Philip Kerr - Esau

A split second later Hurké Gurung raised the deadly knife high in the air, and catching the sun like a heliograph, it began its lethal arcing descent.

Involuntarily Jutta cried out and held up her hands to stop the sirdar.

Tsering thought she was pleading with him and sneered with contempt. She had taught him some German, that was all. So what did that matter? He did not even like the language. Only Boyd had actually offered him some money and an American passport. To live in America, that would really be something.

It was the last thought that passed through his head before the hatchet knife interrupted his thoughts.

Jutta’s scream mixed with Tsering’s own and then the sound of the gunshot as his forefinger pulled the trigger reflexively before his severed hand hit the bloodied snow.

Tsering fell back, his good hand holding the bloodied stump of his arm in front of his face as if hardly comprehending the fate of his missing hand.

‘Mero paakhuraa dukhyo,’ he groaned pitifully. ‘Aspataallaai jachaaunua parchha.’

‘You can count yourself lucky it wasn’t your head,’ said the sirdar, and spat into the snow in front of Tsering. ‘ Hajur? ’

‘Mero haat,’ whimpered Tsering. ‘Mero haat.’

Jutta brushed past the rest of the team now emerging from the clamshell doorway, to fetch her medical bag. There was probably no chance she could save the man’s hand. Not with the radio out of action, and so far away from a hospital in Pokhara. But she could at least stop him from bleeding to death.

Ignoring Ang Tsering, the sirdar had limped a short way out of camp after the tracks left by Rebecca and then Boyd, and his keen eyes, slitted against the sun, were already searching for them on the upper part of the glacier. Of the yeti Rebecca there was no sign. But he was sure he could just make out a tiny figure on the edge of the ice field in front of Machhapuchhare. Looking around, he found Jack standing beside him, holding a pair of binoculars, and he pointed silently.

Jack nodded and found Boyd in his lenses. He was ahead of them by almost a full hour.

The sirdar’s eyes followed several other sets of tracks leading from the camp in the same direction, south and out of the Sanctuary.

‘The other Sherpas ran away,’ he said.

Jack saw the tracks and nodded. Swift was kneeling by the assistant sirdar’s severed hand, separating the gun from the pale fingers.

‘Can’t say I blame them,’ growled Jack, going over to her.

The gun was still cocked and ready to fire. She applied the safety catch and then, holding the hammer with two fingers, she pulled the trigger and eased the hammer carefully forward against the shielded firing pin. When the gun was safe, she looked up at Jack and said, ‘I’m going after him.’

‘Not on your own you’re not. Take Hurké.’

Jack looked around for the sirdar and found him kneeling down in the snow, inspecting a bloody hole in the heel of his climbing boot. Tsering’s loose shot.

‘Forgive me, please. Jack sahib. But I think I have been shot with a bullet.’

They helped him limp inside the clamshell, where Jutta was already applying a tourniquet to Tsering’s injured arm. Hurké sat down and allowed Jack to unlace his boot, grimacing with pain when the boot and then his sock were slipped off. There was plenty of blood, and although it was clear to Jutta that the bullet had done no more than crease the fleshy part of the sirdar’s heel, it was clear also that he would not be walking any great distance for several days.

Swift was already climbing into the SCE suit.

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Jack.

‘You’ll only slow me down,’ she said, lifting her mane of red hair and tying it with an elastic band. ‘You’re hardly recovered from your last journey.’

Jack recognized the truth of this, but still reluctant to let her risk her life alone, he suggested Mac go instead.

‘What about it, Mac?’

The Scotsman shrugged.

‘The suit doesn’t fit me,’ he said. ‘It’s too bloody big.’

‘What about the one Hurké wore?’

‘She’s wearing it,’ he said.

‘Look, Jack,’ said Swift. ‘Jutta’s got her hands full here. Byron’s too slow. Link’s not acclimatized to anything above four thousand metres. Mac’s too small. Hurké’s injured, and so are you. That leaves me, in a hurry, with no time for all this bullshit.’

Jack nodded and then embraced her.

‘Okay, but there’s one thing I’ve got to explain to you. And that’s laybacking.’ He told her about the curling slope at the end of the shelf, where the handhold was to be found, and how to use it.

‘Look, be careful,’ he added. ‘Remember what Boyd said. He’s a professional. He’s been trained for this kind of work.’

‘What will you do,’ asked Mac, ‘if you do catch up with him?’

‘Do? What do you think I’m going to do?’ Swift’s tone was almost scathing. ‘I’m going to try to kill the sonofabitch.’

Emerging from the ice field — a hazardous experience that would have left him considerably unnerved but for the yeti’s tracks, for much of the original route marked by the Sherpas had been obliterated by the storm — Boyd toiled up the slope toward the Rognon and Camp One.

This was going to be easy, he told himself. A lot different from the several weeks he had spent at the NRO as CIA liaison officer on the satellite recovery program, codename Bellerophon. That had been like trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. Harder than that. He remembered the complaints of one of the desk analysts who was supposed to be putting him on the track of the fallen bird:

‘Worse than a needle in a haystack,’ the guy had said. ‘This isn’t proverbial. This is metaphysical. This is like trying to find angels on the head of a pin. A country the size of Florida. Eight hundred kilometres of mountains, most of them unclimbed. Whole valleys completely unexplored. Shit, this was a closed country until 1951.’

Boyd pushed his ice axe deep into the snow and stopped to take a breather. That he had found the satellite at all now seemed even more remarkable. Especially when he considered how inadequate to the task had been the NRo’s much vaunted technical systems. He smiled to himself and glanced around for any sign of pursuit, uncertain as to how equal to his task Ang Tsering would be. But the ice field blocked his view. He would take another look when he reached the top of the Machhapuchhare Rognon.

He was hardly new to this, having established what the Director of Field Personnel, Chaz Mustilli, had termed ‘a hallmark of accomplishment’ in this kind of operation.

A hallmark of accomplishment. Boyd had liked the sound of that. When he had destroyed the satellite, that would be another hallmark. Maybe even a medal. Certainly he would be paid a generous bonus and promoted a grade or two. The Agency was nothing if not grateful to its successful operatives. Eventually, when they saw the situation on the ground as he had seen it, they would surely understand why it had been necessary to kill one of the scientists, contrary to the order that he had been given. It was the kind of order you could make only if you were behind a desk back in Washington. Not the kind that applied in the field if you wanted to get the job done. That was all that mattered here, and if they didn’t understand that then they had no business being in charge of his mission in the first place. Sending him down here with a gun in his hand, what did they expect? There was no point in having a dog and wagging its tail yourself.