Storm Crow

by Jeff Gulvin

  Above him he felt something give. A jerk in the rope, which at first he thought was a chunk of falling ice or heavy snow, but it jerked again and he could see the rope loosening in his hands. He looked below and started to move again, only sixty feet, fifty, forty. Then he felt a terrific snapping of the rope and for a second he thought he was going to fall. The ice screw holding them to the wall was working itself loose, the combined weight of both of them too much for the fragile housing. Swann looked again at the ledge below and then at Brady’s upturned face.

  ‘The ice screw’s coming out, Steve,’ he said, voice stumbling over the words. ‘It can’t hold both of us.’

  Brady looked up at him, opened his mouth and closed it again. Swann had one hand in his pocket, looking at the ledge below them. The screw jerked again and he felt a shiver run from the top of his spine and disappear between his buttocks. The cold chipped at his face, ice on his partial beard and sticking his eyelids together. The rope jerked again and Swann took out his knife.

  ‘Jack. No.’ Brady lifted a hand as if to ward off a blow.

  ‘It can’t hold us.’ Swann had the knife open, his heart so high in his chest it all but stopped up his throat. ‘Look, Steve. Look below you.’ Brady was whimpering like a child.

  ‘FUCKING LOOK, STEVE.’ Swann bellowed it at him and Brady looked below. ‘Snow ledge, Steve. It’s only about fifteen feet.’ Again the screw moved. Swann did not dare slide any further in case it pulled out altogether.

  ‘Don’t cut the rope, Jack. Please don’t cut the rope.’

  Swann blocked his ears. The weight was too much. He remembered Simpson and Yates in the Andes years before. Yates cut Simpson. The first law of mountaineering: you have to save yourself. Simpson fell 150 feet and survived. All Brady would do was drop about fifteen and land in the soft, freshly fallen snow on that ledge.

  ‘Don’t cut the rope, Jack. You’ll kill me. Don’t kill me, Jack.’

  Swann held the rope that bound them together and began to saw. Again the ice screw shuddered—it must’ve been all but out of the wall now. Swann sawed and sawed and all the time he did so, Brady pleaded in his ear. ‘Don’t cut the rope, Jack. Please don’t kill me.’

  Swann sawed, snow in his eyes, and the rope was fraying and fraying and then finally it broke. Brady fell. He did not cry out, just looked up, eyes falling away as he lost height, and then he landed with a thump on the ledge. Swann watched him roll and stop, and relief flooded through him. And then the ledge collapsed, and Brady fell with a cry in his throat that Swann would remember for the rest of his life.

  And silence. Not even the wind, just a perfect stillness, with night falling and the snow dropping soundlessly on to him. Swann clung to the wall like some exhausted insect, with the frayed end of the rope dangling between his legs. He stared at the ledge: it had been a good ledge, full of packed snow, and now it was no longer there.

  He clung there all night and the voices of dead climbers whispered to him through the moan of the wind. He must have slept, because he woke up in the morning still hanging on to that wall, with the clouds all about him and no sign of the sun. He was stiff and freezing cold, and wondered what he was doing there.

  He shook his head and remembered. And then he began to cry, still tied off on the abseil rope, somehow having survived the night, with his body temperature so low he was but degrees from hypothermia. He sobbed and sobbed until he could not cry any more. And all around him the mountain seemed to ring with voices, whispers, cries, guttural voices of men, the clink of axes in ice, the stamp of frozen feet on rock, as if every climber who ever set foot on the Diamir face was raging at what he had done.

  Somehow he got moving, abseiled the rest of the way, and then one more rope length and he could walk, climb backwards and scramble the rest of the way down the mountain. Every inch of the way he prayed he would find Brady—lying in the snow, hurt yes, but still alive—but there was no trace of him anywhere. The last few thousand feet he stumbled in a state of delirium, the cold, the lack of food and the sheer emotional trauma taking his senses from him. He saw other climbers, far distant, in woollen breeches and carrying hawser ropes. A woman’s voice urging him on. Once he saw Brady, heard him calling and he started to lurch across the pack ice before he realized there was nobody there.

