Philip Kerr - Esau

Disappointed and then puzzled.

It was a minute or two before Boyd got near enough to work out that he’d wasted valuable ammunition on the frozen corpse of Jack Furness’s former climbing partner. Boyd cursed himself. He’d known about this. Someone had explained how Rebecca had come to be wearing Didier’s ring. He should have remembered. Now he wondered if he might have cause to regret entering the yetis’ hidden valley with anything less than a full magazine.

Swift was barely down the ropes and standing gingerly on the half-frozen shelf, staring up at the narrow ribbon of blue above her head, when she heard the rolling, reverberating sound of distant shots.

Inside her head, time was already ticking away like a metronome, and anxious not to waste precious moments by standing around trying to interpret the reason for the gunshots, she immediately started along the shelf.

Had Boyd caught up with Rebecca? Had Rebecca turned to attack him? Or had he shot her just for the hell of it? None of these three possibilities seemed very convincing, and she was still trying to think of a fourth when she remembered Didier Lauren.

Swift realized that Boyd must have made the same mistake as Jack and confused poor Didier’s frozen corpse with that of a yeti waiting for him in the darkness. She smiled, aware that she now had a definite idea of exactly where Boyd was. Still about an hour ahead of her. But at least now she could be sure that Boyd was not preparing an ambush of his own.

Encouraged by her own conclusion, she quickened her pace, trying to channel her sudden optimism into energy. She did not feel brave. But there seemed to be little point in worrying about the huge drop to her left. Not when there was a whole primate species — the anthropological discovery of the century — at stake. Alone in the subterranean world of ice and rock she moved faster, trying to goad herself into hurrying when the conditions and the route warned her to go slowly, becoming angry with herself and with Boyd. She knew that she would have to keep hold of that anger if she was going to be able to point her gun at Boyd and pull the trigger.

Back at ABC, Warner surveyed the wreckage of the radio mast left by Boyd and shook his head.

‘We’re never going to fix that,’ he said. ‘Apart from our own individual radios, we’re mute. Boyd must have a more powerful radio with him. He must be planning to arrange his own airlift or something.’

‘One of us is going to have to walk down to Chomrong,’ said Jack. ‘Mac? Feel up to a walk? It shouldn’t take you longer than a day or two. Sixteen kilometres downhill.’

‘No problem.’

‘I think there’s a telephone at the Captain’s Lodge. You could call the chopper in Pokhara and get them up here by tomorrow. And fetch some Royal Nepalese Police from Naksal. We can hardly stay here and do nothing.’

‘On my way.’

‘Shit.’

In the darkness of the crevasse, Boyd stood staring up at the route in front of him. Flat for a couple of miles, the shelf now rose steeply, bending around the wall like a spiral staircase. Except that there were no stairs.

Boyd struck at the surface of the slope with his ice axe and found the ice as hard as steel.

‘How the hell did you get up this, Jack?’

He punched the wall gently with his gloved fist.

‘Come on, man, think. There has to be a way. You’ve come too far to let this hold you up. He did it. So can you. It’s just a question of figuring out how, that’s all.’

There was no other way he could go. That much was plain. Beyond the slope, the shelf petered out into a shattered rib of rock and the sheer face of the crevasse. He was stumped. There were no obvious handholds. Nor any pegs or screws Jack had left on the route. The wall looked as smooth as the face of his helmet.

‘You’re one hell of a climber, Jack boy, I’ll say that much for you.’

After a frustrating ten minutes had elapsed, Boyd’s headlamp finally picked out a broken crampon further up the slope. It was a reassuring sign that he had not been mistaken. Jack had indeed negotiated the slope. The broken crampon was eloquent evidence to the greater difficulty of the return journey. Presumably, he told himself, the yetis had another way out of the hidden valley. Perhaps a route that took them over the mountains. But that was in the future. Right now he had still to get up. He sat down to rest while he considered the problem.

‘Come on, you dumb bastard,’ he told himself. ‘Do you want to spend the night here? Look again, there just has to be a way up.’

He raised his ice axe and then hammered the ground in frustration. Then he saw it. A gap underneath the wall, no wider than about five centimetres. Just enough of an undercut to provide a good handhold if you had the nerve to try it. He would have to step up the wall with his fingers in the groove like a rope walk up the side of a building. There was no other way.

Boyd stood up and tightened the strap of the Colt AR-15 to stop it from shifting on his back. Then he gripped the undercut and placed his cramponed feet onto the slope. This had to be the way Jack had done it. A real piece of mountaincraft. Not for nothing did people say that Jack Furness was one of the best in the world.

Well, he was pretty good himself. You had to be good just to come through the Basic Underwater Demolition, SEAL training. Hell week, they called it. Drown-proofing followed by the toughest assault course in the world, when you had to scale the side of the high-rise wooden walls on San Diego Beach. Climbing along nothing more than two-by-fours bolted to the face of the wall. That required great strength in fingers and ankles too. If he could do BUD/S, he could do anything.

Once he had tried the technique, Boyd found that it was easier than he had imagined. But it was heavy going on the fingers of his gloves. And near the top he caught the sleeve of his SCE suit on an edge of the wall that was nearly razor-sharp and ripped it badly.

When he was standing on flat ground once again, he inspected the damage.

‘Shit.’

He was going to have to make a repair or risk a significant, perhaps even fatal, heat loss. But for a moment he allowed himself to feel impressed by his new surroundings — an enormous, open-ended cavern that looked as big as the Houston Astrodome. Just the kind of place that Tarzan would have fetched up on his way to recover some treasure.

Then he sat down against one of the icy walls, opened the control unit on his chest, and removed a neatly packaged repair kit.

Swift didn’t stop to look at Didier Lauren’s mutilated corpse. The arm, shot away at the elbow, was sufficient confirmation that her earlier theory regarding the gunshots had been correct. And even through the air-conditioning system in her suit she could detect a distinct smell of cordite. She just kept on moving, as quickly as her crampons allowed, ignoring the fatigue that was creeping over her, with only the sound of her own breath inside the helmet for company.

Thirty minutes had passed.

She had arrived at the place Jack had told her about: at the spot where the ledge sloped up into the cavern. Now she was going to have to climb. What was the phrase Jack had used?

Laybacking.

It was, she considered, an inappropriate name for such an obviously strenuous technique. She had only to think of the word to see herself back in the lodge, lying on her bunk, wrapped up inside her sleeping bag, and sleeping for a very long time. Or, better still, back home, on her big brass bed in Berkeley. Now that was what she called laybacking. But not this awkward, crouching way of climbing Jack had described to her, which threatened to put her back out. It was fortunate she was so light and, being a natural climber — or so Jack had once tried to persuade her — within ten or fifteen minutes she had gained the top of the slope and entered the cavern that opened onto the hidden valley and the forest.