Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  He stepped back from the lectern and put one hand in his trouser pocket. ‘In 1971, I read a book that started me thinking. I was quite a young man then, before I became a pastor. Some say I’m from a privileged background and in many ways I am. I was born into a whole bunch of money and sometimes I wondered why. It gave me an edge though, an advantage. I was able to study with the best students and learn from the best teachers and I took it upon myself to do just that. I was in a position to see things that most ordinary hard-working, patriotic Americans were not in a position to see, because they were too busy just trying to feed their families. I tell you, my friends, I saw and I acted. What you are doing is right, organizing yourselves into groups such as this one. That is your Second Amendment right as God-fearing American people. Heck, we’ve been subjugated before. That’s what the fourth of July is all about. But the demon is not here, my friends; the stain of the beast is not yet with us. It is coming, however, mark my words. But it won’t grow here; that diabolical foetus is weaning in malice elsewhere.’

  He paused then and touched his moustache with his tongue. ‘The Omega Foundation is just that. Omega, the last, the end. I’ve been watching and preparing my ground for thirty years and you must do the same. The fight may yet come to this country’s soil. The UN is just the beginning. The time of desolation that was foretold seven hundred years before the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ is at hand. I charge you, my friends, to read the second and seventh chapters of Daniel. You’ll read about four kingdoms—only the fourth one, the beast of iron that smashes and tramples all before it, is a broken kingdom. It comes in two parts and right now the second stage of that kingdom is all but complete. We’re told by the Lord himself in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke that: “The abomination that causes desolation, the nameless one, will stand in the temple of the Lord and claim to be the Lord.”’

  He looked straight at Robinson. ‘Evan,’ he said. ‘Lead these folk in the name of the Lord. The foundations are laid and time grows short. Keep your guns loaded and your powder dry.’

  Swann and McCulloch sat across the table from Frank Cairns at Paddington Green police station.

  ‘Who stole the van, Frank?’ Swann asked him.

  Cairns sat with his arms folded, next to the duty solicitor. ‘What van?’

  ‘The van you drove to Consett.’

  ‘Never heard of fucking Consett.’

  ‘Frankie,’ McCulloch wagged his head, ‘we’ve got you on videotape buying petrol.’

  ‘No, you haven’t.’ Cairns leered at him across the desk. ‘I wasn’t there. I was with friends in Croydon. I can give you half a dozen witnesses.’ He looked at his lawyer. ‘This is a fucking stitch-up. When I get out of here, I want you to sue these bastards.’

  Swann shook his head at him. ‘Real hard case, aren’t you, Frankie. Little Nazi boy running around whacking blacks and Pakistanis.’

  ‘I object to that, Sergeant,’ the solicitor stepped in. ‘You cannot make accusations which have no basis in fact.’

  ‘He’s a member of Action 2000. They, in case you didn’t know, are Nazis.’

  The solicitor shook his head. ‘You have not established that my client is a member of any political group.’

  For a moment Swann was silent, then he changed tack. ‘Who did the talking, Frank? Was it Joanne Taylor that spoke to you? Was it you, even? No. More likely to be Tommy. Yeah?’

  Cairns shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I suppose it was James Ingram to start with. Maybe he put them on to your firm. Got somebody else to do his dirty work.’

  ‘There you go again,’ Cairns said. ‘Rambling. You want to watch that, you know. First sign of madness.’

  They took him back to the cell. Swann called Webb at the Yard to find out the results of the Section 18.

  ‘Find anything, Webby?’ he asked. ‘We’re getting nowhere here.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Webb told him. ‘No shoes we can match to the puddle tread and nothing for the thread in the cab.’ He paused. ‘He’s either dumped them or stashed them somewhere else.’

  ‘Or it wasn’t him.’ Swann scratched his head. ‘He reckons he’s got half a dozen witnesses for the time we think he was driving the van. I thought the Paddington Green treatment might shake him up, but it hasn’t.’