  Sometime that evening he stumbled down the final stretch of the glacier and into base camp on his own. Bowen was on his feet, grabbing Swann as he fell forward, pitching into the tent. He took him and lowered him carefully, wiping the flecked snow from his face. ‘Where’s Brady?’ he said.

  Pia was silent after Swann had finished speaking. He sipped whisky and flicked at the build-up of tears in his eyes. ‘I killed him, Pia. I killed Stephen Brady.’

  She touched his cheek with a soft palm. She was naked, her beauty framed in silhouette against the moonlight. ‘He killed himself, Jack. You tried to save him.’

  ‘I cut the rope.’

  ‘Yes, you cut the rope. But he made the mistake.’

  ‘He pleaded with me.’ Swann’s eyes buckled into knots of grizzled flesh. ‘He pleaded with me not to kill him.’

  Pia kissed his eyes. ‘If it’d been the other way round, he’d have done the same thing.’

  ‘No.’ Swann shook his head.

  ‘You know he would, Jack. You’ve told me yourself. Every climber who ever steps on to a hill knows the risks. He should not have gone on. The weather closing in like that, temperature dropping. Even I know it was madness.’ She stroked his hair and eased herself back into the bed beside him. ‘Ssshh,’ she whispered. ‘It’s all right. It’s all right. You’ve got it out, talked it out, Jack. Everything will be all right.’ She kissed his face and chest and neck, gently, like the wings of a butterfly fluttering over his skin.

  Swann closed his eyes as she moved lower down his body, her hand on his thighs, his belly, lips brushing against him. He reached for her then, the breath stuck in his throat; warm skin, the softness of her breasts, he kneaded them with stiff fingers. He worked himself against her and she caressed his buttocks, then took his penis in her hand, stroking him as he stiffened.

  On her back now, a light in her eyes and her legs wrapped about his waist, ankles locked, squeezing the love out of him as he moved inside her. He could not get close enough, could not get deep enough; frantic now, his skin on fire, the muscles of his face twisted in a mask of pain. Her fingers raked his hair, pulling his head down, pushing it back again, her tongue in his mouth. Then he came with a roaring in his throat like the guttural cry of an animal; and all the fear, the pain and the weakness flowed out from inside him.

  Tommy Cairns believed he had heard the last of them. Nothing on the phone, nothing in the mail. When he first found out it was Ingram’s farm that had been incinerated, he thought it was hysterical. But on reflection he had sobered. Why choose Ingram’s farm? How did they know about it? The reports in the papers said that the workshop was accessed by a passage from the wine cellar, something to do with the original owner’s being terrified of marauding Scots. Maybe that’s why it was chosen. But he knew that whatever Ingram said, the police would think he knew about it. That gave them a hold over him. Not that they needed one; no one knew who they were. Not only that, but Frank had been arrested. He did well and they had to let him go, but it had been close. The press reports about the death of the American at the farm hinted that it might not have been an accident. That disturbed him. Maybe they killed those whom they used, like the female praying mantis.

  He was working at the back of a flatbed lorry in early March, loading some sheets of plywood, when the mobile sounded on his belt. Almost before she said anything he knew that it was her.

  ‘Hello, Tommy,’ she said.

  He stood still, then rested against the back of the truck. ‘What d’you want?’

  ‘The last job I told you about.’

  ‘No. Frank got nicked. We’re not doing any more.’

  ‘It’s a very simple job, purchase and delivery.
Fifteen thousand pounds.’

  Cairns stopped. He was pretty sure that if the police had been watching Charlie, they were not doing so now.

  ‘Frank got arrested.’

  ‘And he got released, didn’t he. This is the last job, Tommy. After that, we’ll leave you alone.’

  ‘I don’t want nothing to do with chemicals.’

  For a moment she paused. ‘You will help us, Tommy.’

  A chill went through him then and he could feel his mouth drying. ‘What do we have to do?’ he said carefully.

  ‘Just buy some more glass.’

  ‘Fucking glass. Jesus Christ. I’m not hiring any more vehicles. And it’s too risky stealing them.’

