The Arctic Event

Chapter Forty-two

The North Face, Wednesday Island.

The climbing rope uncoiled as it arced outward and down to the target ledge, sinuously outlined in the light of the dropped flare.

“I’m going to double-line you down.” Jon Smith twisted a loop of the rope through a carabiner on Valentina Metrace’s climbing harness. “I’ll be supporting most of your weight on the safety line.” He snapped the second rope into place. “All you have to do is back down the bergschrund and keep the main line untangled as it feeds.”

“Fine. No problem. What’s a bergschrund?”

Smith smiled patiently in the glow of their lum sticks. “It’s the interface between the mountain and the glacier.” His beard-darkened features looked tired but also confident, as if he had every certainty in the world she could pull this off. Valentina wished she could feel the same.

“I’ll take your word for it. And then?”

“I’ll use the main rope to lower the packs and rifles to you. Haul the gear well away from the glacier side. It looks a little unstable and we might have an icefall or two.”

She felt her eyes widen, and she glanced toward the glacial lip. “An icefall?”

Again came that steadying smile. “Then again, we might not. But be ready to duck, just in case.”

“You may rest assured!” Valentina knew flippancy was inappropriate at the moment, but she had used it as an effective screen for personal self-doubts and fears for so long, it was a difficult habit to break.

“I’ll send Smyslov down next. Secure him well clear of the glacier face as well. And Val, remember, he is a prisoner.”

She started to flare but caught herself. After all, she’d been the one to inject that concern into the proceedings. “That’s now a given, Jon.”

“Good enough. After that, I’ll rappel down to join you on the ledge. Then we’re out of here and on our way.”

Valentina suspected that for all Smith’s confidence it likely wasn’t going to be all that easy.

The black drop down the trough between stone and ice, with the winds clawing at her and nothing at her back but a long fall, was easily one of the most terrifying things she had ever done, and she had lived a life that held many moments of terror. Yet she could view the act almost in the abstract. Valentina Metrace had long ago learned to compartmentalize her fears, locking them up to scream and weep in their own little mental cage while the remainder of her being dealt with the necessities of survival. She could do the same with pain, compassion, or any number of other emotions when needs required. As with her sophisticate’s humor, she found it a useful mechanism.

Still, 120 feet could take a century to descend. Twice, loose ice slabs broke loose beneath her boots, crunching and clattering away to shatter on the ledge below. In each instance she paused, took a deliberate, steadying breath, and continued.

Finally, she stood on rock once more. The target ledge left a great deal to be desired. At its glacier-side end, it was barely as wide as a man was tall, and slick with glaze ice. Yet it was still an improvement over dangling at the end of a rope. Pressing back against the cliff face, she unlatched from the main line and gave it a signaling tug. It slithered back up the edge of the glacier and out of her light stick’s illumination.

Valentina closed her eyes to the wind- and snow-wracked blackness of the night and took a moment to slap down that shrieking, weeping thing in the back of her mind.

A few minutes later the first of the packs skidded down to the ledge. Signaling for more slack on the safety line, she dragged the equipment to a wider section of the ledge, beyond her judged reach of any avalanche, methodically repeating the process with the other packs and the cased rifles as they were lowered. Pausing, she studied the mound of equipment and weapons for a moment. This wasn’t a particularly auspicious environment for controlling a hostile and potentially dangerous prisoner.

“Damn it, Jon,” she murmured, “this could have been so much easier-just scrick, and over and done with.”

She took a piton and a rock hammer from the gear stack and hunted for a fissure in the cliff face at about head height. Finding one, she sank the piton into it. Taking a short hank of loose rope from one of the packs, she ran it through the fixed ring of the piton, whipping a loop and slipknot into one end.

Looking up, Valentina saw a pair of green glows at the top of the glacier. Jon’s light stick and a second, starting the descent of the glacier edge, moving slowly and painfully. Smyslov was on his way down. Supporting the Russian’s full weight, Smith was feeding the line through the belaying point a few jerky feet at a time.

