Shivering, he broke open the pack pulled out the guide jacket, which he pulled over his jumper. Warm again, he looked upward at the ridge line. This close, the summit was a sharp jagged jumble of rock, deep fissures eroded by wind and ice, deep enough to lose a man. I’ve an hour at least, he thought. Better get on with it. Loading the gear and humming out ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’, he pulled his Vuarnet sunglasses from his pocket and slipped them on; up here, snow blindness was an ever-present threat, even if the glare was filtered by cloud. And so, with a long-handled ice axe in hand, he set out for the ridge line, the hundred-pound load making the pace slow over the broken rock and ice fields.
At that moment, several things were happening. Four men were converging on Chamonix from different directions. In the last miles of a journey that had begun in Moscow, KGB General Borshin drove the Saab Turbo hard up the valley. He enjoyed driving western cars and took the opportunity whenever possible, his driver sitting in terrified silence beside him. Meanwhile, Tansey-Williams had just arrived from Geneva with Kurt Eicheman’s boss, the head of the BND. The last man was an American, the Deputy Director of the CIA. He was not travelling alone, but with a retinue of three aides, who were hurriedly trying to piece together exactly what it was that the Brits wanted, and why they and the West Germans – in the absence of the Director himself – had insisted he attend. Leo Gershin was not a man who liked surprises, and it looked as if they were about to be brought in on something right at the very last second.
Three hundred feet above the Leschaux glacier, Kirov’s team had dug their first snow cave at the base of a rock monolith. They had chosen the site with care. Whatever the snow conditions above them, whatever avalanche risk existed, the rock had been there ten thousand years and another few days seemed likely.
There, in the deep snow, dug in and back, packing the walls and smoothing them down. Like Inuit people, they built a sleeping platform well above floor level with an air hole above them to allow the air to circulate. The cave was big enough for all of them, but would only ever have half the team inside at once. Below the main cave were two smaller two-man observation caves. These were narrow and long enough to lie in out of the wind and in relative warmth. Through a small entry hole, normally obscured by a white nylon flap, a man watched the glacier below and the refuge up on the other side through powerful binoculars.
The day’s preparations were complete. Two men had crossed the glacier that morning and had worked their way up the other side, the route to the Jorrasses from the refuge. They had found the places they needed and had returned by early afternoon. The others had prepared for the specialty of these winter troops: crevasse ambush.
Five crevasses had been prepared, with ice screws and cables set four feet down the wall. On the cable, and secured by a safety line, a soldier could wait in ambush almost indefinitely, appearing as a white shadow against a white world, to wreak havoc on any advancing army and disappear seconds later.
Kirov himself was in the refuge in civilian clothing, a collection of oddly dated equipment about him, the trappings of an eccentric, waiting to play his part. As the sound of a helicopter reached the men in the cave, they tapped the transmit button on their radio and his hissed softly. Kirov himself reached over, switched it off and then concealed it out the back of the dilapidated hut in the snow. They were coming in by chopper. He had expected that. Too much powder snow for ski aircraft. The helicopter made four trips up the valley that afternoon and, by dusk, there were sixteen men at the refuge. They had quickly broken into two groups, four inside the hut and the remaining twelve outside, setting up small four man frame tents. They did so clumsily and there wasn’t the sheer bulk of equipment to support four four man teams on the face. While it had all the appearances of a major expedition by modern Alpine standards, Kirov – who had his gear spread across one of the bunks in the hut – quickly classified the group’s structure. The twelve outside were muscle, there to see no harm came to their masters while they indulged in their sport. They had been surprised to see anyone in the hut, but the demands of mountain etiquette kept their suspicions down and, when Girard recognised Kirov from the Albert after his ebullient greeting, he had spoken to the other three quietly and explained that he had seen the man before in Chamonix and he was harmless enough. Kirov had then welcomed them all – as one does in the mountains – and used one of his solid fuel blocks to heat water for coffee.
“Here long then?” Girard asked in French.
“Sorry,” Kirov said in English. “I only speak English and Finnish.”
“Ah,” Girard said, pleased, repeating the question in English.
“No. Away. Later tonight. I will do a night ski down the valley. Fund raising for the Sisters of Mercy Orphanage in Helsinki,” he explained, noticing Girard’s raised eyebrow.
“And you? By the look of your gear, it’s the Petit Jorasses.”
“No,” Girard corrected, stiffening. “The Grand Jorasses.”
“Mister, had you noticed that winter is here?” Kirov warned him, good-naturedly. “That’s no mountain to be on in the winter!”
“It needs to be winter to climb where we go,” he replied arrogantly as
