White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

White Death. Appropriate name, Hawke thought. Early mountaineers had given the mountains far more benign names: Jungfrau, the Virgin. Monch, the Monk, and so forth. But this particular massif had a far more malicious moniker: the White Death.

Always known to Hawke as “the Bitch.”

That was because the alpine pioneers had long ago listed it as one of the “impossible” faces, in the days when sportsmen had engaged in pure climbing, before men had armed themselves with piton and snap ring. Later, many of the “impossible faces” would fall to the record books. But the southern face of his mountain had retained her virginity for a very long time.

Luc Bresson had told him the story. In the mid-1930s, he’d said, the Nazi mountain-and-cloud cult sent wave after wave of fair-haired German youth to have a go at Der Nadel — restless Hitler Youth fueled by a lust to chalk up one more victory on the Vaterland side of the scoreboard. Hitler himself offered a gold medal struck with a diamond swastika for the first to make it to the top. Years went by, and, in a neatly regimented sequence, all those flaxen-haired romantics would plummet to their deaths. But the Bitch, in all her glory, still retained her hymen.

A few minutes later, when Sigrid returned to the table, Blinky smiled and said, “Alex and I have just been enjoying the spectacular view, my good woman.”

“Disturbing view is more like it,” she said. “May we switch places, dear Blinky? I don’t think I could stand to sit here looking at that damn thing while I eat.”

“Of course you can,” he said, and got to his feet to effect the swap. Now seated next to Sigrid, Hawke took her hand beneath the table. It was a private sign between them. He would squeeze it thrice and she would return the favor. Three squeezes meant I … love … you!

“Are you quite all right, darling?” he whispered to her.

“Of course. Don’t be silly. Why shouldn’t I be? It’s just that I don’t do very well at this altitude.”

But Hawke was no longer listening.

He had turned sideways in his chair. Blinky saw that he was staring up at the needle-shaped pinnacle of Der Nadel. And he had a very strange look on his face. A chill went up Blinky’s spine — that look was a cloud of fear, and it was the very first time Blinky had ever seen it pass across Alex Hawke’s face.

The jolly threesome spent another half hour or so enjoying the Hungarian soup and the ice-cold Hofbrau beer. Blinky worked his magic, steering the group away from what was clearly the elephant at the table: the bloody mountain that would not leave any of them alone. For his part, Blinky was enjoying the sight of Lord Alexander Hawke flirting with a woman he so obviously had come to care for deeply. And, equally obviously, passionately.

“Will you excuse me for a moment?” Alex said, rising from the table while staring up at his mountain. “Brief change in the weather. A brief moment where you can actually see that infamous needle scratching at the underside of heaven. Have a look. That perpetual mist hanging around the summit is giving me a brief window to … I’ll be right back.”

Sigrid and Blinky sat watching him move through the tourists to the rail, where he fed some coins into the telescope.

“Excuse me,” Hawke said to a blond woman dressed in that ’70s all-white disco glitz of the long-gone jet-setters. “Would you mind very much moving a few feet to your right? Terribly sorry.”

She whirled around as if to say something nasty, got a look at who she was talking to, and said, “Of course not, honeychile, is this all right? Maybe another foot?”

Hawke nodded, gave her a smile, and stared up at the other bitch there that day. The Murder Wall had disappeared into the mists again. The air seemed to be turning cooler … as the mountain was again lost to him. He closed his eyes and felt the warm sun on his face.

The warmth of the weightless mountain sunlight was snatched away time and again by invading wisps of cool highlands air. He’d lost his precious moment of unfettered observation.

Every time he looked up at the death-shrouded colossus, he could almost feel it throwing its weight around, almost like it was trying to stare him down.

He felt a chill breeze on his cheek and shivered involuntarily. He flashed on his first attempt at the Wall, how he and his grandfather had been beaten senseless by brutal flash storms from the north, collected and amplified in the natural amphitheater of the Murder Wall. Raging fits of wind and snow that had lashed at them and ripped their goggles from their eyes. These had been the shrieking storms that could instantly snap a man’s neck against that sheer rock face. And then leave him to hang there on the face, twisting in the wind, frozen, for as many years as it took for someone to recover him. … That had been his thought when his piton had given way and he’d plummeted nearly a thousand feet before jolting to a stop when his line had snapped tight.

The violence of the sudden arrest had broken his left leg. His seventy-year-old grandfather had quickly rappelled down to his position and splinted the fracture. Hawke had insisted he was all right and could wait for the rangers to get him down. After a fruitless argument with his stubborn grandson, the older man had continued his climb to the summit. He had one more mountain to climb, he had always told his friend, one more mountain to climb.

And that was the last they had ever seen of the man who had been his beloved guardian since he was seven years old.