When I’d asked the Deacon about what Pasang and Reggie were doing and why, he’d said only, “We’ll need food, gear, clothes, and cooking stuff if we come down this way after we find Percy’s body.”
If?? I’d thought with some inner urgency. This way??? What other way off Everest was there?
I saved such questions for later.
At the present moment I was burying my face and body in the snow as the three stolen rifles and what sounded like one Schmeisser submachine pistol opened up on us. The Germans were unsure of precisely where we were, so their rounds slammed into the ice wall and snow berms all along a 60-yard front on either side of the point where the rope ladder ended at the ice ledge. Other bullets came whistling through the air overhead.
I found it astonishing that no one had ever told me—or that I’d never read—the simple fact that bullets flying close to you sound very much like bees humming by on a summer’s day in some farmer’s field of white wood beehives.
Being shot at for the first time in my life, even though none of the rounds were striking that close to where I hid behind the berm, created odd and interesting physical reactions: I had the tremendous urge to hide behind something or someone else, even behind myself; and my primary urge, which I began working on, was to burrow down into the snow and rock of the North Col until I was somewhere else completely.
This is what war feels like, I thought. And this is what a coward does in wartime.
I quit burrowing, forced myself to raise my head a bit, and watched.
J.C., the Deacon, and I had been busy all day as welclass="underline" besides keeping an eye on the Germans below—and we’d handed that job over to Pasang and Reggie when they joined us in late morning—we’d been staying low and rolling the largest blocks of ice we could find to a place right behind the snow berm above the ice ledge where Mallory and the previous expeditions had pitched their Camp IV tents. And where our rope ladder now terminated on the ice ledge.
The night before, with clouds still filling the valley, the Deacon had taken quite a while to splice on another ten feet of his Miracle Rope to each of the staked ends of the caver’s ladder, then pulled out the old stakes after pounding in new ones near the rear wall of the ledge. It had been incredibly hard work for one tired man, even disregarding the debilitating altitude; the Deacon had been the only one lifting, loading, and tying on the hugely heavy loads that we had been pedaling up on J.C.’s bicycle apparatus.
Now the six Germans climbing the rope were using their free hands to fire pistols—mostly Lugers, I could see through my peephole, but also a few other semiautomatic weapons I couldn’t identify—up at the berms and ledge near the head of the ladder. They knew how precarious their position was, but with snipers covering them and with their own suppressing fire keeping anyone from getting to the top of the ladder, they must have felt fairly safe.
I thought of enemy knights clambering up siege ladders against a castle wall in the Middle Ages. The North Col was our castle, all right, but these Nazi Party Germans coming up the rope ladder were no damned knights. More like barbarian Huns.
Jean-Claude was using his hands to indicate to the Deacon, Reggie, and Pasang, where they crouched behind the berm directly above the ledge and ladder, how high the Germans were getting. Five fingers and a fist meant 50 feet. Six fingers and a fist…eight fingers and a fist.
We had set in place 115 feet of caving ladder. They were getting close to the top, firing at any imagined movement as they came. The snipers were directing their rifle fire at the berms near the top of the ladder ledge now. I had no idea where the Schmeisser’s slugs were going, but the ripping sound of its near-constant firing made me almost sick with fear. I could hear the Deacon’s former sniper rifle slowly firing from somewhere on the glacier further away.
I confess that I was terrified.
Not too terrified, however, to do what I had to do when the Deacon whistled twice. Jean-Claude and I crouched low, took a few steps back deeper onto the Col, and ran as quickly as we could to the place where Pasang and Reggie were waiting amidst the huge blocks of ice we’d rolled up to the berm above the ledge.
J.C. stopped just short of that berm to peer through a gopher spy hole he’d dug earlier. A pumped fist showed us that the Germans were still climbing and eight fingers showed us that they were within 20 feet of the top of the ladder.
Now the hard part for me—I really wasn’t sure I could do it until after I did. I threw my body up and over the berm and rolled down onto the ice ledge, immediately half-rolling, half-crawling on my belly toward the back wall of the ledge.
Bullets slammed into that wall five or six feet above me, knocking painfully sharp ice chips into my face. More slugs struck the icy lip of the ledge in front of me. But the Deacon had been correct; even the sniper with the ’scoped Lee-Enfield couldn’t get an angle on me here if I kept low. Of course, I thought, I’ll have to leave this fucking ledge sometime.
But that was planned for as well.
“Come on,” gasped the Deacon, shifting over behind Jean-Claude’s giant heap of bolted metal load-lifter with its bicycle seat, handlebars, pulley, flanges, and long metal support post. “We only have seconds.”
I nodded, and we both set our backs against the ice wall behind us as we planted our cramponed boots right where we’d practiced, coiled our legs tight, and pushed with all our might.
The massive bicycle pulley machine slid across the ice between the two guide furrows we’d dug with our ice axes. We’d even used four thermoses of our precious melted-snow water earlier to spill between those lines in the snow, creating an icy skidway.
The hundreds of pounds of bolt-assembled metal moved easily enough, and the Deacon actually stood at the rear section to steady the disappearing last support leg, risking getting shot in order to guide it down the ice wall. We shoved the mass of metal over the edge.
The Deacon dropped back down seconds before a fusillade of bullets slammed into the rear wall of our ledge and splatted into the snow berm above.
Men were screaming yards below us. The screams Dopplered away from us. The bullets kept coming, but fewer men were firing at us now.
J.C. held up three fingers. His beloved bicycle pulley device had taken three Germans off the ladder with it. It was one hell of a long fall from that ladder—not merely the vertical 100 feet of the ice face, but hundreds of feet of very steep slope below that. The screams of the falling Germans stopped, and the sudden silence seemed almost violent to me. But a quick flash of another three fingers meant that there were at least three more Germans climbing toward us. Unless they’re retreating down the ladder was my sudden thought, which felt strangely like a prayer to me.
Jean-Claude pumped his fist from his peekaboo position.
The three other Germans were still coming up, obviously using both hands to climb now since the pistol fire from the direction of the ladder had fallen to nothing.