So I’d argue hard for either risking the weather on high Karpo La or trekking farther east to the relative safety of Serpo La—both east of the killing ground that had been Base Camp—as far as I was concerned. I dug into the cache with a will and filled every empty rucksack we’d found there.
The tent fires had died to mere embers by the time we started our northern circle route back to the west of the camp where Pasang and Reggie waited. Less than halfway there, the Deacon said, “Dump the loads here.”
This made no sense at all. We were near the part of the ice wall to the Col where we’d laid fixed ropes and—far, far above—the caver’s ladder. But there was no way on earth that I was jumaring up those ropes or climbing that ladder again, not even if the Germans showed up in hot pursuit. It was the ultimate dead end. To climb to the North Col meant certain death. There was no escape from there, since the south side was a sheer drop of several thousand feet to a deep valley behind Changtse. And to go higher on either Everest or Changtse—which had never been climbed, even though it was “just” 24,878 feet high (lower than our Camp V)—only meant prolonging the inevitable. I started to voice a protest, but the Deacon said aloud, “Trust me, Jake. Dump the stuff here. Trust me. Please.”
All thirty of our Sherpas trusted you, Captain Deacon, and they’re all dead now, I almost said aloud. I was that tired. But I didn’t speak. And because of my silence, our friendship, if that’s what it was—and I’ve had more than sixty-five years to decide it was—remained intact.
And the Deacon—Captain Richard Davis Deacon, the man who had given thousands of commands to his men during four years of the worst war the world had ever known—had just said “please” to me.
I left all my logical arguments for retreat over the passes unspoken and dumped the load into the snow, and we continued postholing around and up onto the glacier to rejoin Pasang and Reggie.
At Camp Fort, as we’d dubbed it, we sat on our rucksacks in a rough circle, to keep our butts from freezing, and tried to talk things through. Even though the Deacon had ordered us each to take some English air at the 2.2-liter flow rate for three minutes—he kept time with his watch—our voices sounded slurred or drunken or just plain stupid. We were all beyond the point of absolute exhaustion. Merely trying to form words in my brain reminded me of newsreel film I’d seen in a British cinema of RAF fliers forced to do mathematics problems in a barometric chamber with the pressure lowered—as if they were in planes gaining altitude—until somewhere around or below this altitude we’d all been at for seventy-two hours and more. Each pilot not only quit doing arithmetic but went face forward onto his desk.
But they had the advantage of scientists and doctors watching them, ready to bring the pressure back up in their sealed chamber the moment they passed out.
The outside of our particular “sealed chamber” was either outer space or a firing squad of crazy Krauts.
My chin had dropped onto my chest and I was snoring softly when the Deacon gently jostled me awake. J.C. was saying something.
“Jake was right, my friends. Unless there’s something that he and I don’t know, the only sensible course of action is to start climbing out of this accursed valley at first light and head for the nearest pass into Tibet or Nepal. Since I value my freedom as well as my life, I suggest Karpo La or Serpo La into Tibet. Nepal does not treat intruders very nicely.”
“There are things that you and Jake don’t know, mon ami,” said Reggie. “The Deacon may not know the precise details, but I think he’s guessed some…or perhaps he does know. It’s hard for me to tell. Pasang knows only the general outline.”
“What the hell are we talking about?” I managed to say.
“Why we have to climb onto the North Col tonight,” said the Deacon.
“Tha’s absurd,” I slurred. “I’m too tired to climb into anything but a sleeping bag.” We’d recovered five more eiderdown bags at the Camp III cache. They were lashed to the outsides of the rucksacks we’d stupidly left a quarter of a mile from here in deep snow, back at the base of the North Col.
“I also agree that we should climb to the North Col tonight, Mr. Perry,” said Pasang. “Allow Lady Bromley-Montfort and Captain Deacon to explain.”
She turned her tired face to our former infantry captain. “Do you want to explain, Richard?”
“I’m not sure I know enough,” he said, and his voice sounded almost as tired as mine had. “I mean, I know the who and when and why, but I’m not certain about the what.”
“But you admitted to knowing—and perhaps working for—our friend who writes a lot of cheques but who prefers gold,” said Reggie.
The Deacon nodded wearily. “Knowing something about what he’s up to, yes,” he said. “I work for him—with him—only from time to time.”
I said, “Would you two mind speaking in goddamned English?” Perhaps it came out a little sharper than I’d meant it to.
Reggie nodded. “My cousin Percival had the reputation, as I presume you have all heard, of being a wastrel, a disappointment to his family, a discredit to his country during the War—he never enlisted, never fought, and spent all of the War in Switzerland or other safe places, including, his mother was ashamed to admit, the peaceful parts of Austria. Cousin Percy seemed only one short step away from being an active traitor to Great Britain. And as a final touch, Percival was known both in England and on the Continent as being a debauched playboy. And a deviant. A homosexual, to use that new word.”
There was nothing to say to that, so we all kept our mouths shut.
“All those appearances were false,” said Reggie. “Artificial. Prepared. Deliberate.”
I looked to the Deacon for an explanation—severe mountain lassitude with delusions for Reggie, perhaps—but his gray eyes were intent on her face.
“My cousin Percival was an intelligence agent before, during, and after the War,” said Reggie. “First for His Majesty’s Secret Service, then for British Naval Intelligence, and finally for…well, for a private network of agents run by someone very high up in our government.”
“Percy was a fucking spy?” I said, too exhausted even to notice my language.
“Yes,” said Reggie. “And young Kurt Meyer—who was not a mountain climber—was one of Percy’s most deeply embedded and most valued Austrian contacts. Eight months before the two met up in the Tibetan village of Tingri, northeast of here, Meyer had been forced to flee Austria. He fled east—then further east—eventually into China and then south, to Tibet.”
“This is a very long way to flee,” Jean-Claude said.
“He had a pack of German monsters after him,” said Reggie. “Tonight you’ve seen what those monsters can do.”
“What did Meyer have—and give to Percy in Tingri—that the Germans need back so badly?” asked the Deacon. “That’s the one part of the puzzle I don’t have.”
“Neither do I,” said Reggie. “All I know is that our national futures—France’s as well as Great Britain’s, Jean-Claude—may depend upon it.”
“It sounds like that leaves me and the United States out,” I heard myself say. My voice sounded almost angry.
Reggie looked at me. “It does, Jake. Leave you out, I mean. I’m sorry you ever got involved, but I didn’t know how to keep you from coming along with your English and French friends. Whatever the rest of us—or whoever joins me, that is—do next, I think you should curve around the glacier valley to the southeast and head for Serpo La into India. That is the safer and more direct of the two eastern passes. With a lot of luck and traveling light, you can be in Darjeeling in three weeks or so.”