The Lions Of Lucerne

76

Claudia scrambled up the icy face to where Scot hung choking. In a flash, she had unsheathed her blade and was preparing to cut away the strap of the assault rifle pinned against his throat. As she brought the blade down toward the strap, what she saw amazed her; Harvath was shaking his head no.

He didn’t want her to do it. Choking was okay, but God forbid the soldier should lose his assault rifle. Men!

Claudia frantically assessed the situation. If Scot didn’t want her to cut away the strap, maybe there was another alternative. She raced up to just about his shoulder level and tried with all her might to lift the strap and untangle him from where he was caught. As strong as she was, Scot was too heavy. It didn’t work. Time was running out.

She thought about trying to wedge herself between Harvath and the face, using her legs push him out and off the piton, but there was too great a danger of them both becoming entangled and then falling with a combined weight that their equipment couldn’t handle. No, there was only one solution. Scot had to be lifted up, and that could only happen with Claudia off the face and anchored on the crest.

After wrapping an extra length of rope around Scot’s chest and under his arms, Claudia shot upward. There was no time to dig proper toeholds or hammer pitons; safety was forgotten as she focused on the man slowly choking to death below her.

The wind continued to buffet her body as she climbed. Twice the gusts threatened to rip her from the face, but she dug in deeper and refused to be beaten. Claudia’s axes swung and cracked into the ice, delivering bone jarring pings through her arms as she scrambled up the mountain. With each swing of the ax came a synchronized kick of the foot; her crampons sending shards of ice and rock flying in all directions, until she was just below the snow-covered crest of the face. From here, it would be two to three more ax holds, and then Claudia could swing herself over the top. This was the spot where Scot had said they would most likely encounter the first signs of danger-an intrusion-detection system or worse…a sentry.

Claudia thought about unholstering her SIG, but realized that her death-defying free climb had left her with no nearby pitons to snag her if she should fall. She would have to go without.

The wind howled with a ferocious intensity. It was so loud that even if someone was standing directly above her, they probably would not be able to hear the sound of her axes digging into the last of the ice. Claudia held her breath and tried to concentrate on what she was about to do. Traversing the last two meters as if it were only two feet, she prepared to hoist herself over the lip. Digging in her crampons, she gave herself a count of three and then swung her body with dangerous abandon over the top.

Unbeknownst to her, the other side of the crest sloped at an extremely steep incline, and Claudia lost control as she began rolling down the slick snow-covered surface. She dug in her heels as hard as she could and was able to stop rolling. The last thing she had expected was that the crest would give way to such a steep hill.

Claudia’s mind raced with more pressing concerns. Had there been any intrusion detectors? There was no way of knowing. The incline took her by such surprise that she didn’t have time to look. Scot could be on his last breath, she reminded herself. I have to get to him. But what about sentries? Claudia took a quick look around and saw nothing. Time to get Scot.

Hammering with a vengeance, she placed two pitons a few feet back from the lip of the crest and anchored herself in. Scot had insisted on total radio silence, but Claudia decided to break it, if only briefly, to let him know she was about to pull on the rope. She didn’t want him to give up.

“On belay,” she said into her microphone.

There was no response.

What if I’m already too late? Once again, Claudia dug in her heels, leaned back into her harness, and began pulling hand over hand with all of her might.

The rope instantly became taut, but wouldn’t move. He’s more tangled than I thought. Claudia leaned farther back and pulled harder. She willed Scot Harvath to live, and to move. Her arms ached, her back and shoulders burned, but she wouldn’t give up. Slowly, she felt herself making progress. He’s free!

She kept pulling, hand over hand, an inch at a time. The pace and strain were excruciating, though Claudia didn’t care. Scot was free. She continued pulling him toward her. The rope piled in a twisted coil as she fed the slack off her waist. Not too much longer…almost there.

“Halt, stehen bleiben!” (Stop, don’t move!)

The voice came from behind her right shoulder and took Claudia completely off guard. She was so frightened by it that she almost let go of the rope.

“Stehen bleiben!” the voice commanded again.

The man was dressed in all white, much like them, and carried an automatic weapon, which was pointed right at her. Claudia stopped pulling on the rope, but held it taut with her left hand.

“Was machen Sie hier?” (What are you doing here?)

“Auf halber Höhe wurden wir von einem Sturm überrascht. Wir haben auf besseres Wetter gewartet und uns entschlossen, den Absteig nicht mehr zu machen.” (We are climbers. We were stuck by the storm halfway down. We waited for it to get better, and when it did, we decided to finish the climb.)

“Mitten in der Nacht? Das glaube ich nicht. Komment Sie mit!” (In the middle of the night? I don’t think so. Come with me!)

The man had been steadily closing in on her. She wrapped the rope twice around her left hand for security.

“Ich habe die richtige Ausrüstung. Schau!” (I have the right equipment, look!)

