Prologue
Above Camp IV
K2
Northwest Pakistan
May 30, 1984
“Did you hear that?”
The climber dug his ice axe into the snow and cocked his head, listening.
“What?” asked his partner, perched a few feet below on the near vertical face.
“A scream.” The climber squinted, trying to locate the shrill sound hiding somewhere inside the untiring wind. His name was Michel Brunner. He was twenty-two years old and considered France’s finest alpinist. Suddenly, he caught the high-pitched wail again. It seemed to come from far away, and for a moment, he was certain that it was approaching. “There!”
“A scream?” asked Fernando Castillo, a Spaniard ten years his senior, who had failed to summit the mountain on three previous attempts. “You mean like a person shouting?”
“Yes,” said Brunner. “But not a man. Something else. Something bigger.”
“Bigger? Up here?” Castillo shook his head and chunks of snow fell from his beard. “I don’t hear anything. You’re tired and imagining things.”
The wind calmed and Brunner listened intently. This time he heard nothing but the pounding of his heart. Still, the sound stayed with him and he felt a stab of fear between his shoulder blades. The wind picked up and the fear left him as quickly as it had come.
Castillo dug the points of his crampons into the hard snow and climbed two steps, bringing him alongside the Frenchman. “How many hours sleep did you get last night?”
“None.”
The Spaniard nodded sharply. “It’s your mind playing tricks on you. The only thing you can hear this high is the jet stream. It makes you crazy.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Brunner hammered a screw into the snow and affixed his rope, then dug out an energy bar from his parka and forced himself to eat a few bites. Castillo was right. He was tired. Bone tired. But that was nothing new. Fatigue was part of climbing. It was just a question of mastering it and not allowing it to master you. They’d left Camp IV at twenty-four thousand feet at two in the morning. It had taken eight hours of steady climbing to make it past the shoulder. Eight hours to gain four thousand feet. Not bad, but not as fast he would have liked. Not as fast as the American, who’d left their side two hours earlier to break trail.
Brunner looked down the precipitous incline. A string of six climbers approached from the Abruzzi Ridge. In their brightly colored parkas and hoods, they resembled a Nepalese prayer flag. Red was Bertucci from Italy. Blue was Evans from England. Yellow was Hamada from Japan. And the others from Germany, Austria, and Denmark.
The expedition was a UN sponsored “Climb for World Peace.” Over the next mountain range, barely one hundred miles away, a force of some two hundred thousand Russian troops had overthrown the government of Afghanistan and installed their own puppet, a bluff, wily dictator named Babrak Kamal.
Brunner gazed up. High above, emerging from the shadows of the great ice serac, was the final member of their team. The American.
“He’s moving too fast,” said Castillo with concern. “The snow up there is always bad. That’s where we lost two men on my last attempt.”
“He’s trying to set some kind of record,” said Brunner.
“The only record that counts on K2 is getting to the top and back down alive. The weather will hold. Does it matter if he reaches the top at eleven instead of noon?”
“Ask him.”
“I intend to.”
Overhead, an untrammeled blue canopy stretched to all points of the horizon. The peaks of the eastern Karakoram Range rose in a saw-toothed crescent. The wind, though blowing at a constant fifty kilometers an hour, was calmer than at any time in the two weeks they’d camped on the mountain. It was as fine a day as a climber could ask for to summit the world’s most dangerous mountain.
Brunner cut another step out of the hard ice. In the serac’s shadow, the temperature dropped fifty degrees. All climbers knew that mountains had spirits. Some were benign and forgiving. The spirits dwelling on K2 were plain evil. Gazing up, he felt as if the serac were daring him to continue.
Just then, a cry cut the air. It wasn’t the shrill hue he’d heard before. It was something else entirely. Something he knew all too well.
Brunner shot a look toward the crest. With horror, he spotted the American’s dark form shrouded by snow, hurtling pell-mell down the incline and making a beeline directly for them.
“ Self-arrest!” shouted Castillo, but both he and Brunner knew that it would be impossible for him to stop himself. He was traveling too fast and without an ounce of control.
“Put in another screw,” said Brunner. “Hook me in.”
“There’s no time,” said Castillo.
“I’ve got to stop him.”
“It’s suicide. If the impact doesn’t kill you, he’ll take both of us with him.”
Brunner motioned toward the climbers below. “If I don’t try, he might kill all of the others. They won’t see him coming until it’s too late. Just make sure the screw holds.”
