Of course, she was devastated by the news of Carver’s death. She thought of the man he had been, their time together, the time they might have had. For months she had clung to the hope that somehow he might recover, maybe not completely, but enough that they could have some kind of future together. Now that hope had been dashed forever, and the constant, dull ache of watching him eke out a half-life in the clinic was replaced by the absolute desolation of grief.
And yet, though she could barely admit it, even to herself, she felt another emotion: relief. The burden of responsibility Carver’s incapacity had created had weighed on her, and poisoned her feelings for him. Deep down, she resented him for deserting her, disappearing into his madness and leaving her to cope, forcing her to take the job with Vermulen. Then she’d felt guilty for harboring such terrible, unfair thoughts. And that had made her resent him even more.
Now he was gone, and the weight was lifted. She could remember Carver as the man he had been when they first met. And she could try to rebuild her life, free of the creature he had become. Somewhere on the edge of her consciousness, there was even a sense of excitement, the possibility of being free for something new.
“Oh, nothing, really,” she said. “I just met someone in the lobby, someone I knew from home. She told me about a friend of ours. He’d not been well for a long time and she just heard . . . he’s died.”
Vermulen had been sitting at a writing desk. Now he got to his feet and held out his arms. His eyes conveyed profound understanding, as though a question had been answered, a problem solved.
She went to him at last, and it wasn’t because she was doing her job, but because he was a living, breathing man and she needed the shelter of his arms. She laid her head on his chest and he stroked her hair as she cried. He lifted her head and dried the tears from her cheeks. They kissed, tentatively at first and then with rising intensity until, without another word, he took her arm and led her into the bedroom.
48
T
hree days out, one more to go. It was early evening, still a while to go before sunset, and they were traversing a southeastern slope, taking shelter from the wind that had been blowing in from the sea, away to the north and west. The mountains were no more than five or six thousand feet high, but topped by razor-sharp shark’s tooth peaks that made them seem much more imposing. Carver and Larsson were back on equal terms now as they tacked from side to side up the slope, using kick turns to change the angle of their ascent. They weren’t talking much. With the amount of effort they were expending every day, breath was too precious to waste on conversation.
There was a long, exposed ridge up ahead, a spine of rock a few yards wide, which jutted from the main body of the mountain, dropping away almost sheer on either side before it fanned out again into a less precipitous slope that fell, like one side of a pyramid, to the valley floor a thousand feet below. The two men planned to cross the ridge, then ski back down to lower, sheltered ground, where they could pitch their two-man tunnel tent, brew up some water on their gas stove, and mix it with their dried rations. Carver was looking forward to beef curry and rice for supper, a classic piece of dehydrated cuisine from the Royal Marines cookbook—a taste of the old days.
The higher they climbed, the less cover there was around them. They began to feel the wind picking up, snatching at their clothes, pushing against their backpacks, beating the hoods of their parkas against their ears. For the past hour or so, the slope that rose ahead of them and to the left had filled most of their field of vision. Carver had become aware of a gradual darkening of the heavens as the blue sky gave way to thickening gray clouds. But now, as they approached the ridge, the view opened up and they could look out toward the Atlantic.
A few strides up ahead, Larsson was jabbing his arm back and forth, pointing at the horizon, and calling out a single word, “Storm!”
Carver didn’t need telling. Away to the northwest a solid wall of charcoal-colored clouds was bearing down upon them and blocking out the waning sunlight like a giant blackout curtain drawing closed.
The wind was picking up speed with every minute that passed, and flurries of snow were whipping through the air, blowing almost horizontally into their faces. As the temperature dropped, windchill would become an ever-greater threat. Exposed skin could suffer frostbite within minutes.
Carver looked past Larsson at the ridge, then glanced back toward the onrushing weather. There was no way they could make it across the ridge before the storm hit them. If they got caught out there, with no shelter on any side, they would be blown off the mountainside like seeds from a dandelion. Even if they survived the wind, they would have to cope with a whiteout. The windblown snow and diffused, cloudy light would remove all definition from their surroundings, leaving them lost and disoriented. On flat ground a whiteout was dangerous enough. On a narrow ridge, with deadly drops on either side, it meant certain death.
