He showed her another picture, this one of her chest. “The virus also stimulates cell growth in areas of damage.” He then showed her four more of the same shot. “Look at this activity and cell growth.”
“How long before my heart started beating?” Duncan asked. “Two minutes.”
She frowned as she considered the implications. “Still — there are ways I could die, aren’t there? Decapitation? I don’t imagine this virus could grow me a new head. And what if I were to be burned?”
“Interesting, isn’t it?” Garlin said. “Those are the ways you are supposed to be able to kill a vampire. Perhaps the stake through the heart must stay to keep the heart from regenerating?” He shrugged. “We don’t know. We agree — there are probably injuries you could not recover from.” He held up his hand as she began to say something. “Don’t worry. We don’t plan on testing those theories. You were shot where you had been before. We knew you could recover from that.” Duncan put her finger in the bullet hole in her shirt. The skin was completely healed. “What now?”
“Now we try to get your memory back,” Garlin said. “Your real memory.”
The mountains first appeared as a slight white bump on the horizon. Turcotte had spent time in Colorado, climbing in the Rockies, and he’d always been impressed at being able to see Longs Peak and Pikes Peak, over two hundred miles apart, from Denver. But what was rising in the distance made the Rockies look like the sculpting of a child, while these were the work of God. Even Professor Mualama was leaning forward, staring through the front of the bouncer at the sight.
On average twice as high as the range that ran through the western United States, the Himalayas soon filled the view to the front. Turcotte slowed the bouncer as they passed over the foothills in northern India, approaching the border of Nepal. The magnitude of the mountains ahead amplified the warnings Colonel Mickell had given him.
“Everest is there.” Morris was pointing to the right front.
What surprised Turcotte more than the sheer size of the mountain was the multitude of other peaks in the area almost as tall. He couldn’t imagine entering the area on foot. He turned to Morris. “You were one of the two guys Delta sent to climb it?”
Morris nodded. “Last year. Made it to within two hundred meters of the top.” “And?” Turcotte asked.
“We turned back.”
Mualama turned and looked at the medic. “Why?”
“We passed our window of opportunity, so we turned around.”
“What do you mean?” Mualama asked.
“You’ve got to get down from elevation before dark. That’s why climbers leave base camp at two in the morning to try to reach the top before noon, so there’s time to turn around and get back down. We had rough going, bad weather, worse conditions than we expected. Besides the altitude, the wind is the great enemy on Everest. You feel as if it is always in your face, trying to keep you from going up. When the beeper went off on our watches and we weren’t at the top, we turned around.”
“But you were within two hundred meters,” Mualama said.
“That’s how people die. Breaking the rules on the mountain. It’s unforgiving. On the way back we were passed by two New Zealand climbers. They kept going. And they never came back down. When you die on the mountain, your body stays there, frozen forever. There are quite a few bodies up there.”
Turcotte had the bouncer at a complete halt now. Morris’s words and the sight in front of him were causing him to rethink his plan. He respected what the medic was saying about turning around no matter how close they had gotten. A plan had to be followed. But he also knew they weren’t going to have the option of turning back.
Morris pointed. “That’s Changtse to the left at seventy-five hundred meters high; Lho La between it and Everest at just above six thousand meters, then Everest, then to the right there, Nuptse at over seventy-eight hundred meters.” Turcotte didn’t feel anxious to move forward. The mountain range intimidated him and he had a feeling it wasn’t going to be as easy as flying the bouncer to the grid coordinate and picking up the sword. “Tell me about the mountain’s history and climbing it,” he said. He’d learned in his special operations career that knowledge was power and he had a feeling he was going to need all he could get to accomplish his mission. Also, if Excalibur had been up there so long, he wanted to know if anyone else had gone up after it and failed.
“I don’t know about this stuff you’ve told me about Merlin and all that,” Morris said. “As far as history records, the mountain was first mapped in 1590 by a Westerner. He was a Spanish missionary to the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar. The Brits were the first to identify Everest and make a calculation as to its height in 1856. But nobody got close to it for a while after that. It wasn’t even so much the difficulty of the terrain, but rather politics. Tibet and Nepal, which bracket the mountain, didn’t welcome visitors. The Brits had to get a special dispensation from the Dalai Lama in 1921 to send a team in via Tibet. Up till then Everest was just a location on a map. No one really had any idea if it could be approached, never mind climbed.”
“But we think Merlin and others climbed it well over a thousand years ago,” Turcotte said.
“If they did, they never made it public,” Morris said.
“Most likely because they climbed it,” Turcotte said, “but only went up and never back down.”
“Everest has claimed many.” Morris was sitting on one of the plastic cases he’d loaded on the bouncer, his eyes on the mountains, his voice low, as if in respect for what nature had laid out before them. “Most climbers approach from the south,” Morris said. “The north face is more technical. What’s the location you were given?” Morris asked.
Turcotte hadn’t had a chance to decrypt the coordinates. Letting go of the controls and leaving the bouncer at a hover, he took the sheet. Quinn had sent it in the only format that couldn’t be decrypted even if intercepted, using a onetime pad. There were only two copies of the pad. Turcotte had one, Quinn the other. They had been given to him by Colonel Mickell since they had no doubt any communications they had were being intercepted.
He matched up the correct date using a trigraph, which had three-letter combinations. He aligned the letter from Quinn’s message, with the letter on his onetime pad, and used the trigraph to come up with the correct letter/number. It only took a few moments, as it was just a two-letter/eight-digit grid designator. Turcotte handed the result to Morris, who had a 1:50,000 map of Everest spread out on the floor of the bouncer. “Damn,” Morris muttered as hemade a small mark on the map with his pencil. Mualama was looking over his shoulder.
“What do you have?” Turcotte asked, unable to see from the pilot’s seat.
“North side. At the top of the Kanshung Face. That explains why no one’s stumbled across it.”
“Is that spot bad?” Turcotte asked.
“The first major attempt to climb Everest in modern times was by George Mallory and Sandy Irvine in 1924,” Morris said. “They approached from the north because of politics. And when they did their reconnaissance of the area during the 1921 and 1922 trips, they kept moving up the mountain in that direction. They even made it as far up as the North Col in 1923. But even Mallory said the south appeared to be the more desirable direction to approach the mountain from and subsequent mappings and climbs have confirmed this.”