The Abominable: A Novel

backs, over the oxygen rigs. I had four of the heavy gas mask bags back there, bulging with everything from an Unna cooker we hadn’t used to extra pots and pans we’d brought along.

“What now?” I whispered painfully. “Can I take off these last two oxygen tanks?”

“Not yet, Mr. Perry,” Dr. Pasang whispered back. “You are still having great trouble breathing because of your inflamed and swollen throat. I really do not wish to do a tracheotomy unless I must.”

“Amen to that.” Even my whispers sounded ragged. “Which way, then? It’s eleven miles to the Rongbuk Monastery and we can ask for help there, but I doubt very much if I can make it beyond the monastery to Chobuk or Shekar Dzong.”

“Herr Sigl may have left friends at the monastery,” observed Pasang.

“Oh, shit.”

“Precisely,” said Pasang. “But let us try to walk those last miles to the vicinity of the monastery and then, dressed in a pilgrim’s cloak I’ve brought with me, I shall reconnoiter Rongbuk while you wait in the rocks at the base of the approach. If there are no Germans there, we shall place ourselves under the care and protection of the reincarnation of Padma Sambhava, Guru Rinpoche, the good Dzatrul Rinpoche, Holy Lama of the monastery.”

“A man, a plan, a canal…,” I rasped, not even amusing myself. “But first I think we should…”

I didn’t hear the shots until after the bullets struck.

The first impact made Pasang’s head snap forward in a mist of blood that covered my own face and lowered oxygen mask. An instant later I felt the second slug tear through my packs and O₂ rig and hit me high in the back, above and to the right of my left shoulder blade.

Pasang had already fallen forward, apparently lifeless, onto the sharp rocks beneath our crampons. Before I could open my mouth to shout, there was that impact against my upper back and I fell forward next to him, not even staying conscious long enough to break my fall with my forearm.

There was the pain in my back and throat and encroaching blackness; and then only the blackness.

26.

I came partially conscious sometime later to the sound of two men talking loudly. They were about ten feet uphill and upwind of us—the wind was roaring down the Rongbuk Glacier valley with a renewed ferocity—and the two were speaking in German loudly enough for me to make out the words over the wind.

Pasang was lying dead, also on his belly, so close that our faces were only inches apart. He’d had no part in his black hair before, but now his leather cap and woolen top cap had been knocked off and a terrible white streak of what I assumed was exposed skull or brains ran down the top of his scalp. His face was completely covered with blood. I started to raise a hand from my side to touch him—to shake him to make sure he was really dead— when Pasang whispered without moving his bloody lips, “Don’t move, Jake.” The whisper was almost inaudible to me six inches from him, so I was sure the two Germans arguing ten feet away against the wind could not hear him.

“I’ll translate,” whispered Pasang.

“Your head…,” I whispered back.

“Scalp wounds always bleed dramatically,” was his whispered response. “I will have a headache—if we survive—nothing more. They did not search us. Let me translate, Jake, so we know when to reach under our outer jackets for our pistols.”

I’d almost forgotten the Webley revolver tucked in a pocket in my Finch duvet and the fully loaded Luger that Pasang had put in the pocket of his goose down jacket.

Amazingly, I recognized the voices from Munich. The heavier, deeper voice belonged to that right-wing German radical’s bodyguard…what was the bodyguard’s name?…Ulrich Graf.

The other voice belonged to another man at the table that night—he’d said little but I recognized his near- lisp—Artur Wolzenbrecht.

Ulrich Graf was saying, almost whining, “SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl…hat gesagt, dass ich sie aufhalten soll, und ich habe sie aufgehalten.”

In a burst of surreality, Pasang’s bloody mask of a face, his eyes still closed and caked with pooled blood that all but concealed his moving lips, whispered a simultaneous translation. If I’d known that he spoke German, I’d forgotten it.

“SS-Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl said to stop them, so I stopped them.” It took me a second to realize that he was translating what Graf had said and another sickening second for me to realize that the “them” being stopped and shot was “us.”

“Idiot!” barked Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl hat gesagt, dass du sie aufhalten sollst, bevor sie das Tal verlassen konnen. Aber nicht, sie zu erschiessen.”

Pasang whispered the translation. “Idiot! Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl said to stop them before they left the valley. Not to shoot them!”

Ulrich Graf’s voice came down the wind to us in the tone of a stupid, sulking child. “Na ja, mit meinen Schussen habe ich sie doch angehalten, oder?”

“Well, my shooting them stopped them, didn’t it?” translated Pasang through blood-caked lips.

I heard Wolzenbrecht sigh. “Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl hat befohlen, sie zu verhoren und sie dann nach Fotos zu durchsuchen. Aber keiner von ihnen sieht so aus, als ob wir sie noch verhoren konnten.”

“Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl ordered us to interrogate them, then search them for the photographs. But neither one looks alive enough to interrogate.” This gave me a second’s hope. But I’d fallen with my right hand under my body and that hand never stopped moving—millimeter by millimeter—first under my Shackleton anorak, and then to the right pocket of my Finch duvet, where the Webley revolver painfully pressed against my lower ribs.

“Was sollen wir jetzt machen?” said Graf. “Warten, bis einer wieder zu sich kommt?”

I caught a hint of movement from Pasang and realized that he was moving his hand to the Luger in his down jacket. His whispered translation was almost inaudible even to me—“What shall we do, then? Wait for one of them to regain consciousness?”

Wolzenbrecht’s reply sounded to me like a rough imitation of a German shepherd gargling gravel. “Nein, vergiss das Verhor. Tote sie erst, und dann durchsuchen wir sie. Aber mit Kopfschuss, nicht auf den Korper zielen.”

“No. Forget the interrogation,” Pasang interpreted in a fast whisper. “Kill them first, then we will search. But fire into their heads, not into their bodies.”

That convinced me to run the risk of pulling the Webley free of my jackets and lying on it. My finger found the trigger guard, then the trigger. My thumb found the hammer. I remembered the Deacon telling me that a revolver had no safety. I could see the slight motion as Pasang freed the Luger beneath him.

“Warum denn?” demanded Graf.

“Why?” whispered Pasang, and I realized that the semi-retarded bodyguard wasn’t questioning why Dr. Pasang and I should be shot, only why we should be shot in the head and not the body.

“Damit wir keine Fotos beschadigen, falls sie welche bei sich haben, du Trottel,” snapped Wolzenbrecht. “Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl kommt sicher bald aus den Bergen zuruck. Stell die Schmeisser auf einen Schuss ein.”

Since their boots were already crunching in our direction before Pasang whispered his translation, I already had the gist of what Wolzenbrecht was saying.

“So that we don’t damage the photographs if the pictures are hidden on their persons, shithead,” whispered Pasang. “Sturmbannfuhrer Sigl should be coming down from the mountain very soon, so set your Schmeisser to single-fire and let’s get it over with…”

Schmeisser! That goddamned submachine gun! These Nazi fuckers were going to shoot us in the head just