  ‘Then use one of your own lorries. You’re a building firm, aren’t you?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I’m really fucking stupid.’

  ‘So, you’re out.’ The way she said it sent a shiver scuttling down his back. ‘Because if you are, I want you to remember that we know who you are.’

  ‘Frankie knows who you are—two of you at least.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s a mistake that needs rectifying.’

  Cairns did not scare easily. He’d been in Belmarsh and other nicks and held his own with the worst of them. Growing up, he and Frank had been in fights galore and had often taken people on when the odds were more than two to one. But he recalled seeing Frank’s ashen face after he dumped the taxi. He knew what was going to happen. The bearded one’s eyes, he kept saying, you should’ve seen his eyes.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Last time. After that, you leave us alone. You fuck off back where you came from and never call me again.’

  She laughed in his ear. ‘That’s more like it, Tommy. Action 2000, remember. A little before 2000—but action all the same.’

  Apart from the cold, Harrison preferred surveillance in winter. The difficulty was getting on to the land unnoticed. But, once there, a winter gilly suit would hide you from anything. During the winter Salvesen was less active. Harrison knew that he had been on a preaching and speaking tour throughout most of the fall. He was not only invited by leaders of the militia, but by some of the mainstream churches: Baptists in Arizona, Seventh Day Adventists in Colorado, Assembly of God in California. Much of the tour was broadcast on his radio station, and Harrison had listened to his sermon in Nevada. Afterwards, he had looked up some of the passages in the Bible.

  Harrison had also written down what he had heard him dictating when he made his one covert entry into the compound. The Gentiles’ day and all that. 1967. The Six-Day War when the Israelis recaptured Jerusalem from King Hussein of Jordan. He had sat in his trailer when he wasn’t seeing Guffy and flicked through an old copy of the Bible. He looked up Revelation, chapter thirteen and found the beast with seven heads, one of which had been wounded, and the ten horns with ten crowns upon them. He read more, trying to get a handle on where exactly Salvesen was coming from, and he found another beast in chapter twelve, a red dragon with seven heads and ten horns, only this time the heads had crowns and none of them had been wounded.

  In early March the snow was still banked up to the highway and Harrison went to Nevada for three days to visit a friend. He drove out of Passover with his bag packed, having already requested his handlers to procure some item of interest from the casinos in Reno and leave it in the dead drop for his return. He hid his truck off the highway near Shoshone and waited for Scheller and Brindley. They gave him a new truck, loaded with a snowmobile, and he drove back to the valley looking like any other tourist. He headed through Passover and West-lake unnoticed, and parked off the road to Dugger’s Canyon.

  He snowmobiled to the hogan and made it to the high lay-up point, using snowshoes and two long ice axes. In the wintertime the rocky outcrop formed the basis of a natural snow hole and he could sleep there in some semblance of comfort.

  Salvesen did not ease up on his patrols just because it snowed. Rather than have his men trudge around on snowshoes, they used snowmobiles and sped around the outer perimeter fence. They also conducted the odd military manoeuvre inside the compound itself. Sometimes they would be conducted at night and the odd poacher had mentioned the coming and going, quietly in the bar. Normally, though, they would go north of the compound, deep into the hills and draws, to the training centre. Harrison had joked about it with the guys back in Salt Lake. Some kind of Bekaa Valley in Idaho.

  He settled down in his snow hole and watched for a while, then fell asleep and was awoken in the morning by a six-point royal bull calling to his herd from the rocks above his head. It was like a foghorn going off and Harrison nearly cracked his head as he woke up. He heard it again, thought the world was falling in on him, then he smelled the rancid scent of its breath. He could see the points on the rack as the huge elk shook its head and bellowed across the mountain. Its front hooves were right on top of the snow hole, supported by the outcrop of rock. Danny Dugger had got an eight-point bull the year before last. He was hunting with Chief, Chief using his bow. He had loosed one off and missed. Danny brought it down with a rifle they had taken as back-up. They never kept the rack, but it was eight points and the elk weighed over a thousand pounds, bigger than some of the horses on the ranch where Chief lived. Danny’s pride and joy were the two ivory teeth he had kept as souvenirs.

