by Ronan Frost
It was the most he’d heard Iskra Zima say since they’d met, and Rye agreed with every single word of it.
He’d traveled the world, he’d climbed in every city imaginable, and the one thing that had remained inherently the same in all those places was the people. Race, creed, or color, it didn’t matter, their basic concerns were the same. “Amen,” he said quietly. Turning his head slightly to better see the Russian, Rye’s eye was caught again by the reflection of something on the side of the mountain on the other side of the range.
Only this time when he tried to focus on it, he saw more than just the light reflecting off the jeweled surface.
This time, because of the lower angle, he could make out the darker base of some sort of angled structure that had been built in sight of the holy peak. “There,” he said, directing the others attention to the structure. “Is that what I think it is?”
“The Brotherhood’s temple,” Vic said, shielding his eyes against the glare of the sun.
Carter shrugged his pack off his back and crouched, teasing his right glove off with his teeth and holding it in his mouth while he rummaged around in the pack’s pockets for his phone to check the images Byrne had sent through along with the maps, including the Blavatsky.
It was hard to see the screen for the glare, but with full brightness on, he swiped through the images until he found the shot he was looking for.
“Look at where it is. Look at the angle. That”—he pointed to the temple perched preciously on the mountainside—“is where Blavatsky’s map was drawn.”
As best he could tell from here, Carter was right.
“Then that’s where we need to be,” Rye said.
They set off across the Bone Garden.
The snow rippled around their feet as they walked, the crampons biting on the ice beneath the fine dusting of fresh snowfall. It was slow going, but at least they weren’t walking into the eye of the blizzard anymore.
It was a small mercy.
But, as the saying went, the Lord gave with one hand and took away with another.
SIXTY-FOUR
They were halfway across the Bone Garden when they heard the distinctive whump whump whump of an attack chopper’s blades cutting through the air.
“Move!” Vic yelled, already running across the ice.
Rye didn’t need telling twice.
He started to run.
The first few steps were slow, the fresh snow compacting beneath his feet as his weight crushed the layers of air out, his feet sinking two inches for every step, which made his gait clumsy and progress across the snowfield much slower than he needed it to be if he was going to reach some form of shelter before the chopper reached them.
But that didn’t stop him from giving it his all.
Vic, being the heaviest, struggled the most, but he was also the most powerful, and drove himself on, covering ground fast. He looked back over his shoulder once, scanning the blue skies for the chopper, then turned and ran, head down, arms and legs pumping furiously. He was breathing hard. Rye could hear each labored gasp from five steps behind him. His own breathing wasn’t much better. Iskra brought up the rear, but not because of fitness or conditioning. She moved lightly across the snow. She was making sure Carter didn’t fall behind.
The whump of the chopper blades grew louder.
Rye could feel the displaced snow churning up around him.
He half turned, still stumbling toward the building twenty-five miles away, to see the first of the men rappelling out of the chopper.
In five ragged steps three more men had come down on their own ropes.
He could see the shape of their AK-47s—a jagged silhouette against the base of their spines as they swung out over the Bone Garden.
They were followed down by four more men before they’d released their harnesses.
The first wave hit the ground running.
They moved with well-disciplined precision.
The second wave hit the ground thirty seconds after the first, with the final wave following them down.
Rye ran for his life.
He drove himself on, gritting his teeth against the burning ache of his thighs and calves as he struggled with the terrain. Head down, he covered the ground expecting to hear the first crack of gunfire at any second.
Behind him, he heard Iskra urging Carter on.
When he looked up again, Vic had gone.
The field of snow was empty up ahead of him, broken only where jagged rocks pierced the drifts. He looked left and right, but aside from more of the boulder field he couldn’t see anywhere the big man could be hiding: and none of the closest boulders were big enough to hide a man of Vic’s size.
Vic threw a look back over his shoulder, but Vic wasn’t back there, either.
Rye couldn’t think about it.
Vic knew how to look after himself.
He needed to concentrate on keeping himself alive.
And that meant running until he dropped, then picking himself up again and running some more.
But he needed somewhere to run to, because there was no way he could outrun bullets across twenty-five miles of mountaintops no matter how stubborn he was.
Behind him, the chopping of the helicopter’s blades changed subtly as it swept across the valley, cutting low over his head. He felt the downdraft from the rotor batter him as he stumbled forward.
It was no more than fifty feet above his head as it flew down the center of the valley, and then it was a comet blazing a trail across the sky.
The distress flare had arced over his head, into the open side of the attack chopper, the pilot wrestling frantically with the controls even as the interior caught fire.
It took less than a minute, the red phosphorus tearing through the leather interior.
Huge plumes of black smoke engulfed the helicopter as it veered erratically across the sky, banking away toward the side of the high valley.
The impact sent shock waves through the length of the valley, the concussive blast of the explosion powerful enough to hurl Rye from his feet as he tried to run away from it.
