The Abominable: A Novel

“No.” He took a long, ragged breath. “I was leading, trying to keep Reggie and me on or near the path through an icy patch. Suddenly the snow opened up and I fell about twenty-five feet into the glacier until my ice axe wedged above me where the crevasse finally narrowed. I hung onto the shaft of the axe. Then I started cramponing my way back up and Lady Bromley-Montfort dropped me a rope. She pulled and I Prusiked. But it took me almost fifteen minutes to extricate myself, and I almost dropped my heavy pack into the abyss. I fell into a crevasse like some novice.”

“You can’t blame yourself, Jean-Claude,” whispered the Deacon. “It’s just too damned dark tonight and we’re all exhausted. No one got more than an hour or two of bad sleep on Monday night at Camp Five and we’ve been on the go since then. We climbed to twenty-seven thousand feet and above on Sunday and Monday, spent the nights high too many times, haven’t had enough water to keep a hamster alive, descended almost ten thousand feet in one day, and tonight climbed almost five thousand feet again. It’s a miracle that any of us can function at all.”

“The Sherpas here at…,” began Jean-Claude and stopped. He was sobbing.

“They never had a chance,” said the Deacon. “And it’s all my fault. I’m climbing master on this expedition, responsible for everyone’s safety. Now all of the Sherpas may be dead, and it’s my fault. I was in command.”

“We see only nine bodies,” whispered Reggie. “There were fourteen Sherpas at Camp Three if all the porters got back safely from Camp Two after we sent them up the glacier. And Nawang Bura came with us and then disappeared. We can hope he made it safely out of the valley.”

“With his meat cleaver against Bergmann-Schmeisser machine pistols and Luger semiautomatic pistols,” the Deacon said bitterly. He rubbed the stubble on his cheek.

“How were the two who almost got away from Base Camp killed?” asked Pasang.

“Long-range rifle shots,” whispered the Deacon. “From our stolen rifles is my guess.”

“I know the hunting rifles that Lady Bromley-Montfort and I brought,” Pasang said. “We both used nineteen twenty Mannlicher-Schonauer bolt-action rifles for hunting. What did you bring, Captain Deacon? It was a modified Lee-Enfield, was it not?”

“Yes,” said the Deacon. “Fitted out with an offset Periscopic Prism Company ’scope. The telescopic sight is offset about three inches to the left because of the bolt action. You sight with your right eye, but can switch to your left eye while firing and working the action. I used it at the Front. It looks clumsy—it was clumsy—but it worked well enough.”

“You were allowed to keep that after the War?” I asked.

“It was illegal, but I did,” said the Deacon. “I’d paid for the telescopic sight myself.”

“But Ree-shard…” Jean-Claude paused for several seconds. “You were an officer, no? Your only weapon was the Webley revolver that you lent to Semchumbi tonight, yes?”

“Yes and no,” said the Deacon in heavy tones, as if he were a Catholic confessing a very dark secret indeed. “Even though I was an officer, I volunteered to be trained as a sniper. I grew very good at it during our weeks in the trenches between attacks.”

I didn’t know how to feel about this revelation. Everything I’d heard after the War suggested that both sides hated snipers on the battlefield. Even their own.

“A Buddhist sniper,” said Reggie, breaking the silence at last. “Which means that we have to regain one of those rifles for you to use.”

“We tried,” said Jean-Claude. “Reggie suggested, and I agreed, that we should set an ambush here at these icy seracs for the yetis—these German-climber yetis—when they came back along this part of the glacier trail. Her idea was good. Fire flares at those carrying our rifles or the Schmeisser machine pistol, try to grab one of those weapons in the darkness and confusion, and then retreat into the ice maze here.”

“They would have killed you both,” said the Deacon.

Jean-Claude shrugged. “We need real weapons, mon ami. Did you succeed in getting the dead yeti’s pistol?”

The Deacon showed the black Luger. “Two rounds, none in the breech. I think Bachner was never a soldier.”

“It was Bachner?” asked Jean-Claude. “The man who was with Sigl in Munich when you went there?”

“Who’s Bachner?” asked Reggie.

I whispered an explanation to her, and then the Deacon interrupted. “Did you see the Germans during this slaughter at Camp Three? How many attackers were there? Is there any chance some of our fourteen Sherpas did get away?”

“We saw at least eight Germans in their hairy jackets,” said Reggie. “They’d given up wearing the yeti masks once they were through slaughtering our people. After setting the tents and stores ablaze, they just tossed the masks and yeti-vests into the fires.”

“I believe that a few of our people dragged themselves into the serac forest wounded,” whispered Jean- Claude. “The boot prints show that the Germans followed them into the ice-pinnacle maze, following their blood trails. Finishing them off.”

“I was hoping that some of those blood trails belonged to the Germans,” I said. “Semchumbi had the Deacon’s Webley revolver. I forget—how many rounds did that hold?”

“Only six,” said the Deacon. “And it’s a double-action revolver. But it has an automatic extractor when you break it, so someone skilled in its use, with extra cartridges at hand, can get off twenty to thirty rounds per minute.”

“Was Semchumbi skilled in its use?” asked J.C.

“No,” rasped the Deacon.

“Did he have extra cartridges at hand?” asked Pasang.

“No.”

“Well, I still hope he shot a few of the bastards,” I said.

“Amen,” whispered Jean-Claude.

From time to time we popped up and looked over the ridge with our binoculars, but—save for the fires dying down—the terrible view remained the same. The Germans had not returned. None of the bodies in the snow had stirred.

“We have to go down there,” said Reggie. Her voice was steadier than mine could have been.

“Why go down there?” I asked. “Why risk it?”

“We need food, kerosene, a Primus or Unna cooker, Meta bars to burn, sleeping bags, extra clothing, anything useful the Germans didn’t destroy,” she said.

“Let’s just retreat down the glacier now,” I said. “It’s too risky to go near those flames. The Germans might be waiting for that. Waiting for us.”

“They probably are,” the Deacon agreed, “but Reggie’s right. We need to forage what we can from Camp Three—God knows there wasn’t anything left at Base Camp, Camp One, or Camp Two—and we need food, fuel, and a cooker to survive.”

“Why do you think there will be stuff left here?” My voice sounded desperate and a little panicked even to my own ears.

“Remember, Jake,” said the Deacon, “we had that tarp-covered cache here at Camp Three—about fifty yards west of the camp, where the boulders get jagged near the base of Changtse. Today’s snow may have hidden it more. And the cache was just far enough away that the Germans may have missed it—unlike at Base Camp and the other camps where they had the advantage of some daylight, they hit Camp Three after dark tonight.”

“Shouldn’t we decide what we’re doing next—which direction we’re going, what our plans are—before we try to salvage anything here?” asked Jean-Claude.

“There’s nothing to discuss,” I insisted. “The expedition’s over. It’s just a question now of whether to climb west over the Changtse Ridge to Lho La Pass into Nepal, or east over the North East Ridge—no, that won’t work— anyway, get out of the valley somehow and over Windy Pass, Lhakpa La, and then over Karpo La Pass down into Tibet. I think that way has to be the second choice.”

“We’ll discuss where and what after we forage,” said