'It's there,' Stump answered. 'We'll hang a flag from it. That's tomorrow, folks.
ASAP. Over.'
'Go team. Over.'
Abe waited for a break in the chatter. 'Any medical problems up or down? Over.'
The climbers knew better than to complain about hangnails. No one was healthy,
but no one was dying either.
Jorgens returned to the air. He wanted to clarify the assault plan and work out any
bugs before the high team committed itself. 'You guys are all synchronized? Over,' he
asked Stump.
Stump didn't mind the repetition. It was good to have some oversight, especially
from someone at a lower altitude. 'We're synced up,' he said. 'We'll wake at
oh-one-hundred. I doubt anyone sleeps anyway. Over.'
'And you'll be out the door by oh-three-hundred. Over.' Jorgens was going to walk
them through the whole thing.
'Roger that. Over.' Radio time was one of the few occasions for the two ex-soldiers to
trot out the patois without getting teased by the other climbers. Abe listened.
'Two ropes? Over.' It was like an aviator's checklist.
'Two ropes. Two bottles per man. Over.' There would be two teams of two, each
linked by a fifty-meter rope of nine-mil. Each climber would start off with two bottles
of oxygen. They would discard the twelve-pound cylinders, once emptied. According
to their best calculations, two bottles would last a climber all the way to the top and
partway down again.
'And if you haven't topped out by sixteen-hundred, you will turn around. Over.' This
one wasn't a question. By mutual agreement, they had decided that if the summiteers
couldn't finish by four o'clock in the afternoon, then they had failed. By that time they
would have been climbing for thirteen hours. To push any longer would only increase
their risk of not getting back to the tent at Five. And a night outdoors above 28,000
feet – especially in a wind like this one – meant certain death. The wind-chill factor
combined with their oxygen deficit would terminate their ambitions for good.
'Sixteen-hundred, turn around,' Stump verified. 'Over.' Like bankers' clockwork,
Abe thought. They were going to beat this extreme chaos with their extreme order.
Just then Base Camp broke in on the conversation. It was Carlos. He sounded very
frightened, which was odd since he was on flat ground and the safest of any of them.
'Base to the mountain. To anybody. Can anybody hear me? Over.'
'Five to Base, we read you, over.'
'Something's going on here. Something bad.'
Stump answered. 'Clarify yourself, Base. Over.' He was annoyed that Carlos had
forgotten to say 'over,' and it was clear he didn't appreciate the note of urgency. In
just a few hours the summit team was going to head off into the night. They needed
support, not last-minute problems from the abyss.
'It's the monk.'
Abe's breath went out of him.
'They've got him.'
'One to Five. What's going on up there, Stump? Over.' Down at One, Jorgens was
not in line of sight with Base Camp. Between him and Carlos lay the satellite peak
Changtse, which cast a sonic shadow. The rest of the camps sat higher than Changtse's
blunt summit and so their communications with Base were unrestricted. He couldn't
hear Carlos. At best he could only deduce that Stump was talking to someone at Base.
Stump took a moment to respond. 'Please hold, One. And Base, tell me more. Over.'
'It happened this afternoon. Li comes up to me. He says we've been harboring a
fugitive. But now they know and they've taken the prisoner into custody. And they
have. I saw him.'
'Damn it, Carlos. Say over. Over.' Stump was upset, but Abe knew it wasn't by the
breach in radio etiquette.
'They took him out to the Tomb. The soldiers and him. He's hog-tied, hand and foot.'
Carlos added, 'Over.'
'What do they plan on doing with him? Over.'
'The soldiers are going to return him to Lhasa. Li said the monk is a state criminal.
He said this is an internal affair of the People's Republic of China. Our interference is a
serious breach of international law. Over.'
Abe couldn't contain himself any longer. 'Internal affair?' he barked into the radio.
This was his patient, a boy, a holy man. And the last time the Chinese had him in their
possession they'd tortured him half to death.
'Is that you, Doc?' Carlos asked.
'When are they taking him off to Lhasa?' Abe asked. He remembered to say, 'Over.'
'Li said maybe tomorrow, probably the day after tomorrow. He wants to finish
making out his report.'
'One, here,' Jorgens interrupted. 'What are you people jabbering about? It doesn't
sound like mission talk. Over.'
'Bad luck,' Stump told him. 'Li sniffed the kid out. Things are unwinding down at
Base. Over.'
Jorgens didn't sound surprised. His irritation was immediately replaced by a tone of
calm succor. 'I was afraid of something like this,' he said quietly. 'The way I saw it,
nothing would happen until after we were finished and gone. But I missed my guess.
Over.'
The one person who didn't hear him was Carlos, who now asked the question
Jorgens had just answered. 'It's worse than bad luck,' Carlos said to Stump. 'Li said we
got the green light to summit because somebody cooperated with him. The summit is
our reward for turning the kid in.'
The ugly charge hung in the air like the smell of sulphur after a lightning strike.
Robby came on. 'I don't believe that.'
'None of us would have done that,' Stump declared.
'That's what Li told me,' said Carlos. 'But he wouldn't tell me who.'
Abe looked over the shoulder of his blood red parka. Kelly's eyes were huge in the
lamplight.
'Look,' Jorgens exhorted the climbers in their precarious camps upon the mountain.
He turned on his basso profundo, smooth and polished, the one he used to address the
American Alpine Club. 'These Chinese will say it's none of our business, they always
do. And they're right. It's none of our business. The boy took his chances. He should
never have come waltzing into camp when their soldiers were there. The important
thing is for us to keep our eye on the ball. Over.'
Everything about Jorgens repelled Abe. He was working them like some Texas
politician, and he'd just betrayed them all.
'They'll kill the boy,' Abe declared as flatly as he could. It was a fact, like the stone in
this cave's walls. His anger would only make it seem negotiable, and it wasn't. 'I've
seen what they do.'
'We can't stop that,' Jorgens replied. 'We're up here. They're down there. It was a
matter of time before they found out. And besides, we're tourists. You people said so
yourselves. Tourists and climbers. Not saviors. Over.'
