Summit: A Novel Read online

  The climber, standing in the photograph’s center, was completely swaddled in thick, gaitered boots, bulky grey trousers, and an all-covering navy blue parka. His face was masked and hidden, but the oxygen mask and dark goggles seemed to disappear the more you looked, until it revealed a white-toothed smile of utter joy. Above, reaching up into a clear yet darkening sky, was an ice axe raised in triumph. A number of flags were attached, mostly hidden behind the axe’s shaft, being torn back and away from the photographer by what must actually have been a violent, constant wind—the only clue in the photograph that the conditions were anything less than perfectly serene.

  Only one flag was clearly visible: the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack. It branded the photo, soaring away from the fact that neither the person bearing the axe, Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, nor the person so expertly using the camera, Sir Edmund Hillary, was actually British. It overpowered such details with the weight of its history to shout, “Great Britain, first to the summit of Mount Everest, May 29, 1953.” Even a young boy could see that the Britain that now lay outside his school gates was no longer great. It made crappy cars and put up ugly concrete tower blocks. It went on strike continually and sent its once-glorious soldiers no further than Northern Ireland, where they were reviled and executed by the Provisional IRA under a continual grey rain. But to young Quinn that Everest summit photo was British, and it was great. It made him believe in his country and also a little in himself as he wondered if, just maybe, one day he too could accomplish such a fantastic feat.

  That famous photograph quickly directed him to the dry explanation of John Hunt’s The Ascent of Everest and then accompanied him onward to many other mountains through the vivid translations of Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, Hermann Buhl’s Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage, Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider. It even pushed him out of the library to pull him eight feet up onto the top of the wooden wainscoting that ran around the inside of the old, exposed walls of the gymnasium. Once there, it left him all alone to the backbeat of a thumping heart, dry-mouthed with vertigo, edging breathlessly along its two-inch-wide lip, knees trembling, small fingers continually searching for handholds within the rough-shaped stones and crumbling mortar. The first time he completed a lap of the entire gymnasium, he shouted with joy, feeling taller and stronger when he climbed down. He never stopped climbing back up, higher and higher, until in the end he turned his back on all the privilege and security his expensive education could have provided and headed for the hills instead.

  Quinn lifted up the old axe that Dawa had returned to him. It was almost identical to the one he remembered in that original photo. It felt balanced in his hand yet so heavy when compared to the smaller, modern axes made of titanium and carbon fiber they now used. As he looked at it, the whiskey suggested to him that it could indeed be the very axe that Tenzing had raised that fine day. It was that vintage, maybe even older. In different circumstances he would have considered it to be a good find. He often came across old equipment high up on Everest. Most of it was junk really, bits of old canvas, tent pegs, tin cans, discarded pitons, once a hammer, but rarely something interesting, something like this. Only one other time had he found something its equal when he stumbled across a discarded brass oxygen cylinder from one of the British climbs of the thirties. He had transported that cylinder all the way back to England as a souvenir, despite the fact that it was desperately heavy, only to reluctantly later sell it on eBay for twelve hundred pounds to a collector in Germany. He had been sad to let it go, but, as always, money was tighter than sentiment.

  Increasingly chilled by the cold, Quinn let the axe fall and returned to the small tent that had been his Base Camp home for the past six weeks. Nearing it, he passed through the harsh, acrid smoke of a yakherder’s dry-dung campfire. Sat around the glowing embers were four hooded shadows, pushing themselves in close for warmth. One of them looked up and nodded at Quinn. It wasn’t a Tibetan. It was Lhakpa Sherpa. “Don’t worry, Mr. Neil. We take turns. Watch for Sarron. You sleep easy. Need rest. All better in the morning.”

  Unzipping his tent, Quinn pushed the ice axe and then his pack inside before reaching for a small gas lamp, which he lit. Once he had crawled in also, he collapsed onto his sleeping bag for a few minutes to recover. Then, putting the old ice axe inside the biggest of the two kit bags at the back of his tent, he told himself to start repacking the rest of his gear for the long journey back to Kathmandu. But it was too cold; he was too tired. He’d do it tomorrow.

  Instead, he pulled his sleeping bag around his shoulders and sipped more of the whiskey from the bottle. He’d drunk enough to no longer feel the pain it caused his split lips and sore throat, the sharp heat loosening his tired mind instead. The song “Photograph” was still caught in it, looping relentlessly. He drank to its beat.

  Photograph.

  Photograph.

  Photograph.

  He told himself not to do it but he did.

  Reaching into his pack, he pulled out his camera and, from his kit bag, another battery pack. With fumbling, cold-deadened fingers, he put the charged battery into the camera and turned it on.

  Neil Quinn began to scroll through the pictures it contained, following the one-way journey a sixteen-year-old boy had made to the roof of the world.

  No amount of whiskey could help him after that.

  21

  Reichsautobahn 7, Direction Northwest, Germany

  October 16, 1938

  1:21 a.m.