Again Val wondered about both men, but especially about Jon Smith. Her professional survivor’s instincts told her Smith was wrong about the Russian, that Smyslov was a foolish risk to be taking. And yet, maybe that was one of the things that drew her to Jon. Scruples were perforce rare within the profession. Maybe this was a man strong enough not to be totally expedient.

With a clatter of dislodged ice chips, Smyslov backed off the glacier face and onto the ledge, his bound hands gripping the main rope. Valentina flipped her safety line aside and came in behind the Russian.

She slid the M-7 utility knife/bayonet out of her harness sheath and lightly pressed the tip of its heavy blade into the small of his back. “I’m right behind you, Gregori. I’m going to take you off the climbing rope now and I’m going to tuck you out of the way for a little bit. Colonel Smith wants to keep you alive, so let’s both work toward that goal, shall we?”

“I am agreeable,” the Russian replied, his voice flat. “What do you think about it?”

“I think I am under Colonel Smith’s orders.” Cautiously she used her free hand to reach around in front of Smyslov, to unclip the climbing rope from his harness. “But I wouldn’t push the point. Now, I will step in close to the cliff face, and you will turn around slowly, facing outward, and step past me. Please recall it’s still a long way down and I’m the one on the safety line. All right, let’s go.”

They accomplished the maneuver like a cautious dance step, Smyslov moving past her down the ledge. Taking a grip on his climbing harness with one hand, Valentina followed, the knife poised and aimed at the base of his spine.

Valentina caught the metallic glint of the piton she had driven into the rock face. She let Smyslov move under it.

“Stop…Face the cliff…Easy, now.”

Smyslov obeyed. Valentina swiftly looped the slipknot over Smyslov’s disposacuff-bound wrists. Hauling on the free end of the line, she lifted his wrists to the piton. She ran a second loop around the join of the disposacuffs and drew both tight, snubbing the rope off.

“That should keep you out of mischief,” she said, sheathing her knife.

“Why?” Smyslov asked, his voice toneless.

“Why what?”

“Why go through all this? Why not simply kill me?”

“I must confess, Gregori, the thought has occurred,” she replied, leaning against the cliff face for a moment. “But Jon doesn’t fancy the idea for some reason. When you called your Spetsnaz friends down on us last afternoon…Was it just last afternoon?…And when you tried to shoot Jon in the cave, that would have been quite good enough for me, but not for our colonel. He seems to think you are not totally beyond redemption. Or possibly he just doesn’t play the game that way.”

“He is a good man,” Smyslov murmured over the rush of the wind.

“Probably better than you or I or anyone else on this island.” A wistfulness crept unbidden into her reply. “He’ll die being a good man one of these days. Well, we’ll be back with you shortly. I do hope you won’t mind hanging around for a bit.”

She edged back down the ledge to the glacier interface, the bergschrund, as Smith had called it. Then she remembered his final instruction. She went back to the gear cache for a second piton. Returning to the glacier face, she dropped to her knees on the ledge, searching for a belaying point. It wasn’t easy; her light source was feeble, and the ledge seemed a solid slab of stone. Finally she found a narrow crack near the lip of the ledge, and she took care to drive the piton in as deeply as possible. Not wanting to unhitch herself from the safety rope, she hooked a snap carabiner through the piton ring and latched a loop of the line through that, leaving herself enough slack for free movement. Standing once more, she moved below the glacier face and gave the main rope a signal tug.

At the top of the glacier, she saw the ball of green luminance that marked Jon Smith start its bounding descent down the ice extrusion.

Not long now and he would be with her. A hundred feet to go…seventy…fifty…

Valentina heard a creaking groan, the yielding of inorganic matter on a massive scale, followed by a series of explosive cracks. She threw herself back against the cliff face, pressing spine to stone just as the entire vertical edge of the glacier fractured and dissolved into a thundering cascade of tumbling, grinding ice.

