* * *
"SO, I GUESS IT GETS
PRETTY cold out here on the mountain," Jason said. Annja sat among the
tents, rummaging through her pack for things she needed to get ready for sleep.
She was annoyed at not having everything on hand; she was the world's most
seasoned traveler, young as she was.
"I usually have everything right there when I need it," she said.
"It's just, these last few days have been so crazy."
"I hear you," Jason said, hunkering down near her. "Maybe you
should share a tent with me. Might help take the edge off."
She flicked a wary glance at him. "I'm supposed to be sharing one with
Trish."
He shrugged and showed teeth gleaming in the fugitive starlight sneaking
through the clouds. "I bet I could warm you up better."
Scowling, she put her toilet kit down and turned her face to him. "Listen.
I like you, Jason. But I'm not interested in hooking up on this trip."
He flushed, and his eyes got a little wild. "I know. I know. I'm a
brother, right? It's the same old racist story. You white people. You act all
accepting. Then when it comes down to it—back-of-the-bus time."
"That isn't fair and it isn't okay," Annja said. "I'm not going
to bother defending myself to you. And I think throwing cheap accusations about
racism around are like throwing around false accusations of rape—it devalues
the whole concept, and makes life a whole lot harder on the real victims."
Shaking his head, Jason straightened back up. "I guess you're one of those
who's only interested in sleeping her way to the top," he said. "I
thought better of you, Annja. I really did."
"Sleeping my way to the top? With Doug? You have
got
to be kidding.
Anyway, isn't Kristie on top? She's the face of the program."
She was just realizing what an unwelcome visual image she'd created for herself
when Jason said, "Everybody knows this gig is your big opportunity to get
some face time as something other than a boring dry-stick librarian type
nay-saying everything. Maybe even get your own show if it goes well. But don't
worry about it, I wouldn't want to do anything to interfere with your
ambitions, lady."
He turned and walked off. It seemed to be kind of the theme for the evening.
"Now what?" she said to the cold air surrounding her.
She knew the answer, though, all too well. The same thing happened on
archaeological digs all the time. You had people spending too much time
isolated with only each other for company and you started having soap operas.
If there was less booze and dope on this trip than on a lot of digs she'd
known—which was to say none, unless Wilfork had a hidden stash, and maybe
Charlie—the tensions caused by danger and culture clash were impairing people's
judgment. She knew that sharing deadly danger was supposed to bring people
together like nothing else. She'd experienced her own share of that.
Now, it seemed, she was experiencing the opposite.
Out of the night Trish suddenly appeared. Annja felt a stab of irrational
relief at the arrival of the expedition's lone other woman.
"I can't believe it," Trish said.
"Can't believe what?" There were so many possibilities.
"That you're actually a racist. What do you think they'd say back at the
studios if they knew about that?"
"How would they react to Jason's trying to coerce me into going to bed
with him by throwing out some wild accusations?" Annja said.
Trish opened her mouth, closed it, frowned.
"Listen," Annja said, "who I have sex with is my choice. Do you
really think you can take that away from me? And I'm not discussing any
'racism' talk any further. It's absurd and insulting and I'm not going to
play."
Trish shook her head. "I just wonder if you've been…infected by these
people. You sure seem to stick up for them."
"Mainly I try to stick up for keeping the peace and not causing conflicts
over trivial stuff like who doesn't like whose opinions. We've been in a lot of
real, live danger already. It's only going to get worse."
Trish crossed her arms forcefully. She seemed dissatisfied, but unsure how to
phrase her dissatisfaction.
"You know, you guys don't really strike me as a whole lot more tolerant
than Charlie's angels," Annja said.
"Of course we're more tolerant. It's just that some things can't be
tolerated."
"That makes a whole lot of sense."
"Listen," Trish said, "we just feel like you're not standing
with us on this. If you're not with us you're against us."
Annja raised her hands in the air and let them fall helplessly by her sides.
"That's it. You're starting to quote George Bush now. You guys sleep where
you want and don't worry about me."
She got up and went off to share a tent with Levi.
