The Abominable: A Novel

what’s left of the poor bastards?

Pasang had put on long rubber gloves from the doctor’s bag he’d carried down in his rucksack, but his arms were bloody up to the elbows.

Suddenly there came a rushing, rustling noise from my right, and I raised the German Very pistol, only barely avoiding pulling the trigger as I realized that the silence was being broken by Reggie, Jean-Claude, and Nawang Bura, all huddled low and moving fast behind the Deacon. Once in the rough square of the low stone sanga, the Deacon silently pointed at each person and then toward his or her appointed post along the low wall. The sahibs still had their Very pistols in their hands. Nawang Bura now had his knife tucked in his broad belt and was carrying a meat cleaver he’d found somewhere amidst the detritus of Base Camp.

“Find anything?” I whispered.

“Twelve dead, just as Nawang Bura told us,” hissed the Deacon from his place opposite the gap in the sanga that had served as the entrance to the infirmary tent.

“What about the two out on the plain?” I whispered.

“Both dead. Heads smashed in. Hearts ripped out,” the Deacon whispered back.

“Who went out to check on them?” I asked.

“Me.”

I tried to imagine having enough courage, even with the enveloping nightfall and fog, to walk alone and exposed those hundreds of yards out to where the two bodies lay on the plain. I didn’t think that I could have done it. Then I realized that the Deacon had almost certainly done that very thing, exposing himself to enemy fire that way and worse, a hundred times or more during the four years of the War.

“Do we know who they were other than Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay?” I managed to ask.

The Deacon whispered to the others crouching around the sanga before answering me. “Keep a sharp watch out. Try looking out of the corners of your eyes—one picks up small motions better that way.” Then to Dr. Pasang, “Will you be finished and dousing that bloody lantern soon by any chance?”

Pasang nodded, dropped a final piece of metal into the metal pan, and turned off the lantern. The relief of no longer being a lighted target…visible meal?…made me sigh audibly.

Reggie moved closer to me along the north stone wall and whispered, “Jake, we identified everyone. It wasn’t easy. Besides Ang Chiri and Lhakpa Yishay, the dead were Nyima Tsering, Namgya Sherpa, Uchung Sherpa, Chunbi Sherpa, Da Annullu, Tshering Lhamo—he was the young Buddhist priest trainee you may remember…”

I recalled our thin, always smiling Tiger Sherpa who’d spent so much time talking to the priests at the Rongbuk Monastery.

“…and also Kilu Temba, Ang Tshering, and Ang Nyima. Those last two were the ones who’d run across the stream to the north.”

“Were the two Angs brothers?” I whispered.

It was just light enough for me to see Reggie shake her hooded head. “‘Ang’ is just a diminutive term, Jake. It can mean ‘small and beloved.’ Ang Tshering meant ‘beloved Long Life.’ Ang Nyima meant ‘beloved Sunday- born.’”

I could only shake my head in sorrow and embarrassment. I hadn’t even understood these men’s names. To me they’d all been porters—a means to our ends, “our” being the Deacon’s, J.C.’s, and mine—and I’d never even bothered to learn more than a few words of their language, and those mostly commands.

I vowed that if I got out of this mess alive, I’d be a better person.

I noticed that the Deacon had taken off his Shackleton jacket and draped it over himself and Pasang as if it were a rain poncho. Then one of the little miner’s lights clicked on and I saw through the folds in their blackout mini-tent that they were looking at small, dull-colored metal objects—three of them—that were in Dr. Pasang’s metal basin.

“Bullets,” Pasang said just loudly enough for the rest of us to hear. “Slugs. Taken from each of the dead men. With Ang Chiri, the bullet had passed through his heart—his heart was missing, you may remember—but had lodged in his spine. The bullet is deformed from impact, but I think you can make it out, Mr. Deacon. It’s similar to this one, which was in Lhakpa Yishay’s brain, had not passed through hard bone, and was not deformed.”

“Nine-millimeter Parabellum,” whispered the Deacon, holding the larger bullet. “I saw a lot of these pulled out of British lads during the War.”

“I did also,” said Dr. Pasang. I remembered then that Pasang had been studying and interning and working in British hospitals during the War.

“This type was usually fired from a German Luger pistol,” said the Deacon. “Seven-round magazine. Sometimes, towards the end of the War, this kind of nine-millimeter round was fired from the Luger Parabellum M-Seventeen variant—a sort of machine gun carbine, thirty rounds, longer barrel.”

“We didn’t hear any shots,” hissed Jean-Claude. He was crouched, flare pistol in hand, and diligently looking into the foggy darkness in his sector. He didn’t even turn his head toward us when he spoke.

“With the wind blowing the way it’s been,” said the Deacon, “and snow falling…Acoustics get very strange on the mountain.”

“We heard Lobsang Sherpa shouting at Camp Five last night,” whispered Reggie. “Heard him over high wind gusts.”

“Which were blowing straight up the mountain toward us from where he lay in Camp Five,” the Deacon whispered back. “With all the seracs and penitentes between Base Camp and Camps Two and Three, with the wind gusting from the west as well as the northwest last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if no one, even those Sherpas still at Camp Two, heard a single shot.”

“So we’re looking for yetis carrying German Lugers?” I said, hoping to lighten the mood. Or at least to lift my own morale.

No one responded.

Under their Shackleton anorak shelter, Pasang was holding up the final bullet of the three he’d retrieved. “This one is odd. Still intact, but hard for me to identify. Not nine millimeter.”

“Eight millimeter,” whispered the Deacon. “Popular with the Austrians and Hungarians in pistols designed before the War by Karel Krnka and Georg Roth. The most common pistol—first used by the Austro-Hungarian cavalry, later produced by the Germans for infantry officers—was the Roth Steyr M. nineteen oh-seven semiautomatic pistol. I had one aimed at my face in a trench one day, but the hammer fell on an empty chamber.”

I had to ask—“How many rounds did the thing hold?”

“Ten,” said the Deacon. He shut off the small lamp, tugged his Shackleton jacket back on over his head, and gestured for all of us to duckwalk closer to him.

“I wish to God we were dealing with yeti, but we’re not,” he whispered. “We have to assume that we’re dealing with several very human killers—perhaps the seven men Nawang Bura saw from a distance—at least some of whom are armed with semiautomatic pistols and perhaps even fully automatic weapons.”

“Machine guns?” I said stupidly.

“Submachine guns,” corrected the Deacon. “We don’t know. But we do know that we have to get back up to Camp Three as quickly as we can—in case these man-monsters try to get at our Sherpas.”

“But the wounds on our Tigers,” hissed Reggie. “The lopped-off limbs, the damage to the tents, the decapitations, hearts torn out…”

“Most probably done with edged weapons or specialized tools—a very sharp garden claw could do some of what we saw here,” whispered Pasang. “They mauled and desecrated the corpses in order to cast fear into the hearts of our Sherpas.”

“It cast fear into my heart,” whispered Jean-Claude, but he was smiling ever so slightly. How the hell can he smile? I wondered.

“We’re not going to rope up,” said the Deacon, taking time to look each of us in the eye, “but we’re going to move in single file and as quietly as we can—stay in touching distance of the person ahead of you, just put a finger on his shoulder if you must—and those of you with Very pistols, carry them loaded, keep the extra cartridges in an