The Hunt

53

They say the weather is the single greatest danger you are ever likely to encounter in the Tibetan mountains. Sure enough, this storm had blown up out of nowhere, and with zero warning.

One moment Jaeger had been leading the march, skis sliding across a hard-packed field of snow, the heavens bright and starlit. The next, a keen, biting wind had blown up out of the west and the sky had darkened ominously.

Tibet being twice the size of France but as barren and sparsely populated as anywhere on earth, it had proved difficult to get accurate weather forecasts. Generally, during the drier spring and summer months, you were more likely to encounter dust storms than any significant precipitation.

Yet by the feeling of the wind as it bit into Jaeger’s face, a blast of wet and cold weather was coming.

Almost fifty per cent of the world’s population relied on fresh water originating from Tibet’s glaciers. Jaeger had read as much in Miles’s briefings. Meltwater from the Tibetan plateau fed the rivers that watered much of China and India. When a storm hit at the kind of altitude Jaeger and his team were traversing – some 5,000 metres – it fell as snow.

Just as it was starting to do now.

The wind stiffened. Soon it was driving hard needles of ice into Jaeger’s exposed features. He halted, peeled off his overmitts, and rolled his ski hat down, transforming it into a white balaclava, the better to shield his face from the knife-edge blasts. The others gathered close, doing likewise.

With each passing second, visibility was worsening, gusts howling down from the northern scarp of the mountains. Jaeger reached into his smock pocket and pulled out a pair of snow goggles. He slid them on, shielding his eyes.

Raff pressed his balaclava-clad face close. ‘Last thing we need – a fucking storm!’ he yelled. He glanced at the mountain range. It was barely visible any more.

‘Got to press on,’ Jaeger yelled back. ‘We stop too long in this shit, we’re dead. Got to get lower…’

His last words were torn away by the wind.

Pulling his compass out of his pocket, he took a bearing, then signalled them all to move out.

They ploughed on, cutting into the teeth of the storm. To Jaeger’s rear, the driving snow obliterated his tracks in seconds.

The weather closed around them. Soon he could barely see the hand in front of his face. It was horribly disorientating. Keeping track of time was as hard as maintaining direction. Forty-mile-an-hour gusts tore into him, threatening to blast him off his feet. He dreaded to think how Alonzo, who had just taken over pulk duty, was faring.

They were skiing through a near whiteout. The four of them closed ranks as the wind howled and screamed. The temperature had dropped to ten below, and the storm felt all-consuming. They were trapped within the belly of a raging beast.

Jaeger didn’t doubt any more what danger they were in. This had morphed from a seek-and-destroy mission into a survival epic. They needed to find shelter. Urgently. Without it, they would perish, swallowed up by the savagery of the storm and ending up as deep-frozen corpses.

He thought back over a vital lesson he’d been given by his mountain and arctic warfare cadre instructor. You didn’t fight the mountains – not if you wanted to survive. You had to learn to bend and flex to the vagaries of the wild.

He tried to scan the terrain before him, but in every direction it looked the same. He struggled to see through the churning mass of white. The air was dark with angry, violent snowflakes. It felt as if he were marooned in a world formed of snow and ice.

And already he felt frozen to the core.

The colder he got, the slower his body and mind seemed to work. In these kinds of conditions, hypothermia killed you by stealth. The more sluggish his brain became, the less likelihood there was of ever finding a way to safety.

He tried to get a grip. He’d been steeling himself to deploy and fight a human enemy – Kammler and his people – not a natural one. But he needed to get his head around this life-or-death challenge and focus.

As he pushed onwards, fighting against the savage whip of the ice-laden blasts, he noticed a bank of snow rising to their left.

As Jaeger knew well, snow was actually one of the best insulators. In the Arctic, the Inuit lived in igloos, which were basically domes made of blocks of snow.

He stopped. The others pulled to a halt beside him, their faces encrusted with a layer of wind-blasted snow and their breath condensing as thick icicles crusted to the exterior of their balaclavas.

He jabbed a hand towards the bank of snow.

‘Time to get the hell out of this wind!’ he yelled. ‘We dig, or we die.’