Inside the tiny tent Rabbi
Leibowitz seemed nervous, almost terrified, at Annja's presence. But he was too
much of a gentleman to say so. They got into their sleeping bags back to back
and fell asleep after the briefest interaction in which Annja announced her
intention to spend the night in his tent, then asked his permission and
reassured him her only interest was sleep. Which it was.
The next day dawned bright. Annja's spirits rose with the sun, although she
knew too well both could be a deception.
They wound their way up the great mountain. By noon they reached a place on the
north face where the easy climbing ended and they faced what the seasoned
mountaineers termed a technical climb up a sheer rock face.
"Technical" meant that to ascend would require the use of protection
such as pitons, and ropes fastened to the harnesses they all wore.
Fortunately the cliff was mostly bare rock, granite with occasional extrusions
of basalt. From her training in geology Annja knew granite was extremely hard.
It would resist attempts to drive in pitons, but when hammered into cracks they
tended to hold quite well. Of course, over millions of years even granite could
be weakened by endless cycles of freezing and thawing, cracking into chunks
from pebble to boulder size ready to peel treacherously away at the rap of a
hammer or even the pressure of a climber's body.
Because this was a journey, not a sport climb, Bostitch and Baron wisely chose
not to take chances. Confronted by a sheer hundred feet of rock they sent the
two strongest climbers to scout a way and secure ropes with anchors at the top.
The others could then climb up with the aid of ropes, belayed by Baron, who
would wait at the base and come up last. Worst-case they could simply haul
exhausted or hopelessly incompetent climbers up they same way they would their
own heavy packs, which they shed before starting off for maximum agility.
Annja found herself somewhat surprised that the lead—meaning most
proficient—rock-climber was Larry Taitt. Apparently he was more than a Future
Bureaucrat of America with an uncharacteristic floppy-puppy attitude. Going
first he swarmed up the rock with the skilled assurance of a spider monkey,
driving spring-loaded camming devices into cracks in the rocks at intervals,
both to protect himself and provide surety to following climbers. After
sneering thoroughly at what the others were doing as mere "trad
climbing," Tommy Wynock free-climbed, paralleling Larry and staying a
little behind, so as to shoot his entire climb with a smaller helmet-mounted
camera. Baron tightened his lips slightly at what he had to consider a lack of
discipline. But although as expedition leader, or at least executive officer,
he considered himself responsible for the welfare of everyone on it—rightly, in
Annja's estimation—he had to face the fact that the
Chasing History's
Monsters
video and sound crew did not consider themselves to be in his
chain of command.
In any event Tommy proved to be an expert rock climber. Knowing that, Jason,
the crew chief, was content to stay at the bottom getting longer shots of the
ascent. Earlier he had taken some panoramic shots of the wide, tortured land of
eastern Turkey. Trish kept track of the dancing colored bars on the monitors of
her recorders and fiddled with her gear.
"Have you ever done anything like this before, Ms. Creed?" Charlie
Bostitch asked, craning his head to watch the climbers scale the forbidding
dark gray rock.
"Some," she admitted. "I didn't really know what I was doing,
though. I've never had much formal instruction. It was mainly a matter of not
having any choice but to go ahead and do it." Which was how she wound up
doing a lot of things, now that she thought about it.
Charlie had a wide orange double-knit headband on that clashed horribly with his
apple-red cheeks. His breath came in great dragon puffs of condensation. He
seemed elated, elevated, as if he were getting more oxygen at this altitude
than he was used to, rather than significantly less. It made Annja look with
concern from him to Baron and back again, remembering that euphoria was a
possible symptom of hypoxia. But Baron's expression remained unreadable as his
eyes were invisible behind his dark goggles.
Off to one side Hamid stood, slightly stooped, like a vulture perched on the
stiffened leg of a dead wildebeest. His expression was fierce. Then again, with
a nose and eyebrows like that Annja wasn't sure he could look any other way.
Once ensconced at the top Larry and Tommy set anchors and fed ropes through.
They tossed the lines down to their waiting companions. The Higgins twins
inspected everyone to make sure their crampons were set to the front of their
boots for a climb up a vertical surface—they were adjustable, and could also be
worn on the bottoms of the climbers' boots for walking across ice. The climbers
also used ascenders, metal grippers designed to slide up the climbing ropes but
not down, helping the user do the same.
