Philip Kerr - Esau

He pushed on, slowly and steadily, managing a reasonable speed, but still nothing to compare with Rebecca. Boyd was carrying only a light load. Just his rifle, a handheld radio wave detector to help him pinpoint the location of the satellite, some C4 plastique and some fuses, and the Satcom transceiver with which he was going to radio in his own rescue helicopter. But the climb up to Machhapuchhare was still a hard, almost cathartic experience that made him appreciate the capabilities of the yeti, whose tracks lay clearly ahead of him Like a series of tiny craters on some cold and forgotten planet.

It was too bad, he thought. Too bad if they would be poisoned by the effects of the exploded isotope, as Warner had said. But he could not see any alternative. If the satellite was not destroyed, then someone else — the Chinese probably — might find it and use the information and the technology it was carrying against the U.S.A. What were the lives of a few apes — albeit ones as rare as the yeti — against the national security of the United States? No one back at ABC understood that. For that matter, no one back in Washington understood that.

He was beginning to feel the effect of the altitude. It was not that he felt breathless. It was just a general lassitude that worked on his legs like one of Jameson’s immobilizing drugs, so that he had to force himself to keep climbing when his body wanted to take a rest. And after a while, conscious that the lengths of his rest periods were growing longer than the work periods, he had to discipline himself, taking fifty steps before taking a rest. Finally he reached the top and collapsed into Camp One as exhausted as if he had climbed Machhapuchhare itself. Crawling into one of the tents, he closed his eyes and dropped into a light doze.

The physical effort of pursuit helped Swift to deflect her mind from the danger Boyd posed to the yetis and to her own person. For a while she reproached herself for taking him at face value, for not being more suspicious of him from the very beginning. Was he really a geologist? A climatologist? He had seemed to know something about what he was supposed to be doing.

She was also aware of the irony of her situation. Just as she and Jack had concealed the true intention of the expedition from their sponsors, so Boyd had concealed his real intentions from her and everyone else. No wonder the expedition had been so well equipped. It was the U.S. military that had been their supplier. And all of it in the name of national security and a missing spy satellite.

But it did not seem so strange to her that it should have landed in the Himalayas. Eight kilometres north of Khatmandu, near the small village of Budhanilkantha and the walled compound that marked the ancient site, was a recessed water-tank where lay the five-metre-long statue of an Indian god known as the Sleeping Vishnu. Even when she had first seen it. Swift had been struck by how much like some cryogenically suspended alien spaceman the Sleeping Vishnu had looked. Now even more so that she was aware of a missing spacecraft. It was almost as if Vishnu might have fallen to Earth from the stricken satellite.

Swift had little regard for organized religion but if she had thought it could help her prevent Boyd from blowing up the satellite and poisoning the yetis’ hidden valley she would offer perfume, flowers, and a whole basketful of fruit to this sleeping god, the least bloody-minded of the principal Vedic deities.

Mindful of the fate that had befallen the five Sherpas in the ice field. Swift entered the precarious maze of ice and chasms, telling herself that this was not a place to put haste ahead of caution. Boyd’s trail was easy enough to follow. He himself had been wise enough to place his own feet in Rebecca’s footprints wherever he could. Swift hoped she would come upon him underneath a fallen mass of ice, or find some evidence that he had disappeared into a crevasse. But in her fast-beating heart she knew to expect more of him. Jack was right. Boyd was a professional. Probably some kind of Special Forces type well trained in this kind of terrain. He would not make an obvious mistake. Whereas she... she was only a lecturer at a university. Just thinking it made her feel inadequate to the task facing her. Apart from the odd skiing trip, the most hazardous thing she’d ever done was venture into a class with sex-mad morons like Todd Bartlett. She figured her best chance — perhaps her only chance — was that Boyd would hardly be expecting her, she might sneak up on him when he was placing the charge and shoot him in the back. Killing him would be the easy part after his cold-blooded murder of Miles Jameson.

Walking through this frozen, fragile landscape. Swift felt as alone as she had ever felt in her life. She wished she could have used the shortwave radio in her helmet to stay in touch with the rest of the team at ABC, for despite the loss of the main radio, the smaller, less powerful GPS units still worked. But that would only have alerted Boyd, who was on the same frequency, to the news that she was following him. So she observed radio silence and tried to forget the possibility that Boyd might be lying in wait just to make sure that he was not followed.

She turned quickly on her heel, her heart beating wildly as the helmet on the SCE suit amplified a sound behind her, and was just in time to see a spectacular serac, as big as a house, collapse across the way she had just come. She felt goose bumps rising on her body as she realized how close she had been to being killed. For a moment she stood there, trembling inside her suit and listening to her voice reminding her of her own miraculous escape.

‘You were bloody lucky. Swift,’ she told herself. ‘Jesus, you could have been under that lot. Now you have to go on. You’ve no choice, have you? You can hardly go back across that lot. Should be interesting on the return journey.’

When she stopped her nervous soliloquy, there was no sound except the occasional creak of the glacier as the sunlight grew stronger. Then she turned and took up the pursuit once again.

Boyd climbed down the ropes into the crevasse and stood on the shelf. He felt the cavernous dimensions of the chasm to his left, extending a few hundred metres below, and smiled in awe of the drop. He had never cared much for heights. Outside wasn’t so bad. But inside made him feel distinctly claustral and sealed off. Like he was already in his casket. One slip here and he might be. He’d be bungee jumping without the bungee.

Pressing himself closer to the wall he began to walk, slowly at first, hearing the ground harder under his cramponed feet than on the snow-covered surface up top. Ahead of him the shelf curved away into the shadowy distance like something he’d once seen in a Tarzan movie. It was small wonder that these creatures had remained hidden from the outside world for so long.

The route had a Gothic splendour about it, and but for the intense cold, Boyd half expected to find his way blocked by a marauding tribe of pygmy headhunters. Other times the shelf narrowed and he was obliged to edge his way along with his back to the wall like some Wall Street type contemplating suicide from the top of a skyscraper on Black Friday.

As it grew darker, his headlamp came on, and soon after that a large rocky overhang forced him to face the wall and sidestep his way around like a spider. You had to hand it to Jack. But for the certainty that he had already followed the route successfully, Boyd would hardly have dared follow so precarious a path. Just as he thought things could hardly get more difficult, he felt himself gasp with fright as he saw a distinctly simian outline standing on the shelf up ahead of him. It was Rebecca, waiting for him in the darkness in a crude-looking ambush.

Momentarily unnerved, Boyd backed away, at the same time unslinging his Colt Automatic Rifle, a short-barrel, telescope-stock carbine version of the standard 5.56 mm M16A1 service rifle. It had an effective range of almost five hundred metres, but he still wished he had thought to bring along a night sight. He raised his weapon to his shoulder and fired five times, blowing the creature’s arm away into the darkness, and was disappointed that it didn’t go howling after it.