  Harrison ignored the bull. He watched the cows in the valley below, looking up at their lord and master and pretty much ignoring him. He put his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the compound. Jesse Tate came out of the bunkhouse with three other men and walked across to the main house. Quite a few of them stayed there in the winter. Salvesen was not home, Harrison knew that much. He had reputedly gone to Michigan to speak to a group up there. Governor Platt was supposed to be going to listen to him. Harrison had never really watched when he was away before, but the word was that Jesse was sergeant-at-arms.

  Since that one time, Harrison had not been able to gain entry. What he needed was to place a listening device somewhere, but it had to be in the house itself, and it was wired and alarmed like a bank vault. He decided to move. There was definitely nobody in the tower on this side and he had the cover of the snow, then the grove of Douglas fir. He made it in just under an hour, which was good going in this weather. As he got to the top of the line of trees, he saw Jesse, Wingo and another man go into the building that jutted from the house on the side. Harrison had named it the armoury because he had seen them come out with M16s, when they were preparing for an exercise in the hills.

  He got to the forward lay-up point and settled. Jesse came out again and yelled across the compound to one of the others, who came running towards him. Together they disappeared back inside and the silence of the day descended. Harrison yawned, wondering why he put himself through this, wondering what else he could do with his life, wondering why the Bureau spent such a lot of money on a seemingly fruitless exercise. He thought of Guffy and the fact that he was lucky to have such a good and loving woman to whom he lied every day of his life. He ought to make the most of her while he had the chance, instead of lying in a hole in the middle of winter playing at being James Bond. Not many men of his age and battered appearance got the chance at an old lady like that. He was lying there, thinking about the warmth of her body still tucked up in bed, when he heard Jesse’s voice in the trees behind him.

  ‘Wingo, your snowshoe’s loose, buddy.’

  Harrison physically jumped, then stilled his breathing to nothing. He had seen them go into the armoury not fifteen minutes before. He heard the tramp tramp of crushed snow under shoes moving directly towards where he lay. With one silent hand he eased the hood down on his gilly and lay flat. If they turned up the hill from the trees, they would see his tracks in the snow.

  They did not though, they walked past him in winter combat gear and set off round the perimeter fence, M16s packed over their shoulders. A pace to the left and they would have stepped on him. Three of them: Jesse and Wingo, and the other one looked like Slusher from the back. Harriso
n breathed again and watched until they were round the far side, then he rolled on his back and looked up at the sky. Blue today, with wispy cloud reminiscent of summertime. He closed his eyes and he pondered. Jesse had gone into that building and Harrison knew that the door on the side was the only way out. Maybe there was another that led to the house, but that still didn’t explain how not fifteen minutes later, they had walked out of the draw and nearly stepped on top of him.

  He rolled back on to one elbow and peered through his binoculars. They were now almost back to the main gate, level with the road they cleared every day in order to get out. He could see two shiny black snowmobiles, like dolphins stranded on a beach. The men got on board, two on one and one on the other, and set off across the flat, white-topped pasture, weaving trails in the snow. He watched until they were no more than dots on the horizon and then he turned his glasses to the goon towers. If there had been anybody there, he would have seen them. It’s very difficult for a person to remain absolutely still unless they have been properly trained.

  Harrison got up and moved quietly back into the semi-darkness of the trees. He deliberately moved round the groundswell and then he squatted and looked at the tracks. He could hear the trickle of water from the culvert, running out and freezing in the snow. The compound was built on a slight plateau, with the ground running away from it on all sides except this one to the east, where the mountains rose. It gave Salvesen excellent visibility and kept his rear more than guarded. Any opposing force trying to reach the relative cover of the trees would be spotted before they’d got fifty feet down the hill. Harrison crouched and listened to the caress of the wind in the trees. Above his head a black crow cawed at him, then lifted on a wing span of almost four feet. For a while it circled like an eagle, then dropped back to the tree line.

  He listened to the trickle of water. The footprints led directly to the culvert, about forty feet to the back of the groundswell, just before the hill started climbing. Harrison sat there and stared. And then he understood.