Swift had little regard for organized religion but if she had thought it could help her prevent Boyd from blowing up the satellite and poisoning the yetis’ hidden valley she would offer perfume, flowers, and a whole basketful of fruit to this sleeping god, the least bloody-minded of the principal Vedic deities.
Mindful of the fate that had befallen the five Sherpas in the ice field. Swift entered the precarious maze of ice and chasms, telling herself that this was not a place to put haste ahead of caution. Boyd’s trail was easy enough to follow. He himself had been wise enough to place his own feet in Rebecca’s footprints wherever he could. Swift hoped she would come upon him underneath a fallen mass of ice, or find some evidence that he had disappeared into a crevasse. But in her fast-beating heart she knew to expect more of him. Jack was right. Boyd was a professional. Probably some kind of Special Forces type well trained in this kind of terrain. He would not make an obvious mistake. Whereas she... she was only a lecturer at a university. Just thinking it made her feel inadequate to the task facing her. Apart from the odd skiing trip, the most hazardous thing she’d ever done was venture into a class with sex-mad morons like Todd Bartlett. She figured her best chance — perhaps her only chance — was that Boyd would hardly be expecting her, she might sneak up on him when he was placing the charge and shoot him in the back. Killing him would be the easy part after his cold-blooded murder of Miles Jameson.
Walking through this frozen, fragile landscape. Swift felt as alone as she had ever felt in her life. She wished she could have used the shortwave radio in her helmet to stay in touch with the rest of the team at ABC, for despite the loss of the main radio, the smaller, less powerful GPS units still worked. But that would only have alerted Boyd, who was on the same frequency, to the news that she was following him. So she observed radio silence and tried to forget the possibility that Boyd might be lying in wait just to make sure that he was not followed.
She turned quickly on her heel, her heart beating wildly as the helmet on the SCE suit amplified a sound behind her, and was just in time to see a spectacular serac, as big as a house, collapse across the way she had just come. She felt goose bumps rising on her body as she realized how close she had been to being killed. For a moment she stood there, trembling inside her suit and listening to her voice reminding her of her own miraculous escape.
‘You were bloody lucky. Swift,’ she told herself. ‘Jesus, you could have been under that lot. Now you have to go on. You’ve no choice, have you? You can hardly go back across that lot. Should be interesting on the return journey.’
When she stopped her nervous soliloquy, there was no sound except the occasional creak of the glacier as the sunlight grew stronger. Then she turned and took up the pursuit once again.
Boyd climbed down the ropes into the crevasse and stood on the shelf. He felt the cavernous dimensions of the chasm to his left, extending a few hundred metres below, and smiled in awe of the drop. He had never cared much for heights. Outside wasn’t so bad. But inside made him feel distinctly claustral and sealed off. Like he was already in his casket. One slip here and he might be. He’d be bungee jumping without the bungee.
Pressing himself closer to the wall he began to walk, slowly at first, hearing the ground harder under his cramponed feet than on the snow-covered surface up top. Ahead of him the shelf curved away into the shadowy distance like something he’d once seen in a Tarzan movie. It was small wonder that these creatures had remained hidden from the outside world for so long.
The route had a Gothic splendour about it, and but for the intense cold, Boyd half expected to find his way blocked by a marauding tribe of pygmy headhunters. Other times the shelf narrowed and he was obliged to edge his way along with his back to the wall like some Wall Street type contemplating suicide from the top of a skyscraper on Black Friday.
As it grew darker, his headlamp came on, and soon after that a large rocky overhang forced him to face the wall and sidestep his way around like a spider. You had to hand it to Jack. But for the certainty that he had already followed the route successfully, Boyd would hardly have dared follow so precarious a path. Just as he thought things could hardly get more difficult, he felt himself gasp with fright as he saw a distinctly simian outline standing on the shelf up ahead of him. It was Rebecca, waiting for him in the darkness in a crude-looking ambush.
Momentarily unnerved, Boyd backed away, at the same time unslinging his Colt Automatic Rifle, a short-barrel, telescope-stock carbine version of the standard 5.56 mm M16A1 service rifle. It had an effective range of almost five hundred metres, but he still wished he had thought to bring along a night sight. He raised his weapon to his shoulder and fired five times, blowing the creature’s arm away into the darkness, and was disappointed that it didn’t go howling after it.
Disappointed and then puzzled.
It was a minute or two before Boyd got near enough to work out that he’d wasted valuable ammunition on the frozen corpse of Jack Furness’s former climbing partner. Boyd cursed himself. He’d known about this. Someone had explained how Rebecca had come to be wearing Didier’s ring. He should have remembered. Now he wondered if he might have cause to regret entering the yetis’ hidden valley with anything less than a full magazine.
Swift was barely down the ropes and standing gingerly on the half-frozen shelf, staring up at the narrow ribbon of blue above her head, when she heard the rolling, reverberating sound of distant shots.
Inside her head, time was already ticking away like a metronome, and anxious not to waste precious moments by standing around trying to interpret the reason for the gunshots, she immediately started along the shelf.
Had Boyd caught up with Rebecca? Had Rebecca turned to attack him? Or had he shot her just for the hell of it? None of these three possibilities seemed very convincing, and she was still trying to think of a fourth when she remembered Didier Lauren.
Swift realized that Boyd must have made the same mistake as Jack and confused poor Didier’s frozen corpse with that of a yeti waiting for him in the darkness. She smiled, aware that she now had a definite idea of exactly where Boyd was. Still about an hour ahead of her. But at least now she could be sure that Boyd was not preparing an ambush of his own.
Encouraged by her own conclusion, she quickened her pace, trying to channel her sudden optimism into energy. She did not feel brave. But there seemed to be little point in worrying about the huge drop to her left. Not when there was a whole primate species — the anthropological discovery of the century — at stake. Alone in the subterranean world of ice and rock she moved faster, trying to goad herself into hurrying when the conditions and the route warned her to go slowly, becoming angry with herself and with Boyd. She knew that she would have to keep hold of that anger if she was going to be able to point her gun at Boyd and pull the trigger.
Back at ABC, Warner surveyed the wreckage of the radio mast left by Boyd and shook his head.
‘We’re never going to fix that,’ he said. ‘Apart from our own individual radios, we’re mute. Boyd must have a more powerful radio with him. He must be planning to arrange his own airlift or something.’
‘One of us is going to have to walk down to Chomrong,’ said Jack. ‘Mac? Feel up to a walk? It shouldn’t take you longer than a day or two. Sixteen kilometres downhill.’
‘No problem.’
‘I think there’s a telephone at the Captain’s Lodge. You could call the chopper in Pokhara and get them up here by tomorrow. And fetch some Royal Nepalese Police from Naksal. We can hardly stay here and do nothing.’