High Time To Kill

by Raymond Benson

  As he and Chandra pitched their tent at Camp One, though, he got the disconcerting feeling that he was in grave danger. He felt that the Union could raise their ugly head at any time.

  At dawn Bond and Chandra were awoken by the Sherpas, who brought them hot tea. The tea was welcome, but he would have given a year’s salary just to have a plate of his housekeeper May’s scrambled eggs. He also would have killed to have a cigarette, but this was truly a situation when having a cigarette would have killed him.

  He rose stiffly from the sleeping bag, coughed and hacked for several minutes, then sipped the tea. Chandra sat up, said “Good morning” but was otherwise atypically speechless. The climb was getting to them both. Bond had slept fitfully, with very vivid, disturbing dreams, which was quite normal at high altitude. What was worrying was that the conditions would worsen as they got higher. That day they were ascending to 6,000 meters. It wouldn’t be long before they would require oxygen.

  The team met at Marquis’s tent, which would remain as Camp One HQ.

  “Right,” Marquis said, breathing heavily. “Today’s climb is another five hundred meters up the ice glacier above us. It’s a relatively easy jaunt. First we have to climb through that small, low-angle icefall to get to the main glacier. We’ll set up Camp Two there.”

  “There are some short ice steps we’ll have to fix rope on,” Philippe Léaud said. “How big are they, Roland?”

  “Ten to twenty meters. No problem. How does everyone feel?”

  They all mumbled, “Fine.”

  “Lets go, then.”

  The team kept the same formation as the previous day, with Marquis and Léaud leading. The ropes were attached easily enough, and they trudged up the slope in silence. As the air grew thinner, their strength diminished with each step. It took twice as long to travel a few feet as it would have at sea level.

  They got to Camp Two midafternoon, totally exhausted. Tom Barlow fell to his knees, gasping for breath.

  “Chettan, take a look at him,” Marquis told the Sherpa. “Make sure he’s all right. The rest of you, set up the tents. The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can collapse.”

  Barlow regained his wind after a few minutes. So far no one except Marquis had shown any signs of AMS. They erected the tents and huddled in two of them to eat. Bond found himself in a tent with Chandra, Marquis, and Léaud. Marquis brought out his cell phone and punched the memory dial.

  “Camp Two to Base, Camp Two to Base,” he said.

  “Hello? Roland?” It was Paul Baack.

  “Paul, we’re here. We’re at Camp Two.”

  “Congratulations!”

  “How are things down there?”

  “Fine. We’re all restless, but we just watched Gone With the Wind on television. Uncut. No commercials. That passed the time.”

  “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” Marquis said, laughing at his own joke.

  “Hope wants to know how everyone is feeling,” Baack said.

  “Tell her we’re fine. Tom had a few moments of breathlessness, but he’s all right now. Tomorrow we’ll push on to Camp Three and wait for you to join us. In the meantime, can we order some Chinese takeaway?”

  “Sorry, we’re all out of Chinese food. You don’t want Chinese food tonight. Why don’t you order a pizza?”

  “That sounds fine, too,” Marquis said, laughing. “Over and out.”

  He put away the phone as they began to eat Alpine Aire freeze-dried rations, which were types of casseroles made of vegetables and/or meat. Sealed tightly in waterproof plastic bags, the rations were lightweight and easily boiled to produce a high-calorie meal with no dishes to clean.

  “Hey, come out here!” a voice called outside.

  “Who’s that?” Marquis asked.

  “Sounds like McKee,” Bond said. He stuck his head out the tent flap. Doug McKee was standing a few feet away, pointing at something.

  “Come look at this,” he said. The others were gathered around a dark object in the snow.

  Bond and his group climbed out and stomped through the ice and snow to see what the fuss was about.

  “I wonder how long he’s been here,” McKee said, pointing to the thing frozen in the ice.

  It was a man’s skeleton, fully dressed in climbing gear.