Castillo unclipped a screw from his belt and hammered it into the snow while Brunner two-pointed across the face in an effort to position himself in the American’s path.
“Is it in?”
Castillo glanced his way. “Another second!”
The American bounded closer, desperately clawing at the mountainside until Brunner could see that his eyes were open, and hear him grunting with every rock he hit. Amazingly, he was conscious. Brunner moved a few feet to his left and dug in his crampons. The American struck an outcropping and lifted off the ice entirely, spinning until his head was below his feet.
Brunner shouted his name. “Billy!”
The American stretched out an arm.
Brunner threw himself at the fast-moving figure. The impact knocked him off the mountainside and he plummeted headfirst down the face. But even as he fell, he was able to wrap his arms around the American’s waist. A moment later, the rope caught, halting Brunner’s descent. The American slid from his grasp, his body slipping across the ice. Brunner flung an arm at his leg, fingers curling around a boot, the force wrenching his shoulder clear of his socket.
Brunner screamed, but he kept his grip.
The two men hung that way until Castillo down-climbed to their position and fashioned a bivouac. A gash on the American’s forehead was bleeding heavily and one of his pupils was dilated.
“Can you hear me?” asked Brunner.
The American grunted and forced an ugly smile. “Thanks, bro. You really hung it out there for me.”
Brunner said nothing.
“Why did you take yourself off the rope?” demanded Castillo.
“Had to,” said the American.
“Why?” asked Brunner.
“Had to get everything set up.”
“What do mean, ‘get everything set up?’” asked Castillo angrily.
The American mumbled a few unintelligible words.
“Tell us,” said Castillo. “What were you setting up?”
“Orders, man. Orders.” The American’s eyes rolled up in their sockets and he lost consciousness.
“Orders? What does he mean by that?” Castillo grabbed the American’s pack and freed the straps that held it closed. Peeling back the cover, he dug his arm inside. “What the hell?”
“Find something?” asked Brunner.
Castillo pulled out a large cardboard box. On its side were the words: Property of United States Department of Defense. He shared a look with Brunner, then said, “It must weigh twenty kilos. And still, he beat us up the mountain. You know anything about this?”
Brunner shook his head. He was no longer looking at the box or the American. His gaze shot upward to the serac hanging above them and to the sky beyond. This time he didn’t need to ask Castillo if he heard the sound. It was no longer faint, nor was it shrill. It was the full-throated, ear-splitting roar of a jet engine in the throes of mech
anical failure. The roar grew louder. In seconds, Brunner couldn’t hear a word Castillo was shouting, even though the Spaniard was barely five feet away.
A shadow passed in front of the sun, and then he saw it, and his breath left him. He knew that he was going to die very soon.
The aircraft passed directly overhead, its wing coming so close to the crest of the mountain that it appeared to slice a sliver of ice from the ridge and launch a million snowflakes into the air. One of its engines was on fire, and as he stood rooted, watching, it exploded, causing the aircraft to tilt wildly to the left and assume a downward trajectory. He recognized it as a B-52 Stratofortress, and the large white star painted on the underside of the wing identified it as American.
For a moment, the pilot righted the aircraft. Its nose lifted and the engines no longer whined angrily. And then, the right wing snapped from the fuselage. It separated so cleanly and so rapidly that it appeared to be a normal procedure. The bomber lost all airworthiness. The nose dropped sharply and the jet began to spin, heading directly at the far mountainside. Debris tumbled from the aircraft. Several large cylindrical objects hurtled through space. The jet’s engines screamed like a dying beast.
Five interminable seconds passed and the jet struck the face of Broad Peak, two miles distant. Brunner saw the fireball before he heard the explosion. The sound came seconds later, buffeting him like a gale force wind.
Brunner looked over his shoulder at the lip of snow and ice hanging above him. The serac. The mountain shuddered. The overhang began to tremble. And then, the serac broke free. Two million tons of snow separated from the mountain and fell.
The last thing the Frenchman saw was a wall of infinite white plummeting toward him.
In the morning sun, the snow sparkled like diamonds.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2009 by Christopher Reich
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States by Doubleday,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York
www.doubleday.com
DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Reich, Christopher, 1961-
Rules of vengeance / Christopher Reich.
p. cm.
1. Physicians—Fiction. 2. Conspiracies—Fiction. 3. Médecins sans
frontières (Association)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3568.E476284R856 2009
813′.54—dc22
2008054446
eISBN: 978-0-385-53030-9
v3.0
Rules of Vengeance Page 41
