“I understand, Professor. I will be ready.”
“All right, get ready. I’ll throw at the count of three. One…two…three!”
She made the throw, biasing the spin of the knife so it would strike haft foremost. Over the wind she heard the tink of steel hitting. Then she heard his explosive curse in Russian. “I missed it! It bounced off and over my shoulder.”
Probably that damn composite plastic grip. It wouldn’t hit and lie dead.
“All right,” she replied, keeping her voice level. “We’ll try that again.”
She drew the first of her handmade throwing blades, the steel of the little weapon warmed by her own body heat.
“Ready? Again, it will be over your head. Throwing on three. One…two…three.”
Her arm whipped back and forward, easing the throw into a toss instead of a strike. Steel rang on stone again, and she saw Smyslov’s silhouette lunge, trying to pin the sliding knife between his body and the cliff face. Again he cursed as the blade landed at his feet, wasted.
“I am sorry, Professor. I missed again.”
One chance left. Valentina blew into her cupped palms, flexing and wringing her aching fingers to renew warmth and sensitivity. “Once more, Gregori, only this time we’re going to work it a bit differently.”
“However you say, Professor.”
She slid the second throwing knife out of its forearm sheath. “All right. This time, lean back.”
“Lean back?”
“That’s right. Lean all the way back, with your arms extended out in front of you. Hang on the piton.”
Smyslov obeyed, tilting his body away from the cliff face. “Like this?” he questioned.
She studied his outline in the glow-stick light for a moment. “Yes, just right, perfect. Now, hold still, very, very still…And, Gregory, one more thing.”
“What is that?”
“Sorry about this.”
She heard Smyslov’s startled bellow as the steel fang spiked into his left forearm, just above the wrist.
“I apologize again, Gregori, but that was the only place I could make the damn thing stay.”
She watched the Russian cross his bound wrists and awkwardly yank the knife out of his blood-blotched sleeve. The razor-edged blade made short work of both the tether rope and the nylon handcuffs. Now he was the one free, and she the one bound.
No matter what, at least one of them would get off this ledge alive tonight. Jon would approve. With her own knife in his hand, Smyslov loomed over her now, his face impassive. What happened next would be out of her hands. Wearily, she rested her cheek on the ledge and closed her eyes.
Smith felt himself floating, adrift, but it wasn’t a pleasant, dream-state float. His body was twisted, distorted, and a broad spectrum of aches and pains stabbed at him. And there was the cold and the growing numbness. This wasn’t right. He must react.
His eyes snapped open, and he saw only snow-streaked blackness. Lifting his head, he could make out a twisted tangle of rope and harness enmeshing him, greenly outlined by the chem light. There was nothing else, nothing around him. He was hanging suspended, faceup in his climbing harness, swinging slightly in the gusting wind, a single thin line extending, bar rigid, above him.
Memory reactivated. He’d been rappelling down to the ledge when the whole vertical face of the glacier had disintegrated under him. The ice, under heavy compression, had given way explosively, and simple luck must have blown him outward, so he had not been caught and carried away under the fall. Nor had he hit the ledge. He must be hanging somewhere below it.
Cautiously, he reached around himself, exploring his surrounding block of space, trying to find something solid. The fingertips of his right hand just brushed a rock wall. The mountain face under the ledge must be slightly concave. He couldn’t call how far below the ledge he was suspended. Nor could he tell how much empty air was below him-possibly two feet, possibly two hundred.
He took a fast inventory of his physical condition. He was bruised and battered, but everything seemed to work. He must have ridden the outer edge of the fall, and the natural elasticity of the nylon climbing rope had absorbed some of the shock of the drop. However, both cold and weakness were settling in fast.
Unfortunately his direct-action options appeared to be limited to a hand-over-hand ascent up the safety line, and he lacked a pair of prusik rope climbers.
And what about the others? Had Val and Smyslov been caught in the avalanche? Squinting upward through the snow, he could make out a ruddy smudge of light outlining the edge of the shelf above him. The first flare they’d dropped to the ledge had gone out. Somebody must have ignited a second one up there. Somebody must have survived. Fighting the constriction of the climbing harness, he tried to inflate his lungs to yell.
Then something entered his sphere of illumination, sliding down the rigid length of his safety line. Another rope, a loop bent onto its end, had been shackled to the safety line by a carabiner. The foot loop for a Z-pulley rescue rig.
Smith caught the new rope. Unshackling it, he hooked the loop over one boot. Pulling himself upright on the safety line, he stood in the loop and gave the rescue line a haul-away tug. The rescue rig went taut, and someone on the ledge began to heave him up in incremental pulls, the slack in the safety rope being taken in as well.
As he was lifted to the ledge, Smith had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to find. One thing was certain: Valentina Metrace didn’t have the mountaineering expertise to set up a Z-pulley like this one.
He reached the ledge ceiling and was distracted by having to fend himself off the cliff face. Accordingly the lip of the shelf took him by surprise. Suddenly hands were reaching down and gripping his harness, helping to heave him up and over the edge.
The feeling of rock under him was one of the grandest sensations he had felt for a long time. For a few moments he knelt on his hands and knees, luxuriating in its solidity. He allowed the trembling to take over then but fought off the recurrent surge of blackness that threatened to break over him. He shook his head like a wounded bear and looked around the ledge. By the sputtering red light of the half-consumed flare, he could make out the multiple anchors and interlacing rope loops of the Z-rig, and the sprawled bodies of Valentina and Smyslov, the two looking fully as totaled as he felt.
Smith inhaled a pull of icy air. “Hydration and energy bars,” he said hoarsely. “Now!”
They huddled together on the ledge, gulping down alternating mouthfuls of body-warmed water and vitamin-augmented chocolate, their metabolic furnaces catching up with the crisis load thrown on them.
Smith noted the black bloodstains on the sleeve of Smyslov’s snow smock. “How bad’s the arm?”
The Russian shook his head. “Not bad. I have a first aid pack on it.”
“Hurt in the icefall?”
Smyslov shot a wry look at Valentina. “Not exactly. It is complicated. I’ll tell you later.”
“If you say so,” Smith replied. “Now that the rush is over, I suppose I should ask just who is whose prisoner at the moment.”
Smyslov shook his head, that self-derisive grin still on his cold-reddened face. “It beats the shit out of me.”
“I’m a little vague on the question myself,” Val interjected, “but may I propose that, for now, we just get down off this damn mountain. We can sort out the fiddly bits in the morning.”
“That sounds like a sensible notion to me, Major. What do you say?”
“I agree, Colonel, eminently sensible.”
“Then let’s move, people. This mountain isn’t getting any shorter.”
Wincing against the objections of bruised and stiffening muscles, Smith pulled himself to his feet. Val helped him up and paused for a moment, mittened hands resting on his chest. “It appears there might be something to this scruples business after all,” she said.