remained the same. The Germans had not returned. None of the bodies in the snow had stirred.
“We have to go down there,” said Reggie. Her voice was steadier than mine could have been.
“Why go down there?” I asked. “Why risk it?”
“We need food, kerosene, a Primus or Unna cooker, Meta bars to burn, sleeping bags, extra clothing, anything useful the Germans didn’t destroy,” she said.
“Let’s just retreat down the glacier now,” I said. “It’s too risky to go near those flames. The Germans might be waiting for that. Waiting for us.”
“They probably are,” the Deacon agreed, “but Reggie’s right. We need to forage what we can from Camp Three—God knows there wasn’t anything left at Base Camp, Camp One, or Camp Two—and we need food, fuel, and a cooker to survive.”
“Why do you think there will be stuff left here?” My voice sounded desperate and a little panicked even to my own ears.
“Remember, Jake,” said the Deacon, “we had that tarp-covered cache here at Camp Three—about fifty yards west of the camp, where the boulders get jagged near the base of Changtse. Today’s snow may have hidden it more. And the cache was just far enough away that the Germans may have missed it—unlike at Base Camp and the other camps where they had the advantage of some daylight, they hit Camp Three after dark tonight.”
“Shouldn’t we decide what we’re doing next—which direction we’re going, what our plans are—before we try to salvage anything here?” asked Jean-Claude.
“There’s nothing to discuss,” I insisted. “The expedition’s over. It’s just a question now of whether to climb west over the Changtse Ridge to Lho La Pass into Nepal, or east over the North East Ridge—no, that won’t work—anyway, get out of the valley somehow and over Windy Pass, Lhakpa La, and then over Karpo La Pass down into Tibet. I think that way has to be the second choice.”
“We’ll discuss where and what after we forage,” said the Deacon, using his command voice. “There are factors that you, Jake, and you, Jean-Claude, haven’t yet heard about. First we have to get a cooker and some fuel and anything else we can scavenge. We’ll also look for survivors when we’re down there.”
“Sherpa or German?” I asked.
“Both,” said the Deacon. “But I’d give my left testicle to get one of the Germans as a prisoner.”
“I’d give your left testicle for that as well,” Reggie said at once.
Despite our precarious position near the glacier trail down to Camp II, we all laughed out loud. When we stifled the laughter, the Deacon said, “Who wants to come with me down to the camp?”
“I’ll go,” J.C. said at once.
“I shall stay here with Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Dr. Pasang.
“I’ll go down to the camp with you two,” I was amazed to hear myself say.
8.
Before the Deacon, J.C., and I found anything to salvage, we found two more Sherpas’ bodies. The Germans had made no effort at yeti-mauling the bodies with blades or sharpened rakes or whatever the hell they’d used at Base Camp; all the Sherpas we could see in the light of the dying flames here at Camp III had been shot. Most, several times. A few had been riddled by automatic weapons fire from machine pistols at close range.
Semchumbi was one of those who’d run east and been shot in the back behind the now-burned-to-the-ground Whymper tents. There was no sign of the Deacon’s revolver on him or near him. We had no idea if he’d gotten any shots off before he died. But the pistol was definitely missing.
Rather than go down into the penitentes where the Germans had headed after their last murder spree, the three of us took the harder route north almost to the ice wall and then circled around to the base of Changtse, where Camp III was still burning. The Deacon had guessed right; the last, snow-covered loads cache about 100 feet east of the camp had not been noticed by the Germans. Two of us crawled under the tarp and then turned our headlamps on to inventory the stores while Jean-Claude stood guard outside.
We were in luck; there were six as yet unused rucksacks and a heap of canvas carryalls in the cache. There were no more oxygen rigs, but there was a Primus stove, two Unna cookers, and twelve bars of Meta fuel. We loaded one Primus with the rest of the stuff into an empty rucksack, even though we’d already discovered the hard way that Primuses often didn’t work well at altitude. But it was worth hauling the additional weight to have that extra chance of being able to melt snow for drinks.
At this point I still saw no reason to climb to the North Col and every reason in the world to head north and east to Windy Pass—the Lhakpa La, that point where the Deacon had finally led Mallory to see the East Rongbuk Glacier as the obvious approach four years ago during the ’21 expedition. If we avoided these killer Germans until we reached the Lhakpa La, we could then head east along the Kharta Glacier (which the 1921 expedition had carefully mapped) and then up and over the almost 20,000-foot-high Karpo La and down into northern Tibet, turning eastward again immediately to avoid the treacherous Kangshung Glacier that ran up to the base of the near-vertical (from its southern side) North East Ridge. The Karpo La was by all accounts a treacherously dangerous pass, with its no-warning blizzards, terrible winds, and deep summer snowfalls—which was why British expeditions hadn’t tried to save time by coming north into Tibet and the Everest region that way—but it seemed to me like a good (and fast) avenue of retreat for us now.
And I desperately wanted a way out. If I could come up with a good one, I was sure that I could convince Reggie and the Deacon, whatever “facts” they knew that they hadn’t shared with us yet. The central fact was those men with guns who had murdered most or all of our Sherpas and who were now looking for us.
Another possibility—a less drastic way home, but one requiring a slightly longer trek in Tibet—was for us to wait till morning and climb high on the shoulder of the East Rongbuk Glacier until we could cut east to Windy Pass, get over Lhakpa La, and then traverse along the base of the great wall that was the Himalayas for some miles, and then get over the frequently traveled Serpo La down into the verdant Teesta Valley and then lower to Gangtok and straight on to Darjeeling. It would be a bitch of a trek—I wasn’t sure that any white men had ever done it—but it had to be safer than facing crazy German killers with automatic weapons.
There was one other wild chance we could take. Lho La Pass to the west was closer—just behind Mount Changtse, which bordered our East Rongbuk Glacier—but it would mean a long traverse climb around Changtse, a descent of unknown difficulty, then a steep ascent again to Lho La, only to have the five of us almost certainly rotting for years in a Nepalese jail for entering the country without permission…and Nepal never gave permission for entry by foreigners, Mr. K. T. Owings was the only exception I could think of. But the Deacon was friends with the man; maybe Owings could help us out…