Unarmed, Vic had carefully and methodically brought down an attack chopper single-handedly. Rye had absolutely no doubt it was his flare, or that he’d had the presence of mind to seek out higher ground from which to make his attack. The man was a hunter.
Rye picked himself up and forced himself to move, no looking back this time.
Carter overtook him, running like his ass was on fire.
He grabbed for Rye’s sleeve, hauling him onto a new path. He realized what the thief had seen: an optical illusion of the rock face around him. There was a narrow cleft in the valley’s side that was all but invisible from their angle of approach. It was barely narrow enough for him to run down without tearing the outer shell of his parka as it dragged along the sides.
A moment later he heard the staccato burst of gunfire and a cry.
He couldn’t think about it, he kept running, chasing the thief deeper into the fissure, praying he wasn’t leading them into a dead end.
Another round of shots ripped through the deathly quiet of the mountain, echoing all around them and seeming to get louder and louder instead of fading.
Ahead of him, Carter stopped running.
Rye saw why immediately.
There was nowhere to run to. Literally. The ground fell away beneath their feet down a treacherous drop, three hundred feet on a seventy-degree slope. The thief looked at him. Then looked behind him. For a moment, Rye thought Carter was going to turn around and run back toward the gunfire: but it was a short moment. Carter crossed his arms over his chest like they showed in the airplane evacuation movies, and stepped out as though onto a slide, and dropped away down the sheer ice sheet, howling as he fell.
Rye hesitated, knowing each second he wasn’t moving was a second closer to one of the hunters coming up behind him.
“Fuck it,” he said, and followed the thief over the edge.
He d
ropped like a stone, feeling each and every jagged spur of rock beneath the too-thin blanket of snow, which did absolutely nothing to protect him from the battering his body took on the descent.
He plummeted faster than any roller coaster without the safety of the rails to stop him being hurled bodily into the rock face beneath him.
Carter slid out of control, his legs kicking out as his body twisted, and Rye realized he was at risk of being turned around and going down the rest of the descent headfirst, but somehow the thief managed to right himself, and then he was rolling and sliding uncontrollably into a dead stop, and Rye realized why he’d been fighting the last hundred feet of the descent so desperately—there was a gorge between the slide and the rock wall. It could just as easily have been five feet deep or five hundred, there was no way of knowing at this angle, but the momentum he’d built up from his rate of descent wasn’t going to be enough to see him sail over it safely with the weight of the pack on his back.
But he couldn’t stop himself from falling, and all he could think in that long-sliding second was: I don’t want to die.…
And in that moment, that desperate slide, his heartbeat froze, time dilating as the mountain raced away beneath him, and he thought about how he was going to survive this.
Hannah used to say that screaming was a waste of thinking time, and certain death, whereas not screaming bought you maybe two or three seconds more thinking time.
It might not save your life, but it might make all the difference.
And it did.
Rye grabbed for the ice ax still clipped to his belt and hit the release, even as his body started to twist away beneath him—and he understood why Carter had suddenly lost control of his descent—and as his momentum took him onto his stomach, gripped it with both hands and slammed it into the sheet of ice as he slid uncontrollably down it.
Rye felt rather than heard the rip as the side of his backpack tore on a razor-sharp barb of protruding rock, slicing through the heavyweight nylon fibers. The rent in the fabric ran the length of his arm, wide enough to spill the contents across the slope. There was nothing he could do about it: he was falling faster than he could hope to control. It was all he could do to resist the impulse to reach out to try and grab onto something to arrest the momentum of his descent. All that would succeed in doing was wrench his arms from their sockets and leave him in agony as he continued to fall.
He couldn’t help himself, this time he screamed.
And used that scream to fuel another desperate swing of the ice ax.
This time the head of the ax bit, but the snow rippled away around it, the blade grinding as he slid relentlessly on.
He kicked at the ground, trying to dig his crampons in, but as the small metal spikes bit they jammed, and his legs twisted, his body coming away from the ground.
He slammed the ax down again, hitting bare rock so hard the handle nearly twisted out of his grip.
He was losing it.
Snow plumed up all around him.
Every erratic spur of rock cut at his belly.
There was blood on his front where rocks had torn through the parka to cut him open and burns where friction from the slide had melted the material, leaving black scars across the colorful padded jacket.
The ax bit into the slope, but his momentum yanked it clear before it could slow him more than a little.
He bounced and slid, tumbling wildly out of control, losing sense of what was up and what was down as his weight threatened to carry him out over the edge.
All around him the contents of his pack skidded and spilled, burrowing into the snow.
Rye put everything he had into a final frantic swing of the ice ax, knowing he was out of time.
His body plummeted down the ice slide, his wild descent faster in these last few feet than at any other time during the desperate slide. He plowed on, body skimming the planes of snow, bouncing and juddering and being battered every inch of the way as the edge of the slope and the sheer drop down into the gulf opened up before him.