  Trying to ignore his left index finger, Josef listened to the steady hum of the truck’s heavy tires on the smooth pavement beneath his feet. He wished the noise would lull him to sleep, but it didn’t, asking instead the continual question, “Where are they taking us?” The engine rumbled in reply but gave no answer as the bloody end of Josef’s finger seared in pain once more.

  How could one finger hurt so damn much?

  The pain seemed to have layers to it. The sharp, cutting sensation of the nail having been ripped away now lay above a secondary pulsing that felt deeper than the thickness of the finger. Rhythmical, like the relentless ticking of a clock, it told him that the ointment, smeared on hastily before the finger was bandaged, was already losing the battle with infection.

  If this is only one finger then what the hell must Gunter be feeling?

  Josef looked down at the shadow of his friend stretched out on the floor of the truck. Even in the dark he could see the white of the bandages that entirely covered both of his mutilated hands and hear the occasional moans that accompanied his constant drift in and out of consciousness. Reaching out to him with his still-intact right hand, Josef felt once again the hot fever on Gunter’s clammy forehead. He wondered if he was dying.

  The thought frightened Josef. He and Kurt, his hands untouched by the gestapo but his damaged knee having suffered particular attention throughout their interrogations, had already done what little they could to try and aid their broken friend. They had given him sips from the water bottles the guards provided. They had made him as comfortable as possible, propping up and covering him with the three old blankets that awaited them in the back of the otherwise empty truck. They had wiped his brow. But their best efforts had made no impression on his suffering.

  It appeared to Josef to be more than just the torn and ripped fingers. He suspected that Gunter had sustained some unseen internal injury in one of the earlier beatings. The gestapo had known from the start that Gunter was the ringleader. They’d singled him out, dedicating the most time to him, hoping to extract what they were so desperate to find out. Josef didn’t know if Gunter even knew the true identity of the people in Munich who were behind the smuggling operation, but, looking at those bandaged hands, in the end he must have told his torturers everything. No one could resist the gestapo, not even Gunter.

  Again Josef wondered where they were being taken. They were back in the hands of the SS now and the only conclusion he coul
d come to was a desperate one; they were being taken somewhere to be shot. It couldn’t be for more torture. The gestapo were masters at that and had already extracted every detail. No, the SS would simply want to silence the three of them. They had been there on that hill, they knew what the SS had done to those nine Jews, including women and children—Josef himself had complained about it during their interrogation. In the darkness of the truck, Josef saw it all again, hearing once more the shots and the explosion that had killed them. With every murderous echo that night, a bit more of his old, carefree life had been wrung from him. By the time they had reached the valley road, Josef knew that he was no longer young, no longer a free person who lived without consequences. Ever since, the memory of those sounds had denied him the right to even hope for his own survival.

  Why couldn’t the SS just have arrested us?

  Is this really what happens now?

  Gunter began to moan, then screamed once, horribly, before falling silent again. The cry made Josef recall his own screams when the gestapo had set to work on his hand only for that tall, blond SS-obersturmführer to suddenly barge into the room, waving a fistful of official-looking documents and demanding they immediately release him.

  At first, his interrogators had refused to unbuckle the heavy leather straps that bound Josef’s wrists to the deliberately spoon-shaped wooden arms of the chair. On the left one, in a pool of red blood that spewed from the end of his finger, the rough pliers, his fingernail still within its teeth, was set down alongside his trapped hand. With a taste of bile in his mouth, eyes stinging with dirty tears of pain, Josef had flicked the pliers onto the floor, only to receive a punch in the side of the head from one of his torturers.

  The SS officer responded by instantly pulling his Luger from its holster and shouting, “Do not touch this man again, any of you. These documents show that your most senior officer, the reichsführer of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, orders that you release him into my custody immediately. Do so now, or I will shoot you myself!” The man had jabbed the pistol toward the face of the nearest gestapo officer and passed the documents to another. Within seconds, Josef was out of the room. His finger hastily covered, he was put into the awaiting lorry, Kurt and Gunter already inside. They had left immediately.

  Another cry from Gunter made Josef, once again, tell the two SS guards seated between them and the rear of the truck that he needed their help and, once again, they said and did nothing. A terse “you should save your breath” had been their single response for the entire journey. There was nothing Josef Becker could do but sit in silence as his friend failed, waiting for arrival at what he was sure would be his final destination.

  Their first stop after the arrest had been their own regimental barracks in Garmisch. For a number of days a visiting officer from the SS, accompanied by officers from his own regiment, had individually questioned them. The interviews were thorough yet formal, almost civilized in their adherence to military protocols.

  Josef hadn’t told them much because he didn’t know much.

  Yes, he was a qualified Heeresbergsführer, an official mountain guide of the army.

  Occasionally they did guide people over the mountains and bring contraband back.

  Yes, they did get paid to do it, always in cash when they handed over the goods at the end of the return journey.

  He sent most of the money to his mother and two sisters who lived in Elmau.

  Yes, he had also bought a new BMW motorcycle with some of it. He used it to get back to his home village to visit his family.

  They were a close family, had been since his father was killed in the Great War.

  Yes, he used the motorcycle to go climbing as well.

