Philip Kerr - Esau

The sight took her breath away.

Jack had not exaggerated. It was indeed a magical-looking place. Well sheltered. Lush. The perfect spot for the world’s newest and shyest ape species, if ape was what you called a creature whose DNA was just over half a percent different from man’s own. Swift was no longer sure. All she knew for certain was that the yeti had to be protected. At whatever cost. She drew the automatic from her belt and advanced cautiously across the broken ice floor, toward the cavern’s curiously shaped exit. There she stopped and, crouching down close to the wall, scanned the edge of the giant rhododendron forest and listened carefully.

The forest in front of her was silent. There was only the faint rustle of leaves and the groan of the cold Himalayan wind stirring the tops of the tall fir trees. There was a film she had seen, based on a book by James Hilton, that gave a name for such a secret magical place: Shangri-La. It was true there were no monasteries in sight, and certainly the hidden valley offered no immediate prospect of eternal life. It would be as much as she could do to survive the next few hours. But this looked and felt like somewhere special.

Swift removed her crampons. Then, slowly, she approached the tree line.

The forest remained silent.

She peered forward, through the enormous rhododendron leaves. Then, grabbing a branch for support, she began to move down a gentle gradient and waded into the thick vegetation. She came stealthily, acutely aware she was in as much danger from the yetis she was trying to protect as she was from the man who was threatening to kill them. Boyd had already demonstrated that he would not hesitate to use his gun to protect himself against the yetis. But could she? She kept on moving, always looking around her and ready for anything, she hoped. She was not afraid. Rather she felt a strange kind of exhilaration. Anthropology had never seemed so exciting.

But if she had hoped to track Boyd through the forest, she was disappointed. There were no obvious clues to the direction he had taken. Recalling a story that Byron Cody had told her about tracking mountain gorillas in Zaire, she dropped onto her belly and began to crawl through the undergrowth. Visual clues, he had told her, were often obscured by thick vegetation.

There was very little snow on the ground, so dense was the plant life. Ahead of her lay a short tunnel roofed by a fallen fir tree and walled by dense rhododendrons. She wormed her way inside it, grateful for the cover it seemed to afford and hoping that her suit would not tear. Without its protective warmth she knew she would not live for very long in such low temperatures. At the far end of the tunnel, she stopped crawling and listened.

Nothing.

Where were the yetis? Where was Boyd? Was he here at all?

A powerful smell, similar to a stableful of horses, only stronger and more pungent, permeated the vegetation ahead of her. Inside her helmet she felt her nose wrinkle with disgust. It was the same stink she had smelled on Jack after the sirdar had brought him out of the crevasse, and she wondered how much stronger it would have been had she not been partly shielded from it by her suit.

Swift looked around for dung deposits, having no wish to find herself crawling through the stuff, and was surprised that there were none to be seen. It was a moment or two before she guessed the reason for the bad odour.

Fear. It was the smell of fear.

If yeti anatomy was anything like a gorilla’s, then the creature’s axillary parts would have contained several layers of apocrine glands, which were responsible for making this simple but highly effective means of olfactory communication. One yeti following the trail of another would have come across the scent and recognized the message: danger close by.

Was Boyd the danger?

With a growing sense of urgency. Swift kept on crawling until, from somewhere in the distance ahead of her, she heard the unmistakable sounds of a yeti hoot series followed by a gunshot.

Swift got to her feet and started to run in the direction of the sound.

Annapurna Base Camp was still. The air was the colour of sapphires, as if the gods had already purified the Sanctuary of the stain of human blood that still lay upon the snow outside the clamshell. Mac was long gone and Jack paced the campsite with frustration, cursing the injuries that stopped him from pursuing Swift. Time passed slowly, and sounds became the events of his day: Ang Tsering groaning inside the clamshell; the hum of the power cell; a growl like a chainsaw in a distant forest that disappeared with the wind, but coming back again, grew louder. Hands above his narrowing eyes. Jack stared into the sky.

It was a helicopter. But how? It was impossible that Mac could have made it down to Chomrong already. It was only a couple of hours since he had gone and Chomrong was sixteen kilometres. Jack made two metronomes of his arms and walked toward the previous landing site.

Beating the air and the snow like the white of an egg, the chopper spiralled down into the Sanctuary’s bowl, hovered above the camp for a minute or two as if inspecting something, and then lunged toward the ground, whipping snow into Jack’s face as he ran to it. The markings were clear enough. It was the Royal Nepal Police.

A couple of uniformed officers, both armed, jumped out of the fuselage as the rotor blades began to slow. ‘Is everything all right here?’ yelled one of the policemen, a sergeant.

‘There’s been a murder,’ shouted Jack. ‘And there may well be another if we don’t get after the man who did it.’ He pointed down the glacier, toward Machhapuchhare. ‘He went that way.’

Jack tried to lead him back to the helicopter, but the sergeant remained where he was, his eyes taking in the severed hand that still lay on the bloodstained snow.

‘First we must see the body,’ said the sergeant.

‘You don’t understand,’ said Jack. ‘He’ll kill again unless we can stop him. There’s no time to lose now.’

‘Perhaps so,’ said the sergeant. ‘But either way we must wait to refuel before going any farther. It is two hundred and forty kilometres from Khatmandu.’

Even as the police sergeant spoke, the pilot was hauling jerry-cans out of the helicopter.

‘This way,’ said Jack. ‘But please... Chito garnuhos . Please hurry.’

Boyd entered the forest in classic combat style, running to a tree, taking up a kneeling firing position, crawling on his belly toward better cover, and kneeling again. He jerked the short barrel of his carbine one way and then another, searching for a target and wishing that he’d thought to attach a forty-millimetre grenade launcher, just in case one of the yetis proved to be hard to kill with the standard nine-millimetre round.

After a couple of minutes, he felt sufficiently relaxed to lower the gun barrel and take a reading with the handheld radiowave detector. The bird’s onboard computers and data transmitters utilized a local oscillator, operating around a specific signal frequency and emitting detectable electromagnetic radiation — this could be identified by the detector in Boyd’s hand; and once the waveform pattern of the operating signal was found and compared with a calibrated memory within the unit, the data displayed on a small screen could be analyzed by a small microchip to produce a bearing on the satellite that was accurate to within half a metre. For finding a needle in a haystack it was the nearest thing to having a giant magnet. Even so, with a working range of only fifty metres, Boyd estimated that since his arrival in the Sanctuary, a search area of some one hundred square kilometres, he had taken as many as a thousand separate readings with the little detector device, all of which had been negative. But on this occasion he found a positive reading and a bearing almost instantly. The bird lay straight ahead of him.