Lexina didn’t say anything, a tall figure swathed in cold-weather gear, her face hidden behind dark goggles and a face mask. Coridan and Elek flanked her like sentinels, also silent. They were standing on a knoll on the Northeast Ridge, buffeted by the howling wind. Twenty meters below, a line of fourteen of Aksu’s men made their way along a narrow track just off the knife edge of the ridge.
“I was the first to complete this route,” Aksu continued. “It is faster, but more dangerous, especially if the wind picks up.”
Lexina broke her silence. “How long?”
“We will make it to a camp spot I know on the ridge by dark. We will rest four hours. We will then depart at 0300 for the final assault to the location you have given me. It will require some technical climbing to get across the top of the Kanshung Face.”
Lexina nodded.
“I must warn you,” Aksu said, “that without acclimatization you will not last long on the mountain.”
“Our blood—” Lexina began, then halted. “You need not worry about us.” She then left the knoll, joining the end of the column. Aksu paused, looking to the southwest toward the mountain hidden in the clouds. The weather was bad, that was obvious to his experienced eyes. He could see a twenty-mile-long plume of snow coming off the top of the peak. If it was the same in the morning, they would not be able to make the attempt, as the Northeast Ridge was too narrow to chance with a strong wind. However, he also knew that Everest was fickle. The weather could change in a flash. There was nothing to do but continue on for the moment.
The controls were getting sluggish, something Turcotte had experienced once before in a bouncer, but that had been when he had taken one as high as it would go, away from the surface of the planet, much higher than their present altitude. He saw no reason why it should be happening, so close to their goal. They were just south of the West Ridge, flying parallel to it, a route suggested by Morris.
“We’ve got a problem,” Turcotte announced as he pushed on the controls, edging them closer to the ridge.
“What’s wrong?” Morris asked.
“We’re losing power.” Turcotte looked to the left, searching for a level spot. “Buckle up,” he advised the medic and Mualama.
With his free hand, Turcotte tightened down the straps holding him in the depression in the floor of the bouncer. “I’m open for suggestions where to put this down.” All he could see was an extremely steep snow- and ice-covered slope leading up to the ridge above them. About two thousand feet below them was a wide glacier, but Turcotte didn’t want to descend, knowing that however far he took the bouncer down, they’d have to make up for on foot.
“Can you put it on top of the ridge?” Morris was pointing up.
Turcotte pulled on the controls, but not only wouldn’t the bouncer rise, he realized they were losing airspeed and descending. He knew he needed to do something before they completely lost power.
“Screw it,” Turcotte said. He pushed over on the controls and headed for the slope. “Hold on!”
The edge of the bouncer hit hard, digging into the ice and snow, striking rock. The alien metal gouged into the side of Mount Everest as Turcotte kept his hands on the controls. The bouncer came to a stop and he slowly let go of the controls. The bouncer was stuck into the side of the ridge, enough power in the craft to keep it in place. Turcotte looked up. The top of the ridge was out of sight above them. Looking down, he could see that there was an almost vertical drop below. “Let’s gear up.”
Morris checked his watch. “It’s late. We’ll have to camp on the mountain.”
“Let’s get as high as we can before dark,” Turcotte said. He had some experience of cold-weather operations from his time in Special Forces, so he carefully put on the layers of clothing Morris had brought. First they all put on skintight underwear that would wick any perspiration away from their skins. Turcotte knew one of the great dangers of operating in the cold was sweating and then stopping and having the moisture freeze next to the skin. Next were several more layers of specially designed clothing, topped by a Gore-Tex outer shell.
Morris had laid out the three packs and filled them during the flight. Each contained several oxygen cylinders, a sleeping bag with waterproof shell, and a little food. Turcotte strapped his MP-5 submachine gun to the outside of the pack. He knew he had to keep it away from his body or else the gun might “sweat” and then freeze up. A clanging clutter of climbing gear was also on the outside of each pack.
“Here.” Morris held a canteen in each hand and a packet of pills. “Put the canteen in the inner front pocket of your parka. Anyplace else and the water will freeze. The pills are amphetamines. Take them only if you absolutely need a surge of power. They’ll give you a couple of hours of energy, but coming down from the high will be bad.”
Turcotte stowed the canteen and sealed the Velcro flap to the pocket. Then he took the harness Morris gave him and put in on over all the clothes, making sure it was tight. He stepped into crampons and cinched them to his boots. He put a lined helmet on, then attached the oxygen mask over it. Morris adjusted the flow for both him and Mualama.
“Most people couldn’t last more than a couple of minutes up here going from ground level to this altitude,” Morris said, his voice muffled by his mask. “The acclimatizing that is done on a normal Everest climb is primarily to get the blood to change; after several weeks at altitude you develop twice the number of red blood cells that carry oxygen. The blood packing we did on the way here accomplished the same thing — the problem is that the doubling is artificially produced, not by your own body. So it isn’t being renewed. We’ve got a forty- eight-hour window. Past that, your blood will start thinning and you’ll be in big trouble.”
“How much trouble?” Turcotte asked. “You’ll die.”
Yakov stumbled as the MC-130 banked hard right. The interior of the plane smelled of vomit and sweat. As experienced as the Delta men were in this type of low-level flight, this one had exceeded even the wildest they’d ever been on.
The pilots had surpassed the standard safety margins in effect during training and pushed their training and equipment to the limit, rarely climbing more than one hundred feet above the ground. Just a year previously such a flight would have been impossible, owing to the likelihood of either striking the ground, a tower, a building, or high-tension wires as they infiltrated Turkey. But a year earlier, NASA had launched an eleven-day operation called the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission.
The mission had mapped over 80 percent of the planet’s landmass using C- and X-band interferometric synthetic aperture radars to produce a digital map of the planet’s surface. The accuracy of the results was far beyond anything done previously. Altitude data was within sixteen meters’ absolute accuracy and horizontal data was within ten meters. This led to the MC-130’s crew’s ability to fly at double that possible error with no fear of striking anything. The pilots had a three-dimensional display of the terrain ahead on their monitors. The aircraft’s computer also had the data loaded and was constantly using a ground-positioning receiver, updated every half second, to monitor the route and warn of possible collisions.
There was the slightest of possibilities that something might have been constructed along the flight route since the shuttle mission, but it was a risk the crew would rather take to avoid being picked up on Turkish radar and having fighters scrambled to intercept.
Yakov reached inside his parka, pulled open the Velcro on an interior pocket, and pulled out a flask of vodka. He extended it to the Delta commando next to him, indicating he should partake. The man looked at him incredulously, the front of his own parka speckled with vomit. Yakov shrugged, unscrewed the cap, and took a deep swig. He extended it around to all the men close by, but all passed. Yakov put the top back on and slipped it back inside.