  Bond’s dreams that night were filled with unholy terrors. He thought that an avalanche had buried him at one point and that he was suffocating and freezing. As he dug frantically in the snow with his bare, frostbitten hands, he came upon the frozen skeletons of an entire expedition. The skulls were laughing at him. One addressed him in Roland Marquis’s voice: “Oh, bad luck! You never were the best, Bond. But you tried to be, didn’t you? Now look at you!”

  He awoke with a start. Chandra was shaking him. “James, there’s a fire. Wake up!”

  “What?” Bond snapped out of it, groggy and disoriented. The first thing he noticed was the biting, cold air attacking his lungs. He coughed hard and wheezed for a few seconds.

  “One of the tents is on fire!”

  Bond leaped out of the sleeping bag, slipped on his boots, and followed Chandra outside. The sun was just rising, casting an eerie orange glow over the ice around them.

  Three men were stomping on a tent that was ablaze. Bond had to think a moment to remember whose tent it was.

  “Schrenk?”

  “He got out. He’s over there.” Chandra pointed. Otto Schrenk was one of the men putting out the fire. They were using snow shovels and blankets to snuff it out. Bond and Chandra jumped in to help, and within minutes it was extinguished.

  “How did this happen?” Marquis asked, stumbling up to the scene. His voice was hoarse.

  “The goddamn stove in my tent,” Schrenk said. “I was trying to boil water, and the tent caught fire. Look, it’s all ruined.”

  “What gear did you lose?”

  “I’m not sure yet. My extra clothes, I know.” Schrenk began to rummage through the blackened fabrics and pulled out some tools that were still intact. “There are these, thank God.”

  “He can borrow some of my clothes until we reach Camp Three,” Philippe Léaud said. “You’re my size, Otto?”

  “I think so, thanks.”

  The team settled down for breakfast and attempted to get their wits about them. No one was thinking particularly straight. They gathered by Marquis’s tent as he pulled out a map of the route.

  “Today we come to our first big obstacle. After we cross the glacier, we come to the so-called ice building. Now, we have a couple of options. The normal route is to climb six hundred meters on a steep ice slope to the left of the seracs of the ice building. We would then traverse right across the first snow plateau to make Camp Three at sixty-six hundred meters. Now, this is very steep ice climbing, which we will fix rope on. I know that an American team who did this claimed it wasn’t that difficult, just extremely tiring. The other possibility is to do what the Japanese did and climb directly through the ice building. This would be easier going technically, but it could be dangerous. This ice building is really the key to the north face—how to get around it. A serac collapse in the area killed a Sherpa in 1930. It’s pretty scary, I must say, and different teams chose different strategies for getting around it.”

  “What do you recommend?” McKee asked.

  “I say we should try the Worth method from 1983 and climb the ice-wall to the left of the ice building. Above that we would go right across the glacier back to the north face.”

  “You’re the boss,” Léaud said.

  “Now, when Schrenk—where is Schrenk?” Marquis asked, looking around. Only then did everyone realize he was the one member of the team missing.

  “Maybe he’s putting his gear back together?” McKee suggested.

  They looked around and found Schrenk walking toward them with his gear packed and ready to go.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Did I miss anything?”

  “It’s all right,” Marquis said. “Just follow us. Let’
s go, everyone! I want to start climbing in ten minutes!”

  Bond and Chandra rushed back to the tent and packed quickly. Bond slipped on his crampons and joined the party outside. The wind had died down, the sun had risen, and it was a relatively beautiful day considering the fact that they were on the side of the third tallest mountain in the world. They were already higher than many of the peaks around them. This was what Bond truly loved about mountain climbing. It was a vigorous, dangerous sport that, when one achieved the goal, gave one a sense of accomplishing the impossible. Here one really was the king of the world.

  The “ice building” is a beautiful but frightening formation that is virtually a tunnel of ice. It could have been used as a shortcut up to the plateau, but, as Marquis said, the possibility of icefalls is very high.

  Instead, Marquis led them up the ice slope to the left, which was at a steep angle ranging from forty-five degrees to seventy. Slowly and carefully, they worked their way up a gully that proved to be quite strenuous an operation.

