Десмонд Бэгли - High Citadel

Forester said, ‘We must keep a fire going — the rest of us will look for wood.’ He paused. ‘Bring some petrol from the plane — we may need it.’

‘All right,’ said O’Hara.

‘Come on,’ said Forester to Peabody. ‘Let’s move.’

Peabody lay where he was, gasping. ‘I’m beat,’ he said. ‘And my head’s killing me.’

‘It’s just a hangover,’ said Forester callously. ‘Get on your feet, man.’

Rohde put his hand on Forester’s arm. ‘ Soroche ,’ he said warningly. ‘He will not be able to do much. Come, señor.’

O’Hara followed Rohde from the cabin and shivered in the biting air. He looked around. The airstrip was built on the only piece of level ground in the vicinity; all else was steeply shelving mountainside, and all around were the pinnacles of the high Andes, clear-cut in the cold and crystal air. They soared skyward, blindingly white against the blue where the snows lay on their flanks, and where the slope was too steep for the snow to stay was the dark grey of the rock.

It was cold, desolate and utterly lifeless. There was no restful green of vegetation, or the flick of a bird’s wing — just black, white and the blue of the sky, a hard, dark metallic blue as alien as the landscape.

O’Hara pulled his jacket closer about him and looked at the other huts. ‘What is this place?’

‘It is a mine,’ said Rohde. ‘Copper and zinc — the tunnels are over there.’ He pointed to a cliff face at the end of the airstrip and O’Hara saw the dark mouths of several tunnels driven into the cliff face. Rohde shook his head. ‘But it is too high to work — they should never have tried. No man can work well at this height; not even our mountain indios.’

‘You know this place then?’

‘I know these mountains well,’ said Rohde. ‘I was born not far from here.’

They trudged along the airstrip and before they had gone a hundred yards O’Hara felt exhausted. His head ached and he felt nauseated. He sucked the thin air into his lungs and his chest heaved.

Rohde stopped and said, ‘You must not force your breathing.’

‘What else can I do?’ said O’Hara, panting. ‘I’ve got to get enough air.’

‘Breathe naturally, without effort,’ said Rohde. ‘You will get enough air. But if you force your breathing you will wash all the carbon dioxide from your lungs, and that will upset the acid base of your blood and you will get muscle cramps. And that is very bad.’

O’Hara moderated his breathing and said, ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’

‘I studied medicine once,’ said Rohde briefly.

They reached the far end of the strip and looked over the edge of the cliff. The Dakota was pretty well smashed up; the port wing had broken off, as had the entire tail section. Rohde studied the terrain. ‘We need not climb down the cliff; it will be easier to go round.’

It took them a long time to get to the plane and when they got there they found only one oxygen cylinder intact. It was difficult to get it free and out of the aircraft, but they managed it after chopping away a part of the fuselage with the axe that O’Hara found on the floor of the cockpit.

The gauge showed that the cylinder was only a third full and O’Hara cursed Filson and his cheese-paring, but Rohde seemed satisfied. ‘It will be enough,’ he said. ‘We can stay in the hut tonight.’

‘What happens if these communists turn up?’ asked O’Hara.

Rohde seemed unperturbed. ‘Then we will defend ourselves,’ he said equably. ‘One thing at a time, Señor O’Hara.’

‘Grivas seemed to think they were already here,’ said O’Hara. ‘I wonder what held them up?’

Rohde shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’

They could not manhandle the oxygen cylinder back to the huts without help, so Rohde went back, taking with him some mouthpieces and a bottle of petrol tapped from a wing tank. O’Hara searched the fuselage, looking for anything that might be of value, particularly food. That, he thought, might turn out to be a major problem. All he found was half a slab of milk chocolate in Grivas’s seat pocket.

Rohde came back with Forester, Willis and Armstrong and they took it in turns carrying the oxygen cylinder, two by two. It was very hard work and they could only manage to move it twenty yards at a time. O’Hara estimated that back in San Croce he could have picked it up and carried it a mile, but the altitude seemed to have sucked all the strength from their muscles and they could work only a few minutes at a time before they collapsed in exhaustion.

When they got it to the hut they found that Miss Ponsky was feeding the fire with wood from a door of one of the other huts that Willis and Armstrong had torn down and smashed up laboriously with rocks. Willis was particularly glad to see the axe. ‘It’ll be easier now,’ he said.

Rohde administered oxygen to Mrs Coughlin and Aguillar. She remained unconscious, but it made a startling difference to the old man. As the colour came back to his cheeks his niece smiled for the first time since the crash.

O’Hara sat before the fire, feeling the warmth soak into him, and produced his air charts. He spread the relevant chart on the floor and pin-pointed a position with a pencilled cross. ‘That’s where we were when we changed course,’ he said. ‘We flew on a true course of one-eighty-four for a shade over five minutes.’ He drew a line on the chart. ‘We were flying at a little over two hundred knots — say, two hundred and forty miles an hour. That’s about twenty miles — so that puts us about — here. ’ He made another cross.

Forester looked over his shoulder. ‘The airstrip isn’t marked on the map,’ he said.

‘Rohde said it was abandoned,’ said O’Hara.

Rohde came over and looked at the map and nodded. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘That is where we are. The road down the mountain leads to the refinery. That also is abandoned, but I think some indios live there still.’

‘How far is that?’ asked Forester.

‘About forty kilometres,’ said Rohde.

‘Twenty-five miles,’ translated Forester. ‘That’s a hell of a long way in these conditions.’

‘It will not be very bad,’ said Rohde. He put his finger on the map. ‘When we get to this valley where the river runs we will be nearly five thousand feet lower and we will breathe more easily. That is about sixteen kilometres by the road.’

‘We’ll start early tomorrow,’ said O’Hara.

Rohde agreed. ‘If we had no oxygen I would have said go now. But it would be better to stay in the shelter of this hut tonight.’

‘What about Mrs Coughlin?’ said O’Hara quietly. ‘Can we move her?’

‘We will have to move her,’ said Rohde positively. ‘She cannot live at this altitude.’

‘We’ll rig together some kind of stretcher,’ said Forester. ‘We can make a sling out of clothing and poles — or maybe use a door.’

O’Hara looked across to where Mrs Coughlin was breathing stertorously, closely watched by Miss Ponsky. His voice was harsh. ‘I’d rather that bastard Grivas was still alive if that would give her back her legs,’ he said.

Mrs Coughlin died during the night without regaining consciousness. They found her in the morning cold and stiff. Miss Ponsky was in tears. ‘I should have stayed awake,’ she sniffled. ‘I couldn’t sleep most of the night, and then I had to drop off.’

Rohde shook his head gravely. ‘She would have died,’ he said. ‘We could not do anything for her — none of us.’

Forester, O’Hara and Peabody scratched out a shallow grave. Peabody seemed better and O’Hara thought that maybe Forester had been right when he said that Peabody was only suffering from a hangover. However, he had to be prodded into helping to dig the grave.