Summit: A Novel Read online

  Josef wanted to say something, but he only knew one name and Ilsa was dead. In silence, he found himself looking directly at the officer’s Blue Max medal. It was a thing of beauty, delicate and fine, chivalrous when compared to the blunt, black Iron Cross that hung to the front of it. It spoke to Josef of a time when innocent children weren’t shot like rats.

  “The only thing that I can put on the record, Herr Generalmajor, is that the SS soldiers who captured us murdered the nine Jews that we were transporting over the hills,” Josef said, looking at the generalmajor.

  Ganzler stared back into Josef’s eyes for a second. “And I think they will murder you too, Gefreiter Josef Becker. I have given you a last chance, and now, whether I like it or not, I must accept that I am watching you fall. You just haven’t hit the ground yet.”

  He stood up, saluted, and, with a final glance at Josef, took up his pipe and left.

  Within an hour, the three of them were being moved to Munich in two black Mercedes cars. Through the rear windows, the snowy Bavarian mountains had silently watched them go. Two hours later they arrived at Gestapo Headquarters in the center of Munich, immediately leaving the surface world of night and day for a small cell in a basement.

  Down there, Josef understood immediately that his life was now the possession of others, to do what they would with it. Almost immediately, new interrogations began, interrogations that became beatings, and beatings that became torture, always Gunter first. When Gunter was thrown back into the cell that last time, his fingers bleeding, and they pulled Josef out, he already knew what they were going to do to his precious hands.

  The arrival of the SS officer may have stopped it after the agony of just one finger but it couldn’t have been for compassionate reasons. There was no compassion in the SS. It had to be because they wanted the prisoners for themselves. They were going to be silenced.

  The monotonous sound of the truck’s engine suddenly changed, the sound jerking Josef back to the moment as he felt the vehicle turn off the long highway it had been following. The engine started to rise and fall, the lorry slowly working its way along what felt like narrower, windier roads. A deeper chill cut into the truck, an invisible mist moistening his clothes and bringing with it a smell of damp, earthy farmland. It made Josef wonder if they were going to have to dig their own graves.

  The truck slowed even more, changing down to its lowest gear, protesting as it climbed slowly up a rippling gradient before finally stopping. One of the SS guards immediately pushed a sacking hood over Josef’s head and pulled him toward the back of the truck where unseen hands roughly pulled him down onto his feet. Through the bottom of the hood Josef caught a glimpse of damp, rounded cobblestones, shiny yellow with reflected light.

  Standing there, Josef could feel his heart pulsating in his chest, beating like a massive drum. He tried to calm it by thinking of the mountains but instead could only recall the face of little Ilsa in that godforsaken chapel above the Paznaun and the sound of the rifle bolts from outside.

  He waited to hear that sound again.

  22

  Hotel Shambhala, Lhasa, Tibet

  May 31, 2009

  4:50 p.m.

  Sarron stared up at the asbestos-paneled ceiling of his hotel room in Lhasa. He had stopped the plump Han Chinese hooker from dressing. Even if her high-pitched squeals of faked appreciation had reminded him of a yak calf with a hoof caught in barbed wire, he wasn’t finished with her yet.

  Watching her dimpled backside wobble to the bathroom, he reached for his cigarettes. He had seen her hanging around the hotel when he returned from the airport and thought she might distract him. It hadn’t worked. His body was still tense with rage, violently seething. He had debt up to his eyeballs, contacts around the world that no longer returned his calls, the Indian Intelligence Bureau investigating him for arms trading, and now this fuckup on Everest.

  He lit a cigarette and watched its smoke twist and turn upward as he told himself again that the summit bonus, his ticket out, was gone. The closing words of his last telephone conversation with Tate Senior burned once more in his ears. “Sarron, don’t expect another cent from me. Understand also that my lawyers are going to find everything there is in this world that has your name on it and tie it up in such a storm of endless legal bullshit that it will be frozen harder than my s—” The incensed American had been unable to complete the word “son.”

