‘On my way.’
‘Shit.’
In the darkness of the crevasse, Boyd stood staring up at the route in front of him. Flat for a couple of miles, the shelf now rose steeply, bending around the wall like a spiral staircase. Except that there were no stairs.
Boyd struck at the surface of the slope with his ice axe and found the ice as hard as steel.
‘How the hell did you get up this, Jack?’
He punched the wall gently with his gloved fist.
‘Come on, man, think. There has to be a way. You’ve come too far to let this hold you up. He did it. So can you. It’s just a question of figuring out how, that’s all.’
There was no other way he could go. That much was plain. Beyond the slope, the shelf petered out into a shattered rib of rock and the sheer face of the crevasse. He was stumped. There were no obvious handholds. Nor any pegs or screws Jack had left on the route. The wall looked as smooth as the face of his helmet.
‘You’re one hell of a climber, Jack boy, I’ll say that much for you.’
After a frustrating ten minutes had elapsed, Boyd’s headlamp finally picked out a broken crampon further up the slope. It was a reassuring sign that he had not been mistaken. Jack had indeed negotiated the slope. The broken crampon was eloquent evidence to the greater difficulty of the return journey. Presumably, he told himself, the yetis had another way out of the hidden valley. Perhaps a route that took them over the mountains. But that was in the future. Right now he had still to get up. He sat down to rest while he considered the problem.
‘Come on, you dumb bastard,’ he told himself. ‘Do you want to spend the night here? Look again, there just has to be a way up.’
He raised his ice axe and then hammered the ground in frustration. Then he saw it. A gap underneath the wall, no wider than about five centimetres. Just enough of an undercut to provide a good handhold if you had the nerve to try it. He would have to step up the wall with his fingers in the groove like a rope walk up the side of a building. There was no other way.
Boyd stood up and tightened the strap of the Colt AR-15 to stop it from shifting on his back. Then he gripped the undercut and placed his cramponed feet onto the slope. This had to be the way Jack had done it. A real piece of mountaincraft. Not for nothing did people say that Jack Furness was one of the best in the world.
Well, he was pretty good himself. You had to be good just to come through the Basic Underwater Demolition, SEAL training. Hell week, they called it. Drown-proofing followed by the toughest assault course in the world, when you had to scale the side of the high-rise wooden walls on San Diego Beach. Climbing along nothing more than two-by-fours bolted to the face of the wall. That required great strength in fingers and ankles too. If he could do BUD/S, he could do anything.
Once he had tried the technique, Boyd found that it was easier than he had imagined. But it was heavy going on the fingers of his gloves. And near the top he caught the sleeve of his SCE suit on an edge of the wall that was nearly razor-sharp and ripped it badly.
When he was standing on flat ground once again, he inspected the damage.
‘Shit.’
He was going to have to make a repair or risk a significant, perhaps even fatal, heat loss. But for a moment he allowed himself to feel impressed by his new surroundings — an enormous, open-ended cavern that looked as big as the Houston Astrodome. Just the kind of place that Tarzan would have fetched up on his way to recover some treasure.
Then he sat down against one of the icy walls, opened the control unit on his chest, and removed a neatly packaged repair kit.
Swift didn’t stop to look at Didier Lauren’s mutilated corpse. The arm, shot away at the elbow, was sufficient confirmation that her earlier theory regarding the gunshots had been correct. And even through the air-conditioning system in her suit she could detect a distinct smell of cordite. She just kept on moving, as quickly as her crampons allowed, ignoring the fatigue that was creeping over her, with only the sound of her own breath inside the helmet for company.
Thirty minutes had passed.
She had arrived at the place Jack had told her about: at the spot where the ledge sloped up into the cavern. Now she was going to have to climb. What was the phrase Jack had used?
Laybacking.
It was, she considered, an inappropriate name for such an obviously strenuous technique. She had only to think of the word to see herself back in the lodge, lying on her bunk, wrapped up inside her sleeping bag, and sleeping for a very long time. Or, better still, back home, on her big brass bed in Berkeley. Now that was what she called laybacking. But not this awkward, crouching way of climbing Jack had described to her, which threatened to put her back out. It was fortunate she was so light and, being a natural climber — or so Jack had once tried to persuade her — within ten or fifteen minutes she had gained the top of the slope and entered the cavern that opened onto the hidden valley and the forest.
The sight took her breath away.
Jack had not exaggerated. It was indeed a magical-looking place. Well sheltered. Lush. The perfect spot for the world’s newest and shyest ape species, if ape was what you called a creature whose DNA was just over half a percent different from man’s own. Swift was no longer sure. All she knew for certain was that the yeti had to be protected. At whatever cost. She drew the automatic from her belt and advanced cautiously across the broken ice floor, toward the cavern’s curiously shaped exit. There she stopped and, crouching down close to the wall, scanned the edge of the giant rhododendron forest and listened carefully.
The forest in front of her was silent. There was only the faint rustle of leaves and the groan of the cold Himalayan wind stirring the tops of the tall fir trees. There was a film she had seen, based on a book by James Hilton, that gave a name for such a secret magical place: Shangri-La. It was true there were no monasteries in sight, and certainly the hidden valley offered no immediate prospect of eternal life. It would be as much as she could do to survive the next few hours. But this looked and felt like somewhere special.
Swift removed her crampons. Then, slowly, she approached the tree line.
The forest remained silent.
She peered forward, through the enormous rhododendron leaves. Then, grabbing a branch for support, she began to move down a gentle gradient and waded into the thick vegetation. She came stealthily, acutely aware she was in as much danger from the yetis she was trying to protect as she was from the man who was threatening to kill them. Boyd had already demonstrated that he would not hesitate to use his gun to protect himself against the yetis. But could she? She kept on moving, always looking around her and ready for anything, she hoped. She was not afraid. Rather she felt a strange kind of exhilaration. Anthropology had never seemed so exciting.
But if she had hoped to track Boyd through the forest, she was disappointed. There were no obvious clues to the direction he had taken. Recalling a story that Byron Cody had told her about tracking mountain gorillas in Zaire, she dropped onto her belly and began to crawl through the undergrowth. Visual clues, he had told her, were often obscured by thick vegetation.
There was very little snow on the ground, so dense was the plant life. Ahead of her lay a short tunnel roofed by a fallen fir tree and walled by dense rhododendrons. She wormed her way inside it, grateful for the cover it seemed to afford and hoping that her suit would not tear. Without its protective warmth she knew she would not live for very long in such low temperatures. At the far end of the tunnel, she stopped crawling and listened.