Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Well, that’s good to know.’

Jack released the talk button on the radio.

‘Friend of mine was killed on that ice fall,’ he said, and spat into the crevasse.

‘Now he tells us,’ said Jameson. Raising his eyebrows, he added, ‘Still, this does look like the kind of place you’d expect to see a yeti.’

‘A yeti’s probably got too much sense to hang around in a place like this,’ said Mac.

‘Mac’s right,’ agreed Jack. ‘Time we were moving. This place gives me the creeps.’

Mac stayed where he was on the bank of snow, still looking through the binoculars.

‘Come on, Mac.’

‘Just a minute,’ he growled irritably. He lowered the binoculars and, frowning, stared across the ice barrier toward Machhapuchhare’s lower slopes. ‘Probably nothing.’

‘What is it?’ said Swift.

Mac raised the binoculars again. ‘Shouldn’t they be just about to start up the mountain, toward the Rognon?’

Jack was climbing up on the snowbank beside the Scotsman. ‘Yes, they should.’

‘Then what are those?’

Mac handed him the binoculars and pointed. ‘Just below the crest of the Rognon,’ he said quietly. ‘Around two hundred metres above the ice fall. See them?’

Jack followed the line of Mac’s arm and was just able to pick out two tiny black dots standing motionless on the approach slope of the holy mountain.

‘They’ve stopped now,’ said Mac. ‘But I’ll swear they were moving until a moment ago.’

‘I’ve got them,’ said Jack. ‘Are you sure? They look like a couple of rocks tome.’

‘ ’Course I’m bloody sure.’

‘Wait a minute. You’re right. They are moving.’ He twisted the focus bezel, trying to improve the clarity of his view. ‘It can’t be the Sherpas. Even the sirdar’s not that quick.’

‘The Sherpas are going up,’ said Mac. Throwing down his glove, he began to quickly fit a long zoom lens onto the body of his camera. ‘Those two look like they’re coming down.’

Swift tore a monocular out of her rucksack and, taking Jack’s outstretched hand, climbed up onto the snowbank beside him. She pointed it toward the Rognon.

‘Yes, I see them,’ she said excitedly.

Her heart gave a leap as one of the two tiny figures started to move quickly downhill, springing from one leg to the other through deep snow.

‘Christ,’ breathed Jack. ‘Look at that thing move.’

Mac tried to focus his long lens on the distant slope.

Jameson called the sirdar on his own radio.

‘Hurké? This is Jameson.’

‘Go ahead, Jameson sahib.’

‘We’re looking through the field glasses at the slope immediately above you. There appear to be two figures coming down toward you from the upper slopes of Machhapuchhare.’

‘I not see anything, Jameson sahib. But the sun is in my eyes.’

‘Whatever it is looks bloody powerful,’ said Mac, holding down the shutter button. The power-wind on his camera sounded like a tiny robot in perpetual motion.

‘Mac, there’s no whatever about it,’ Swift insisted. ‘They just have to be yetis.’

‘Yes!’ yelled Mac. His triumph echoed around the seracs, drowning out what Jameson was saying to the sirdar. Mac snatched out the roll of film and fumbled another one into the camera body. ‘Christ, I hope these bloody pictures enlarge all right.’

‘Say again please?’ said the sirdar.

Jameson repeated himself in Nepali.

‘Haami her-chhaii did ivataa yeti, timiharu ukaado maathi,’ he said.

‘That just has to be some kind of great ape,’ said Mac. ‘It can certainly move.’

‘The other one’s moving as well, now,’ said Swift. ‘They seem to be heading straight for the ice field and the Sherpas.’

Aware of some kind of commotion at the sirdar’s end, Jameson pressed his talk button and said:

‘Ke bhayo, Hurké? What’s the matter?’

Now he could hear the raised voices of the other Sherpas and then the sirdar’s shouting.

‘Roknu, roknu. Stop. Aaunu yahaa. Come here. Hera. Hera!’

‘Hurké, come in, please. What the hell’s going on there?’

For a moment he heard a whistling noise that he thought might be feedback between his own radio and Jack’s, and he glanced around to see that Jack was holding the binoculars again.

The whistling noise came across the radio again, and this time he recognized it for what it was. Not radio feedback, but like a big seabird wheeling over a windswept harbour. It was the sound of a large mammal.

When the Sherpas overheard Jameson telling Hurké Gurung on the radio that two yetis were descending the slope of the mountain and heading for the ice field, they were terrified. Terror quickly gave way to panic as they heard the snowman’s distinctive call echo among the ice towers.

Hurké Gurung shouted at them to stay where they were and even cursed them as cowards. But by then they had already dumped their loads and turned on their heels, running back the way they had come.

The ice field below Machhapuchhare, like the larger one at the foot of Annapurna, was a frozen cataract, a river whose source was to be found on the slopes of the mountain itself. Entering this frozen chaos was like walking into a minefield — something you did only with extreme care. Anyone foolish enough to rush into such a lethal obstacle did so at his immediate peril, as the many deaths in ice falls throughout the Himalayas had proved.

The first man to run was Narendra, the son of one of the other Sherpas back at ABC — a Tiger named Ngati. The last the sirdar saw of Narendra was when he darted across instead of around a space marked by three bamboo poles. It was not fifteen minutes since Hurké had probed the snow covering the space with one of the poles and guessed at the existence of a hidden crevasse. His guess had been a good one, and as soon as he ran onto the snow, Narendra disappeared screaming into the unseen chasm below.

The man behind, Ang Dawa, seeing Narendra fall to his death, veered abruptly to his right and barged into a tall and precariously balanced pinnacle of ice. The next second, Hurké heard a dull thump, and several tons of snow and ice engulfed Dawa and two others, Wang Chuk and Jang Po. A fifth man, Danu, leaped out of the fatal path of the falling serac only to find that his almost superhuman jump had brought him to the lip of yet another crevasse. For a brief second he swung his arms like a windmill as he tried to regain his balance before his feet slipped from under him, and emitting a cry of horror that lasted for several seconds after he too disappeared from sight, the man fell to his death.

Trembling, sick to his stomach, the sirdar sat down heavily on the snow and watched helplessly as a huge cloud of ice particles, like the vapour from some enormous explosion, mushroomed above the fallen tower and then slowly dissipated.

Jack’s voice on the radio jolted him from his stunned contemplation of the disaster that had befallen his men.

‘Hurké? Come in, please. It’s Jack.’

‘Jack sahib.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘Not okay, sahib. The men are dead. They ran away, sahib. They ran back into the ice field and now—’

He stopped talking and looked around. A loud, vocalized sound on the slope above him — like a series of sustained belches followed by some harsher, staccato grunts that sounded like the pigs feeding in his village, and then a sharp whistle — reminded the sirdar why the others had run in the first place.

‘How many did he say were dead?’

‘Five men,’ said Jack grimly.

‘Jesus Christ. Five?’

‘Hurké? Are you still there? Come in, please. This is Jack calling. Over?’

The radio stayed silent for a moment.