  Lying back on the stained nylon bed cover, Sarron felt the walls of the small room closing in on him. The feeling made him tremble with anger and aggression, his mind raced, flicking involuntarily between thoughts of violence and pain. Struggling to suppress the urge to smash both the cheap room and the slovenly whore to pieces, he snatched the glass ashtray from the nightstand and perched it on the center of his chest over his tattoo of the 1er Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins regimental badge as if it might pin him to the bed. Telling himself to calm down, he drew heavily on the cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke.

  Now exhale.

  Slow.

  Inhale again.

  The cigarette burned as Sarron steadied his thoughts.

  Looking down to ash the cigarette, the old tattoo, distorted and magnified through the thick glass, caught his eye. It resembled little more than an ugly black bruise now. The sight of it made him think back to a time when it was crisp and new, to the lull during that vicious fighting in Chad when it had first been inked. He was going to have to fight like that now for his survival.

  Inhaling deeply again on the cigarette, feeling his lips curling back against his teeth, he told himself if that was to be the case then the people who had let him down were going to be the first casualties.

  Quinn.

  Pemba.

  Dawa.

  They were all up there with the boy.

  They should have done better—that fucking Quinn, especially.

  Brooding about the Englishman, Sarron was reminded of what Wei Fang, the Chinese liaison officer, told him happened after he had left the tent. How Dawa had handed Quinn that old ice axe, insisting that he take it even when Quinn tried to refuse.

  Why did Dawa do that?

  Why did Quinn seem so spooked by the axe?

  What is its significance?

  Something inside Sarron cautioned that he needed to know the answers to those questions, and that he should limit his opening salvo of the coming battle to stun, not kill, until he did. Even if it was nothing, Dawa and Quinn had used that axe to humiliate him and, in return, he would make sure that it would be used to punish them when the time came.

  Stubbing out the finished cigarette in the ashtray, he got up from the bed, retrieved his cell phone from his discarded clothes, and called a number in Kathmandu. He issued a stream of instructions before throwing the phone back onto his clothes and motioning the returning Chinese girl facedown onto the bed.

  Just as he was saying, “Bitch, you are going to fuck me silently this time,” and reaching to the floor for her underwear to stuff into her gap-toothed mouth to ensure she complied, his phone rang again. Seeing the same Kathmandu area code on the screen, Sarron answered, shouting, “What now? Haven’t I made myself clear?”

  “I don’t think so. Well, not yet anyway,” said the refined English voice on the other end of the phone.

  “Who is this?”

  “Sarron, it’s Henrietta Richards. I have been asked to look into the death of Nelson Tate Junior by the US Ambassador to Nepal. I have some questions for you.”

  “FUCK OFF!” Sarron screamed.

  The hooker flinched on the bed as the cell phone flew across the room to shatter against the far wall.

  23

  Apartment E, 57 Sukhra Path, Kathmandu, Nepal

  May 31, 2009

  3:05 p.m. (Nepal Time)

  On the other side of the mountains, Henrietta was not the least bit surprised by Sarro
n’s reaction to her call. The honest and the intelligent had always seen her as the undisputed historian, the guardian even, of Himalayan mountaineering. They actively sought her confirmation of their successful summits as a necessary endorsement of what they had achieved. The braggarts, the frauds, and the crooks, on the other hand, saw her only as a potential threat. There were many reasons for Henrietta Richards to dislike Jean-Philippe Sarron, and the fact that he had always refused to give her the time of day was confirmation of them all.

  In the beginning Henrietta had come across Sarron, as she did most people, because of his climbing achievements, but in the latter years of her time at the embassy, it was more due to his other activities. There were many myths and legends about Sarron but even when she found that the truth was different, it was, ultimately, no less tawdry or dangerous. It was said, for example, that Sarron had been in the French Foreign Legion—he sometimes said so himself—but Henrietta knew from her investigations that he had actually served in the 1er Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins, the French Army mountain troops. He had only been seconded to the FFL when the intense fighting that took place between Chad and Libya in the mideighties moved into the Tibesti hills. What was undoubtedly true though, was that using accumulated periods of long leave, he did undertake some of the toughest climbs of that time. For a short period, Henrietta was even developing an admiration for his abilities, but when he showed absolutely no interest in respecting hers, she placed him under a more critical eye.

