Summit: A Novel Page 6

  Completely disarmed, Josef whispered his name.

  Before Ilsa could say anything in return they both suddenly heard the cascading sound of rifle bolts being actioned.

  Raising his index finger, Josef motioned Ilsa to be perfectly still.

  A sharp voice outside shouted, “You are completely surrounded. You will all come out now.”

  Gunter instantly extinguished the lamp.

  The adult Jews began to panic.

  In the darkness, Josef seized the small girl by the wrist of her exposed hand and pulled her closer to the side of the stone altar, keeping her down.

  Feeling the narrowest of gaps behind the heavy stone slabs, he instinctively pushed her inside.

  A shadow stepped into the faint rectangle of the chapel doorway, blocking it.

  A bright light then blasted the entrance, the incandescence burning into Josef’s blinking eyes the silhouette of a man, the outline of a stick grenade hanging from his right hand, an officer’s cap on his head.

  “Out! All of you! With your hands in the air or I will throw in this grenade!” the figure shouted.

  One by one, the Jews slowly stepped out of the chapel into the blinding light.

  There, they were met by a dark line of soldiers standing on each side of the spotlight, the glinting metal of rifles and machine pistols pointing back at them.

  When Gunter, Kurt, and Josef came out, a number of the soldiers pushed forward to seize them, separating them from the Jews.

  Kurt immediately started to struggle, rolling his shoulders and ripping his arms from their grip. In an instant, one of the soldiers thumped the butt of his rifle onto the side of Kurt’s neck. Another delivered a sideways stamp to his right knee. Josef heard a distinct crack of bone or cartilage as Kurt crumpled to the ground, the two soldiers falling onto him, pushing him, writhing and groaning, further into the snow. They quickly stripped him of his hunting knife and papers, which they passed up to the officer.

  At the same time, the ends of cold gun barrels were shoved hard up under Gunter’s and Josef’s chins to stop them from trying anything similar. The pair of them were tugged closer to the light, a leather-gloved hand snatching at the scarf that still covered Gunter’s face, ripping it down as Josef’s and Gunter’s weapons were also removed.

  Josef could smell the stink of stale coffee and tobacco on the fetid breath of his captors as they worked. It was worse than the goats. He recognized the skull-and-crossbones badge that adorned the officer’s cap and caught glimpses of the double sig runes on the side of the soldiers’ helmets as they rifled their pockets:

  Finding Gunter’s and Josef’s reichpass books, the soldiers immediately passed them to the officer, who held them to the side of the light, studying them against a notebook. When satisfied with what he saw, he folded the reichpass books inside, standing back to address them in formal, Berlin-accented, high German. “I identify you three as Obergefreiter Gunter Schirnhoffer, Gefreiter Josef Becker, and Gefreiter Kurt Müller, serial numbers abt.1651/99-1, abt.1659/99-1, and abt.1663/99-1 respectively, all soldiers of the 99th Gebirgsjäger. I hereby place you under arrest for the crime of Treason against the Reich. You are to be returned to Germany for court martial and punishment. Start taking them down.”

  The guns pulled away from beneath their faces, only to return with a jab to their spines, signaling they should start walking away from the chapel, back down the snowy, narrow ridge.

  Two other soldiers pulled Kurt back onto his feet. His right leg immediately gave way under him and he collapsed back onto the snow with a cry of pain. Observing the fall, the officer ordered the soldiers to stop. Pointing at Josef and Gunter, he shouted, “You two, come back. You will carry your colleague down to the valley.”

  Turning back for Kurt, Josef looked at the illuminated chapel, willing the tiny girl inside to stay hidden. Then, each taking an arm, he and Gunter had to lift Kurt once again. Together they began to all but carry him down the slope, his right leg dragging uselessly.

  At the turn onto the steep path from the ridge, they submerged once again into the inky dark below.

  Some minutes later, a rifle fired. The shot’s retort raced over them to collide with distant, invisible hills before springing back in multiple echoes.

  There was another, then a third.

  Josef counted four more as he struggled with Gunter to help Kurt down the steep, narrow path, all the time their captors goading them to keep moving.

  With each echoing shot, a feeling of nausea grew in his stomach.

  After the seventh, Gunter shouted, “You SS bastards.”

  It earned him a punch in the face, but it didn’t put him down.

  Gunter just scoffed at his attacker.

  From behind, another soldier struck him on the back of the head with the pistol grip of his MP38 machine gun.

  This time Gunter did go down. Kurt and Josef fell with him.

  From somewhere far above as he lay in the snow to the side of the path, Josef heard their two mules begin to bray wildly.

  A man’s voice screamed, “Ilsa! Ilsa! Ilsa!”

  The desperate cries were silenced by a long burst of machine-gun fire as, under a barrage of kicking jackboots and incensed screams of “Get up! Now!” Josef was forced to pull himself up from the snow.

  Standing, he looked back uphill to see the flash of an explosion illuminate the entire ridgeline bright orange.

  An avalanche of masonry hurtled down the mountainside.

  The sound of the blast ripped all sense from Josef’s brain, its echo continuing to sound in his numbed heart all the way to the valley floor.

