White Death: An Alex Hawke Novella

CHAPTER SEVEN

“All aboard!” shouted the squat little Eurostar porter at London’s busy St. Pancras station. Typical London weather, raining buckets and pea soup fog. Hawke and Congreve, each carrying their own luggage, made their way through the hubbub of the crowded platform toward the nearest first-class carriage.

Hawke entered their car first. He dropped his leather carryall on the floor of the freezing vestibule, then turned around to unburden Congreve of his Louis Vuitton hard-sider. The chief inspector was coming up the steps, huffing and puffing as Hawke snatched his suitcase away. Congreve’s cheeks had turned bright apple red in the chilly air of the terminal.

“You’re a godsend, Alex,” he croaked.

“Did you really need to bring this bloody thing? The bag alone must weigh over forty pounds. Are you mad? Ever heard of backpacks?”

Ambrose put one hand against the cold steel bulkhead and paused to catch his breath. Fishing for his handkerchief, he began to mop his brow and said, “Backpacks, you say? No, actually, I have not. What the devil are they?”

“They’re what normal people carry things in.”

“I did not pack this lovely antique Vuitton suitcase. My wife, who is a woman barely acquainted with normality, did.”

Far be it from Hawke to reply to that one. Lady Mars was one of his closest friends, and she had long aided him in his futile quest to keep Congreve out of as much trouble as they could manage. Despite the famous detective’s somewhat sedentary lifestyle, he embraced Winston Churchill’s famous claim that “There is nothing so exhilarating as to be shot at without effect.”

Safe to say Ambrose himself had dodged more than his fair share of bullets during his own legendary career at Scotland Yard. The number of bullets fired at him had decreased somewhat when he’d joined Lord Hawke and his notoriously dangerous lifestyle, but they were still quite numerous.

It was much warmer in the cabin. The two men made their way up the hectic aisle and located their seats. Collapsing into them, they each pulled out a copy of the day’s Times.

A few minutes later, the train chugged slowly out of St. Pancras Station, heading south out of London, bound for Paris and the Gare du Nord. And thence to Zurich Hauptbahnhof, the central rail station near the beautiful Zürichsee, the banana-shaped blue lake that added so much life to the city.

“Know much about Switzerland?” Ambrose said to Hawke as they crossed the Swiss border some hours later.

Hawke grinned and nodded his head.

Congreve often imitated Sir David’s brusque manner, his whisky-seasoned admiral’s bark. Hawke laughed.

“Could you believe that?” Hawke said. “Old boy had clearly been hard at his Google all morning long. Just wanted to show off.”

They both chuckled, then picked up the books they’d carried along for the train ride. Congreve’s was Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles, of course. He proudly announced he was reading it for the twentieth time. He rarely strayed from the tales of his life’s epic hero, the incandescent master detective Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

Hawke was thumbing through The Deep Blue Good-by, another tale in a brilliant series about his beloved sunburned and sandblasted knight-errant, Travis McGee, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar marina, Fort Lauderdale. What a life! Living on a houseboat, a bachelor in paradise who had his pick of every bikini tan on the beach and— And Ambrose interrupted his reverie.

“You said earlier that you’d climbed Der Nadel once before. ‘White Death,’ I believe you called it.”

“Yes. Rather odd, isn’t it? The old man wants me to climb the one mountain in all of Switzerland that I’ve never conquered. I still have dreams about that wicked bitch all the time.”

“I’ve never heard you speak much about that experience. Tell me more.”

“I’m terrified of that hill, frankly. It’s just rock, snow, and ice like all the rest. But this bitch almost seems like she wants to kill you … like you’re not anywhere near good enough for her.”

“It’s that bad?”

“Much worse. There’s a reason so many climbers meet death up there. It’s insane to even try to cheat it. That’s why they come for it. A sheer vertical face called the Murder Wall, smooth as glass. Survive that, and you’ve got a shot at reaching the summit. Which is a bloody rock spike that forgives nothing. It’s like a giant needle scratching at the top of the world.”

“Hence the name Der Nadel? The Needle.”

“Yes. Vertical faces, treacherous ice fields, swept by appalling wind and ice storms. Barely anything to hold on to or even stick your ax into. Bloody hell thing that monster is, I’ll tell you that.”

“So why did you do it?”

“Reach the summit, do you mean? Oh, I didn’t. I very nearly fell to my death from the north face. Chaps had to come up and bring me down. One of them continued on, reaching the summit looking for another climber who’d gone missing.”

“And you’re actually willing to have another go? After that nightmare? Isn’t that, as you said, ‘insanity’?”

“More than willing, Ambrose. Determined.”

“Ah. If at first you don’t succeed — why on earth would you even dare to — all because your—”

“Because my grandfather’s up there.”

There was a silence then between the two of them. Hawke abruptly picked up his old Travis McGee paperback again and pretended to read for a while. Then he put it down and stared out his window for a very long time as they began a long climb up into the sunstruck white-tipped Alps. He finally slept a bit, with his chin on his chest.