With that, Claudia grabbed one of the ice axes with her right hand, spun to her left, and with a snap, let it fly. The ax hit the man square in the chest. His throat let out a dry rasp of a death rattle as his winter white combat fatigues went red with the gush of blood pouring from his body.

“I don’t know if you can hear me,” said Claudia over her headset as she began pulling furiously on the rope, “but I’m not alone up here. We’ve got to get moving.”

Claudia was able to pull in several more meters of rope and thought surely he was almost there when the snow around her exploded in a hail of gunfire. There wasn’t time to warn Scot. If she stayed where she was, she was a dead woman. She reacted with the speed of a cat who’d stepped onto a hot stove.

Tying off the rope on one of the anchor pitons, Claudia rolled hard to her left toward the shelter of a small snowbank. The bullets fell like a hailstorm as the second sentry ran toward her with his weapon blazing. Claudia fought to pull the gloves from her hands. She needed to remove the pistol from inside her suit. The gloves came free and next was the tape that covered her zipper.

The sentry was getting closer. She could hear his boots crunching in the snow as he rushed in her direction, continuing to fire. Claudia pulled part of the tape away and then yanked down on the zipper. It opened a couple of inches and then stopped. What’s the problem? Looking down, Claudia saw the tape had become caught inside the zipper. Damn it! The opening wasn’t large enough for her to get her hand in and retrieve her gun. She pulled frantically. Come on…come on!

The man was almost all the way up the slope and in only a matter of seconds would have her perfectly in his sights. Claudia kept pulling on the zipper, then remembered her knife. She could cut a hole in the suit and pull her pistol out that way. She unsheathed the blade, pulled the material away from her body, and plunged it in. She ripped in a downward stroke and was about to reach in for her gun when she saw the sentry appear at the top of the slope. She was too late.

As the man stood in front of her, his weapon rising to fire, it was preceded by a little red dot. Laser sight. Claudia watched helplessly as the dot traced up her leg, then her chest, where she lost track of it before it flashed once in her eyes and then came to rest on her forehead.

Suddenly, the sentry’s body tensed and a red dot appeared on his own forehead. For a moment, Claudia didn’t understand, then the sentry’s dot darkened and began to drip. Blood!

Looking to her right, she saw Scot precariously perched half over the lip of the crest. He was still aiming the silenced Makarov at the sentry, who slumped to his knees and fell face first into the snow, a lake of blood forming beneath his head.

Claudia ran to Harvath as he hoisted himself onto the crest and unslung the assault rifle. For several moments he didn’t move and didn’t speak. He just lay in the snow, staring upward.

Finally, as Claudia leaned over him, he spoke. “Wow, talk about a cliff-hanger, eh?”

“Are you okay?”

Scot rubbed his throat and continued to breathe heavily. “I’ll probably be wearing turtlenecks for a while, but I’ll live. How about you?”

“Scared, but I’ll live too. You know that’s the second time you’ve done that?”

“Done what?”

“Saved my life.”

“You pulled me out of the water and off this mountain, so I’d say we’re even,” said Scot.

“Speaking of mountains, I thought you said you were a good climber.”

“I used to be. I don’t know what’s happened. Maybe I’m getting old.”

In most other circumstances, Claudia would have laughed at that. Instead, she just looked down at him, so happy he was alive.

“What happened to your suit?” said Scot referring to the slash Claudia had torn with her knife. “Were you hit?”

“No. I did it myself.”

“What were you going to do? Distract the guy by flashing him?”

“Very funny. I guess I can stop worrying about you now. You’re one hundred percent intact, bad sense of humor and all. Should we check the bodies?”

“Yeah, I guess my little nap time’s over. Where there’s two sentries, there’s bound to be more. We’ve gotta get moving before they figure out we’re here.”

“If you want to rest a few moments more, I’ll check them.”

“No, you take the one I just shot. I think I’d better take the other guy. He looks like he might have an ax to grind with you. Look for anything that might tell us how to get inside.”

They searched the sentries, patting down all of their pockets.

“Anything?” Scot asked.

“No. Just cigarettes. Nothing else useful.”

“My guy’s still warm, like he hasn’t been outside for that long. How about yours?”

“Same thing, I think.”

“Good, they probably just came on duty. Hopefully no one will be expecting them to check in for a while.”

“But this one has a radio. What if he called in?”

“There’s nothing we can do about it anyway. Let’s get going. Grab his weapon. You know how to use it?”

“H amp;K MP5. It’s a common weapon for the Swiss police. We don’t normally use silencers, but I can handle it.”

“Good, let’s move.”

Claudia pulled the weapon from the dead sentry and rolled him to the edge of the crest. Harvath counted to three, and they pushed both sentries over and threw the climbing gear along with them. They kicked up as much snow as they could to cover the blood and headed down the slope.