From that point the climb came off with few dramatics. Levi did manage to break
loose twice. The second time those above simply hauled him the rest of the way
up like a backpack.
The actual backpacks came up next. Baron waited at the bottom until the last
climber was securely perched on the cliff top. Then making an ostentatious
point of using the safety ropes and all the proper safety procedures he
clambered up himself, retrieving all the climbing equipment out of cracks in
the granite as he came. When he reached the top he wasn't even breathing hard,
despite the fact they were well above eight thousand feet now.
So the afternoon progressed, in a serious of vertical stages punctuated by
hikes, often along narrow icy trails. As always Annja found these the scariest,
even though the party roped itself together for all questionable crossings. She
knew that for a party like this the greater dangers, statistically speaking,
were likely to be the deceptively gentle snow and ice fields, where hidden
crevasses and the ever-present danger of avalanche were greatest. But she'd
seen too many people come to grief on narrow cliff-face ledges to feel
complacent about them. Even if she'd actively helped some of those people come
to grief on them.
The party, it seemed, had been well screened for fear of heights. Annja herself
lacked phobias of any kind, so far as she knew, although she did have what she
considered a healthy regard for gravity.
The least experienced member of the party, Levi, was cheerfully unathletic and
not much more coordinated than a newborn foal. However, he was happily amenable
to going where he was steered. In the face of dizzying panoramas—and even more
dizzying sheer drops to certain doom—he kept a smiling, calm demeanor. Annja
was unsure whether that came from fatalistic philosophical detachment or a
self-induced nerd trance. When he explained to her at one rest break that he
occupied his mind contemplating a slew of ancient and abstruse Qabbalist
commentaries on construing the nature of the Creator, it didn't exactly clear
things up for her.
"Near-sightedness helps, too," he added with a smile.
Hamid bore the climb the same way he seemed to bear everything including
sunshine and happy tidings—with the smoldering demeanor of a pissed-off martyr.
Still, even Levi's inevitable peelings, as the seasoned climbers referred to
them, failed to produce much excitement. "That's why we use protection,
people," Baron said in a voice of suitably heavy irony as Levi swung like
a stoic rabbinical piñata over the latest terrifying void. As always his dark
tinted goggles hid his eyes, but the set of his jaw when Zeb and Jeb tittered
at his words promptly shut them down.
As the sun dropped, swelling and reddening like a boil, toward the Anatolian
Plateau behind them they began the day's last and most difficult ascent. Annja
followed Levi to help bolster his confidence as he made his halting way aloft.
His best efforts weren't enough to keep him from bumping into the rocks again
and again. Annja was climbing on her own but was bent onto the safety lines by
a quickdraw, which consisted of a pair of carabiners—basically snap rings—held
together by a synthetic strap. She helped the rabbi as best she could. This
mostly took the form of stopping him when he broke free of the cold unforgiving
rock and began to spin, helping to stabilize him and get him oriented the right
way, and generally encouraging him. He kept grinning down at her in an almost
manic way, and she guessed that only shortness of breath caused by thin air and
the tightness of his harness on his chest kept him from babbling his gratitude
in a constant stream.
At last, both pushed and pulled, the gangly rabbi reached the top. Feeling
thoroughly wrung out by the last spasm of effort Annja hauled herself over the
black rock lip.
She quickly found a scene turned to nightmare.
Levi had gotten to his feet and stood blinking in confusion through his glasses
and the goggles strapped over them. He held his gloved hands up before the
shoulders of his puffy jacket.
"Come on, vessel of unrighteousness," a harsh and thickly accented
voice commanded. "Clear the way. You will be dealt with later."
Hamid the Kurd guide gestured with the muzzle brake of the short rifle he held
in his hands. His own heavy jacket lay open to the wind that was kicking up
powdered snow all around the ledge, which was about the size of a theatrical
stage. The wind was also sweeping some fresh snow down from the dark, thick
clouds that had gathered like vultures around the peak. Did he have that thing
under there the whole time? Annja wondered, gingerly obeying his command. It
must have gouged and battered his ribs unmercifully.
