“What is the means?” the president asked. That information was not on the basic document.
“Dassam,” Chechnik replied, frowning.
“So the only data that we have is from our highest level source in the Chechnyan resistance,” the President said, slipping the document back into its folder. “There are no intercepts, no lower level confirmation?”
“No, Mr. President. Just this.”
“The Keldara can complete the basic mission,” the President said, handing back the document. “If they reacted on the basis of this it might reveal the source. They are not to be informed.”
Mike paused, looking up at the front of the glacier and frowning.
The storm of the previous day had laid a blanket of snow that while deep wasn’t particularly trying. But a night’s full movement had brought them to the base of the glacier that was, from his point of view, their major obstacle. Just getting up on it was going to be a pain in the ass. The glacier had plowed out the valley it formed in, ripping away the hard rock walls and even if there had been “easy” ways up before it formed, thouands of years before, they were now gone.
However, he needed to get up onto the damned thing. The best route he’d been able to find crossed the glacier. While that had it’s own issues, they were minor compared to the problems every other route presented. The Keldara were fine at walking in mountains, even very steep ones. They weren’t, by and large, quite so up on going up vertical faces.
The best approach seemed, based on both the satellite photos and his own eyeball, to be the left. But even that was damned near vertical. He’d planned on just tackling the face, about seventy five feet and about a 3 face, maybe a 4. However, thinking about it there was an easier way.
The glacier was flanked on either side by ridges that stretched in a serpentine up to the two nearby summits. They were currently positioned on the shoulder of the left ridge and the ascent on that looked fairly smooth and the worst pitch was maybe 60-70 degrees. They could walk that. Once they were above the glacier they could just rappel down to the surface.
He signaled to the point to head up the ridge and started walking again.
They’d gotten down to “mountain speed”, take a step, plant your ice axe, take a slow, deep breath, take another step. It was a slow way to move but the only way when the air got this thin. And the step-breath speed had several added benefits.
High mountains had dozens of ways to kill you.
The first and most obvious was just falling. The team was roped together so that if someone started to slip down on of the faces the rest of the team could stop their slide and recover them. But whole groups had slid off mountains before this. It was one of the things he was worried about with Yosif’s team. The step-breath pace meant each member of the team had time to get sure footing before taking the next step.
More subtle was hypoxia. Air pressure fell off fast above ten thousand feet. They weren’t in the super high, such as the Himalayas, but the air was definitely thin. At this level mild to extreme hypoxia was a real danger. Hypoxia occurred when the cells of the body exhausted all of their oxygen. Symptoms were headache, extreme exhaustion and nausea. At the extreme convulsions or even death were possible as the body’s tissues wrestled oxygen away from the nerve cells, which required one hell of a lot of O2. By moving slowly and deliberately it gave the body time to move all the oxygen it could grab around to the spots that needed it. If they moved faster the big muscles of the thigh, the reason that runners had to breath so hard, would start hogging the stuff.
And water was an issue. With the body needing more oxygen, the blood started to produce more red blood cells, thickening it. You had to drink and drink a lot to keep the blood from getting thick as molasses.
Another danger was sweating. Even as cold as it was, and it was really fucking cold, well below zero farenheit since they were moving at night, if you moved too fast you could break into a sweat. That was just fine under normal conditions. But up here if you sweated at some point you’d slow down and stop being so warm. Then the sweat would freeze onto your body, just like the frozen snot in his nose that tickled like mad and crinkled his nose hairs. If that happened, the only thing for it was for the whole team to stop and get whoever had broken a sweat into cover. They’d have to strip off their wet clothes, put on dry and cool down. If they didn’t, when the sweat froze it would suck every bit of heat out of their body, fast. The term for that was “hypothermia.” And just like hypoxia, it was deadly. Once the body dropped below a certain temperature it started to shut down.
To keep from sweating, despite the temperatures the team had their jackets partially unzipped and most were only wearing a balaklava over their face and head. Gear-wear ran a knife-edge as thin as they ridge they were walking up. If you wore too many clothes you got too hot and started sweating. By the same token, any exposed flesh was liable to frost-bite.
Keeping an eye out for hypothermia, frostbite and hypoxia was the job of the assistant team leaders. Heck, it was everybody’s job. When a person became hypothermic, hypoxic their judgement dropped to nil. And frostbite only occurred after a portion of skin had become so numb from cold you couldn’t tell it was frostbitten. The only way to tell was to look. And it was hard to look at your own face.
The problem was, what with the exertion, fatigue and general malaise caused by the low O2, everybody was thinking slower and so worn all they could do was concentrate on the next step. Mike found he had to flog his brain to get it to work. It was worse than being awake for a couple of days.
The team paused to rotate the point and he was willing to just stop and breathe for a bit. The guys breaking trail couldn’t take the added exertion for long. Mike had set a hard time limit of twenty minutes on trail-breaking and everyone, including him, took turns.
Just climbing up the slopes, carrying one heavy ass ruck, with a quarter the amount of oxygen available in lower areas, was hard enough. But when you also had to stamp down snow on each step it became a nightmare. So they were rotating. Mike found himself only two back from the front as they shifted the safety rope back. The previous point was standing by the side of the trail, carefully balanced on the edge of the knife-ridge, just breathing deep. Mike wasn’t sure, what with the helmet, goggles and face mask over the guy’s face, but he was pretty sure it was Sawn.
“Sweat?” he asked as he passed the previous trail breaker. He checked to see there was no exposed flesh but as far as he could see Sawn was covered from head to toe.
“Good,” Sawn said, gasping. “Tired. Fucking tired. No sweat.”
“Good… man,” Mike gasped back, taking another step. Even conversation was impossible.
Three more days.
Pavel slid the piton hammer into place and triggered it, slamming one of the spikes into the rock wall.
Pavel had never taken rock climbing training. He had only recently begun, through the internet connections the Kildar had installed, to realize there were others like him in the world. For among the Keldara Pavel had always been considered strange; he liked to climb.
The Keldara would sometimes, when grazing was bad, run their sheep, goats and cattle into the high valleys. And while sheep were stupid, goats were canny. They frequently did not want to come back to the corrals at night. And goats could climb. My, could they climb.
Since Pavel was very young, he had followed the herds into the mountains. And since he was a child it was often Pavel who went searching for the recalcitrant goats. Because anywhere a goat could go, and more, Pavel could, and would, go. With a grin on his face. The higher, the stranger, the more brutal the face, the more he enjoyed himself.