“What about you?” McKee asked.
“I’m staying,” Marquis said.
“So am I,” Hope Kendall said.
“No, you’re not,” he said.
“Look, I don’t—”
“I don’t want to argue with—”
“I’m staying!” she said forcefully.
Marquis glared at her. “Very well. Who else wants to stay? It would be less wear and tear on you, 1 think. We’ll just have to hunker down in our tents when the storms hit. But I can’t guarantee we’ll live through them.”
When all was said and done, everyone decided to leave except for the core group, which consisted of Marquis, Bond, Chandra, Hope, Baack, Leaud, Glass, Barlow, Schrenk, and three Sherpas. Those who elected to descend promised to be back in two days. Some of them were going to stay put at Camp Three rather than go all the way down.
One thing was certain, Bond thought. The Union man had to be one of those who had elected to stay.
An hour after the others left, the wind began to pick up.
Bond was looking on the far east side of the plateau for any traces of the missing men, when his cell phone rang. Digging it out of the parka pocket with the gloves was clumsy, but he managed to get it open.
“James, I think I found them!” It was Chandra.
“Where are you?”
“Where I said they would be. In a crevasse. Come down and look.”
The plateau was large enough that it would take him an hour of strenuous walking to cross it. “All right, I’m on my way. Mark your position and meet me at the top in an hour.”
It was midafternoon when Bond got to the slope that Chandra had pointed to earlier. The Gurkha was waiting for him, bundled up like a polar bear. The wind was stronger now, and dark clouds were forming in the sky. They hadn’t much time left.
Chandra led him a hundred meters over one crevasse to a second one that had a natural ice bridge at one end. Fifty feet down, wedged in tightly, were two bodies.
“Chandra, I could kiss you, but I don’t think I can find your face,” Bond said. “We’re going to need some help getting them out of there.”
Bond got on the phone to Marquis and Leaud, who arrived on the scene just as the snow started falling. With the windchill, the temperature dropped to eighty degrees below freezing. Bond pointed out the bodies to them, and Marquis said, “You had better wait until tomorrow, after the first storm passes. Paul said we should have ten to twelve hours of clear weather between the two storms.”
“I’m going down now,” Bond said. “We have at least an hour. Help Chandra belay me.”
“You’re mad, Bond, but all right. I’m as curious as you are at this point.”
It took Bond forty-five minutes to get down to the bodies. They had set up a Z-pulley system, which offers a three-to-one mechanical advantage through the use of two pulleys. The result was an ingenious method of hauling heavy objects safely on what could possibly be unstable ice.
Bond had his back flat against one wall of the crevasse, and his feet pushing against the opposite one. He inched down to one of the bodies and used the ice ax to free it enough to turn it over. It was the corpse of the third hijacker. The other body was five feet below. Chandra gave him more slack as he inched down into an even tighter squeeze. When he got to the body, Bond had to work for another twenty minutes chopping ice away from around the head and shoulders so that he could pull it up.
“The wind is getting stronger, Bond,” Marquis said over the phone. “You had better come up.”
“I’m almost finished,” Bond said. “Five minutes.”
Finally, he tore away the frozen blanket covering the man’s face. It was Lee Ming.
“All right, I got him,” Bond said into the phone. “I’m going to fasten the harness around him.” Since Lee was dead, Bond didn’t have to worry about fashioning a comfortable harness. He wrapped the rope around the man’s shoulders and arms and tied a Prusik knot.
The storm hit with frightening strength just as Lee’s body was near the top of the crevasse. Marquis, Chandra, and Leaud were pulling as hard as they could, but the wind proved to be a formidable opponent- Getting Bond up was much easier, as he could help by using his crampons to “walk” up the side of the crevasse as they pulled.
“We have to get into the tents as quickly as possible!” Marquis shouted. He could barely be heard over the howling wind.
They threw Lee’s body onto a plastic sled, then all four men fought their way to the camp. They were in a full-scale blizzard now, and they could barely see where they were going. Bond directed them to his tent, where they laid down the corpse on a sleeping bag. Hope Kendall had provided Bond with some sharp instruments and tools, although she didn’t know what he needed them for.
“I’ll stay in here,” he told them. “You all go back to your tents, and hurry. Chandra, keep the phone handy.”
Marquis nodded and the others left the tent. Bond closed the flap, but the noise outside was so loud that he could barely hear himself think. He didn’t particularly relish the thought of spending the night with the corpse, but he didn’t want to take the chance that the Union operative might get to the body if he left it alone.
The cadaver was frozen solid. Bond lit the Bibler stove, which generated a little heat. He took the standard-issue chemical hot packs, normally used when activated to treat frostbite, and placed them on Lee’s chest. He lit them, melting away the ice that held the man’s clothes in a solid straitjacket.
In ten minutes Bond was able to cut away Lee’s shirt and expose his chest. The skin was cold and hard. He carefully examined the area above Lee’s breast and found the pocket of skin where the pacemaker had been inserted. It was still intact. Now all he had to do was wait awhile for the skin to thaw
The storm raged outside. To pass the time, Bond took a snow shovel, opened the tent, and spent fifteen minutes clearing the entrance. It was quite common for climbers to find themselves buried inside their tents by huge snowdrifts after a big storm. Anyone caught inside without their shovel might never get out.
Bond came back into the tent and examined Lee’s skin. It was now a bit like rubber, not totally fleshy, but soft enough to cut.
He took a scalpel from Hope’s tools and began to carefully cut a square out of the man’s chest. It was tough, almost like cutting leather. Once the square was outlined, he used scissors to grasp a corner and pull it up, revealing bluish pink inner flesh and a gold- plated pacemaker.
Bond breathed a sigh of relief. He removed his oxygen mask so that he could get a better look. He snapped the leads with the clippers, then, with his bare fingers, wrenched it out of the now-pliant, liquidless flesh.
He had it! It was in his hand! Bond clutched the device triumphantly, ready to pick up the phone and call Chandra. He dialed his number and started to speak, when he felt a sudden sharp, heavy blow on the back of his head. The tent spun chaotically as everything went black.
Bond fell forward on top of Lee’s mutilated cadaver, dead to the world.
TWENTY-TWO
LOVE AND DEATH AT 7,900 METERS
OTTO SCHRENK HAD watched bond’s projected shadow from the outside of the tent, waiting until it was in the ideal position. Not wanting to kill him yet, Schrenk used a stone to knock Bond unconscious. He then tore open the flap, crawled in, and squatted over the two bodies. He rolled Bond off Lee, pried open the clenched fist, took the pacemaker, and reached for his mobile phone.
“You there?” he spoke into it.
“Yes,” came a voice from the other end. The storm made the connection tentative.
“Where are you?”
“I’m at our agreed rendezvous. Where else would I be in this storm? Do you have it?”
“I have it.”
“Good. Make sure Bond doesn’t wake up.”