The Abominable: A Novel

The Deacon shook his head. “Unless they’ve used up all their ammunition shooting everyone at Base Camp, there must be more cartridges around here somewhere—perhaps in this yeti’s rucksack hidden somewhere here in the ice pinnacles or the ridges. What kind of total fool sets up an ambush for five or six people and keeps only two rounds in his magazine and none in the spout?”

I couldn’t answer that question, so I didn’t try. I wasn’t even sure where or what the “spout” of such a pistol was.

“He probably had more rounds in his rucksack. All three of us will look around this immediate area—you can use your headlamps, I’m going to use the big electric torch—but we can’t take more than five or ten minutes at the most. We don’t want to fall too far behind Jean-Claude and Reggie.”

I bent almost double as I started coughing and hacking again, straightening up eventually to feel Pasang’s big hand on my shoulder, steadying me.

“Here, drink this, Mr. Perry. All of it.”

He handed me a small bottle. I swallowed all of the fluid, which burned like liquid fire going down, sputtered but kept it down, and handed the bottle back to Dr. Pasang. Within thirty seconds I no longer had the compulsion to cough, and for the first time in almost forty-eight hours my throat didn’t feel as if it had a turkey wishbone stuck in it.

“What is that stuff?” I whispered to Pasang as we followed the Deacon out of the rough circle of red light from our yeti’s ambush torch.

“Mostly codeine,” Pasang whispered back. “I have more for you when the coughing returns.”

We turned on our lights and searched for close to fifteen minutes, but while we found boot prints behind ridges and ice pillars, there was no sign of a rucksack with ammunition in it. Finally the Deacon called us back together and we left. I could feel the Deacon’s frustration burning like a blue flame in the dark. What good was a German semiautomatic pistol with only two rounds in it?

Better than no pistol with no rounds, I told myself. I think I was trying to convince myself that my efforts down in that god-awful crevasse had been worthwhile.

Once we were back west of the crevasse and the red light and on the trail up the glacier, the Deacon turned, put a hand on my shoulder, and said, “Jake—I didn’t want to tell J.C.—but mostly I wanted you going down there because I thought you might recognize our chum minus his yeti face. Did you?”

“I think so. Maybe. Yes…I think.” Dead men’s faces, I’d learned, looked different from their alive faces.

“Well, who is it, for heaven’s sake?”

“Karl Bachner,” I said. “Bruno Sigl’s German climbing pal—the older, famous one, the one who was the president or founder of all those German climbing clubs—the older man who was at the table with us the night we met Sigl in Munich last autumn.”

The Deacon was close enough for me to make out his features in the dim light; he did not look surprised.

7.

We saw the glow from the flames and heard the gunshots when we were still more than a mile of glacier travel away from Camp III.

“Damn!” said the Deacon. I knew he was afraid that Reggie and J.C. had arrived there just in time to be caught in a massacre.

The pistol shots echoed down the long glacier valley, and they sounded strangely benign—like those last few kernels of corn popping randomly in a pan—but then the volume of shots increased. Mixed in with discrete pistol shots, there suddenly came a sound like someone ripping a long strip of thick fabric.

“What on earth…,” I whispered.

The Deacon held up one finger, silencing me as we listened. None of us had gone on oxygen, and we were all panting and wheezing after trying to move so quickly here at 21,000 feet. The ripping sound came again.

“It could be a Bergmann-Schmeisser submachine gun,” the Deacon said at last. “God help the Sherpas and Jean-Claude and Reggie if it is.”

“How fast can it fire?” I asked even while not really wanting to know.

“Four hundred fifty rounds per minute,” said the Deacon. “And the rate is limited only by the time it takes for the gunner to slap on a new thirty-two-round snail drum magazine. That bulky round magazine makes the Schmeisser MP-18/I awkward to carry, aim, and fire with any accuracy, but you don’t really need accuracy with that rate of fire. You just keep spraying. The Germans loved their damned Schmeissers for close-in trench fighting.”

“Jesus,” I gasped.

“Let us move more quickly,” said Pasang and broke into a trot, his crampons flashing in the lowered beams of our headlamps.

“I assume…no more…pretend yetis,” gasped the Deacon as he ran along beside the long-legged Sherpa. We were still each carrying more than thirty pounds of oxygen rigs and other stuff in our rucksacks.

“No,” agreed Dr. Pasang. “It is just men murdering men now.”

I trotted faster to keep up with the two, but the sense of something caught in my throat had returned and from time to time I had to stop, lean over with my hands on my padded knees, and cough until I retched. Then I would run faster in an attempt to catch up. Neither man waited for me in the dark.

The flames lit up the entire valley, including the face of Changtse and the ice wall to the North Col. We were less than two hundred meters from Camp III when two dark shapes suddenly stepped out in front of us as if to block our way.

My hand came up and I almost fired my mini-Very pistol at the closer silhouette before the Deacon cried “No!” and batted down my arm.

It was Reggie with J.C. close behind her.

“This way,” hissed Jean-Claude, and we followed him off the deep-printed trail as he led us north along a line of snow-covered ice pinnacles and iced-over seracs. After a few seconds of crunching along, I realized that J.C. had chosen this place to get off the main trail because the ice crust here was so thick that we left no boot prints.

“We need to get to Camp Three immediately,” whispered the Deacon with a pained urgency audible in his voice. The firing had stopped several minutes earlier. The Deacon was carrying Bachner’s two-shot 9-millimeter Luger in his gloved hand rather than the full-sized Very pistol.

J.C. and Reggie led us about two hundred meters north along the line of penitentes and seracs, then east through that icy maze until we reached a spot where we could look down on Camp III. Those of us who had binoculars in our rucksacks got them out.

“Oh…God…damn…it,” whispered the Deacon.

The tents at Camp III were all ablaze. Bodies of Sherpas were sprawled everywhere—we counted at least nine made visible by the flames—and those stacked crates and heaps of supplies that had not been burned had been hacked to bits with axes. There were no fake yetis visible, but whenever the fog shifted high enough, I could see bloody boot prints leading into the forest of ice pinnacles to the south of the camp.

The five of us slumped below the ice ridge and sat staring at one another.

“We arrived too late to help,” whispered Jean-Claude. “And it is all my own etre damne par Dieu fault!”

“What happened?” asked the Deacon.

Jean-Claude emitted a stifled noise that could have been either a sob or a gasp. “I fell into a damned crevasse. Moi! The great Chamonix ice and glacier expert!”

“Were you using lights?” I asked.

“No,” said the despondent J.C.

“Were you roped up?” I asked.