Val was aware of the strike and brush of ice fragments, none of them quite large enough to bludgeon her or carry her away. The big stuff, the car- and truck-sized slabs of glacier, were tipping outward, their weight and momentum carrying them beyond the shelf of rock. Then a streak of green light plummeted past en route to oblivion, and she dimly heard her own scream of denial over the grating roar of the icefall. Then something seized her with irresistible force, snatching her off her feet and hurling her to the ledge. Her head slammed into stone; white light blazed behind her eyes; then blackness took her.

Consciousness returned with the sound of an accented voice calling her name. She found herself lying facedown on the rock shelf, unnervingly near the edge, and with something stabbing uncomfortably into her stomach. Her head rang with the blow she had taken, but her thick parka hood had kept her skull from fracturing. She didn’t think she’d been unconscious for long, but the cold of the stone and the wind were already creeping into her. Groggily she tried to stand but found she couldn’t. It was as if she were glued down on the ledge. A moment of befuddled exploration revealed why.

It was the safety line, and the thing that was prodding her so uncomfortably was the piton and carabinier that she had looped it through. Drawn taut, the line ran from her climbing harness, through the carabiner, and over the lip of the ledge. Valentina’s last few seconds of memory returned, and she recalled the avalanche and Smith’s chem light falling past her.

“Jon!”

There was no answer from the black void beside her. The lifeline hung rigid, a dead weight hanging suspended from its end. She pushed and writhed, trying to draw back from the edge against the merciless drag of the rope, only to find she couldn’t gain even an inch.

It was futile. Under ideal circumstances she might have been able to lift the hundred and eighty-odd pounds dangling at the end of the rope, at least for a short distance, but conditions were far from ideal. Sprawled on an ice-glassy slab of rock, there was nothing to give her leverage or purchase. She was hopelessly pinned.

Again she heard her name being called. A dozen yards farther down the ledge she could see Smyslov leaning back against his restraints, trying to see what was happening.

“I’m here, Gregori, and from the look of things I’m not going anyplace.”

“What has happened?”

She hesitated for a moment, then realized her list of available assets and allies was ominously short. In a few terse sentences she described the situation.

“You should not have secured the lifeline like that,” he said.

“Do bloody tell,” Valentina grunted, again straining against the drag on the rope.

“Is the colonel all right?’

“I don’t think so. He hasn’t answered me and I don’t feel any movement at the other end of the line. I’m hoping he was just knocked out by the icefall.”

“You must get him up and out of there, Professor,” Smyslov called back.

“I know it, but I can’t get enough slack on the safety line to tie it off! If I cut loose, he’s gone!”

“Then you must drive in a second piton and secure your climbing harness to it. You will then be able to unharness without losing the colonel.”

Valentina gave up on fighting the lifeline. “That’s an excellent idea. Only I don’t have a second bloody piton!”

“Then use the spike of your rock hammer.”

She looked around within the arc of her reach and the glow of her light stick and swore again. “I managed to lose that, too.”

“Professor, he could be injured or dying!”

“I know that, damn it!”

Smyslov said no more. Panting, Valentina rested the side of her head against the frozen stone. They would all die if she didn’t do something. Trapped here, the storm and the inevitable, invasive cold would finish them all.

There was an answer, of course, obvious, simple, and easily done.

She could free herself by cutting the safety rope.

But as Jon had phrased it, that was an option she was not yet ready to consider.

She had her knives, three of them: the utility blade at her belt and her two throwing knives in the slip sheaths strapped to her forearms. Maybe she could use one of them as an ad hoc piton. But she lacked a hammer to drive the blade in solidly, and the hilts weren’t meant for the task. One slip or fumble, and Jon would be dead-granted that he wasn’t already.

That left Smyslov, the man she had quite been prepared to kill. But how had Jon phrased it? “I’m not sure if he’s an enemy yet, Val.”

Logic would indicate that he must be. But logic also indicated that her only alternatives were to cut Jon’s safety line or allow all three of them to perish on this mountainside.

“Gregori, how good a judge of human nature do you think the colonel is?”

“A very good one, I should think,” the Russian replied, puzzled at the question.