  12

  The Second Step, Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—28,133 feet

  May 26, 2009

  5:07 p.m.

  The realization of what was missing paralyzed Quinn. He lay there, able only to visualize Nelson Tate Junior’s young body being struck by the rockfall, seeing it sweep the boy off the ledge to cartwheel down the sheer face below like a rag doll, the rucksack releasing, the oxygen system spinning away, the yellow down suit ripping and bursting in explosions of blood and feathers at every contact with the razor-sharp edges of the mountain …

  Stop!

  Breaking his mind from the image, Quinn told himself to put his ski goggles back on. But, as he wrenched them back around to his eyes, he found that the hard plastic lens was split cleanly in two. They were useless. Pulling them up over his head, he tossed them away. When his gloved hand returned, he saw that it was covered in blood from his bleeding forehead. He pushed it back, applying pressure to the wound to try and staunch the flow, involuntarily imagining the boy’s fall all over again until a new sequence of thoughts finally intruded:

  You need to move.

  You can make it through this.

  You’ve got to try.

  With his other hand, Quinn reached for a frayed and faded length of red rope that was projecting from some hard ice at the foot of the rock wall.

  He tugged on it.

  It held.

  He waited a little and then pulled on it with all the remaining strength he could muster.

  Slowly, Quinn brought himself up onto his knees, then his feet.

  His head spun like a gyroscope as he straightened himself. Winded from the exertion of getting up, it was all he could do to lean into the rock to stop the spinning.

  Breathe.

  His dry mouth pooled with saliva. He was going to vomit.

  Instinct made him push his oxygen mask out of the way. He needn’t have bothered. Nothing came out as he dry-heaved painfully. It was a long time since Quinn had eaten anything.

  The vomiting only winded him more.

  Still continuing to retch, he pushed his mask back up onto his mouth as the rock in front of his face replayed Nelson Tate Junior’s body rolling to a rest, far below, smas
hed to a bloody pulp.

  Quinn screamed at himself to stop thinking of the boy’s fall, to start thinking about saving himself instead.

  FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DO SOMETHING!

  He began to pull in the purple rope that had linked him to the boy. When he arrived at the finality of its tufted end, Quinn felt disgusted with himself.

  Untying the remnant from his waist harness, he let the severed rope fall to his feet.

  Immobile, he stared down at the hopeless coils until an inner voice said he wasn’t going to find the boy’s body there.

  LOOK FOR IT!

  Grasping the end of the rope with which he had righted himself, tugging on it once more to be sure that it really was hard frozen into the side of the mountain, he gradually inched himself toward the edge of the snowy ledge. There he stopped, tentatively leaning out, craning his head to look down into the cavernous black and white drop below.

  Almost immediately, Quinn made out the forms of two dead bodies, one clad in blue, another in green, partially snow-covered and folded into the rocks directly below the step, but of the yellow-suited boy, there was no trace. As he searched further, an understanding of the boy’s unhindered drop down the sheer side of the mountain reawakened a forgotten—or was it just heavily suppressed?—sensation from long ago.

  Jump! a crystal-clear voice suddenly seemed to command.

  His legs started to tremble, his eyes fogging.

  JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! it repeated.

  Quinn’s insides spiraled into nausea once more.

  To beat the vertigo that was threatening to overpower him, he forced himself to step away from the drop and back into the mountainside.

  Turning, he saw a dark shape flick out from the rocks to his right until a cloud pushed up the face, obscuring the area.

  Quinn kept his eyes fixed on the spot until the cloud thinned and he saw the darting shape again.

  The small black form leapt out, tumbling and twisting madly on the buffeting wind until it could break free with a flick of wings and disappear back into the rocks.

  It was a gorak, a mountain crow.

  Quinn’s first reaction was to consider its presence as inevitable.

  Years of expeditions with the Sherpas had ingrained his subconscious to automatically offer up their superstitions, whether he believed them or not.

  The Sherpas said gorak came to collect the souls of lost climbers …

  The bird was slow to reappear a third time.

  While Quinn waited, a baser, more sickening realization of what it was really doing there ousted the mystical. Unlike humans, gorak are not interested in achieving incredible feats of survival at high altitude. They are motivated to break avian records for one reason and one reason alone: food. Even though a rock buttress blocked Quinn’s view beyond the end of the snow ledge, he grimly understood what must have attracted the crow.

  Continuing to look across the length of the narrow ledge, he noticed some new marks in the snow, tight into the rock face.

  His heart jolted.

  The kid went that way!

  The thought offered a moment of alternative, but not of sustained relief. The route down from the Second Step ran in the opposite direction. Quinn already knew the direction in which he was looking was a dead end in every sense, a projection of crags and buttresses that offered no prospect of safe descent.

  The bird appeared again, as did the thought of what it might be feeding on.

  No. You can’t permit that.

  Cursing the absence of his ice axe to give him some support, Quinn cautiously began to make his way along the exposed traverse toward the bird.

  In the beginning, it did indeed seem to lead nowhere. Only as he finally reached its visible end, the point where the rock buttress jutted out, did he understand that there was something beyond.

