The Afgan Campaign

17

Flag and I find Tollo five hundred feet down, alive and delirious.

He doesn’t know who we are. His pinpointers are gone. He’s blind. He orders us back up the face.

I want to go. I would. But it’s not so simple. Five hundred feet have taken Flag and me two hours. The face is steep as a ladder and slick as frozen snot. My boots are rags, frostbound as boards; their soles glisten with ice.

Darkness has fallen. Cold-sickness has taken Flag. Frozen vomit plasters his breast; his speech is slurred; he can no longer close either hand.

We cling to a shelf no wider than the sole of a shoe. Tollo sprawls thirty feet below. Upside down, hung up on an outcrop by a rope caught round his ankle. His other leg, from the knee down, is turned around backward.

“Who is it? Is that you, Matthias?”

I’m going to have to go down to him. The distance seems like nothing in the recounting. In summer a child could scamper it with ease. But now, in the dark and the plunging cold, with our own exhaustion and our icebound boots, the pitch seems distant as the moon. I would leave Tollo. I’m ready to start back up the face. Then I see Flag, with his frost-benumbed mitts, readying to start down. I curse him in language that would get me strung up under tamer circumstances.

I can’t let him go down.

It has to be me.

I make it somehow, belayed by the line Flag lowers from the ledge.

Tollo doesn’t know me. Even when I shout in his ear. His leg is turned around completely. When I touch it, it’s hard as a block of stone.

“My cap,” he says. “Can you see my cap?”

He has lost his boar’s-tusk skullcap. It must have fallen off, he says. There it is. He points it out to me. About ten feet down, across the ice. “Can you get it for me?” he asks in a voice so faint I have to put my ear right next to the ice-hole which is his beard, and even then I can barely hear him. He is like a child. My heart is wrung. At the same time I hate him. I hate him for falling. The selfish bastard will kill me. My life will end on this face and all he wants is his salt-sucking cap.

“Let it go, Tollo.”

“My cap.” He says he has to have it.

“What for?”

He coughs something I can’t understand.

What? I shout at him.

“In hell,” he says. It will be disrespectful to appear without a cap.

Sure, why not? Why shouldn’t I die for his bung-fucked cap?

I get it. I plant it on his skull, beneath his fleece hood. I press my mouth to his ear: “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

We rope Tollo under the arms, Flag and I. The back of his cloak is solid ice; it makes a sledge. If we climb, pitch to pitch, we can haul Tollo up behind us. One stage at a time. We start up. One traverse. Two. Except now Flag is failing too. He can’t talk. I fear for his extremities. I can still feel my own. I’m all right. Youth. Youth is everything.

“…the crest…” Flag manages to croak. He means we must regain the trail.

“Why? So we can die there instead of here?”

I have entered a state of rage so towering, words cannot give it expression. “Tollo!” I shout down. “How about pulling your weight? Use your arms, damn you!”

“Shut up,” barks Flag.

“Why didn’t he rope himself? We’re gonna top off because of this ass-wit.”

“Shut up.”

I keep babbling. I know I’m cracking but I can’t stop. A part of me has entered delirium and I know it, but another part remains surprisingly lucid. I figure I have half an hour before I lose all sensation in my hands and feet. Beyond that, what? An hour till I’m frozen head to foot. What is particularly galling about going into the books this way is that within twenty days there’ll be flowers on this slope. It will be spring. In a month, Panjshiris will be grazing sheep here. They’ll strip our corpses and jig over our bones-ours and however many other hundreds of our compatriots will have gone briskets-down before the column gets over these mountains.

“Wake up!”

I gape at Flag like a man surfacing from a nightmare. He bawls into my ear: “Got to make the trail!”

I can’t tell whether he’s lost his mind or I have. What’s waiting for us at the trail? Nothing. The column has moved on. We’ll never be able to track them in the dark, and certainly not sledging Tollo. Our only hope is if the section following us has come up. But they’d be crazy to do that. Cross the Clothesline in this cold and dark? Never. They’ve scratched out a camp somewhere below.

“Right,” I shout back. Make the trail. Good plan.

The way we climb is with the butts of our half-pikes. Plunge the spike into the ice, pull your weight up by the shaft. Knee first, then foot; when you know it’s solid, seat the rope over your shoulder, the one that’s hauling Tollo; then push up with that leg.

At places the slope isn’t bad. We can chop steps into the ice. Have we climbed a hundred feet or a thousand? I know I’m hallucinating. It seems like I can hear Biscuits’ voice. In Greek. Pretty good Greek too. She has waited for us. The column is gone but she’s still there, at the trail. That’s a good hallucination. I appreciate it. It’s like one of those dreams you have, where you say, By heaven, that is imaginative! I glance over to Flag, wondering if he’s seeing the same mirage I am. Apparently not. He just keeps climbing. By Zeus’s iron balls, he’s got guts. What a soldier! I’m proud to step off for hell beside him.

“Hey! Flag!” I’m going to tell him I love him; I don’t care how unmilitary it is.

“Shut up!”

I want to tell him about Biscuits. Where did she learn Greek so well? Must have been from Macks who had her before we came on the scene. She’s above us, shouting down. Something about a rope. “Grab it! Pull yourselves up!” I am really impressed with her Greek.

Flag struggles to catch the rope. This is strange. How can he be after the rope that’s in my mirage?

Now I’ve got the rope. Somehow we’ve reached the trail. Crawling. Facedown. Rolling over the lip, propelled by our knees. Stand? I can’t. Biscuits and Flag haul up the rope that I seem to remember is attached to Tollo. It occurs to me that this might not be delirium.

“Hey!”

Biscuits kneels over me. I’m on my face on the ice; she rolls me over.

Hey!

What?

She grabs me by the hair and shakes me so hard the roots almost come out.

“Hey!” she shouts into my ear. “Are you stupid?”