  After one of those climbs, Sarron had somehow acquired a hotel in Kathmandu with a small trekking business. In the bars of Thamel, it was said that he bought them for when he was going to leave the army, but Henrietta knew they were actually given over under some duress in lieu of a nonexistent payment for a wayward shipment of French military oxygen. When Sarron did finish with the army in 1988, he moved to Nepal to take up the ownerships. The hotel was quickly sold as the man clearly had little aptitude for hospitality. However, trading on his climbing reputation and his ruthless streak, Sarron built up the guiding business, assisted in this by two brothers.

  Oleg and Dmitri Vishnevsky were wild Russians from the mountainous Caucasus, who, as teenage conscripts to the OKSVA in Afghanistan, deserted by escaping over one of the highest passes into Pakistan during the winter. With no prospect of a welcome home from Mother Russia, they spent the next few years traveling onward, stealing and cheating their way along the tourist trails of the Indian subcontinent until caught one night breaking into Sarron’s equipment store in Kathmandu. The pair told Sarron, during their subsequent beating, of how they had crossed the Dorah in January in little more than army fatigues, that they were Russian and nothing he could do would break them. Sarron, tempted by the challenge but suspecting they might be right, decided instead that they should work for him. He paid them very little, told them to drag his clients to the summit if necessary, and regularly tapped their psychotic streak if anyone crossed him.

  By the midnineties, No Horizons, his unruly yet effective expedition company, had become increasingly successful at getting people up the highest peaks, even Everest if they paid enough. His heavy French brogue and constant cursing were ever-present features of those base camps where the majority of the occupants were paying handsomely for the often questionable pleasures of being there. As the number of climbers to the eight-thousand-meter peaks increased exponentially, so did the demand for bottled oxygen. By renewing some old military contacts and, quite literally, breaking some new local ones, Sarron started to feed off this market as well.

  For a time, he appeared to be living well off it all. Too well to make sense, a few even said, despite the obvious facts that he paid his two head guides next to nothing, suffered no mark-up on his own oxygen, and was clearly one of the principal ringmasters of what was fast becoming a high-paying Everest circus. More recently however, everyone was in agreement that things seemed to have been turning against the Frenchman. A demand for higher standards and quality was making both the expedition and oxygen businesses more professional and competitive—a competition that increased still further when the global recession significantly reduced the number of punters able to pay the $65,000 Everest admission ticket. Sarron’s problems were further compounded when his two guides, the “Vicious Twins” as they had become known, vanished after their sideline of importing crystal meth and MDMA from Thailand turned sour when a bad batch killed three backpackers in a Thamel dance club. Since Sarron had then been compelled to pay market rates to the more respected guides, he needed to try and win back the business he was losing.

  That was enough of an explanation for most, but Henrietta knew the true extent of Sarron’s other activities—and losses. Diplomatic circles had long suspected that No Horizons was also a “front” for profiteering from the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, primarily through the sale of stolen French army weapons to the rebels and general thuggery for hire in Kathmandu. The fact that the Nepalese Maoists had come in from the hills to political respectability in 2006 had also killed that side of Sarron’s dealings, leaving only the Naxalite rebels in India as customers. From what Henrietta had heard, the Indian Intelligence Bureau were also now onto that. A failed, somewhat bizarre attempt in late 2008 to sell two containers of Chinese counterfeit climbing clothes through the port of Naples had even traced back to Sarron to show how desperate he had become.

  Yes, it was hardly surprising that Sarron was not going to speak to her about such a disaster for his operation on Everest.