Carver pointed up ahead, then gave a single, decisive shake of the head and drew a finger across his throat. Larsson nodded in response and pointed back toward the main bulk of the mountain. “Make camp—now!” he shouted, barely able to make himself heard over the battering clamor of the wind.
They turned around and skied back a dozen strides to a short, flat shelf in the lee of the mountainside that gave some meager protection from the elements. They took their skis off and jabbed them vertically into the snow along with their ski poles, then slung their packs down next to them. Both men had snow shovels strapped to the outside of their backpacks. They freed them and wordlessly began digging a rectangular hole, shaped like a section of a shallow trench, fighting the wind and snow that seemed as determined to cancel out every effort they made.
When the hole was about knee-deep, Carver stepped over to Larsson’s pack and untied the nylon bag that contained their tent. If they could just erect it inside the trench, then shovel snow back over the flaps along either side, that should provide enough shelter to enable them to ride out the storm.
Working quickly, methodically, Carver sorted out the pegs, guy-ropes, and poles: far better to spend a minute doing that now than waste five panicking if anything went missing. He and Larsson drove the pegs into the snow, ready to take the cords. The tent was brand-new, designed for easy assembly. Under normal circumstances it just took a few minutes to erect, but the storm had other ideas. The gale was rising to a murderous intensity, the snow thickening. Carver and Larsson were both strong, fit men. They knew what they were doing. Their equipment was top of the line. They threw every ounce of their strength and energy into the task of securing the ultralightweight material. Yet the two men could no more resist the might of the elements than King Canute could hold back the oncoming tide.
The blizzard now reached a new crescendo, whipping the bright-red nylon tent into the air like a kite, its flight visible for no more than a second or two before it disappeared into the all-enveloping whiteness.
Carver watched it disappear. He allowed himself a quick, sharp spasm of frustration, then turned his mind to the problem of survival. Visibility was getting worse by the second. Already he could barely see the outlines of the packs and skis just a few feet away, and Larsson was little more than a shadow, half hidden by the driving snow.
“This way!” Carver shouted.
He reached out and grabbed Larsson’s arm, then dragged him along as he fought against the buffeting wind toward their equipment, lying by the rising mountain face.
There were deep drifts of snow piled between the mountainside and the wide ledge on which they were standing. In a perfect world, they’d burrow into them to create a proper snow hole, protected from the elements like an underground igloo. But that would take two or three hours. Carver estimated they had no more than fifteen minutes before the freezing wind and snow completely overwhelmed them. Their only hope was to hack out a rudimentary cave. It would be partially open to the elements, but at least it might provide some degree of shelter.
Carver set to work, stabbing at the snow and removing it in chunks like icy white bricks. By now, he’d been on the go for the better part of nine hours. The last food he had consumed had been a midday snack of energy bars and chocolate, eaten on the march. He was cold and dehydrated, shivering and sweating at one and the same time. He was wearing several layers of specialist mountain clothing, designed to expel moisture from his skin, keeping him as dry and warm as possible. But as his energy and liquid levels dropped, the clothes became less effective. He had to complete the hole as fast as possible, but the very weakness that made rest and shelter so vital was slowing him down, making every strike of the shovel an effort.
Even through the blizzard, he could see that Larsson was faring no better. His movements were slow and ineffective. He turned and looked at Carver, and though the Norwegian’s eyes were hidden by his goggles, the way his head was lowered and his shoulders slumped told Carver that his friend was close to admitting defeat.
Carver pumped his fist and screamed, “Come on!” He had no idea whether his words could be heard but the sense of them seemed to get through to Larsson. He drew himself up for a second, then turned back to the hole, attacking the snowdrift with one last, desperate spasm of energy.
