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FORTY-FIVE

As the ice shelf caved in, there was nothing Harvath could do to save her. Jillian was too far away. It was like watching someone fall through a frozen lake. As her screams echoed off the side of the mountain, Harvath was tempted to look back, but his instincts had taken over and he was totally focused on saving himself.

Flattening his body against the upper peak of the shelf, Harvath slid his ice axes out from their holsters and swung them, along with his crampons, into the ice as hard as he could. Behind him, he could hear the sickening sound of the shelf as it wrenched the rest of the way away and collapsed into the chasm below. At least twenty feet out from the face of the mountain, Harvath said a silent prayer that the receding hunks of ice and snow wouldn’t drag his safety line, and him, down into the frozen void.

He lay there waiting to be yanked off at any moment, but the moment never came. As the thunderous roar of the collapsing shelf subsided, Harvath began to entertain the guilty thought that for the umpteenth time in his life, he had cheated death.

With his hands beginning to ache from the death grip he had on his axes, he knew he needed to come up with some sort of a plan, the crux of which had to be getting to Jillian to see if she was still alive.

Looking down, Harvath saw that only about two and a half feet of shelf still remained below him. From the edge of it to the face of Mount Viso, where they had rappelled down with their first set of ropes, was about eighteen feet. The shelf which Harvath had crossed, and which had swallowed up Jillian, had been nothing more than a fragile bridge of ice and snow that covered over the entrance to a deep cavern of blue-green ice. Even though his anchor was firmly established on the far mountain wall, using his rope to swing out over the open expanse, Tarzan-style, was not the best of ideas. Eighteen feet might not seem like much, but it was plenty of distance in which to pick up a full head of steam and slam into the other side. He immediately struck it from his list of possible options.

Ice chasms in general were like a big V, wide at the top and progressively narrower as you got toward the bottom. If one were to imagine a huge triangle with its point downward, it would form a pretty good picture of what things had looked like before the shelf had collapsed. Harvath now stood at the top of the chasm looking across to where his rope was anchored on the other side. Since swinging across was out of the question, the only way he could go was down. The problem, though, was that if he established another set of anchor points on this side, when he wanted to climb back up he’d still be on the wrong side of the cavern with no way to get across. There was no telling what condition Jillian was in. He needed to figure something out quickly. Finally, Harvath had an idea.

After pulling up the balance of his rope from where it had fallen into the cavern, Harvath set new anchor points in the ice above him. Confident that they were secure, he tied a small loop in a portion of the rope that led back across the chasm toward Mount Viso and lay between his two sets of anchor points. Then, after attaching an extra carabiner to the loop of rope, he unslung his pack and removed only the most essential items. The key was to leave as much weight in the pack as possible. It was essential for his eventual ascent that it weigh more than the remainder of the line. The few items he needed to have with him he stuffed inside his parka and then attached the pack itself to the carabiner.

Having tested the anchor points to make sure they would hold his weight, Harvath holstered his ice axes and began his descent. With every crack and pop of ice, he immediately froze. There was no telling how stable the remaining portion of the shelf above him was. If it collapsed, he’d be crushed beneath it, and if the ice around his pitons gave way, he’d be set loose on an unstoppable trajectory straight at the wall of ice on the other side.

Inch by inch, Harvath played out the rope, trying to judge how much farther he had to go. Crystals of snow hung in the air, obscuring everything from view. Twenty feet, forty feet, fifty — soon Harvath began to lose all concept of how far he had rappelled. His muscles ached more from the careful, measured descent than if he had been tackling it at regular speed, but he knew all too well that regular speed was only advisable under perfect conditions. What he now found himself in were definitely less than perfect conditions.

Harvath needed to take a breather, just for a moment, and as he sat back in his harness, he contemplated calling out for Jillian. The upside of the idea was that if she was alive and could call back to him, he’d be able to get a fix on her location. The downside was that the vibrations from his shout could very well bring the remainder of the shelf crashing down on top of him. Harvath decided it was best to err on the side of caution and held back any yelling for the time being.

Thirty feet later, as his crampons touched the icy floor of the chasm, Harvath saw a pile of what looked like broken snow-white surfboards, and sitting atop it assessing her injuries was Jillian Alcott.

She was alive! Harvath couldn’t believe his eyes. After securing the balance of his rope, he carefully picked his way across the ice and climbed up the mound of broken snow. “Are you okay?” he asked as he scanned her head and face for any signs of trauma.

Jillian gave him a pained look and said, “I don’t think I like ice climbing very much.”

