Philip Kerr - Esau

‘This is like arming Achilles,’ said Jameson, handing Jack a clear bubble helmet made of photochromic plastic, to reflect any strong sunlight.

‘Don’t you think it would make better sense if someone went with you?’ said Swift. ‘After all, there are two suits.’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘This is just a reconnaissance. It makes no sense at all to risk the lives of two people down there. I’m going to follow the shelf along the inside of the crevasse, see where it leads, and then come straight back.’

Jack crowned himself with the helmet, and while Jameson and Mac locked it onto the suit, he checked his helmet’s hot mike through the small control unit he wore on his chest. This also provided display readings for the backpack.

Mac spoke into the suit’s outside microphone, which allowed the wearer to pick up ambient sound.

‘Hadn’t you better turn on your life support?’

‘Good idea,’ said Jack. Flicking another switch, he started the tiny pumps and fans in his backpack and heard the reassuring whir of the micro-machinery that would help keep him warm in the freezing depths of the crevasse.

‘Gloves are a bit stiff,’ he said, flexing his fingers, ‘but everything else feels fine. I’m warming up now. Man, this feels good. I could sure have used this last night. It was a cold one up here. Hold on. What’s this? There appears to be a loose pipe. Can you see? Next to my cheek.’

‘That’s your drinking water,’ Mac advised.

Jack turned his head inside his helmet and found that the plastic pipe slipped neatly into his mouth. He sucked and tasted cool water.

‘They seem to have thought of everything.’

Mac nodded down at Jack’s genitals and shook his head.

‘Not everything,’ he said. ‘If you want to piss, you have to go in the suit. Or take it off. Your choice.’

Jack felt air blowing past his face as the suit gently inflated, and then stamped his boot to check the grip of his crampons.

‘I don’t think I could climb in this,’ he said. ‘At least not a big wall like the southwest face. But I bet it would keep you alive in real weather.’

‘According to the instructions,’ said Mac, ‘the helmet will illuminate automatically when you enter somewhere dark. The lamp on top is controlled manually, with the switch next to your radio control. There are two bulbs: carbide for standard use and when you want to conserve battery life, and halogen when you want the extra power.’

Mac pointed to the control panel on the front of the suit.

‘The other display is a compass and position finder. Allows you to use a satellite navigation system to tell precisely where you are on the earth’s surface to within fifty metres. Assuming you wanted to deviate from the route inside the crevasse, all you have to do is to input the coordinates of where you wanted to go and the device would give you precise compass headings.’

‘Got it.’

The Sherpas greeted Jack like excited schoolboys, pointing at him and laughing. One of them, a man named Kusaang, grinned and made a great show of offering Jack a cigarette, and with good nature Jack made a show of taking one, realizing that he could not smoke it, and then tucked it behind the hose pipe on his helmet, much to their apparent delight.

‘Okay, folks, show’s over. Let’s get this expedition on the road.’ Jack collected his ice axe and began to walk slowly toward the ice corridor.

Picking up piles of rope, aluminium ladders, a tent, guns, camera equipment, food, and rucksacks, the rest of them followed.

While some of the Sherpas were putting up a tent in the corridor. Jack waited for Mac to hook the rope onto the karabiner on his waist harness.

‘You’re safer camped down here than right next to the crevasse, I would think,’ said Jack. From this tent, the rest of the team would stay in contact with him by radio. ‘More sheltered too.’

‘Don’t worry about us,’ said Mac. ‘We’ll be fine. As soon as you’re gone, we’re opening the whisky.’

Standing on the opposite side of the corridor. Swift raised the radio to her mouth.

‘Jack, this is Swift. Can you hear me okay?’

‘Loud and clear.’

As soon as Mac moved out of the way, Jameson stepped in to strap a holster around Jack’s waist and to give him a hypodermic pistol.

‘There’s one in it, okay? It packs quite a dose, so for Christ’s sake don’t shoot yourself.’

Jack tried to place his trigger finger inside the guard and found there was only just room and no more.

‘I don’t suppose the fingers of these gloves were made for guns,’ he said, holstering the gun before mounting the ladder that Tsering had fixed to the wall of the corridor with ice screws and some wire. ‘Wish me luck.’

At the top of the ladder. Jack stepped onto the wall and turned to look back down at them all.

‘Jack,’ said Swift. ‘Please be careful. If something happened to you—’

‘Sure, you’d never forgive yourself.’

Then he waved once and disappeared from their sight as he walked down the gentle slope to the crevasse.

Tsering and Mac, holding on to the end of Jack’s rope, nodded at Swift.

‘Taking in,’ she said. ‘Climb down when you’re ready.’

Jack sat down carefully at the lip of the crevasse and hammered in his ice axe.

‘Slack,’ he said and slowly eased himself over the side, searching for the shelf in the almost unfathomable depths below him.

As Jack descended into the darkness, he switched on the standard light on top of his helmet, turning the blue ice a fantastic shade of yellow in front of his face. It was like being lowered into the frozen stomach of an enormous alien animal, seemingly long dead. The tiny trickle of meltwater running down the walls, caused by the heat from his suit, felt like an ominous sign that the alien’s digestive juices were already stimulated by the presence of this explorer. And now that he was inside the crevasse, he could see how much wider it was than on the outside. From one wall to the other was distance of at least eighteen metres, with the bottom of the crevasse hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of metres below.

Once, when climbing Everest, he had been obliged to cross a crevasse that had required five aluminium ladders tied end to end in order to span it. The ice field, with as many as thirty of these aluminium bridges, had been one of the most dangerous things about climbing Everest. In a way the darkness below your feet helped: The height of any potential fall, and hence the danger, remained an unknown quantity. But now he thought he might never walk across one of those sagging ladder-bridges again. As his feet touched the shelf he looked up at the blue Danube of sky above his head and saw just how hazardous crossing a monster crevasse like this one might really be. To say nothing of leaping blindly onto a hidden shelf. A leap of faith was what Mac had called it, and that was what it was. Imagining the two yetis making such a jump gave him a new respect for the capacity of these legendary creatures to survive and to remain elusive.

‘Okay, I’m down,’ he said. ‘You can cut me some slack now.’

‘Okay,’ said Swift.

Jack paused for a moment, pulled the rope toward him, and then unclipped the waist harness karabiner from the rope. He had no idea just how far he might have to walk, and there was always a danger that a rope dragging behind him might snag or even freeze and cause him to trip. Better to trust his crampons and his ice axe.

‘Untying now.’

He turned to face the route. There was no doubt about this. To his left the shelf petered out underneath a series of enormous stalactites that descended into the darkness like so many organ pipes. He switched momentarily to the halogen light. To his right, the shelf was so well defined that it looked almost like a proper pathway, and what he could see of the route at the limit of the beam, some twenty or twenty-five metres in front of him, appeared to be straightforward enough. Here and there, layers of ice and snow were marked by bands of what he took to be volcanic ash, creating fantastic shapes and patterns.