dead before he really knew he was falling, although falling through the cornice with Sigl had been his plan from the first.
The Deacon looked down, not at the drop but at the edge of the rock, and I saw the reason for J.C.’s flailing with his free hand.
He’d wrested the Deacon’s Lee-Enfield rifle off Sigl’s shoulder and dropped it behind them a second before they fell.
I picked it up. “The telescopic sight was broken on the rock,” I said dully.
“That doesn’t matter,” said the Deacon and took the rifle from me. He snapped the trapezoidal metal magazine free from its place in front of the trigger guard and quickly emptied into his hand and counted the long, brass-bound cartridges. Then he quickly reloaded them into the magazine, using his thumb. I’d counted ten rounds. The lead nose of the bullets looked very heavy and very pointy.
Reggie was getting dressed again with Pasang’s help. She was shaking uncontrollably with the cold and her lips were blue. Despite Bruno Sigl’s sneering at her, she’d distracted him just enough for Jean-Claude to do what he did.
I crossed the top of the Second Step with the Deacon to the limestone bench at the top of the 90-foot drop. He went to one knee behind the bench, supporting his elbows and the rifle on the stone. I took a knee next to him and accepted the binoculars he’d just pulled from his rucksack.
“Be my spotter,” said the Deacon.
“I don’t know what that means, Richard.”
“It means keep looking and tell me if I’m shooting low or high, too far left or too far right,” he said. “If I miss, tell me in which direction I missed and how many yards left, right, up, or down. I’ll correct according to your calls.” His voice was so calm that we might have been discussing railway timetables in Paddington Station.
“Got you,” I said and raised the heavy field glasses to my eyes.
The four other Germans were only halfway between Mushroom Rock and the Second Step. They must have taken a break on the east side of the bollard, somewhere out of the roaring wind, while Sigl—the fittest and best climber in the group—had gone on ahead without a rest.
Before Reggie and Pasang could come up to join us, the Deacon—using only the iron sights on the rifle, ignoring the off-kilter telescopic sight on the left—had taken a breath, held it, and fired his first round. The sound of the shot made me jump and deafened me for a moment.
The first German in the line on the ridge dropped backward as if someone had jerked his legs out from under him. Through the binoculars, I could see the crimson stain spreading across the chest of his white anorak and into the white snow.
“Down,” I said. “Direct hit in the chest.”
Two of the other three Germans turned to run, forgetting that they were roped together and still tethered to the man who’d just been shot. The bloody body of the dead German was dragged some yards east behind the running men. The Keystone Kops aspect of the scene might almost have seemed funny to me if absolutely everything else right then hadn’t been so fucking sad.
Then two of the running Germans tripped and went down in a pile while the third man, still standing, whirled our way, took a pistol from his anorak pocket—I couldn’t tell if it was a Luger or some other sort of gun— and began blazing away in our direction. I heard one distant bee buzz, but other than that, nothing came near us. The sound of his shots was almost lost in the wind.
The Deacon took another breath, held it, and shot that German in the face. I saw the explosion of blood, flesh, and skull fragments all too well through my wavering binoculars. The pistol fell out of his dead hand, and he dropped and lay on the snow and rock, his long legs still twitching from random nerve impulses. But through my binoculars, I could see the lumpy gray stream of his brains fanned out behind his leather-helmeted head.
“Dead,” I said. “Head shot.” I didn’t know if such announcements were part of a spotter’s job, but I’d have done anything right then to help the Deacon.
The other two men struggled to get to their feet. One was still looking toward us, his head cocked back to see us on the top of the Second Step; suddenly the German thrust both arms and hands in the air in the universal sign of surrender.
The Deacon shot him twice, both times in the chest above the heart. Watching through the glasses, I realized that my spread hand would have covered the tight cluster of the bloody death wounds on that man’s chest.
The last man simply threw back his hood and tugged down his oxygen mask and balaclava—showing a bare face that looked very German and very young indeed, not even any chin stubble visible through my glasses—and appeared to be weeping while crouching on all fours. I wanted to say
I didn’t say a word.
The Deacon shot him three times, once before the man in the white combat anorak tumbled over and twice more until he stopped wriggling.
Nothing and no one was moving on that part of the North East Ridge now, other than the occasional flap of torn fabric in the wind.
Reggie and Pasang stood behind us, looking down at the ridge. No one said anything. As if motivated by a single, shared thought, we all turned and took the few steps to the south, stopping well short of the collapsed cornice. The glacier so far below still seemed empty.
“Fuck,” the Deacon said very softly.
“Yes,” whispered Reggie.
We stepped back from the edge and moved around to sit on our rucksacks on the leeward side of the low bench—now littered with seven empty brass cartridges that the Deacon policed out of habit, picking them up and setting them in one of his outer pockets—and, the remaining four of us all hunkering lower from the wind, we started talking over what we were going to do next.
23.
We huddled low on the east side of the bench rock at the top of the face in order to talk, but first we all indulged in five or eight minutes of English air, on full flow. It helped a little, and I didn’t cough anything else up while inhaling or exhaling.
Finally we put down our masks and got down to business.
“I can’t believe that Jean-Claude is gone,” Reggie said. We leaned closer to hear her, but the high winds seemed to be moderating somewhat, as if Everest were allowing us a brief moment for remembrance of our friend.
But despite that lull in the wind, no one else said anything for a long minute or two. “It’s decision time,” said the Deacon.
I didn’t understand. “What decision? A dozen Germans, including Sigl, are dead, including the one Reggie shot with her flare pistol and the ones who fell from the ladder on the North Col. There’s nothing stopping us from going back down the mountain, back to what’s left of Base Camp, and then getting the hell out of here. Back to Darjeeling.” That was a long speech for a man with such a sore throat, and I was sorry my three friends had been forced to hear the rasp and scrape of it.
“I think Herr Sigl came in force this year,” said the Deacon. “A dozen of them may be dead, but I’d be surprised if someone with Sigl’s cunning didn’t leave one or two on the glacier, in the Trough, or down by Base Camp. Just to make sure none of us get away.”
“We have to get those photographs and negatives back to London,” said Reggie. “That’s our highest priority. That is what Jean-Claude and all our Sherpas died for, whether our Sherpa friends knew it or not.”
The Deacon nodded and then nodded some more but then shook his head. Then he looked up, over the top of my head to the west, and said, “I want to climb the mountain. But I’ve never abandoned a fellow climber in need and I won’t start now, Jake.”
I was stunned at this. “If you want to keep climbing, I’m fit to come with you,” I lied. It felt like the bloody trilobite I’d coughed up had eaten out my insides—the way the goraks had got at Mallory and hollowed him
