“They are up on the north side. They’re moving across the top of the mountain. It’s tough going.”
“We have enough fuel for another pass.” Cole said. “They’re down there.” He looked up the side of the mountain butt where the handler said they’d climbed.
As the chopper lifted high above the jungle Cole studied the rock face, the play of sun and shadow making it hard to see clearly.
The mountain top wasn’t all that big. Maybe half a mile wide, a little more elongated and flatter than the ones around it. Or at least from the air it looked that way. Where the jungle did open up it was because of boulder fields and they offered no landing areas for fixed wing aircraft.
“If this is where it happened, it must have happened fast,” Cole said. “Nobody would choose this place.”
It was a miracle that the man had survived and gotten out of there and all the way to Thailand. Maybe he’d gotten help from the escaping Hmong.
They crossed the side of the mountain and looked for potential landing spots.
Cole thought grimly, yet still with fascination about Kiera Hunter down there in that jungle. She was a chip off the old block for sure.
The chopper crossed the western most point of the mountaintop and he believed now that had to be where the plane was. He felt the excitement building. He was closer than he’d ever been to the big prize. He could taste it. He couldn’t lose it now.
40
Kiera, locked in a frozen embrace on the cliff face, glanced down at Porter. She was amazed at the circle of men who’d used their packs and branches to create a makeshift cushion. I love these guys, she thought.
Porter was scanning the skyline with his binoculars in the direction of the unseen chopper. Now he turned back to Kiera.
“They’re gone,” Porter yelled. “They didn’t see you. The trees are too high and they’re too far out. You’re good. Just move your right hand up a few inches and to the right. It looks like a finger hold you can use.”
She looked but a bulge of rock blocked her vision.
“Run your hand around that nub to your right and up a little,” Porter said. “You’re real close.”
She followed his advice and found the fissure and put her fingers in and released the pressure on her left foot. She figured she’d been within about ten seconds of losing it and falling.
“Got it.”
She brought her right foot up, her knee scraping over the jagged surface. She found the narrowest of toeholds.
“Okay, get this body the hell up there,” she admonished herself.
Kiera pushed her left hand up seeking a more secure grab. She found it and pulled herself back on line. She took some long slow breaths, and then continued.
At one point she glanced back down at the men and had to smile. They’d formed a half circle around the packs, as if they might put out their arms and act as a net to break the fall to the packs. Not going to happen, she thought.
Porter, moving below from one angle to another, continued to feed her a constant stream of information, and to cheerlead her every move.
The problem of getting around the shelf was her final challenge. She remembered an instructor had referred to her as a long-legged spider. Right now she felt awkward and heavy.
The left edge of the overhang glared down at her, the final nemesis, as if determined to deny her.
“You get an elbow up, you’ve got this,” Porter yelled, his voice sure, confident. If he feared for her chances he hid it well.
Kiera had a toehold that would take all her strength to push up to the lip, but it meant giving up a good handhold. She’d have to make a kind of lunging move and if she couldn’t get a hand over the lip she knew it would be over.
She visualized the move over and over. Convinced herself. Purged her mind of all doubt. Doubt kills.
I will do this.
Her arms were beginning to shake and she felt so weak that, once more, she wanted to grab the damn wall with her teeth to take the pressure off her limbs.
Okay, she told herself, you’re ready. Just get up over the lip and you got it, girl. You trained all your life for this. Let’s do it.
Her fingers were cut and bleeding now as she jammed, grabbed, pulled at every crevice, outcrop, rip or tear she could find in the damn rock.
And then her left hand eased up over the ledge, followed by her elbow. She found a toehold that felt solid. She pushed and finally got her right shoulder and arm flattened on the ledge.
Kiera took a breath and then repositioned her lower body. Sweat rolled into her left eye and she blinked furiously, unable to use her hand.
Here we go. I own this mountain.
She made a final lunge with her right side. All or nothing.
Grabbed.
Held.
And then hauled a knee up and over. Then pulled the rest of her body.
On top of the flat surface she collapsed, emitting heaving sighs, laughed. She kissed the sun-warmed flat rock. Then lay there breathing.
Fuck me—that was hard.
She chuckled with overwhelming relief and astonishment.
She looked out across the top of the trees. The sky lay silent and still in the late day. Twilight not all that far off. The chopper had vanished but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t be back. They had to get everyone up fast.
Porter yelled, “Kiera, you okay?”
She got to her hands and knees and moved to the edge and peered down. “I’m going to find something to anchor the rope with. I need you to pick somebody who is light, but has good arm strength.”
The men were all back now looking up at her. That’s right, boys. You’re looking at a mountain-kicking chick.
Trees were plentiful on the slope behind the overhang and she found the one she wanted and secured the nylon rope.
After that it was a matter of instructing the first Hmong how to use the rope and how to climb if he wasn’t familiar with ascending rock.
It turned out the first one up was Tang, and he came with good technique and loads of strength. The guy wasn’t totally ignorant of using a rope and he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred twenty pounds.
Once he was on top he smiled appreciatively, his eyes full of admiration. “You climb no rope. Very good.”
They brought the next Hmong, then the monks one after another. Then Phommasanh. The packs were brought next to last, Porter attaching them together. With all the muscle on top, each was easier than the last.
Finally Porter, being by far the heaviest load, but the strongest as well, came up last. And, it turned out, the least happy doing the climb even with half a dozen people there to pull him up.
As he was coming up, trying to walk the face, she told him to just maintain his grip. “It’s all foreplay. Hug the rock and walk up, we’ll do the rest.”
Once he was up, he looked back down and just shook his head, then turned to her and said, “Let’s go find that plane.”
They headed away from the cliff and into the tangle of jungle. Almost immediately they discovered just how difficult the terrain was. Rocks, dips, jungle so thick you could only see ten feet in front of you. They had to wield machetes to get through and progress was slow and painstaking.
