Quayle counted to twenty and, as gloved fingers scrabbled over the lip, he rolled to the edge and peered over smiling, his face just twenty inches from Girard’s.
“Bonjour, dickhead! Time we had a little chat.”
Girard’s eyes widened in fright and surprise as Quayle grabbed the hand, pulling it back.
“No, you’re not going anywhere…” Quayle seethed.
Looking down, found a hold for his other hand, and someone below shouted a question at him. “Let me up, Quayle!”
“No…”
Another question came flurrying up from below, this one more urgent.
“You’re not going to do anything to me,” Girard said, his boot scrabbling for another hold, his arms aching now. “So let me up and we can talk about this.”
“I will do what I like,” Quayle answered.
“Take a look down, you interfering bastard! That’s your friend! A bit of insurance. Now let me up!”
Friend? What friend?
Quayle quickly looked over the edge, as Girard shouted, “It’s Quayle!” down to his companions.
Oh Jesus, thought Quayle. There, leading the second pair, looking upward in growing confusion was Pierre Lacoste. The job! He said he’d taken on a job! Quayle flashed a look across at the man roped to Lacoste. He was tugging at something in his jacket. A gun was being drawn.
Quayle didn’t hesitate. He swung his ice axe down hard and Girard screamed in agony as the serrated blade drove through his hand, pinning him to the mountain face like a butterfly to a display board.
“Hang around a while, you cunt! I’ll be back!” Quayle snarled, then dropped off the face like an avenging angel, all mountain honour aside.
They had started it.
But he would finish it.
His abseil jump took him thirty feet, straight onto the man with the gun as it went off. His crampons pierced and skewered the grey haired man’s left hand but, as he screamed, hanging in his figure eight, he turned the gun on Quayle.
Quayle was ready for it. The climber never even saw the sharpened blade of Quayle’s ice axe swinging downward. The first blow took him in the neck and the second cut his rope like a cotton thread. Screaming with his final breaths, he cartwheeled down through the air, his body striking the face every few seconds, the thuds sickening to the ear.
Quayle looked across quickly. One shot had been snapped of.
“Pierre!” he called across the face, his voice echoing back. “Are you OK? Pierre?” The old guide was hanging on his line, moaning in pain, blood dripping from his sleeve. “Hold on!” Quayle cried. “I’ll come for you!”
He looked back upward to the last of the three. Your turn, bastard.
The man looked down at him. His face was a mask of terror.
“No, please!” he cried. “It wasn’t my idea! I’ll tell you whatever you want to know…”
Quayle went up the rope, hand over hand like a sailor, until he swung next to the man, his eyes on fire.
“You have a gun? If I have to find it, you go too…”
“NO, NO, NO, GUN!” the man shouted quickly. He had been sick down his jacket. Suddenly, the enterprise had lost its glamour.
“Stay here,” Quayle said. “Don’t move!” Moving across the face, he took the rope that linked the man to Girard and tightened it, then moved back down to Lacoste who hung unconscious in his harness.
On the glacier things happened fast. The two men charged with watching events on the mountain raised the alarm simultaneously and, within seconds, men were running for skis and pulling guns from covers. Sergi watched for five seconds and then picked up his radio.
“Table, this is chair.”
“Go chair,” Kirov crackled back instantly.
“The movers are coming.”
“Thank you.”
Sergi dropped back down onto the second wire and scooped up his assault rifle. Then, in one hair raising jump five feet across the width of the crevasse, he crossed to his second set of wires to await the beginning of the action.
They passed him ten minutes later, some skiing well, others badly. In camouflage whites, he was next to invisible and, as the last man passed, he climbed up to the higher cable and calmly set up his rifle on the small pile of snow he had prepared earlier.
He would not fire unless someone broke from the main group, but would remain hidden and safe below the surface – because where he was, he was in the direct line of fire of his own team.
Kirov initiated the contact, a classic crevasse ambush. They rose from the ground like white ghosts and, with short measured bursts from silenced weapons, it was all over in under twenty seconds. Just bodies on the ice. There had been only four rounds expended by the annihilated force and, after forty seconds of wind blown silence, two of Kirov’s team came up from the ice and moved amongst the bodies, checking they were all dead. Thirty seconds later, the corpses were bundled into the crevasse, and Kirov picked up his radio and spoke quickly into the mouthpiece.
They moved off fast, back towards the refuge. Three minutes later, the last man in the team – who had been sitting on the side of the Glacier Pierre Joseph – picked up his rifle and, aiming at a spot he had isolated the day before, he fired a rifle grenade.
There was a flat crack at the head of the snow line and a blasting roar of wind shook the valley as two million tons of snow and ice began to slide, gathering momentum down the slope. Fifty seconds later, as the ice dust and snow settled, there was no evidence of any deaths on the glacier below. The entire scene was buried under thirty feet of snow.
The bodies would be covered for the next three hundred years.
Quayle was moving slowly upward, Lacoste over his shoulder, when he heard the solid roar and felt the wind tug at his jacket. Barely acknowledging the event, he kept moving up and past the man, still