  They were nearly halfway up the gully when it was Bond’s turn to make the next pitch. Chandra belayed while Bond used the ropes already set in place by Marquis and Léaud, who were a hundred meters above them.

  Just when the angle was at its steepest, Bond’s crampons suddenly slipped off his boots. He lost his footing and began to plummet. He slid backward on the ice and attempted to stop himself with his ice ax, but he was unable to obtain a secure hold with it. Chandra jumped into action and held the belay rope tightly.

  Bond fell thirty meters and was jerked to a halt by the rope. His back felt as if it had snapped in two. He yelled in pain as he dropped his ice ax.

  “Hold on, James!” Chandra called.

  Bond swung limply on the rope. The others became aware of what happened and stopped climbing.

  “What happened?” Marquis called from above.

  “James?” Chandra called. “Are you conscious?”

  Bond lifted his hand and waved.

  “Can you swing yourself to the wall and get a foothold?”

  “I’ll try,” Bond called. He began to swerve and kick, gaining enough momentum to rock himself back and forth on the rope. Finally, he hit the wall of ice but couldn’t find a handhold. He kicked away once again, attempting to maneuver himself toward an anchor that had been set a few-feet to his right. After two more tries he grabbed hold of it and slowly worked his way down the rope to the ledge where Chandra was.

  “What happened? Are you all right?” Chandra asked.

  “Yes. Gave me a hell of a fright, though. Bloody crampons. They slipped right off my boots!”

  “How could that happen?”

  “Where are they? Did you see them fall?”

  “I think so. Over there somewhere.” They moved carefully along the ledge and found one of them. The other had fallen into oblivion.

  Bond picked it up and examined it. The ring that the straps went through was bent and had a two-millimeter gap in it. Bond removed his goggles for a moment to look at it closely.

  “This ring was filed,” he said. “Look, it has serrated edges there. Someone tampered with it!”

  “When was the last time you looked at them?”

  “Well, last night, I suppose. But they were in my tent all night. Who could have … ?”

  He thought a minute. “Schrenk. He was missing at the team meeting over breakfast. He could have had time to slip into our tent and do the damage.”

  Chandra nodded. “It’s possible. Maybe that fire was something he set on purpose to cause a diversion.”

  At that moment the two Sherpas caught up with them. Schrenk and McKee were not far behind at the rear. When they appeared on the ledge, Bond cheerfully addressed them.

  “My crampons slipped off. Anyone have a spare pair?”

  McKee said, “I do. I’m not sure if they’ll fit you. What happened?”

  “I don’t know. They came undone somehow.” Bond looked directly at Schrenk, who averted his eyes.

  McKee pulled off his backpack and dug into it. He found the two extra crampons, which were wrapped in cloth to protect the other gear from the sharp spikes. Bond tried them on. They were a little small but would do the job.

  “Thanks. I’ll make sure the others bring up more when they meet us at Camp Three.”

  “What the hell is going on down there?” Marquis called. He was quite some distance away.

  Chandra waved the okay sign and they began to climb again.

  Four hours later they reached the plateau, 6,600 meters above sea level. Everyone was coughing and attempting to take slow, deep breaths.

  “What about oxygen?” McKee asked Marquis.

  “We don’t need oxygen until we’re higher up. If you need it now, you’re going to use it all up. How many canisters did you bring?”

  “Three, but the Sherpas have the team’s entire supply.”

  Marquis nodded. “But we have to conserve it. We’ll need the oxygen at Camp Five, where the plane is. We don’t know how long we’ll be there. Try to make do without it, okay?”

  McKee coughed and nodded.

  Marquis looked at Bond. “What the hell happened to you down there?”

  “Nothing,” Bond said. He thought it best not to alarm anyone about the tampering. “The crampons slipped off. I must not have fastened them very well. My fault.”

  “Don’t let it happen again, Bond. As much as I can’t stand you, I’d hate to lose you.”

  “Thanks, Roland, that’s comforting.”