  They held him for forty-eight hours, but he stuck to his story. The solicitor knew they had nothing more concrete than the video evidence, which was not good enough on its own. They had no choice but to release him. He waved to Swann as he was driven away.

  Autumn in London was wet and cold. In January it snowed hard. Swann and Webb went to Scotland and climbed ice-crusted waterfalls. They stayed in a small hotel on the banks of Loch Tay with Pia and Caroline.

  He lay upstairs with Pia. They had the curtains drawn back, so they could see the wafer of light from the moon over the darkness of the loch. Long after they had made love and Pia slept against him, her body soft and warm, Swann lay on his back with the pillow raised, one arm behind his head, and looked out at that moon.

  He fell asleep and dreamed. Steve Brady, standing at the bottom of the bed with his head caved in and blood dripping over the ice axes, which dangled from smashed wrists. He woke up screaming.

  ‘Jesus, Jack. What the hell’s the matter?’ Pia sat bolt upright, her fingernails digging into his shoulder blades.

  She switched on the light and stared at Swann’s ashen face, his eyes sunk back in their sockets. ‘You were dreaming again, weren’t you. The climb. You and Steve Brady.’ She sat down and sighed. ‘You should never have gone on to the ice, Jack. That’s not the way to deal with it. You need to talk about it. Don’t you see, you have to. You’ve bottled it up for years.’ She got out of bed and stood there, naked, goose pimples rising on her skin. ‘I can’t go on like this. I really can’t, Jack.’

  He reached out and took her wrist, pulling her back towards him. ‘I’ll be all right,’ he said.

  ‘No, you won’t, Jack. You won’t. You’ll go on and on and on.’ She flared her nostrils at him. ‘I love you, you know. I really love you. You can trust me. Talk to me. Talk to me now. How can I help you, if you won’t even talk to me?’

  Swann poured a shot of whisky from the bottle on the bedside table. He held the glass with white knuckles, fingers gripping the wet sides like ice, sweat still sticky on his brow.

  ‘The Diamir face,’ he began. ‘Steve wanted to go on.’ He looked at Pia. ‘I’ll tell you, Pia. I’ll tell you now. Just don’t leave me.’

  Ice crusting the vertical walls of the Merkl Gully, where Hermann Buhl had stepped before him and the Messner brothers, Gunther never making it off the mountain. Swann looked across at Brady, as the clouds rolled in around them, massing against the summit and yet still allowing a glimpse at 8000 metres.

  ‘London’s a long way from here, Jack,’ Brady said. ‘When’re we going to be here again?’

  Swann looked up at those steep, grey curves where buttresses of ice had dripped in the sun that had blinded them earlier, replaced now by thick dark cloud that promised snow and perhaps the threat of avalanche.

  He gazed below to where Ellis and Bowen had been; but surely now Bowen had got him down, thousands of feet below, upon the grey-black centipede of the glacier and the safety of walking on flat ground where you were sure of your axe and boots. He looked back at Brady and caught the fever of light in his eyes.

  ‘We should go back, Steve. We won’t make it before the weather breaks.’

  ‘We can make it, Jack. I’ll lead. Come on. You and me, alpine-style. This is Nanga Parbat. The Himalayas. We can make it. Look, you can see the bloody summit.’

  Swann did look and Brady was right, you could still see the summit cast in pink with the final glow of the sun.

  ‘OK, go for it, you bastard. But we better fucking make it.’ Swann kicked in with the points of his crampons, legs slightly bent at the knee. He checked his weight against the slim metal
screw twisted into the fissure of grey ice at his chest. He peered at the screw, not seeing it and seeing it, then he rested his weight, took the slack through the sticht plate and looked up. Brady was already climbing and the cloud seemed to murmur with voices of caution as Swann watched him, ice axes inverted, the shaft loops loose about his wrists as he plunged in the picks and hauled himself up the face.

  ‘The bastard’s not putting in enough protection,’ Swann murmured. He wanted to shout, but the cloud swirled about him now and the first flakes of snow were settling on his jacket.

