Philip Kerr - Esau

Swift shook her head.

‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Think about it, Byron. This is just an entrance. A yeti could jump into this crevasse, but it would have to have the jumping ability of a flea to be able to jump out. There has to be another exit from that Alpine forest. Possibly over the mountain ridge. Or another crevasse, another tunnel we don’t know about.’

Still monitoring the sirdar’s progress back along the shelf, Mac went ahead and asked him how far he had left to go.

‘We have come past the body of Didier, the poor fellow,’ reported Hurké. ‘Maybe an hour or so walk is ahead. Possibly more. Jack is very slow. Over.’

‘They’re still at least an hour away,’ Mac shouted up to Jameson, who had reached the top of the ladder. And then to one of the Sherpas: ‘Nyima? You’d better break out some flares. That helicopter will be here by then. We’ll need a signal.’

‘Hoo-hoooo-hooooo-hooooo!’

Jameson gave a thumbs-up sign to Mac. Then, unslinging his rifle, he approached the edge of the crevasse. Kneeling down he pointed the barrel of the gun and the beam of the torch into the darkness below. The restraining ropes shifted violently as the beam touched the net’s big shaggy red-haired captive, causing it to begin a near interminable series of hoots. Jameson felt a small quiver of excitement as he made out the distinct white of one terrified eye.

He lifted the gun to his shoulder and, ranging across the yeti’s writhing body, tried to select a mass of muscle that might make a suitable target, using the eye as an original point of reference. Presented with a clear view of the yeti’s neck where there was little chance of chemical absorption taking place, he dropped the barrel and, squeezing the trigger, fired the dart neatly into what he hoped would turn out to be the creature’s shoulder. For several moments after he had fired, Jameson kept the Maglite under the gun barrel pointed at the dart to make sure the yeti did not try to pull it out.

Gradually, the screams grew quieter, and finally the creature became silent. Jameson stood up and climbed back to the top of the ladder, smiling broadly.

‘We’ve got a live one.’

There were several cheers. Even the Sherpas, initially nervous at the yeti’s strange calls, looked pleased.

Swift thought: Let Jack be okay, and the expedition’s triumph would be complete.

Jameson glanced at his watch and then looked up at the sky. He and Mac and a couple of Sherpas faced Swift, Tsering, and the others from the far side of the crevasse.

‘You’d better light that flare now,’ he told Tsering. ‘Let’s hope the chopper gets here soon. I’d rather not give the yeti any more dope until I’ve had a chance to take a quick look at him.’

‘Yes, sahib.’

The flare Tsering ignited was yellow — the colour to indicate a rescue position. The signal smoke rose into the early morning sky like some mountaintop sacrifice.

The Sherpas heard it first, their keen ears less affected by the high altitude than the Europeans’ and the Americans’ — a distant chugging in the air. A minute or two later a French-built Allouette came into view, doodling itself onto the white horizon, a black dot becoming a spot on its way to being a smudge. Specially designed for high-altitude rescue work, the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation chopper arrived from the south, flying at the very edge of its five-thousand-metre ceiling. The pilot, a young Nepalese named Bishnu, was already on the radio, giving the expedition call sign and asking if the yellow smoke was theirs.

‘That’s it,’ Jameson told him. ‘Over.’

‘What do you want me to do? Over.’

‘Do you have ski pads?’

‘Ski pads, yes. But I can’t see a landing site. There’s nowhere suitable. Do you want us to lower you a line? Over.’

‘Negative. What I want you to do is this. Come in as low as you can over the crevasse. We’ll hook an animal onto the pads. It’s in a large cargo net, so there shouldn’t be any problem. Then I want you to lift it up under my instructions so that I can get a better look at it before we go back down to our campsite. There’s a rocky outcrop on Machhapuchhare to the south of here. A sort of Rognon. You may have seen it. Over.’

‘I saw it.’

‘You can land there and wait for an injured man to be brought out of the crevasse. Then, when we’ve picked up the injured man, we’ll fly him and the animal back up to Annapurna Base Camp, together with myself, the expedition doctor, and whoever else there might be room for. Over.’

‘Okay, this is your shout. And your bond. Over.’

Since the RNAC never flew any missions without written assurance of payment — the paperwork could take several days — the office in Khatmandu had posted a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bond to cover all airlifts and rescues at the outset of the expedition. Each flight up from Pokhara cost at least a thousand dollars.

The Allouette made several looping turns, dropping fast, and began to lower itself toward the crevasse, the nearly solid silver disk of the extra-wide rotors glinting in the rising sun like some giant-sized halo. The tents in the corridor began to stir against the mechanized wind. Snow billowed in the stiffening downdraft. Under Jameson’s experienced direction, the Allouette dropped toward the crevasse in a series of lurching moves and halts until it was no more than three mertes above the chasm. Meanwhile, Mac, Tsering, and the Sherpas had taken hold of the net and were hauling the captured creature up to the surface. Jameson took hold of one section of the cargo net, paused for a moment as he radioed the pilot to come down several more centimetres, and then neatly hooked the net onto one of the helicopter’s ski pads. He repeated the manoeuvre and then climbed aboard the ski pads himself to ride the chopper across to the other side of the crevasse, where he and Tsering hooked the rest of the net onto the other pad.

Slowly the chopper began to rise again, and the yeti appeared over the Up of the crevasse, its shaggy red hair blowing through the spaces in the cargo net. Only when Jameson had checked the netting to see if the creature had torn any holes that might allow it to fall from the helicopter did he take the hand of the copilot and climb up into the body of the chopper.

The Allouette’s interior revealed the helicopter as an ancient one, resembling an old bus, with just one seat — the pilot’s — and a bare steel panel floor. As soon as Jameson was aboard, the copilot shouted, ‘Bhitra.’ The pilot replied with a thumbs-up sign and returned his attention to what view there was through the perspex bubble in which he sat. It was cracked and starbursted in so many places that it seemed to Jameson to be almost opaque. The helicopter began to ease upward, more quickly now, and Jameson glanced anxiously out the open door to check on the yeti as the chopper curled up and away from the crevasse and the ice corridor.

‘Is that what I think it is?’ asked the copilot.

‘Yes, it is,’ said Jameson.

‘Hajur? Hudaina...’

‘Chha, hernuhos.’

The copilot looked out the door again.

‘Aoho,’ said the copilot with eyes large first with amazement, then with laughter.

‘Ke bhayo?’ asked Jameson.

‘Sir, the yeti,’ giggled the copilot. ‘It is married.’

Jameson frowned and looked out of the doorway. A strange-looking hand was poking out of the net. It was larger than a gorilla’s hand, stronger, with longer fingers, and he noticed that the tip of one of these was adorned with Didier Lauren’s gold ring.

Half an hour went by. Then the sirdar was on the radio, reporting that he and Jack were back at the rope. Jutta Henze immediately descended into the crevasse with a casualty bag and the Bell stretcher. With the helicopter already returning from the Rognon, she had no time to examine Jack properly, but it was plain to see that he was already suffering the effects of hypothermia.