  Calling over to Sanjeev Gupta, she asked, “Sanjeev, can you find out what hotel the No Horizons team uses in Kathmandu? It’s probably the Peak or the Khumbu, most climbers tend to stay at one of those two. When you do, please give them a call and find out when the No Horizons team will be arriving back from Tibet. I want to organize one of my post-climb chats with Neil Quinn as soon as possible.”

  Feeling strangely irritated that Quinn should have gotten himself mixed up with someone like Sarron, Henrietta stood and readied herself to leave.

  “I’m off now, Sanjeev. I think it might be useful to have one of my little lunches with Pashi the barber to hear what the gossip is on the No Horizons expedition. Can you warn him I’m coming? Back later.”

  24

  Wewelsburg Castle, NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA, Germany

  October 16, 1938

  3:21 a.m.

  Josef, the burlap bag still covering his head, stood blindly in the cold awaiting his fate. But no guns were loaded, no shots fired.

  The only sounds were remote noises of other people echoing from an unseen building he sensed was surrounding him.

  They must have been delivered to a prison.

  Finally hands gripped his shoulders and started him walking.

  Another thought came to his mind.

  Their prisons have guillotines.

  The realization made him nauseous as through the bottom of his hood, Josef dizzily watched his feet slowly step up three steps, cross over a heavy stone doorstep, then follow a smooth-floored corridor, newly tiled in highly polished red, white, and black squares.

  They walked far into the building before turning and entering what he thought must be a large room—unlikely in its overpowering warmth and rich smell of food.

  Despite his fear, Josef’s mouth instantly started watering.

  The guard pushed Josef down onto a bench and removed the hood to reveal a heaped plate of steaming potato and sausage placed on the table in front of him. A ceramic mug of hot wine was set alongside it. It too steamed with a smell of mulled spices. To Josef’s side, Kurt was also sat at the table, his leg propped out straight to the side of him, but there was no sign of Gunter.

  The pair of them looked at each other, shrugged, and started eating hungrily.

  When Josef drank from the mug, he noticed a small design on it. It was also on the plate, even engraved into the cutlery. Words within it read: “SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg.”<
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  Josef had no idea what that was. He didn’t care; he hadn’t been shot and he couldn’t imagine he was going to be if they were letting him eat and drink like this.

  Those were his last conscious thoughts.

  Josef awoke to find himself lain out on a blanket on a wooden floor. His head was aching, his mouth dry, his tongue swollen, as if he was suffering the consequences of an evening mixing liters of wine and beer before a heavy yet too brief sleep.

  Lifting his head, the daylight shining in through a single-dormer window above him bleached his eyes.

  With some difficulty, he stood up. Head reeling, he pushed out a hand to stabilize himself against a wall and looked around to see Kurt lying on another blanket. Gunter was on the only bed. Both were sleeping. Gunter’s bandages seemed new, but blood was already seeping through them. He looked at his own hand and saw that the dressing on that had also been changed.

  He checked his watch.

  3:47

  But it was stopped.

  He asked himself, When, a.m. or p.m?

  He didn’t know.

  The spinning in his head subsided a little so he moved over to Kurt, crouching down to give him a shake. Slowly he too began to wake.

  Moving on to Gunter, Josef saw that he was breathing slowly now. Laying his undamaged hand on his friend’s forehead he felt that his fever had receded a little.

  Deciding to leave Gunter sleeping, he looked instead around the little room. It had few identifying features. The bare wooden floorboards were smoothly polished, the white walls newly painted. The dormer window had been recently reglazed. It was little more than another cell but cleaner and brighter, more monastery than prison.

  Josef went to the window and looked out over rolling countryside. The land appeared hard and frosty, rendered colorless by a pale autumn haze. A roundel of white light hung low in the sky. Josef wondered if he was looking west or east, if the almost hidden sun was rising or falling. Trying the handle of the window, he was surprised to find that it clicked open readily. He pushed his head out into the cold air. The chill brought some precision to his befuddled brain as he understood that they were in a room high within the roof of a castle or country house, a tall building positioned higher still on some cliff or promontory that raised it up far above the surrounding countryside.