“I hope you’re right. I’m going to throw you a knife.”

It was going to be a task easier said than done. Combatant knife throwing was one of the most difficult of the martial arts to master. Were belts awarded for it, Valentina Metrace would easily be a red-belt master. Yet even the legendary William Garvin would have been challenged by this scenario: high gusting wind, miserable lighting, a bad throwing angle, and thick, hampering clothing. Most critically, there was nothing to sink the blade into.

The best bet would have been to skid the knife across the surface of the ledge to Smyslov’s feet, but given the way she’d tethered him to the cliff face, he couldn’t reach down to collect it.

Valentina peeled off her overmittens and gloves. Lying on her side, she pivoted around the piton to face Smyslov, the move putting her legs over the cliff edge from the knees down. She slid the utility blade out of its belt sheath, judging its throwing balance. “Here’s how it’s going to work, Gregori. I’m going to try to put this knife on the cliff face just above your head. You’re going to have to catch it as it slides down past you. Got it?”

“I understand, Professor. I will be ready.”

“All right, get ready. I’ll throw at the count of three. One…two…three!”

She made the throw, biasing the spin of the knife so it would strike haft foremost. Over the wind she heard the tink of steel hitting. Then she heard his explosive curse in Russian. “I missed it! It bounced off and over my shoulder.”

Probably that damn composite plastic grip. It wouldn’t hit and lie dead.

“All right,” she replied, keeping her voice level. “We’ll try that again.”

She drew the first of her handmade throwing blades, the steel of the little weapon warmed by her own body heat.

“Ready? Again, it will be over your head. Throwing on three. One…two…three.”

Her arm whipped back and forward, easing the throw into a toss instead of a strike. Steel rang on stone again, and she saw Smyslov’s silhouette lunge, trying to pin the sliding knife between his body and the cliff face. Again he cursed as the blade landed at his feet, wasted.

“I am sorry, Professor. I missed again.”

One chance left. Valentina blew into her cupped palms, flexing and wringing her aching fingers to renew warmth and sensitivity. “Once more, Gregori, only this time we’re going to work it a bit differently.”

“However you say, Professor.”

She slid the second throwing knife out of its forearm sheath. “All right. This time, lean back.”

“Lean back?”

“That’s right. Lean all the way back, with your arms extended out in front of you. Hang on the piton.”

Smyslov obeyed, tilting his body away from the cliff face. “Like this?” he questioned.

She studied his outline in the glow-stick light for a moment. “Yes, just right, perfect. Now, hold still, very, very still…And, Gregory, one more thing.”

“What is that?”

“Sorry about this.”

She heard Smyslov’s startled bellow as the steel fang spiked into his left forearm, just above the wrist.

“I apologize again, Gregori, but that was the only place I could make the damn thing stay.”

She watched the Russian cross his bound wrists and awkwardly yank the knife out of his blood-blotched sleeve. The razor-edged blade made short work of both the tether rope and the nylon handcuffs. Now he was the one free, and she the one bound.

No matter what, at least one of them would get off this ledge alive tonight. Jon would approve. With her own knife in his hand, Smyslov loomed over her now, his face impassive. What happened next would be out of her hands. Wearily, she rested her cheek on the ledge and closed her eyes.

Smith felt himself floating, adrift, but it wasn’t a pleasant, dream-state float. His body was twisted, distorted, and a broad spectrum of aches and pains stabbed at him. And there was the cold and the growing numbness. This wasn’t right. He must react.

His eyes snapped open, and he saw only snow-streaked blackness. Lifting his head, he could make out a twisted tangle of rope and harness enmeshing him, greenly outlined by the chem light. There was nothing else, nothing around him. He was hanging suspended, faceup in his climbing harness, swinging slightly in the gusting wind, a single thin line extending, bar rigid, above him.

Memory reactivated. He’d been rappelling down to the ledge when the whole vertical face of the glacier had disintegrated under him. The ice, under heavy compression, had given way explosively, and simple luck must have blown him outward, so he had not been caught and carried away under the fall. Nor had he hit the ledge. He must be hanging somewhere below it.