The point of the ax hit home, burying the blade into frozen mud beneath the sheet of ice. The sudden jarring stop wrenched the handle from his grasp, and even as he dug his feet in, his weight carried Rye over the edge and there was nothing he could do to stop himself from falling.
SIXTY-FIVE
In those few precious seconds between the edge and oblivion he learned how to fly.
But that miracle didn’t last anywhere near long enough. Rye slammed into the sheer side of the gorge’s far wall, the ruined pack on his back taking the brunt of the impact.
It was enough to save his life for at least a few seconds longer.
The impact drove shockwaves of pain through his body, radiating out from each point of impact in ever-increasing waves that became one with every screaming nerve-ending and synapse. The collision sent Rye tumbling, hands and head down, like Superman flying through the atmosphere in those first awkward flights as he seemed to bounce and hit everything. The added weight of the pack tipped him, and for one sickening second Rye thought he was going to hit the ground flat on his back—which would absolutely shatter his spine and leave him paralyzed at best, or dead. But then, maybe dead was better?
A rock splinter gouged into the side of his face, tearing a second smile from above his right ear to just below his nostril. There was a lot of blood.
He couldn’t see the bottom of the gorge and had no way of knowing how far he had left to fall.
There was a limit to what was survivable, and without the ice ax to slam into the rock there was precious little he could do except fall.
He’d fallen thirty feet in what had felt like minutes but could only have been seconds.
His mind raced.
He seemed to be capable of thinking a million things at once, none of the thoughts taking up more than a fraction of a second outside of his head.
He grabbed at the pack’s thick shoulder strap and pulled it off his shoulder, moving instinctively. It wasn’t as though he could use the pack as a parachute, though. It was hardly going to arrest his fall.
Rye didn’t flail or kick out, he simply fell, twisting and rolling as he went.
He’d fallen sixty feet in the few seconds since he’d slammed into the wall.
There was no surviving a free fall of sixty feet.
And he was only going to fall faster the farther he fell, assuming the crevice didn’t abruptly end in a base of scree and built-up snow.
The pack tore away from his shoulder, ballooning open as it created enough drag to jerk his body physically backward despite being in free fall.
He saw his chance.
It’s a million to one shot, Jim, but it might just work, that sarcastic bastard in his head heckled, quite probably for the last time.
The drag factor threated to tear the pack out of his hand as he clung onto the one remaining shoulder strap. He needed to get this exactly right. There wasn’t a millisecond’s room for maneuver. Beneath him, coming fast, Rye had seen a protruding rock—like a gigantic crooked finger—and he had one shot at hooking it with the pack.
Whatever happened after that was in the lap of the gods.
He dropped his shoulder, slipping out of the strap, and lashed out with his right arm in a single motion, the ripped front of the pack catching and tearing on a boil of the rocky finger. For one sickening second, he thought the cloth was going to shear all the way through, but the reinforced stitching of the main seams held, and suddenly he was hanging, not falling.
Rye clung onto the strap, painfully aware that the material simply couldn’t and wouldn’t hold for more than a few seconds.
He needed to find a handhold or foothold, something to take the strain.
His heart hammered in his chest, and yet, despite the flood of adrenaline coursing through his system, Rye was remarkably calm.
Looking down, he still couldn’t see the bottom of the crevice, but that was as much because the gorge narrowed to the point where i
t was little more than a fissure in the rock and there was no way for light to penetrate deep enough to reveal the true extent of the drop.
The shadows were a mercy.
There was no telling how far that fissure split the mountain. It could run all the way down to hell for all he knew.
The nylon tore another juddering inch. Rye dropped, the strain on his shoulder almost too much to bear. With his free hand he reached out for the wall in front of him, feeling out desperately with his fingers for even the slightest lip in the rock he could use to his advantage.
The crevice narrowed as it descended, becoming a chimney. So, if he could climb down to that point it would be easy to brace himself hand and foot on either side of the chimney wall and crab down to the bottom.
If.
The wind moaned eerily through the upper reaches of the crevice.
He looked up to see Carter leaning out over the edge. But before he could call down, another burst of machine-gun fire tore through the air. Rye saw the puffs of snow where the bullets buried themselves into the side of the fissure, and splinters of stone rained down into his eyes.
Rye flailed at the icy wall of stone, and his toe caught. The steel crampons made it impossible to contemplate trying to climb with any kind of grace. It was all about strength, and with luck, some crude hand- and footholds big enough to accommodate the teeth of the crampons.
The problem was that he couldn’t climb with his gloves on, and without them he was going to freeze, but short-term necessity had to supersede long-term need. One toe braced against the wall, one hand tangled around the strap of the backpack, Rye teased his right glove off with his teeth and let it fall away into the darkness beneath him.
He didn’t hear it hit the bottom.
With his fingers free, he felt like he had a chance.