  Marquis walked away toward his tent. Bond and Chandra looked over at Otto Schrenk, who was helping Doug McKee erect a tent for the two of them.

  Was it Schrenk? Or could it have been someone else?

  At least they were safely at Camp Three, where they would spend the next week acclimatizing. The rest of the group would be joining them over the next few days.

  Bond knew, though, that someone on the team definitely wanted him out of the picture.

  TWENTY

  HIGHER AND HIGHER

  THE OTHERS FROM THE BASE CAMP BEGAN TO ARRIVE IN GROUPS THE following day. Paul Baack was one of the first, carrying the lightweight laptop satellite phone with his own equipment. Hope Kendall had partnered him, and insisted on examining the Lead Team—but not until she had had a night’s sleep. Bond thought she didn’t look well, but then he remembered how he had felt on reaching Camp Three.

  The next day Bond visited the doctor in her tent. They sat crosslegged opposite from each other as she examined him. Bond thought she seemed much better, but he could see that the climb was taking its toll. She wore no makeup, of course, had dark circles under her eyes, and looked thinner.

  “How are you feeling, James?” she asked, listening to his breathing with a stethoscope.

  “I’m fine now. When I first got to Camp Three, I felt like hell.”

  “I know what you mean,” she replied. “I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “You should heed your own advice and get plenty of rest, then.”

  “This is my job,” she said. “Cough, please.”

  He did. It was a horrid, dry croup.

  “That cough’s a beaut. Does your throat hurt?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to give you some lozenges. You need to drink more water. Are you drinking water?”

  “Yes.” He coughed again.

  “Then drink more.” She reached into her bag and gave him a packet of vitamin C and eucalyptus lozenges. “Otherwise, you’re fit as a buck rat.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  She smiled, but then rubbed her forehead and shut her eyes tightly. “Damn,” she said. “I can’t shake this headache.”

  “You need to take it easy,” he said. He put a hand on the back of her neck and massaged it. That brought the smile back.

  “Mmm, that’s nice,” she said. “Would you just do that for the next twenty-four hours?”

  “Seriously,” he said, “are you
all right?”

  “Yeah, I think so,” she answered but wasn’t very convincing. “Go on, now. Send in your cuzzy.”

  “My what?”

  “Your cuzzy, your cousin, your brother, your mate …” she explained. “It’s Maori talk. Chandra. Send him in. Please.”

  Bond let it go and crawled out of the tent.

  It was about three hours later when he noticed Marquis rushing to Hope’s tent. Paul Baack was standing outside it, looking as if he were lost and didn’t know what to do. Bond approached him and asked, “Is something wrong?”

  “Yes,” Baack said. “Dr. Kendall is sick.”

  Bond stuck his head in the tent. Marquis was kneeling by Hope, who was lying on her sleeping bag. Carl Glass was with them.

  “We have it under control, Bond, you can leave,” Marquis said rudely.

  “It’s all right, he can stay,”Hope mumbled. “God, just letme die now.”

  “She’s got acute altitude sickness,” Glass told Bond.

  “My head feels like it’s going to explode,” she said. “Goddammit, this has never happened to me before!”

  She coughed loudly and gasped when she attempted to breathe deeply.

  “My dear Hope,” Marquis said, “you yourself said it could strike anyone at any time. You’re no exception. Now, please, let me take you down to Camp Two. You need to descend as quickly as possible. I can carry you on—”

  “Shut up, Roland!” she snapped. “I’m not going anywhere. This will pass. Stop fussing over me. I hate it!”

  “I’m only trying to—”

  “Please just leave me alone! Get out of here!” she screamed.

  Marquis stiffened, embarrassed and angry. He moved away and, without a word, glared at Bond and left the tent.

  “What should we do?” Glass asked her.

  “I’m sorry. He’s right, dammit,” she said. “I need to go to Camp Two but I just don’t have the strength. For three days I haven’t slept, haven’t eaten, haven’t peed … I’m constipated as hell.…” She was on the verge of tears, but she didn’t have the energy for it.