Cautiously, he reached around himself, exploring his surrounding block of space, trying to find something solid. The fingertips of his right hand just brushed a rock wall. The mountain face under the ledge must be slightly concave. He couldn’t call how far below the ledge he was suspended. Nor could he tell how much empty air was below him-possibly two feet, possibly two hundred.

He took a fast inventory of his physical condition. He was bruised and battered, but everything seemed to work. He must have ridden the outer edge of the fall, and the natural elasticity of the nylon climbing rope had absorbed some of the shock of the drop. However, both cold and weakness were settling in fast.

Unfortunately his direct-action options appeared to be limited to a hand-over-hand ascent up the safety line, and he lacked a pair of prusik rope climbers.

And what about the others? Had Val and Smyslov been caught in the avalanche? Squinting upward through the snow, he could make out a ruddy smudge of light outlining the edge of the shelf above him. The first flare they’d dropped to the ledge had gone out. Somebody must have ignited a second one up there. Somebody must have survived. Fighting the constriction of the climbing harness, he tried to inflate his lungs to yell.

Then something entered his sphere of illumination, sliding down the rigid length of his safety line. Another rope, a loop bent onto its end, had been shackled to the safety line by a carabiner. The foot loop for a Z-pulley rescue rig.

Smith caught the new rope. Unshackling it, he hooked the loop over one boot. Pulling himself upright on the safety line, he stood in the loop and gave the rescue line a haul-away tug. The rescue rig went taut, and someone on the ledge began to heave him up in incremental pulls, the slack in the safety rope being taken in as well.

As he was lifted to the ledge, Smith had plenty of time to wonder what he was going to find. One thing was certain: Valentina Metrace didn’t have the mountaineering expertise to set up a Z-pulley like this one.

He reached the ledge ceiling and was distracted by having to fend himself off the cliff face. Accordingly the lip of the shelf took him by surprise. Suddenly hands were reaching down and gripping his harness, helping to heave him up and over the edge.

The feeling of rock under him was one of the grandest sensations he had felt for a long time. For a few moments he knelt on his hands and knees, luxuriating in its solidity. He allowed the trembling to take over then but fought off the recurrent surge of blackness that threatened to break over him. He shook his head like a wounded bear and looked around the ledge. By the sputtering red light of the half-consumed flare, he could make out the multiple anchors and interlacing rope loops of the Z-rig, and the sprawled bodies of Valentina and Smyslov, the two looking fully as totaled as he felt.

Smith inhaled a pull of icy air. “Hydration and energy bars,” he said hoarsely. “Now!”

They huddled together on the ledge, gulping down alternating mouthfuls of body-warmed water and vitamin-augmented chocolate, their metabolic furnaces catching up with the crisis load thrown on them.

Smith noted the black bloodstains on the sleeve of Smyslov’s snow smock. “How bad’s the arm?”

The Russian shook his head. “Not bad. I have a first aid pack on it.”

“Hurt in the icefall?”

Smyslov shot a wry look at Valentina. “Not exactly. It is complicated. I’ll tell you later.”

“If you say so,” Smith replied. “Now that the rush is over, I suppose I should ask just who is whose prisoner at the moment.”

Smyslov shook his head, that self-derisive grin still on his cold-reddened face. “It beats the shit out of me.”

“I’m a little vague on the question myself,” Val interjected, “but may I propose that, for now, we just get down off this damn mountain. We can sort out the fiddly bits in the morning.”

“That sounds like a sensible notion to me, Major. What do you say?”

“I agree, Colonel, eminently sensible.”

“Then let’s move, people. This mountain isn’t getting any shorter.”

Wincing against the objections of bruised and stiffening muscles, Smith pulled himself to his feet. Val helped him up and paused for a moment, mittened hands resting on his chest. “It appears there might be something to this scruples business after all,” she said.

“Every once in a while you can be pleasantly surprised.”