  He knew then that they would not make it. The cloud was too low; already the sun, which had glided across the summit in false caress only moments earlier, had betrayed them. Above him, Brady faltered, stopping on the ice as if, with the descent of the cloud, his confidence had drained away. For a moment he looked back, down the funnel of the gully, with ice and rock and mountain, steep and unforgiving, all about him. ‘Come back,’ Swann said to himself, Brady being too high to summon from here. He felt the rope go slack, the weight of it damp now against his arms. He paid out a little more as Brady seemed intent on one more effort. Thoughts of bivouac entered Swann’s head, but where could you bivouac in the Merkl Gully?

  Brady moved up again; Swann saw the arc of the axe and then the left foot rising and kicking in. He saw the ice splinter, an image imprinted on his mind from sixty feet below. And then the rope sang and Brady was in space, adrift all at once from the face. Even then, Swann thought of descent; only Brady’s descent was loose and fast and lost from the wall. The rope fizzed under his hands and Brady was sliding, slithering off the face, desperately trying to twist one ice axe round for a brake. And then he was past, floundering. For an instant, Swann saw his face, lips drawn back, the red of his gums—and then gone. The rope bucked and kicked and then hauled at the muscles in Swann’s forearms as he rammed it over the sticht plate. It buzzed and hummed with the vibration. Never would he forget that sound. In the deepest sleep, in the quiet of the morning, he would feel the snap of his muscles and the sudden weight that racked his body, forcing his feet down in the ice till it crumbled and cracked, and then he was loose, hanging horizontally in his harness, the rope between him and the belay point harsh and taut and tearing into his body.

  For what seemed an eternity, Swann hung there, holding the stricken rope, eyes fixed on the sliver of metal that plugged them both to the wall. And the snow fell harder, flakes of ice it seemed, in his eyes, his nose, coating his body in a fine mist of white so he could no longer see the ice screw. He calculated the distance in his mind. No protection between them. Sixty feet up, one hundred and twenty of falling. He had felt the shudder through his arms as Brady bounced off the packed ice of the gully wall, and now the weight was such that he knew, though he could not see, Brady was hanging as he was, adrift from the mountain. No movement: either Brady was unconscious or he could not get a grip on the wall.

  Swann took the loose end of the rope, twisted it round his right leg and tied off. Now, at least, he had his hands free. But he was still lying on his back in mid-air; his harness seemed to have worked itself down and he could not get straight. But more than that, it was the weight of his partner which pulled him. Swann found breathing hard, tight and constricted in his lungs, no room for his diaphragm to work. He knew he had to get upright, too long like that and he would pass out, not much longer and he would die of asphyxiation. He still had both axes on his wrists, and he let the loop of one slide down his forearm until he could grip the shaft. He swung it upwards with all the strength he could muster, and the pick bit into the ice and held. Swann hauled on it and the rope tore at him. For a moment he gasped; he could feel the restricted flow of blood to his lower body, a fizzing sensation as the veins were squeezed shut. After a few moments of manoeuvring he managed to get himself semi-upright, and he sat there, hanging on to the shaft of the axe.

  He could breathe now and he peered below, dangling like a spider from a single thread, as the snow fell in flurries about him, hiding the world beyond the wall at his nose. Looking up he could see nothing, right in the thick of the clouds now; he should never have agreed. They should have gone down when they still had the chance. He thought about the ice, and the atmospheric change from the heat of the day when your clothes fairly wring with sweat to the sudden shift as the clouds roll in and the temperature drops like a stone. For a time the ice is weakened, still partially melted by the sun and not yet given over to the hardening of the night. That’s why starting at first light was so important: the ice is packed hard, having frozen solid during the night. It is bitterly cold to begin with, but your feet and axes are more certain then than at any other part of the day.

