Philip Kerr - Esau

‘Thank you,’ she said.

The yeti waited. He looked almost as if he was waiting for a tip until she realized that he was looking at the equipment and tents that constituted Camp One. Gently he touched the top of a tent before pulling out a sleeping bag and sniffing it curiously.

Swift smiled. It was hard to connect this yeti with the one that had killed Boyd. But she could hardly reproach him for that. Boyd would have killed her with much more enthusiasm. Watching the yeti, she felt science giving way to sentiment and realized that she wanted to give him something.

Raking through her belongings in the tent she shared with Jutta, she thought of giving him a glove, a notebook, a woolly hat, but there was nothing that seemed appropriate. Then she remembered the yetis’ predilection for shiny objects and recalled that she had carried a small makeup bag in her rucksack to Camp One. Quickly finding it, she took out a folding hand mirror and handed it to him.

The yeti looked at himself for a moment and then, grunting with pleasure, tugged at his lower lip with one enormous forefinger. She wondered if he had ever seen himself before and, if he had, whether or not he recognized himself.

Gradually the yeti’s mouth split into what looked to Swift to be an enormous grin. Immediately she took off her helmet and smiled back, for she knew that what was more important was that in this enormous hominoid she recognized something of herself. She felt a tear at the corner of her eye and blinked it away. A moment passed and then, still holding the mirror, he walked quickly away.

Swift watched him for a while, hoping he would turn and look back at her. But he never did.

It was only when he had disappeared from sight that she wondered how she was going to get back through the ice field. She had quite forgotten the serac that had collapsed across the route. If only she had remembered she might have been able to have the yeti carry her to the other side. She was about to call ABC on Boyd’s radio when she saw the helicopter.

Even before the chopper landed Jack had jumped to the ground — his knees buckling a little as he landed — and started to run toward her. As they embraced she saw the tears in his eyes, and she did not know if it was the joy of seeing her alive or the wind from the rotor blades.

She may not have heard any tumultuous fanfare of Nietzschean trumpets. But the ape had touched her, and she had felt something change inside herself. It was not exactly an epiphany she had experienced. Rather a sense that perhaps the biggest answers were not to be had in response to questions, but only to an appreciation of the mystery of things. She had found out slightly more than she had bargained for, but with the paradoxical result that she now felt she knew slightly less. One set of answers merely posed another set of questions, and the monolithic enigma of her youthful inspiration seemed just as adamantine as it had always been.

Arriving back at ABC, Swift found herself curiously reticent as to exactly what had happened in the hidden valley, beyond the simple facts that Boyd was dead and the yetis were safe. It was not that she felt traumatized but that her experience already seemed too personal to share with the others. Soon she would have good reason to be glad of her caution.

Perrins took the call from Bill Reichhardt. The NRO had some good news to report. The Keyhole-Eleven satellite computer had been switched on for a couple of minutes and half the auto-destruct code entered into the onboard computer’s memory before the signal disappeared again.

‘I’d say the power cut out before he could finish typing out the auto-destruct sequence,’ explained Reichhardt. ‘The question is, did he finish the job himself? Did he blow the bird up?’

‘I think we can all rest easy on that score,’ opined Perrins. ‘However, as we’ve not heard from him since, I think we have to assume that he was killed during the completion of his mission.’

‘That’s too bad, Bryan,’ said Reichhardt. ‘He must have been a good man. You must be proud of him.’

‘Yes, Bill, I am. We’re all proud of him.’

Perrins put down the phone and, picking up his American Film Institute catalogue, glanced over the early Hitchcock movies, circling the ones he wanted to see with a red pen. The Man Who Knew Too Much . Perrins pursed his lips and shook his head. If only he could have said the same about himself.

Several days later, the team was back in Khatmandu, discovering that both Russia and China had urged restraint on their respective allies, and as a result, the Indians and Pakistanis had demobilized and agreed to the presence of a U.N. peacekeeping force in the Punjab. The crisis appeared to be over.

Jack spent a couple of days under observation in the American hospital while Swift walked around the capital city and tried to enjoy the comforts of the Hotel Yak and Yeti, which was Khatmandu’s finest. But while she was staying there, something happened that destroyed what little faith she still had in human nature.

One night, she returned from a bar in Thamel after a late-night session drinking cold San Miguel beers with Byron and Mac. The hotel night porter mistakenly gave Swift a fax intended for Lincoln Warner. By the time she was back in her room and realized it was not meant for her, she had read it. The fax was from the London Times regarding a paper written by Warner that was shortly to appear on the nature of the Abominable Snowman. At first Swift thought that there must have been some kind of mistake, and before accusing Warner of anything, she made a couple of telephone calls to London. These filled in what the fax had only sketchily detailed. The enthusiasm of her source, the science editor of the Daily Telegraph , and his many informed questions were sufficient confirmation of what she had feared. Warner had e-mailed a paper containing not only his own results but also a detailed account of the whole expedition to Nature magazine in England. While everyone else had been searching for the yeti, at no small hazard to their lives, Lincoln Warner had remained in the clamshell preparing his paper, mailing it by instalments, with the data and conclusions he had drawn sent last of all and immediately upon his arrival in the Nepalese capital.

It was a spectacular betrayal and directly in violation of the confidentiality clause Warner had signed prior to joining the expedition. Byron Cody and Jutta Henze were outraged and ceased to have anything to do with him. Meanwhile, those bravest few of the world’s news media who were in India to cover the now defused crisis quickly arrived in Khat, desperate to speak to Warner about his fantastic discovery. Somehow this hardly seemed to matter to Swift, and she made very little comment to Warner beyond the fact she was disappointed that he had jumped the gun.

Wondering what to do, Swift spent a whole day visiting temples in and around Khatmandu. One of these, the Hindu temple at Pashupatinath, perhaps the most famous in all of Nepal, seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on her. There were other temples that were perhaps more beautiful, but with Pashupatinath there was also a sense of sanctuary. The very word now held an extra meaning for her. Located on a hilltop, away from the clamorous city streets, the temple offered a meditative spot for Swift, a place where she could put things in perspective. It was here, on the banks of the Bagamati river, that funeral biers were set alight. The sight of burning ghats held her mesmerized. At first the sight of bodies being cremated in the open air, like so much garden refuse, put her in morbid mind of the millions who would surely have died in a nuclear holocaust. But life continued around these public cremations. People sold flowers, incense, and firewood; outcast attendants poked the funeral fires with long poles; women washed clothes in the dirty river; and boys kicked a soccer ball. It was as if this acceptance of death added an extra dimension to existence itself.