  Gripping the buttress for support, he saw that the ledge narrowed to a width of just a few inches but actually continued around the small promontory. Hugging the rock, his oxygen mask blocking any downward view of his feet, he blindly forced the sharp points of his crampons into every groove he could feel and edged his way around, constantly fighting the magnetic pull of the massive void he knew was below.

  13

  On the other side, Quinn saw a small, roofed alcove that pushed darkly back into the rocky cliff.

  He moved to step down toward its small opening.

  Immediately the black bird, forgotten during the difficult climb around the buttress, flew up into his face.

  A claw snagged on his oxygen mask, stopping the bird in midflight. Hooked, the crow violently beat its rigid wings against Quinn’s exposed eyes and wounded forehead in wild desperation to free itself.

  Instinctively using his arms to push the frantic, pecking bird away, Quinn lost his balance. Tumbling from the side of the buttress, his body fell onto the edge of the little alcove.

  His hands were unable to grip the icy lip of the cave floor; his crampons scratched desperately at the steep face below, their points breaking away loose ice and rocks to start the immense drop to the glacier ten thousand feet below.

  Quinn began to slide down the face after them.

  With a lunge, he reached an arm back up into the cave to get a hold on something, anything.

  His right hand slapped onto the shaft of an ice axe.

  The kid’s?

  With all his might, he seized it.

  It held his fall for a split second only to explode from the ice.

  Instantly Quinn started sliding downward again.

  Really falling now.

  Dragging the axe after him, its metal head banging against the mountainside above, Quinn dropped ever faster, caught by gravity—the only thing up there that altitude couldn’t slow.

  The axe’s long steel pick caught.

  It broke away.

  It hooked again, this time slotting into a horizontal crack in the rock.

  It stopped instantly but the force from Quinn’s dropping body ripped his hand down the shaft.

  Still falling.

  Just before his hand could slip off the very end of the shaft, it momentarily gripped around the raised metal collar of the axe’s end-spike.

  Simultaneously, a crampon toe-point keyed into a small crack in the rock.

  Two points of contact.

  Two points of contact that held.

  Stopped.

  Quinn wedged his other foot into a bigger crack and spread-eagled across the vertical rock, face pushed hard against the cold schist. He could do nothing more than wait for his shattered nerves to settle.

  Shit.

  When finally recovered enough to be able to move, he slowly pulled himself up alongside the axe. Resting his face next to its shaft, his blurred vision slowly took in that it was not the kid’s. The shaft was made of wood, not titanium. It was an old axe.

  Whatever, it had saved his fucking life.

  Kicking in and pushing up from below with his feet, feeling with his free hand for every edge he could find, reaching ever higher with the long axe, Quinn continued his climb back up.

  Eventually he dragged himself into the cave. Panting and shaking from the exertion, watering eyes adjusting to the darkness, Quinn began to take in the small area. It was only about eight or nine feet deep, not much wider either, the roof just high enough to permit someone to stand. Slowly he made out the body of Nelson Tate Junior lying to one side, pushed tight against the left wall of the little cave, curled in the fetal position. A mound of snow and ice rose up to fill the remainder of the small chamber, looking like the treacherous mountain in miniature.

  While Quinn looked at it, a spontaneous feeling of dread sent a shudder through his body. Shaking it off as a residual effect of his near fall, Quinn crawled further in between the boy and the frozen mound. Fighting a desperate need to just stop
and rest, he laid down the old axe and pulled the boy’s body over onto its back to check for signs of life.

  To his relief, he found a faint pulse in his neck, but no amount of shaking was bringing him around this time. He knew well that the boy desperately needed water, heat, oxygen, but, in that small cave, he had none of these things. There was only one option left to him to get the boy moving again. Immediately, he reached into the innermost pocket of the fleece jacket inside his suit and pulled out the expedition’s small high -altitude medical kit. Ripping the Velcro cover open, he searched for the preassembled syringe he knew would be inside. Uncapping the needle, he squirted a little fluid from the end and compressed the puffy down over the kid’s thigh as much as he could with his other hand.

  Quinn stabbed the needle through fabric and feathers, deep into the muscle below, depressing the syringe’s plunger as far as it would go. Discarding the syringe, he then pulled the boy up into a tight embrace praying that the steroid might revive his charge. It was his last chance, a slim one.

  The kid twitched once.

  Quinn then felt a growing tremor run through the boy’s body. It culminated in a violent spasm as if the kid had been subjected to a massive electrical shock.

  It was all Quinn could do to hold on to him.

  The boy began thrashing wildly, throwing his head from side to side, his frozen hands jerking up and clawing bluntly at his face. Desperately they pushed off the oxygen mask and goggles as if they were suffocating him. Freed, his mouth began alternately coughing up foamy sputum and drawing in desperate groaning breaths that racked his whole body.

  A second spasm flung the boy’s whole body backward before arching his spine so intensely that his head began to push painfully into Quinn’s sternum. His eyes, white, bulging from their sockets, stared up at Quinn from a face set in a rictus of terror.

  His spiked feet began scraping against the ice floor to try and push himself away as he spat individual words up at the Englishman.

  “But … you … blood … dead.”

  A different voice, deep within Quinn, admonished him to get moving or they both soon would be.