Forgetting that she had medical experience as well, Harvath continued in triage mode. “Anything hurt?”

“My right shoulder,” she replied as she tried to roll it forward.

“Your legs and everything else are okay? Nothing’s broken as far as you can tell? You can move everything? Fingers? Toes?”

“Just the shoulder,” replied Alcott. “I think it’s bruised.”

It was an absolute miracle. “I can’t believe I’m looking at you,” he said. “What happened? Judging by how much rope I played out, we’ve got to be at least eighty feet down.”

Jillian used her good arm to brush the snow off her climbing pants as she replied, “I did what you told me. I let the rope out nice and slow.”

Harvath was dumbstruck. “How? How is that possible?”

“I’ve got to admit, it scared the hell out of me. I just grabbed the rope as hard as I could.”

“But when it drew tight, it would have pulled you in and smashed you against the wall.”

Jillian shrugged her shoulders. “Whatever we were standing on was made up of a lot of snow, because a huge slab of it wound up between me and the cliff face and broke the impact, but my shoulder still bore some of the brunt of it.”

Harvath marveled at her. “And you just lowered yourself the rest of the way down here?”

Jillian looked at him as if he was a moron. “I had about five hundred pounds of snow on top of me. The only way I was going was down.”

“I think you’re going to find going up a lot less stressful than coming down.”

“I’d better.”

“In the meantime,” said Harvath as he fished through Alcott’s pack and came up with a headlamp for her that matched his own, “maybe we ought to see what we came all the way down here for.”

Jillian took the lamp from Harvath and placed it over her head. As they turned the lamps on, they saw the only path available to them — a narrow ramp that led deeper into the bowels of the ice cave.

The four-foot-wide passageway sloped downward at such an angle that they had to lean back in their crampons to prevent picking up too much speed and losing control.

The walls of ice were so close on each side that they could reach out and touch them both at the same time. It was like walking through a narrow slot canyon.

After several minutes, the path began to level out, and Harvath and Alcott no longer needed to lean back in their crampons. As they approached the end of the passageway, they crawled beneath a jagged overhang and entered a wide antechamber. The chamber was honeycombed with low tunnels feeding off in all directions. The most magnificent feature of all, though, was a soaring, translucent wall of ice at the far end of the room. Even from where they stood, there was no mistaking what was frozen behind it. Ignoring everything else in the chamber, they walked over to get as close a look as possible.

The ceiling of the antechamber rose steadily higher, and the light from their headlamps cast an otherworldly glow over the scene. Like some sort of enormous, subzero aquarium, the wall of ice held three perfectly preserved elephants.

There was no question what they were looking at. They had unearthed Dr. Ellyson’s discovery, and both Scot and Jillian were speechless.

Finally, Harvath tugged on Jillian’s parka, and they spread out to examine other portions of the cavern. Moving deeper into one of the tunnels, they began finding bodies — remnants of Hannibal’s elite guard. There had to be over thirty of them, most of which were still encased in ice of varying degrees of thickness. Modern equipment lay scattered across the tunnel floor, and they could see places where the ice had been purposely melted away to remove some of the frozen bodies and strip them of their artifacts and God only knows what else.

The naturally formed tunnels bent and doubled back on each other, and Jillian and Harvath drifted in different directions, allowing their own natural sense of curiosity and wonder to dictate their individual courses. Even when they were in separate tunnels, the echo of crampons scraping along the floor of ice notified each of the other.

The lights from their headlamps were the only accompaniment to their own private thoughts as they stared into the face of history. Here and there, Harvath came across random artifacts, propped up against walls or carefully arranged inside narrow alcoves of ice, waiting to be catalogued and placed in plastic bags to be taken back to the Lavoines’ barn. They had stumbled upon an amazing work in progress, and though many of the artifacts had already been removed, the historical significance of what remained was still astounding.

Looking at the breastplated soldiers frozen in the walls of ice with their eyes bulging and mouths agape in silent screams was like passing through some sort of ancient house of horrors. It looked as if they had all been preserved in a state of abject terror. And just like the elephants, they seemed as if they could come back to life at any second and burst through the ice with their swords and war hammers held high, ready to do battle.

Besides Ellyson, Bernard, and their Sherpa, Maurice, no one had seen any of these soldiers for over two thousand years. Harvath could only imagine how Ellyson must have felt upon discovering them for himself. It must have been an incredible rush, both personally and professionally.

Harvath’s reverie was abruptly interrupted by the sound of Jillian frantically shouting his name.