“But aren’t we all doing that right now?” I asked with a little too much excitement in my voice. “Poking our goddamned heads up like ducks in a shooting gallery, I mean! Won’t they catch a sun glint on the lenses of the binoculars?”
The Deacon pointed east. “Not anytime soon, Jake. The sun’s still climbing over the North East Ridge and the summit, all behind and to the right of us. In the evening, we’d have to be very careful about where and when to use the glasses. As for seeing our heads poking up…you may have noticed these little snow-and-ice tunnels that Jean-Claude and I have constructed. It restricts our width of vision but keeps us in the shadows here and more or less invisible to anyone not staring straight at us.”
“You seem so sure of yourselves,” I snapped.
“We’re not,” said J.C. “But I think the Deacon is right that the odds are in our favor in terms of being targets for their rifles—at least until we begin climbing up the snowfield on the North Ridge toward Camp Five.”
“Why didn’t we do that during the night if showing ourselves in the daylight is going to be so dangerous?” I demanded of the Deacon.
“Because,” he said in soft, deadly tones, “we want to kill some Germans before we abandon the North Col.”
I almost laughed at this. “How! By using the two rounds in your stolen Luger against eight or ten Germans? By firing our Very flares down at them as they come up the ladder that we’ve so conveniently left behind for them?”
“Not quite,” said the Deacon.
“What are we going to do, then, ‘to kill some Germans’?” I said. “Drop rocks on them?”
“You’re getting closer to the plan there,” said the Deacon.
I could only stare. Suddenly a thought made my stomach muscles clench. “While you’re peering out your little snow-and-ice tunnels here, how do you know that the Krauts aren’t chipping ice steps up the whole wall to the North Col a few hundred yards east of here?” The image was so clear I could almost see it.
“We would hear them chopping steps,” said Jean-Claude. “Also, they have been very busy cleaning up the evidence of their crimes. Carrying and burying bodies, even with a crevasse handy, is hard work at twenty-one thousand–some feet. And they also have the slaughter at Base Camp to conceal, not to mention the wrecks of Camps One and Two. Ree-shard and I think it will take them all until sometime this afternoon to finish hiding the evidence of their crimes.”
“But a sniper’s still out there watching and waiting for us to show ourselves,” I said.
“Yes,” said the Deacon.
I looked him straight in the eye. “If you were that sniper, what would you have done? Where would you be now?”
The Deacon removed his pipe from his pocket and stuck it between his white teeth. He didn’t light it. I’d never seen him actually smoke his pipe at real altitude.
“I would have started climbing the slope of Changtse in the middle of the night,” he said calmly. “Find a concealed shooting point at or near the summit at twenty-four thousand eight hundred–some feet. Come first light, all of us here on the North Col would have been in his range and in his sights. My Lee-Enfield has an attached magazine of ten rounds. I would have picked off all of us without ever having to change clips.”
I thought I might suddenly vomit. My head jerked upwards and my eyes scanned the high, snowy slopes of Changtse looming above us immediately to the west.
“How do you know the fucker’s not there now, taking aim?” I asked.
“Because we were out here before four thirty this morning watching for lights ascending Changtse,” Jean-Claude said. “There were none. And even Herr Hitler’s German supermen cannot climb that treacherous slope in the dark.”
“But since dawn…,” I began.
“We have been watching,” said J.C. “Nothing. We saw one of les boches—the tall man carrying Ree-shard’s rifle with the odd scope—disappear back into the penitentes, headed in the direction of the glacier path. The rest have been busy carrying off the bodies of our friends they killed and shoveling and sweeping up ashes and the remnants of our tents and crates.”
I shook my head. I’d never been a soldier, so I didn’t understand tactics, much less strategy. But I also had never felt as afraid as I did at that moment—not even during the most dangerous moves I’d made on mountains or ice. As if reading my thoughts—or expression—the Deacon set his hand on my shoulder again.
“We have a plan, Jake. I promise you. Remember, these are Germans. They’re arrogant people. They’re going to come at us straight-on sometime today—straight up the ladder we left for them, feeling safe in their near certainty that we don’t have any weapons that can really hurt them—and then we’re going to kill as many of them as we can. Only then will we begin our tactical withdrawal up the mountain.”
I did laugh this time. Easy and loud enough probably to be heard down at Camp III, where men in white anoraks were dragging away the bodies of our friends. But it wasn’t a hysterical laugh.
“What?” asked Jean-Claude.
I stifled the laughter but still had to grin. “Only my friend Richard Davis Deacon, current Earl of Watersbury whether he wants to be or not, could call climbing to the summit of Mount Everest a ‘tactical withdrawal.’”
11.
The Germans came for us around five o’clock that afternoon. They’d been chopping their way up the slope below the caver’s ladder—their lack of 12-point crampons and of the fixed ropes we’d brought up with us slowing them down some for almost three hours before they reached the base of the ladder.
The Deacon still thought that their plan was to rush up the ladder, keeping us pinned down with rifle and automatic weapons fire as they came, boil out onto the North Col—our guess was that, with Karl Bachner dead and buried in his crevasse, there were no more than ten of the white-garbed Krauts—shoot us all, burn our camp and kick the ashes (and our corpses) into the nearest crevasse, and be back at their unseen camp in the ice pinnacles below our old Camp III before dark. By their dinnertime.
That, said the Deacon, was their plan.
The early part of their plan had gone like clockwork. They were out of our two-cartridge pistol range as six of them chopped their steps up the slope where we’d had our fixed ropes—the Deacon wasn’t going to take his two measly shots at that range anyway—and before long all six of the white-garbed men below were clustered at the base of the rope ladder. We knew this because I’d been sent out to burrow spy holes through the snow ridge about twenty yards east of the ledge, and Jean-Claude had done the same about twenty yards west of the ledge. Now we both had good views east and west; at least no one was going to sneak up on us by carving steps somewhere else on the 1,000-foot slope to the North Col.
J.C. whistled, I saw the Deacon’s white-hooded head pop up—behind a berm of snow at the edge of the precipice, out of sight of those below, even snipers in the ice pinnacles or on the glacier—and Jean-Claude held up both gloved hands, flashed six fingers, and then made the sign for climbing.
They were coming up, all right. Six of them. All armed, of course.
The five of us hadn’t exactly been lazy this long day. Pasang and Reggie, working on the Deacon’s instructions—or at least on the plan they and the Deacon had come up with that morning—had struck camp, packed essentials in our five rucksacks there at Camp IV, and then taken the heavy loads and one more load consisting of the main Whymper tent from the camp to find a suitable crevasse up on the Col. There they lowered the pack loads we’d dragged up the night before and the folded, tightly tied tent and its poles down into the darkness of the crevasse, covering over the anchoring stakes with kicks of snow. The cache could be found by someone hunting hard for it and following all of our boot prints on the North Col, but they had no reason to search—we’d left decoy gear and two of the Meade tents at the site of Camp IV for them to burn with their Teutonic efficiency—and we’d left a lot of boot prints atop the Col.