41
At Cole’s demand, Besson’s chopper curled down around a break in the tree line on a return trip up the valley.
Swinging closer to the mountain, Besson shouted, “
Vers le bas! Vers le bas!
” He pointed to a clearing. They circled.
There were five elephants but no visible people. Cole scanned the area. Then he picked up one lone and apparently unarmed person tending the elephants. He’d been right.
“Take it down,” Cole ordered. “It looks clear. But could be trouble.”
Cole grabbed a strap loop as the pilot made an acrobatic move between towering trees and sank down toward a landing spot.
The elephants, gathered around a crater watering hole, turned toward them. The one person there, who appeared to be their handler, seemed shocked to see they were actually going to land, and turned and started to run.
He slipped in the muddy water’s edge, then quickly got to his feet.
“Get that boy.” Cole yelled. “Bring him down, but don’t kill him. We need information.”
The pilot rose and circled around the crater, forcing the man to run the other way.
Besson elbowed his security chief aside and moved into the open door with his hunting rifle, sighted quickly and fired as the chopper hovered.
The man on the ground stumbled and rolled into the mud holding his left leg.
“Nice shot,” Cole said, actually thinking it was a lucky shot.
Still no signs of others.
When Besson raised his weapon as the wounded man tried to crawl away, Cole grabbed his arm. “That’s enough. He’s no good to us dead.”
The elephants scattered from the watering hole to the trees and stopped there.
“Set it down,” Cole yelled to the pilot.
The chopper settled and the security team exited with combat proficiency, hitting the ground on the run and ducking under the swirling blades.
Cole and Besson followed.
Besson’s security guys ran to the wounded man and dragged him from the mud to the grass, where he lay writhing in pain.
“Get men around the perimeter,” Cole said. “They could be close. The plane might be near here.”
Besson sent a team to the perimeter and let his security chief handle the interrogation. The man’s leg wound was used to advantage as he was in great pain and the slightest abuse there took his resistance down fast. Delivering abuse seemed to please the colonel a lot, most likely also hoping it was making up for his original screwup that made all this necessary.
Cole wanted to know two things: how many were with Hunter and Vale, and where they had gone. If they left the elephants here, their search had to be close by.
The colonel and his men worked on the elephant handler with violent, brutal efficiency. He took a lot more than Cole expected, but he finally began telling them what they wanted to know.
At first Cole didn’t believe what the man revealed, that the Hmong, the monks, Vale and the Hunter woman had actually climbed up the face of rock.
Cole and two of the men climbed up to the first ledge and they found plenty of evidence that was exactly where the climb took place. He calculated they had a two-hour time frame and could be pretty far into the search by now.
When Cole returned to the chopper he saw that the elephant handler was lying half in the bomb crater watering hole face down, the security chief looking pleased with himself.
They left his body and started back to the chopper.
The elephants at the edge of the jungle began moving closer, showing signs of growing agitation. Apparently they didn’t like seeing their handler get abused and killed.
The two biggest elephants, one of them a tusker, were out ahead of the others and their heads moved back and forth like they were in a charge mode.
“Look at those two,” Cole said. “Let’s get on out of here.”
Besson had his hunting rifle up and looked like he wanted to shoot the closest elephant. The security team made a wide birth around the elephants and all of them had their weapons up and ready.
Cole said, “They know what rifles are. They won’t charge. Shooting them might change that. Let’s go!”
They quick-stepped back to the chopper.
Once safely back aboard and the chopper lifting off, Cole watched the bull and the big female lead the others to the mahout like they were going to a member of the family to see what his condition was.
Cole was pleased. They had them now. “Let’s get teams up there. Find this damn plane.”
42
“We’re close,” Kiera said, her excitement rising with her apprehension as they pushed through a thicket and neared the source of her life in so many ways. She knew this could well be one of those moments that would define her life from now on.
Porter said the Hmong were worried now about the return of the chopper. The sound was faint, but definitely a chopper was out there somewhere. But once the sound faded away again they seemed to relax.
There was some discussion about the possibility of a rifle shot, but in the end no one could be sure. The jungle muffled all sound. It might have been a falling limb or rock or a distant thunder clap.
The terrain gave them no break. It twisted and fell and rose and turned through rock, through tangles of vines and lateral roots they had to climb over.
As they drew closer and closer to the coordinates, Kiera’s stomach tightened, her breathing quickened.
It was a strange thing to realize this was where her grandfather actually went down. That, injured, he’d still been able to get out of here and all the way to the Mekong and across into Thailand.
The terrain narrowed, rose to a knoll, the light still strong but the sunlight slanting away as they walked out to an opening of lighter growth and massive boulders. The breeze picked up from the southwest, and a smell was in the air of storms that would come later.
“If this is the place,” Porter said, “how the hell he got down here and survived is something.”
“He told me that the trees saved him. The limbs slowed the fall and broke the impact.”
Ahead lay another stretch of dark forest as they moved across the rocky knoll and made a discovery that answered one of her questions. The mountain on the west side broke off and went down gradually. It appeared to track all the way to the valley. A man could have gone that way without have to scale down cliffs.
“The elephants could maybe be brought up here if we have a lot to carry down,” Porter said. “Assuming the wreck is still here.”
“It’s here somewhere close,” Kiera said. “This is definitely how my grandfather was able to get off the mountain.”
They looked at the landmarks and referred to the hand-drawn map. Kiera turned and looked for two big boulders. “Yes, this is it. Has to be.”
This was virginal cloud forest and the declivities and gullies were densely covered.
She could sense the excitement in Phommasanh as he gave orders to the monks and Hmong. Machetes appeared from packs and the men began to clear away the heavy underbrush, moving with practiced precision.