Desmond Bagley - High Citadel

‘We must leave here quickly,’ said the girl. ‘They must not find my uncle.’

O’Hara suddenly swung round and regarded Rohde, who had remained conspicuously silent. He said, ‘What do you import, Señor Rohde?’

‘It is all right, Señor O’Hara,’ said Aguillar weakly. ‘Miguel is my secretary.’

Forester looked at Rohde. ‘More like your bodyguard.’

Aguillar flapped his hand limply as though the distinction was of no consequence, and Forester said, ‘What put you on to him, O’Hara?’

‘I don’t like men who carry guns,’ said O’Hara shortly. ‘Especially men who could be communist.’ He looked around the cabin. ‘All right, are there any more jokers in the pack? What about you, Forester? You seem to know a hell of a lot about local politics for an American businessman.’

‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said Forester. ‘If I didn’t take an interest in local politics my corporation would fire me. Having the right kind of government is important to us, and we sure as hell don’t want a commie set-up in Cordillera.’

He took out his wallet and extracted a business card which he handed to O’Hara. It informed him that Raymond Forester was the South American sales manager for the Fairfield Machine Tool Corporation.

O’Hara gave it back to him. ‘Was Grivas the only communist aboard?’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m getting at. When we were coming in to land, did any of the passengers take any special precautions for their safety?’

Forester thought about it, then shook his head. ‘Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise – I don’t think any of us knew just what was happening.’ He looked at O’Hara with respect. ‘In the circumstances that was a good question to ask.’

‘Well, I’m not a communist,’ said Miss Ponsky sharply. ‘The very idea!’

O’Hara smiled. ‘My apologies, Miss Ponsky,’ he said politely.

Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin; now he stood up. ‘This lady is dying,’ he said. ‘She has lost much blood and she is in shock. And she has the soroche – the mountain-sickness. If she does not get oxygen she will surely die.’ His black eyes switched to Aguillar, who seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘The Señor also must have oxygen – he’s in grave danger.’ He looked at them. ‘We must go down the mountain. To stay at this height is very dangerous.’

O’Hara was conscious of a vicious headache and the fact that his heart was thumping rapidly. He had been long enough in the country to have heard of soroche and its effects. The lower air pressure on the mountain heights meant less oxygen, the respiratory rate went up and so did the heart-beat rate, pumping the blood faster. It killed a weak constitution.

He said slowly, ‘There were oxygen cylinders in the plane – maybe they’re not busted.’

‘Good,’ said Rohde. ‘We will look, you and I. It would be better not to move this lady if possible. But if we do not find the oxygen, then we must go down the mountain.’

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.