Raymond Benson - High Time To Kill

Bond sighed and clapped the big man on the shoulder. “Sorry, its classified, but I appreciate your hard work. Let’s just say I have find something on that plane and bring it back to England.”

Baack nodded and said, “Well, you can count on me to help however I can.”

“Thanks. You’re doing a great job already,” Bond said, then he left the tent.

The news about Helena still hung heavy on his heart. He had done his best to put it aside, but there was no denying that he was worried. What he needed was a different sort of distraction.

On the way back to his quarters, he saw Hope Kendall.

“Well, hello. When did you get back?”

“An hour ago,” she said. She pointed to her new tent. “I’m over there.”

“You sound much better.”

“I feel a lot better,” she said. “I guess I needed the extra two days at Camp Two before coming up here. This time the ascent didn’t bother me at all. I did it in less than four hours.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Bond said.

“Hey, and thanks for that Gamow Bag. It saved my life.”

“Don’t mention it. Can I buy you dinner? I know a great little Nepalese takeaway in the neighborhood.”

She laughed. “You never give up, do you?”

Not now, Bond thought.

Roland Marquis finally deemed the Lead Team adequately acclimatized to ascend to Camp Four. Marquis, Glass, Leaud, and Barlow had all made practice runs and reported that it would take two, maybe three days, one pitch at a time, to get to Camp Four.

The first day went relatively well. On the second day they had to cross thirty-degree snow slopes that ended at the rock wall over the Bergschrund. The Sherpas had hauled an aluminum ladder that could extend across the crevasse. Roland Marquis, belayed by more than one person, carefully crossed the ladder and fastened anchors on the opposite side. He looked back at the others, then saw something in the Bergschrund.

There’s a person down there,” he called, pointing. One by one they all crossed the ladder and were in a position to see. It was indeed a corpse, a woman, with a blanket wrapped loosely around her. Bond thought that she looked well preserved.

“She has to be one of the plane survivors,” Bond said. “Look, she’s hardly dressed for climbing.”

Both Marquis and Bond thought it best to attempt to retrieve the body. Using an elaborate system of belays and anchors, the Sherpas climbed down into the Bergschrund and tied a rope around the woman’s shoulders and upper arms. They gave the signal and she was brought up to the ledge.

She was wearing blue jeans, tennis shoes, a sweatshirt, and the blanket. The woman had been a tourist in a comfortably pressurized plane. She had obviously survived the crash and had attempted to climb down the mountain. Now she was frozen stiff.

Bond broke the ice surrounding the blanket and pried it away from her body. He searched her pockets and found an American passport.

“Cheryl Kay Mitchell, from Washington, D.C.,” Bond read. “She’s the American senator’s wife.”

It was also apparent that her skull was cracked and the head and shoulders were horribly misshapen. Her clothes were torn in some places, and there were cuts and bruises on exposed patches of skin.

“Poor woman,” Leaud said softly.

“She fell,” Marquis surmised. “From a great height, too. Her body must have bounced and bounced and slid all the way down here from the crash site. There is absolutely no way she could have survived this far. Look at the way her body has frozen. I would bet that she has a million broken bones.”

“If she didn’t fall immediately, then I suspect she died within an hour or two after leaving the plane and then the body slid off the edge up there somewhere,” Bond said. “She was probably desperate to do something and knew she wouldn’t survive inside the plane. . . .”

“We’ll take her back to Camp Three tonight. Let’s leave her here for now. There’s nothing else for us to do but press on.”

The discovery cast a pall over the group, but they continued over the rock band in silence. It was the most technically difficult climbing they had done so far.

Camp Four was finally reached, and the next day the group began the assault to the final stop—the Great Scree Terrace at 7,900 meters. They had to climb 250 meters of a rock band via a snow gully and 100 meters of rock wall to reach an upper snowfield at around 7,500 meters. Tom Barlow and Doug McKee began using oxygen, something the Sherpas liked to call “English Air.”

On the thirty-first day of their journey, with five days left in the month of May, the Lead Team finally made it. The Great Scree Terrace was a bizarre, sparkling-white, gently sloping plateau that seemed to be out of place at such a high altitude. The remainder of the mountain, only 686 meters of it, towered over the plateau like a malevolent sentinel.

The Sherpas began to set up Camp Five while Bond, Marquis, and Chandra examined the wreckage spread out before them. One broken wing was half buried in snow and ice. Forty meters beyond that were pieces of the tail. Sixty meters farther was the fuselage, remarkably intact. The other wing must have been completely buried or blown off the plateau. The cabin door was wide open. Any footprints that might have led from the plane had long been covered.

“I have to go in there first, Roland,” Bond said.

Marquis said, “Be my guest.”

“Come on, Chandra,” Bond said as he trudged through the knee-deep snow toward the aircraft.

TWENTY-ONE

THE MISSING BODY

BOND TURNED ON A flashlight and stepped into the cold, dark cabin. Light filtering in from windows had a ghostly, incandescent quality that was unnerving even to him. Ice and snow had built up through holes in the fuselage, so it appeared that the passenger seats had been built in snowdrifts. An eerie whistling sound echoed throughout the cabin.

Nearly all the seats contained a body each.

Bond shined the light at the cockpit. The pilot and copilot were slumped forward in their seats, frozen in a macabre still-frame of death. Another man was lying in the aisle between the cockpit and cabin. He didn’t appear to be dressed like the crew.

“Help me pull this one up,” he said to Chandra.

Together they tugged on the hard, stiff body and turned it so that they could get a good look at the man’s face. Ice had formed a grotesque transparent mask across half of it. There was a bullet hole in his neck.

Bond recognized him from Station 1’s mug shots. “This is one of the hijackers.”

Chandra nodded. “I remember.”

“Come on, let’s look back there.” Bond stepped over the body and moved back into the small main cabin. He counted the corpses.

“The plane has twelve seats for passengers. The crew consisted of the pilot, copilot, and an attendant.” He indicated a woman sitting in a single seat facing the other passengers. “Here she is. There were ten tourists booked on the flight, which would have left two empty seats, right? I count nine bodies.”

“The woman we found near Camp Four would make ten,” Chandra said.

“But Lee Ming and the three hijackers would have made fourteen. One hijacker is accounted for, making eleven. That means there should be eleven bodies in here. Where are the other three?”

“Wait, here’s someone not sitting in a chair,” Chandra said, shining his light in the back of the cabin. It was another man, dressed similarly to the hijacker they found in the cockpit.

“It’s one of them,” Bond said, examining him. “All right, that means there are two missing. Let’s see if Lee Ming is one of these people.”

They each took a side of the plane and shined their flashlights on the faces one by one. The dead were all Caucasian men and women of varying ages. At least three had their eyes open, fixed in a frosty expression of fear.