The Abominable: A Novel

The Deacon dropped back down seconds before a fusillade of bullets slammed into the rear wall of our ledge and splatted into the snow berm above.

Men were screaming yards below us. The screams Dopplered away from us. The bullets kept coming, but fewer men were firing at us now.

J.C. held up three fingers. His beloved bicycle pulley device had taken three Germans off the ladder with it. It was one hell of a long fall from that ladder—not merely the vertical 100 feet of the ice face, but hundreds of feet of very steep slope below that. The screams of the falling Germans stopped, and the sudden silence seemed almost violent to me. But a quick flash of another three fingers meant that there were at least three more Germans climbing toward us. Unless they’re retreating down the ladder was my sudden thought, which felt strangely like a prayer to me.

Jean-Claude pumped his fist from his peekaboo position.

The three other Germans were still coming up, obviously using both hands to climb now since the pistol fire from the direction of the ladder had fallen to nothing.

“Ankles,” said the Deacon.

I dug my crampons into the ice of the ledge as deep as I was able and grabbed Richard Davis Deacon’s ankles as hard as I could—and my hands and wrists were very strong from my years of rock climbing. Still, it had seemed easier when we’d practiced on the flat snow and ice further up on the Col as the Deacon propelled himself forward like some circus acrobat, the belly of his off-white Finch jacket sliding across the almost smooth ice slide we’d created for J.C.’s bicycle pulley.

I’d driven my ice axe as deep into the ice at the junction of the back wall and the ledge as I could, and my right arm was around it. I was still almost pulled forward and off the ledge, until my crampons found deeper grip and the muscles and ligaments of my right arm tried to tear free, but I stopped the Deacon’s wild forward slide with the entire upper half of his body hanging horizontally out over nothing.

Taking his time, he aimed the black Luger, took another two or three seconds—I could imagine that first white German face, probably with blue eyes, turned up to the Deacon only 20 feet or so above him—and then the Luger fired. Rifle bullets were striking the ice wall near the Deacon now—the snipers obviously nervous about hitting their own men, two of them left on the ladder—but still the Deacon waited another few interminable, terrifying seconds before firing his second and last round down and inward along the vertical ice wall.

“Back!” he cried and I madly pulled his ankle, then his powerful calf muscles under the high wool stockings, then his thighs and rump, until he was back at the base of the wall with me.

“Both men fell,” he gasped. Then, more loudly, “The snowballs!”

Each “snowball” was a block of ice that must have weighed at least thirty or forty pounds. We’d had a hell of a time through the long day’s wait finding them and rolling them over to the “ammo dump” of ice blocks we’d built up just behind the berm.

The Deacon and I slowed each block’s impact on the ledge as much as we could—we didn’t mind if some of the ice broke off—and then we got behind each ice clump snowball and kicked it down our frozen sluiceway. Reggie and Pasang fed us another big chunk of ice every time we shouted, and we halted its slide, got behind it, aimed it, and kicked it out.

We had twelve such ice blocks in the ammo dump. We kicked them all over. The 900-and-some feet of steep slope beneath the point where the rope ladder started was very prone to avalanche.

Jean-Claude sprinted low to his peephole. The Schmeisser had stopped firing—the Deacon had said that their barrels heated up fast on full automatic—and only slow, deliberate rifle shots were spoiling the calm of the Himalayan late afternoon.

“Four more Germans down for good. One guy self-arrested and ran back to the rope and is climbing again,” shouted Jean-Claude. “Moving fast. About halfway up. Closer now…two-thirds of the way up the ladder.”

The Deacon nodded, reached for the fire axe he’d planted along the base of the rear wall of the ledge, counted to ten, and then, in two swift, sure movements, cut both ropes that now anchored the ladder.

The scream from below was very long and very satisfying.

“Now!” said the Deacon, and I ran for the west end of the ledge, leaping up into the low burrow we’d hollowed out there, rolling behind the berm even as shots rang out. A few seconds later the Deacon jumped into the low furrow we’d dug out at the east end.

Rendezvousing behind the tall berm with J.C., Pasang, and Reggie, the Deacon and I gestured to show that neither of us had been hit.

“I was watching,” said Dr. Pasang. “Five men, including the one who fell with the ladder, are dead. One man was still writhing, but I’m all but sure that his back is broken. Others were injured, but the German with the Schmeisser and another German hurried out of the ice pinnacles to help them back to cover.”

“If they started with the dozen we thought we saw last night,” said the Deacon, “they’re down to five now— counting out Bachner, whom Reggie removed from the game last night—and some of those five aren’t feeling all that chipper right now.”

“Do you think they’ll give up and leave?” I asked, my heart pounding so loudly that I could barely hear the words I’d just spoken.

The Deacon looked at me as if I’d just broken wind.

Reggie answered. “They won’t quit, Jake. They don’t know if we’ve already found Percy and Meyer and recovered what they had, but they can’t take the chance that we have. They could never return to Germany if they fail again…nor to Europe. Their own Nazi Party would have them killed. Their would-be Fuhrer, from what Percival told me, is not a man who ever forgets or forgives. These top Nazi-German climbers will all be marked men if they fail.”

“Jesus,” I whispered. “What was Meyer handing off to your cousin, Reggie? Some sort of revolutionary bombsight? A piece of the True Cross?”

“I don’t know what it was, Jake,” she said. “But I do know that it is far more important to Bruno Sigl’s political faction than any bombsight or the Holy Grail would be.”

“Les boches will try to climb again,” said Jean-Claude. “Climbing at several places along the face of the North Col, most probably. There may well be more than five of them left. They obviously came in force this year. The sniper will stay behind again, covering them, as they cut steps up the face. It is a very formidable rifle with a very formidable telescopic sight, Ree-shard.”

The Deacon grunted. I knew that he blamed himself for leaving the rifles at Advance Base Camp.

“Do you think they will come again soon, Mr. Deacon?” asked Pasang.

“I don’t think so,” said the Deacon. We’d been passing around a single oxygen tank with mask that we’d left here for just this recuperation time, and he took his turn getting a few deep breaths of English air before he spoke again. “Cutting steps on a virgin ice slope anywhere down there is going to take them hours—until well after sunset. And they’ll still have to solve the last hundred feet or so of vertical ice. I’m not sure if they’d want to try this last vertical pitch of the climb several hours after dark.”

“Les boches probably do not know that Ree-shard had only two cartridges in Herr Bachner’s Luger,” said Jean-Claude. “The gunfire probably surprised them, no?”

“All the more reason for them to climb at night,” I said. I kept alternating hits on the English air tank with sips of water from one of the thermoses. After my first battle, modest as it was, I felt…strange. I hadn’t known that after a battle a man could feel both elated and strangely depressed and deflated at the same time. But I was aware of my strongest reaction: I was just damned glad to be alive.

“But they’d have to use electric torches strung around their necks for the hard parts of that climb,” said the Deacon. His voice was almost as husky as mine. “If I were still waiting with eight rounds left in the magazine of Karl Bachner’s Luger, that would be bad news for eight of them.”

“You’re that good a pistol shot?” asked Reggie. “Shooting straight down into the darkness, at only a flickering chest lamp, while you’re hanging out over the edge of the abyss in the cold?”

“Yes, I am,” said the Deacon.

I saw a strange smile pass between them. Something was being said, or acknowledged, that I wasn’t privy to. I felt a stab of jealousy and then mentally kicked myself in the ass.

“So are we sticking to the plan?” asked J.C.

“We are…unless anyone objects,” said the Deacon.

No one objected.