Philip Kerr: Esau

Mostly the mountains were the original Pre-Cambrian continental crust of the Indian subcontinent’s northern margin and consisted of schists and crystalline rocks. But here in the bergschrund and nearer the summit, the rock was limestone, from a time when the world’s highest range of mountains was the floor of the shallow Tethys Sea. These early Paleozoic sediments had lifted almost twelve kilometres since the onset of the Himalayan mountain building around fifty-five million years ago. Jack had even heard it said that there were parts of the range that were still rising at the rate of nearly half an inch a year. The Everest that he and Didier had conquered, without oxygen, was almost half a metre higher than the Everest scaled by Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing back in 1953.

The tunnel slope levelled off, with the roof becoming simultaneously higher so that he was able to stand straight again. Pointing the almost solid beam of the flashlight above his head. Jack found he was in an enormous cavern, and certain only that the ceiling was beyond even the range of his Maglite, he decided that it must be at least thirty metres high.

He shouted out and heard his own voice bounce back off the invisible walls and ceiling, reinforced and prolonged by reflection in a cold, dark resonating chamber that had already left him feeling chilled to the bone. By this sound he might have judged himself to be standing not inside a cavern underneath Machhapuchhare Himal but in the soaring vault of a ruined and forgotten Gothic cathedral that was now the hidden hall of a malevolent mountain king. Designed to carry the human voice upward in praise and prayer, to God in heaven, the vault was filled instead with the silence of the tomb.

How long had this silence prevailed before being desecrated by his presence? Was he the first human to have entered the cavern since the creation of the Himalayas some one and a half million years ago?

At first he thought it was a rock he saw in the artificial beam of his Maglite. It was a moment or two before his untrained eye perceived that, staring back at him from the moist, earthen floor of the cave, and about the size of a melon, was the bony face of a nearly complete skull.

He dropped to his knees and immediately began to brush away the dirt and gravel from the find with his gloved fingers. Jack was well aware that the Himalayas contained an abundance of fossils. Only a few kilometres away, on the northern slopes of Dhaulagiri, the seventh highest mountain in the world, he had once found an ammonite — a spiral-shaped mollusk dating from 150–200 million years ago. Muktinath was famous for its Upper Jurassic fossils. To the west, the Churen Himal in Nepal, and the Siwalik Hills of Northern Pakistan, had yielded many significant hominid fossils. But this was the first time Jack had discovered anything himself.

He Lifted the skull clear of the dirt and examined it carefully in the beam of his flashlight. The lower jaw was missing but otherwise it looked to be in remarkably good condition, with a near perfect upper jaw and an unbroken cranium. It was larger than it had looked on the ground, and for a brief moment he thought it might have belonged to a bear until he noted the absence of any large canine teeth. It seemed to be hominid, and after a couple of minutes’ further scrutiny he felt quite sure of it, but he had no idea if what he was looking at was related to any of the other fossil hominids for which the Himalayas were known, or even if it was a fossil at all.

He thought of the one person who would be able to tell him everything there was to know about the skull. The woman who had once been his lover and who had consistently refused to marry him, but who was rather better known as a doctor of paleoanthropology at the University of California in Berkeley. He knew her simply as Swift. Maybe he would present his find to her as a gift. There could be no doubt that she would appreciate having the skull more than any of the other souvenirs he had promised to bring her back from Nepal, like a rug or a thangka .

He could almost hear the unprincipled advice that Didier would have offered him.

‘Trust you, Didier,’ Jack said sadly. ‘Besides, there’s still the small problem of getting down from this mountain to consider.’

Jack returned to the bergschrund entrance carrying the skull in his hands. He looked inside his tightly packed rucksack and decided that something would have to be left behind if he was to get the skull down the mountain. But what? Not the sleeping bag. Not the first-aid box. Not the socks, the advance base rations, the Nikon F4 camera.

He started to unpack the rucksack.

A half-full bottle of Macallan malt whisky came to hand. Quite apart from the fact that he and Didier enjoyed drinking it, whisky was a more effective treatment for frostbite than vasodilator drugs such as Ronicol. High-altitude rock climbing was one of the rare occasions when the medicinal properties of alcohol really could be justified. And this was an emergency.

Jack sat down on the floor of the bergschrund and uncorked the bottle. Then he toasted his friend and prepared to finish the bottle.

India.

The telephone rang.

Pakistan.

The telephone rang again. The man stirred in his bed.

In recent weeks when the phone rang during the night, it had usually been something to do with the worsening situation between these two ancient enemies.

The man wriggled his way up the bed, switched on the bedside light, collected the receiver, and then leaned back against the padded headboard. A quick glance at his watch revealed that the time in Washington, D.C., was 4:15 a.m. But his thoughts were sixteen thousand kilometres away. He was thinking that on the Indian subcontinent it would be mid-afternoon on a hot day made warmer by the posturings of the Indian and Pakistani leaders and the dreadful possibility that one of them might decide that a preemptive nuclear strike against the other was the best way of winning an as yet undeclared war.

‘Perrins,’ yawned the man, although he was wide awake. A bad attack of indigestion, the result of a supper cruise down the Potomac aboard the presidential yacht Sequoia, had seen to that.

He listened carefully to the somber-sounding voice on the other end of the secured line and then groaned.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’ He replaced the receiver and cursed quietly.

His wife was awake and looking at him with a worried expression.

‘It’s not—’

‘No, thank God,’ he said, swinging his legs out of bed. ‘Not yet anyway. But I have to go to the office all the same. Something that “requires my urgent presence.” ’

She threw back the quilt.

‘No need for you to get up,’ he said. ‘Stay in bed.’

She stood up and slipped on a bathrobe.

‘I wish I could, dear,’ she said. ‘But that dinner. I feel like I’m pregnant again. Pregnant and overdue.’ She headed toward the kitchen. ‘I’ll make some coffee.’

Perrins shuffled into the bathroom and held himself under an ice-cold shower. Cold water and coffee might be the only stimulation his heart would get for the rest of the coming day — just like the day before.

Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed and standing on the porch of the red-brick colonial. Kissing his wife goodbye, he stepped into the back of a black Cadillac sedan that the office had dispatched to collect him.

Neither the driver nor the armed guard alongside him in the front said anything during the drive north up the Henry G. Shirley Memorial Highway. They were both the speak-when-spoken-to types, servicemen who had driven and protected Perrins for the last year. They knew that a man attending a dawn meeting at the Pentagon might have other things on his mind than the unusually severe cold weather and the way the Redskins had been playing.