By any rational standards, Carver had gone beyond the limits of human endurance. The exhaustion of his muscles, the desperate shortage of oxygen in his lungs, the relentless battery of the wind, and the insidious tentacles of cold worming into his body had fused into one all-encompassing agony. And all he had to do to make it go away was give in to the temptation to stop: to lie down in the snow, go to sleep, and surrender his life to that ghost-white embrace. But there’s a reason Special Forces selection and training involve the infliction of pain at a level that would be considered a criminal breach of human rights, amounting in any other context to virtual torture. It’s not just a matter of physical toughening. There’s a psychological, almost spiritual, element, too: accepting agony and exhaustion and—because you can always, at any time, admit failure and drop out—choosing to make them part of your life. It’s the same talent for self-mortification, or perhaps the same madness, that makes a gold-medal marathon runner or a world-champion boxer. Carver hurt. He wanted to stop. And yet, relentlessly, he chose to keep digging.
Beside him, however, Larsson was faltering again. He had given all that any man could reasonably expect. But he could not go beyond that and make the unreasonable effort on which his survival depended. He was barely able to lift his shovel, scraping at the snow, rather than attacking it. Carver could see that Larsson was past the point where encouragement would be of any use. He would have to finish the job by himself.
He hollowed out a space about waist-high, stretching back a little over a yard or so into the drift and just wide enough for the two of them to huddle, side by side, facing the open air, with their gear piled beside them. Larsson fell to the ground before summoning up enough energy to drag himself into a sitting position against the back wall with his arms folded over his knees, which were drawn up to his chest. His head was lolling forward as if his neck no longer had the strength to support it. A spasm of shivers shook him as violently as a fit.
Carver dragged Larsson’s sleeping bag from his pack and unfurled it. “Get into this,” he ordered.
Larsson grunted incoherently and did nothing. Carver lifted up Larsson’s goggles. His eyes were bleary and unfocused. Hypothermia was setting in.
Lifting up Larsson’s boots with his left arm, Carver used his right to drag the sleeping bag over Larsson’s feet and halfway up his legs. Next he grabbed Larsson around the back and heaved him off the ground in a sort of fireman’s lift, slipping the rest of the sleeping bag under his raised backside and then, once Larsson had been lowered to the ground again, pulling it up his body. Now, at least, the sleeping bag was insulating Larsson from the chill of the shelter’s icy walls and floor. But there was still much more to be done.
It was vital to get a hot drink into Larsson’s system. Carver unpacked the gas stove, set it up, and pumped the fuel reservoir to create the pressure needed before the burner could be lit, the old-fashioned way, with a naked flame. Carver had a packet of matches, but he couldn’t hope to light them with his hands encased in thick ski gloves. He ripped off his right glove, exposing his hand to the cold. It started to shake. He tried to strike a match against the box, scrabbled feebly across the surface, overcompensated when he tried again, and snapped the end off the match, unlit.
Three more attempts followed. On each occasion, he got the match alight, only for the flame to be snuffed out by the gusts of air eddying around the snow cave.
Larsson gave another convulsive shiver.
This wasn’t going to work. They needed more shelter. Carver pulled his glove back on, crawled out of the hole, and reached out for one of the blocks of snow he’d cut from the drift. He hauled it back toward him and positioned it at the opening of the cave. It took five precious minutes to build a low wall, shin-high, across the entrance: five minutes in which Larsson’s spasms became progressively more feeble. But now, at least, there was a pocket of still air and Carver could finally ignite his stove, cram a pot full of snow, and brew up some strong tea, sweetened with sugar and condensed milk.
He poured half of it into a cup and held it to Larsson’s lips, gently pouring it into his mouth. At first, Larsson gagged, unable even to swallow. But then he relaxed and drank. A flicker of life returned to his eyes.
Carver gulped down a few mouthfuls of tea for himself. Then he opened one of the outside pockets of his backpack and pulled out a bar of Kendal mint cake, a white, creamy block of sugar, glucose, and water, flavored with mint oil. It contained virtually no protein, vitamins, essential minerals, or anything else that would please a health-conscious nutritionist. But as a means of providing an exhausted body with a shot of raw fuel, it was pretty hard to beat.