  Yes, he did like to climb. He had climbed many routes.

  Everything: rock, ice, snow, whatever necessary to reach the top.

  Germany and Austria. Switzerland also when he got some leave.

  No, not always alone, but often.

  No, he didn’t know who organized their smuggling runs. He had never met them, never even been told about them. He was only a guide. It was what he did before the army; it was what he did in the army; it was what he would do after the army.

  No, he didn’t understand that there would be no “after the army” now.

  No, he wasn’t a communist.

  No, he didn’t love Jews. They were people. He was a guide. He had guided a lot of people in the mountains.

  The interviews went on and on. Josef saw no reason to be devious. The only thing he knew for sure was that he climbed, he soldiered, he worked with Gunter and Kurt on whatever mountain work came up. His captors knew it also, so why deny it?

  On the fourth day, Josef had been taken from his cell back to the interview room once more. As he walked there, he wondered what use it would be to ask the same questions all over again. However, this time when he stepped into the room he was confronted with the back of the commanding officer of the 1st Gebirgs Division.

  Generalmajor Ludwig Ganzler was looking out of the frosted window and up at the sheer, spiky rock faces of the Wetterstein Mountains that towered over the barracks. Ganzler’s adjutant was already sitting to the side of the questioning table, a leather file of papers open in front of him. The generalmajor turned to contemplate Josef as he entered. He was smoking a meerschaum pipe with an ivory bowl carved in the shape of a ravenous wolf’s head. The room was clouded with the smoke of the pipe’s aromatic tobacco. It irritated Josef’s eyes as he stood to attention and saluted, yet its smell was faintly comforting. His father’s pipes still hung on the wall of his mother’s house.

  Ganzler gestured Josef to a chair. As he also sat at the table, Ganzler placed the pipe down in front of him on a silver dish that his adjutant must have brought into the room for that precise purpose. The wolf’s smoke dwindled and then stopped. It was the first time that Josef had ever been so near to his commanding officer. He was a long-faced man, grey-haired. He spoke like a gentleman. Josef had taken many like him hunting in the hills but never the generalmajor. At his neck, behind the Iron Cross First Class, hung a distinctive enameled blue star, the “Pour le Mérite.” In the regiment they said that the generalmajor had won his Blue Max, the highest decoration of German valor, as a young lieutenant on the Italian front in 1917, the week before another young officer by the name of Erwin Rommel had done the same, and that they had become lifelong friends as a result.

  The two medals trembled a little as Ganzler began to speak. “You know that I watched you make that solo climb up the Waxenstein?”

  Josef nodded.

  The officer glanced at Josef’s right hand.

  “I don’t see the regimental ring I sent to you in recognition of your feat. Did the SS take it?”

  “Yes,” Josef replied, recalling the moment before they were placed in the cells, when they had torn the identification tag from his neck, taking his ring with it.

  “A pity. Whatever trouble you may be in now, Gefreiter Becker, you earned that ring that day. Do you know I followed every move you made through a telescope I had brought to my office? It was a beautiful thing to see, a perfect demonstration of bold, fluid climbing. I wondered how you could do it, so alone up there, without ropes or pitons. You were hugely exposed. One slip. Imagine.”

  Ganzler stopped, waiting for Josef to say something.

  “I never think about it, Herr Generalmajor. I just concentrate on climbing.”

  “So you do, to very great effect. Watching you that day made me proud of our regiment. I thought to myself it is not only the SS who can conquer the great alpine north faces, but we, the Gebirgsjäger, the true troops of the mountains, can also climb like spiders. With men like you, I said to myself, it is true; Germany can be truly great once again.

  “Your officers tell me, and I believe them, that you are the finest climber in the entire division, one of the very best in all Bavaria. I
wondered if I might watch you fall that day, but I didn’t, and I was glad of it.” He paused and then said slowly as he stared at Josef, “It goes against the grain of any decent commanding officer to watch helplessly as good men die.”

  Josef hung his head a little to escape Ganzler’s piercing look.

  “You should know, Gefreiter Becker, that I have tried to keep this as a military matter—a regimental matter, in fact. I and others like me believe that we should be able to deal with our own. However, I fear that this may no longer be possible in your case. The gestapo and the kripo are fighting between themselves to have you three delivered to Munich. You must understand that there are other agendas at work in this country now that go far beyond simple soldiering. They make matters such as this much more complicated than they once might have been.”

  The generalmajor waited to let what he was saying sink in before he spoke again.

  “The reason that I have called you here is to ask you one last time, as one soldier to another, if there is anything that you can tell me that might make it possible for me to keep you in Garmisch, to give you a life behind bars here rather than a wasteful death in Munich.

  “War is coming, sooner or later, Gefreiter Becker. When it does, a man like you would not stay in any jail of mine but would be free to serve his country, to take his chance alongside the rest of my soldiers. I think that you earned that right as I watched you climb.

  “Tell me, Becker, who organized the smuggling? Was it Obergefreiter Schirnhoffer? Who in Munich was behind it? Give me something, a name, anything that I can put on the record to permit me to keep you here.”