“Wow! Incredible! I don’t believe it!” the Brit exclaimed, and he called cold fish. There wasn’t a single floppy-fish bet. And neither the Swiss nor the German was flopping.
Sherm gave the Austrian another half-hour. He was sobbing manfully over the radio to the British announcer. He saluted his fallen friends and stated his intention to declare a victory for all Germanic peoples when he reached the winner’s summit.
“Oh no, you don’t,” Sherm said, and the mouse clicked that Austrian straight into oblivion.
The Austrian froze. “Something’s happening!” he bellowed into the radio.
“Explain!” the Brit demanded, but then it was over. The Austrian was on his way to the bottom. It was a long, bumpy ride, but he never achieved any of the bone-breaking somersaults and flops that killed his companions. He reached the bottom a floppy fish.
Sherm MacGregor was deeply satisfied as Cedar Dunnaway muscled his way doggedly to the winner’s summit.
“Cedar, I’m gonna make you a star,” Sherm said.
There was a mist leaking down from the summit, and Sherm heard several different crew voices shouting over the technical feed from New Zealand.
“It’s obscuring the summit cameras. Where did it come from?”
“I don’t care where it came from, just fix it.”
“I can’t fix fog!”
Cedar Dunnaway climbed into the mist, which became thicker around him until he had vanished from sight.
“Now the climber cams are out! Dammit, is he on the summit or not?”
“GPS says he’s there, but I got no audio and no video.”
“Come in, Dunnaway. You’re the champ, Dunnaway! Come in!”
“How can you possibly lose all the summit cameras at the same time?”
“I have no idea. Must be something weird going on up there.”
“Like what?”
“Yeah,” Sherm MacGregor said aloud. “Like what?”
Chapter 33
Cedar Dunnaway tried real hard at everything, all the time. He wasn’t the smartest man, nor was he the most ambitious, but he was a man who tried real hard. Usually it didn’t get him anywhere. The one skill that he could count on was patience. Back home, which was in Buffalo, New York, there were people who called him “the most bullheaded human being I ever met.” One time and one time only was Cedar ever given good advice. The man was the manager of the Seven-11 where Cedar was a cashier. Cedar was trying to teach himself to use a complicated cash register. He had been working on it for six hours straight.
“I’ve never seen anybody so determined to do anything,” the manager said. Cedar took that as a compliment.
Cedar was fired. Although he eventually excelled at making change, he never became competent at other tasks as simple as facing display shelves or cleaning the frankfurter cooking machine. But the manager told him, “Cedar, you figure out the one thing that you can do that will make your life prosperous, and then you put your determination into it the way you know how to do, and then you’ll be a successful man.”
Cedar went home and wrote that down.
Now, it took him a while to figure out what that one thing was. It couldn’t involve much thinking, so it had to be hands-on. It couldn’t be creative. Cedar was not creative. He was pretty good at climbing rocks, though.
Could he make a living climbing rocks?
Well, yes, he could, if he was good enough. He could enter a contest. He could climb rocks and plastic cliffs and he could climb walls of ice. He could even get paid for doing it.
When he reached his arm over the rim of the winner’s summit in New Zealand, he said to himself, “Cedar, you did try hard enough.”
Then he pulled himself over the rim and the black glass before his eyes became transparent, and he was seeing a fog bank that should not have been there. Also there were two people, sitting on woven mats on the ice, who should not have been there. One was old and one was young, and neither of them looked as if he were equipped for climbing on ice.
Cedar stood himself up on the summit.
Remo Williams pulled a tiny chip out of his pocket and rolled it in his fingers.
Chinn looked at it curiously, Remo nodded at the rim of the summit, where an arm appeared, then a man’s head rose into view with a pair of face-hugging goggles that were completely black. Remo flicked the chip at the man’s head.
It spun at a fantastic speed, sawing through the plastic transmitter on the head strap like a circular saw going through a foam cushion. The back half of the transmitter, including the two-inch antenna, popped off and was gone. The climber never even felt it.
“Where’s the fire?” the winner asked.
“No fire. Just steam.” Remo nodded at chalky-dry rock sitting in a basin of melting snow. Remo had rubbed it against another rock until the heat built up, then he dumped it in the ice where it raised billows of steam.
“We would like to ask you how you managed to win this climb,” Remo said.
Cedar Dunnaway’s spine was ramrod straight as he answered, “Determination.”
Chapter 34
Something was going on. This was not right at all. Sherm MacGregor tried to watch all his video feeds at once and flipped to other feeds, but still he got nothing useful. He was just as confused as everybody else when Copter Cam closed in on the winner’s summit to airlift out Cedar Dunnaway. Cedar was standing there, looking fine as could be. Also standing there were two men, one in a T-shirt, one in a—what?—a kimono, for God’s sake.
The ESN correspondent who was inside the helicopter was supposed to do an on-the-spot interview with the champion, but that didn’t happen. First the two men hopped on the helicopter, and then the cameras stopped working. The two men were gone when the helicopter landed at the base of the wall.
Nobody knew what it meant, so they did their best to ignore it. Cedar Dunnaway was proclaimed champion. The other climbers were airlifted from the summit or picked off the wall. It would all be edited together into a seamless, fast-paced extreme extravaganza by tomorrow’s airtime in the United States.
But Sherm still wanted to know what was going on. He called ESN and had himself patched through to the location producer, Aaron Presci. He was their biggest single advertiser and he could do things like that.
“We don’t know who,” Presci said. “Maybe just some pranksters who wanted to get on TV.”
“Pranksters? Come on.”
“When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.” Presci hung up on him. Presci had to be in pretty dire straits if he was hanging up on his bread and butter, Sherm MacGregor.
Sherm could have had the man fired, but he refrained. Presci was a good, take-no-shit guy. He would find out what was going on if anybody could.
There was a message light blinking on their telephone. Remo didn’t like the look of it. He was frustrated enough already. Days spent down under with nothing to show for it except a lower opinion of the human race, and now this. Whatever it was. But he knew what it was.
Chiun said nothing, just waited, face expressionless.
Remo listened to his message, and his face darkened. He phoned the front desk and asked to be connected to a number in the United States. Arizona.
The phone rang.
“It’s me,” Remo said.
“Son,” said Sunny Joe Roam.
“Give me Freya.”
A moment later, he heard Freya say, “Hi, Daddy.”
She sounded just a little bit frightened.
Remo spoke with her in a calm voice. It would be okay, he assured her. It would be fine. Not to worry.
When he hung up the phone, he was staring wide-eyed at the floor.
“Little Father, my daughter is afraid.”
“I heard.”