  He looked below, but could not see Brady anywhere. He knew he was in space over the gully. He had an abseil rope over his shoulder. Leaning against his axe head, he pulled the rope round and taking another ice screw, wound it into the wall with the head of his second axe. He buried it as deep as it would go and pulled down on it hard. You never knew with ice: with rock you can almost be certain of your belay, but ice moves, it contracts and expands and what is sure to begin with does not necessarily stay that way. Once the screw was in the wall, Swann took a sling and two karabiners and hooked himself on to it. He tied off the climbing rope, then unclipped himself. The rope jerked and Brady slipped that bit further, and now he was hanging on his own, only the single ice screw to hold him. But there was only half the weight and Swann had faith in that screw. The relief was incredible, but he was aware of a dull pain, between his belly and his bowels, and he wondered if he had ruptured something. No time to think about it now, he had to find his partner and somehow get down to their tent before the weather blocked their retreat.

  He abseiled, kicking out from the wall and sliding down on a figure of 8. He came to where the wall pushed out in a ledge to the drop below and saw Brady dangling twenty feet further on. Fifteen feet more and he would be back on the slope. It was steep but not vertical. Swann got to the ledge and stopped. ‘Steve,’ he called. ‘Can you hear me, Steve?’

  No answer. Swann looked at the way his body was hanging. His left foot was at an awkward angle and he was bleeding from somewhere. Swann dug home another piece of protection and tied off. He pulled the rope down, clipped in to the new ice screw and abseiled down to the wall above which Steve Brady was hanging. It was getting darker now and the snow fell harder. If he could just get him down to the camp. But then he wondered, where was the camp? Were they following the same route? Then he felt panic overtake him. No they weren’t, the lower slopes of the gully had been too steep and they had traversed some distance before going up it again. So where did that leave the tent? The fall, Brady hanging in mid-air; everything was a blur all at once. He forgot about the tent. What he had to do was to get Brady.

  Once on the wall below Brady, he tied off again. What he would give right now for a bolt gun. He climbed back up. Brady was unconscious, but his eyes were flickering. His head was badly gashed, mouth split and his left foot definitely broken somewhere. There was no way he could climb. Swann looked down and the mountain slopes seemed treacherous beyond belief. He had no choice: if they did not get off this face both of them would die.

  Moving above Brady, he fixed another belay point and tied off the abseil rope. Then he fixed a rope sling between himself and Brady, about ten feet apart. Brady still twirled in space. Swann unclasped his pocket knife and cut through the rope that held Brady to the ice wall above them. He took in the slack on his own rope, but there was still a terrific jerk as Brady fell a few feet more. Swann felt the wrench at his middle again and Brady groaned below him. ‘You OK, Steve? Can you hear me?’ he called. Brady looked up at him for a moment and his eyes seemed to expand and contract in his head.

  ‘Jack?’

  ‘You fell, Steve. Don’t talk. I’m lowering you down, abseiling along with you.’

  ‘Cold, Jack. Cold.’

  ‘I know. Don’t talk.’

  So they began the
long descent with snow falling all about them. Every now and then mini-avalanches would overtake them and Swann would press himself tighter to the wall and pray that the ice screw would hold. He got them three hundred feet, six hundred, nine hundred, and then the darkness was closing in so hard he had no idea where they were on the wall. The tent and the final camp were but distant memories; every sensation, every bearing had been turned upside down. Below him, Brady kept talking as if the very words would keep him alive. He told Swann he could feel nothing below his waist. ‘Am I paralysed, Jack? D’you think I’m paralysed?’

  ‘You’re fine. It’s just shock.’

  ‘Yeah. Shock. That’s it, Jack, just shock.’

  At twelve hundred feet it got steeper and Swann cursed himself for not being able to find somewhere to bivouac. Below him, as the gloom grew, he could see a snow ledge, about ten feet across. Beyond that he saw nothing, but it might be good enough for them to huddle together. They had no tent, no food, no sleeping bags. Their intention had been to reach the summit and get back to the tent in eight hours. That was history now, consigned to the dustbin of foolishness. Swann was angry. Brady would not be hanging there if they had retreated when they should have done. The one thing a climber never messes with is Himalayan weather.

  He looked again at the ledge, sixty feet below. It looked full and snow-covered and maybe there would be enough depth to dig some sort of snow hole before it got too dark.