The Abominable: A Novel

the Deacon, using his command voice. “There are factors that you, Jake, and you, Jean-Claude, haven’t yet heard about. First we have to get a cooker and some fuel and anything else we can scavenge. We’ll also look for survivors when we’re down there.”

“Sherpa or German?” I asked.

“Both,” said the Deacon. “But I’d give my left testicle to get one of the Germans as a prisoner.”

“I’d give your left testicle for that as well,” Reggie said at once.

Despite our precarious position near the glacier trail down to Camp II, we all laughed out loud. When we stifled the laughter, the Deacon said, “Who wants to come with me down to the camp?”

“I’ll go,” J.C. said at once.

“I shall stay here with Lady Bromley-Montfort,” said Dr. Pasang.

“I’ll go down to the camp with you two,” I was amazed to hear myself say.

8.

Before the Deacon, J.C., and I found anything to salvage, we found two more Sherpas’ bodies. The Germans had made no effort at yeti-mauling the bodies with blades or sharpened rakes or whatever the hell they’d used at Base Camp; all the Sherpas we could see in the light of the dying flames here at Camp III had been shot. Most, several times. A few had been riddled by automatic weapons fire from machine pistols at close range.

Semchumbi was one of those who’d run east and been shot in the back behind the now-burned-to-the- ground Whymper tents. There was no sign of the Deacon’s revolver on him or near him. We had no idea if he’d gotten any shots off before he died. But the pistol was definitely missing.

Rather than go down into the penitentes where the Germans had headed after their last murder spree, the three of us took the harder route north almost to the ice wall and then circled around to the base of Changtse, where Camp III was still burning. The Deacon had guessed right; the last, snow-covered loads cache about 100 feet east of the camp had not been noticed by the Germans. Two of us crawled under the tarp and then turned our headlamps on to inventory the stores while Jean-Claude stood guard outside.

We were in luck; there were six as yet unused rucksacks and a heap of canvas carryalls in the cache. There were no more oxygen rigs, but there was a Primus stove, two Unna cookers, and twelve bars of Meta fuel. We loaded one Primus with the rest of the stuff into an empty rucksack, even though we’d already discovered the hard way that Primuses often didn’t work well at altitude. But it was worth hauling the additional weight to have that extra chance of being able to melt snow for drinks.

At this point I still saw no reason to climb to the North Col and every reason in the world to head north and east to Windy Pass—the Lhakpa La, that point where the Deacon had finally led Mallory to see the East Rongbuk Glacier as the obvious approach four years ago during the ’21 expedition. If we avoided these killer Germans until we reached the Lhakpa La, we could then head east along the Kharta Glacier (which the 1921 expedition had carefully mapped) and then up and over the almost 20,000-foot-high Karpo La and down into northern Tibet, turning eastward again immediately to avoid the treacherous Kangshung Glacier that ran up to the base of the near-vertical (from its southern side) North East Ridge. The Karpo La was by all accounts a treacherously dangerous pass, with its no-warning blizzards, terrible winds, and deep summer snowfalls—which was why British expeditions hadn’t tried to save time by coming north into Tibet and the Everest region that way—but it seemed to me like a good (and fast) avenue of retreat for us now.

And I desperately wanted a way out. If I could come up with a good one, I was sure that I could convince Reggie and the Deacon, whatever “facts” they knew that they hadn’t shared with us yet. The central fact was those men with guns who had murdered most or all of our Sherpas and who were now looking for us.

Another possibility—a less drastic way home, but one requiring a slightly longer trek in Tibet—was for us to wait till morning and climb high on the shoulder of the East Rongbuk Glacier until we could cut east to Windy Pass, get over Lhakpa La, and then traverse along the base of the great wall that was the Himalayas for some miles, and then get over the frequently traveled Serpo La down into the verdant Teesta Valley and then lower to Gangtok and straight on to Darjeeling. It would be a bitch of a trek—I wasn’t sure that any white men had ever done it—but it had to be safer than facing crazy German killers with automatic weapons.

There was one other wild chance we could take. Lho La Pass to the west was closer—just behind Mount Changtse, which bordered our East Rongbuk Glacier—but it would mean a long traverse climb around Changtse, a descent of unknown difficulty, then a steep ascent again to Lho La, only to have the five of us almost certainly rotting for years in a Nepalese jail for entering the country without permission…and Nepal never gave permission for entry by foreigners, Mr. K. T. Owings was the only exception I could think of. But the Deacon was friends with the man; maybe Owings could help us out…

So I’d argue hard for either risking the weather on high Karpo La or trekking farther east to the relative safety of Serpo La—both east of the killing ground that had been Base Camp—as far as I was concerned. I dug into the cache with a will and filled every empty rucksack we’d found there.

The tent fires had died to mere embers by the time we started our northern circle route back to the west of the camp where Pasang and Reggie waited. Less than halfway there, the Deacon said, “Dump the loads here.”

This made no sense at all. We were near the part of the ice wall to the Col where we’d laid fixed ropes and—far, far above—the caver’s ladder. But there was no way on earth that I was jumaring up those ropes or climbing that ladder again, not even if the Germans showed up in hot pursuit. It was the ultimate dead end. To climb to the North Col meant certain death. There was no escape from there, since the south side was a sheer drop of several thousand feet to a deep valley behind Changtse. And to go higher on either Everest or Changtse —which had never been climbed, even though it was “just” 24,878 feet high (lower than our Camp V)—only meant prolonging the inevitable. I started to voice a protest, but the Deacon said aloud, “Trust me, Jake. Dump the stuff here. Trust me. Please.”

All thirty of our Sherpas trusted you, Captain Deacon, and they’re all dead now, I almost said aloud. I was that tired. But I didn’t speak. And because of my silence, our friendship, if that’s what it was—and I’ve had more than sixty-five years to decide it was—remained intact.

And the Deacon—Captain Richard Davis Deacon, the man who had given thousands of commands to his men during four years of the worst war the world had ever known—had just said “please” to me.

I left all my logical arguments for retreat over the passes unspoken and dumped the load into the snow, and we continued postholing around and up onto the glacier to rejoin Pasang and Reggie.

At Camp Fort, as we’d dubbed it, we sat on our rucksacks in a rough circle, to keep our butts from freezing, and tried to talk things through. Even though the Deacon had ordered us each to take some English air at the 2.2- liter flow rate for three minutes—he kept time with his watch—our voices sounded slurred or drunken or just plain stupid. We were all beyond the point of absolute exhaustion. Merely trying to form words in my brain reminded me of newsreel film I’d seen in a British cinema of RAF fliers forced to do mathematics problems in a barometric chamber with the pressure lowered—as if they were in planes gaining altitude—until somewhere around or below this altitude we’d all been at for seventy-two hours and more. Each pilot not only quit doing arithmetic but went face forward onto his desk.

But they had the advantage of scientists and doctors watching them, ready to bring the pressure back up in their sealed chamber the moment they passed out.

The outside of our particular “sealed chamber” was either outer space or a firing squad of crazy Krauts.

My chin had dropped onto my chest and I was snoring softly when the Deacon gently jostled me awake. J.C. was saying something.

“Jake was right, my friends. Unless there’s something that he and I don’t know, the only sensible course of action is to start climbing out of this accursed valley at first light and head for the nearest pass into Tibet or Nepal. Since I value my freedom as well as my life, I suggest Karpo La or Serpo La into Tibet. Nepal does not treat intruders very nicely.”

“There are things that you and Jake don’t know, mon ami,” said Reggie. “The Deacon may not know the precise details, but I think he’s guessed some…or