She recognized the gun as a Russian-made AKSU. It was the submachine gun–sized
version of the AKS-74, although it shot the same powerful 5.45 mm cartridge as
the full-sized assault rifle. As a result it produced a fearsome noise and
muzzle blast. This wasn't the first one Annja had encountered.
Although by the wild look in Hamid's dark eyes, it could well be the last.
Bostitch and Baron stood together with the sheer dark wall of the next cliff at
their backs, their own gloved hands upraised. Bostitch blinked incessantly and
his features were slack with befuddlement, as if he couldn't wrap his mind
around this turn of events at all. Baron, though, seemed to be nearing
dangerous pressures; Annja half expected at any instant to see white steam vent
suddenly not just from his tightly compressed mouth, but from nose and ears as
well.
"I don't understand," Bostitch was saying, shaking his head.
"Why are you doing this, Hamid?"
"How can you not know? It is because your people have betrayed ours. They
have denied us the promised prize for helping them seize Iraq—the north. And they have allowed their lapdogs the Turks to assail us there, to
destroy our dreams of a free and united Kurdistan once and for all!"
Her mind racing, one question crowded its way out of Annja's chapped lips.
"Why did you wait until now?" she asked.
"Silence, unclean thing!" Hamid jabbed the AKSU at her like a dagger.
"Stay out of the way."
"That's twice," she muttered under her breath.
She saw about half the party stood on the ledge with gloved hands upraised or
clasped behind hooded or colorfully capped heads. Bostitch, Baron, Taitt and
Levi were with her. Also the darkly muscular Fred Mallory, whose black eyes
smoldered beneath charcoal-smudge brows and his army-like haircut. Next on the
rope came Wilfork, and then Zack Thompson. Josh Fairlie belayed from the bottom
of the hundred-foot face.
To one side Jason stood, his café-au-lait features wooden and gray as
driftwood, shooting the whole evil scene with the video camera that squatted on
his shoulder.
The gunman stood just to the left of where Annja had emerged onto the narrow
ledge. Obedient to his command, or at least his gun, she had moved both away
from the edge and counterclockwise. She kept moving, gently, gently. The
movement took her to what she judged was the edge of Hamid's peripheral vision.
The Kurd promptly turned his back on her to jab his AKSU down at Wilfork's
startled porkpie face, for once drained of its florid color. He screamed at him
to stay where he was. As I thought, she told herself. He doesn't think I'm
worth paying attention to.
Male-chauvinist contempt had never been so welcome. She was a little far away
from him to make a move. The last thing she wanted was to startle him into
triggering a burst into poor Wilfork's face—and rain bullets down onto those
climbing below him.
"What do you think you're going to accomplish, Hamid?" Leif Baron
said in a voice reminiscent of a metal rasp over wood.
"This faithless one here records the vengeance of the Kurdish people upon
you double-dealing capitalist infidels."
"Capitalist?" Larry said, sounding far more perplexed than scared.
"The Kurds are devout socialists," Baron said tersely. "Put a
sock in, boy."
"For daring to speak," Hamid said, "you shall have the honor of
cutting the rope that holds your friends. Then I shall shoot you all, except
the
kafir
with the camera, and roll your bodies down on the rest. Then I
shall drop rocks on any who still cling to the cliff. Then this worthless dog
and I shall descend the mountain together to show his footage to the
world."
"Can you make it down this route alone?" Bostitch asked.
Hamid laughed wildly. "If I cannot, I die a martyr. And this one dies a
dog. And in the fullness of time, Allah willing, his camera will be found, and
the world will see our vengeance. We Kurds are patient, as is Allah."
He pointed the stubby little Kalashnikov from the waist at Larry Taitt and
gestured imperatively. "Now! Cut the rope. Quickly, quickly, or I shall shoot
your master, the decadent plutocrat Charles Bostitch, in the belly. Move!"
The color dropped from Larry's face like a curtain falling. Snow began to blow
in thick swirls around them. The clouds pressed close to the merciless
mountain, enclosing them in a microcosm of fear. Larry flicked his eyes toward
his boss. His right boot trembled on the verge of taking a step.