Blowback

by Brad Thor

  After using the computer and printer of Marie Lavoine’s neighbor to download the satellite information, Harvath spent forty-five minutes in Bernard’s equipment room putting together what he thought they would need for their climb. Though most of the hotel’s guests normally brought their own gear, the Lavoines had been well prepared for those who hadn’t. Harvath was able to find not only boots, but also Helly Hansen jackets and pants made from heavy wind-stopper fabric that fit him and Jillian perfectly.

  With the pieces of numbered masking tape stuck to the top of the worn kitchen table, Harvath spread out several of Bernard’s maps along with their newly acquired satellite imagery. Suddenly, they had a much clearer picture of where Ellyson had focused his search. Harvath had no idea what he and Jillian would find when they got there, but he couldn’t help wondering if the search and rescue teams would have been able to save Bernard and the rest of his party if they had had the information that was now sitting in front of him. For some reason, he doubted it. Something told him, just as it had Marie Lavoine, that the disappearance of Bernard and the rest of his party had not been any accident.

  As it was at least a two-hour hike to get up to the Col de la Traversette, Harvath quickly divided up their gear. He gave Jillian the lighter items like the flares, food, and first aid kit for her to carry in a KIVA technical pack, and he took one of Bernard’s larger internal-frame backpacks to hold everything else.

  Marie tried to convince Harvath to postpone the trip for at least a day or two until some of the other local mountain guides, who had been friends of Bernard, were available to go along with them. Harvath would have appreciated their participation, but he couldn’t afford to wait. Besides, the time he spent attached to the Navy’s cold warfare specialists, SEAL Team Two, had made him an experienced enough climber, and he was confident he could teach Jillian anything she needed to know along the way. If they ran across a feature that they couldn’t tackle, they would just have to turn around and come back.

  On the surface it looked good, made sense, and sounded safe, but in the back of his mind, Harvath knew that a million fatal expeditions had started out with the same false sense of security. There was no room for excessive pride in climbing, because there was no more imposing foe than an unforgiving mountain that didn’t care if you lived or died.

  FORTY-FOUR

  T he climb to the Traversette was steep, dangerous, and extremely difficult. Both Harvath and Alcott lost their footing several times. The debris-strewn moraine was covered with sharp rocks and jagged pieces of shale. Off in the distance, they could make out the towering peak of Mount Viso. Its craggy, snow-covered face was made even more menacing by the thickening curtain of heavy clouds gathering around it. Harvath knew that the weather was something they were going to have to contend with. Marie had given them an update on the forecast before they left, and the gods were not smiling on their venture. All they could hope for was to be able to move fast enough to beat the storm.

  By the time they made it to the pass, their bodies were wrung out. They were above the snowline now, but neither of them cared as they unslung their packs and looked for a place to lie down. Harvath reached for one of his bottles of water and drained it in three long swallows. Dehydration was one of the most common consequences of altitude. He looked down at his gloves, the palms of which were shredded, as were Jillian’s. He removed a roll of duct tape from his pack, repaired his gloves as best he could, and then threw the roll to Alcott.

  Once Jillian’s gloves were patched, the pair shouldered their packs and continued upward. In retrospect, the jagged rocks and loose pieces of shale were a cakewalk in comparison to what they now faced. As the pass wound its way around the north side of Mount Viso, the winds picked up dramatically and the snow they were walking upon quickly turned to ice. Once again, they stopped, and as Jillian ate some of the food Marie had packed for them, Harvath removed two sets of crampons from his bag. Once he was sure that both his and Alcott’s were securely attached to their boots, they started walking again.

  Harvath chose his steps very carefully. They were on a narrow precipice with the sheer wall of the mountain rising immediately to their right and a fathomless drop, easily thousands of feet, immediately to their left. Very quickly, Harvath gained a new appreciation for how Hannibal could have lost more men and pack animals on this high Alpine pass than at any other point in his campaign.

  They walked for twenty more minutes, stopping more and more often for Harvath to check their location on the spare GPS unit he had found in Bernard’s equipment room. When they reached the point indicated by the satellite imagery, Harvath held up his gloved hand, indicating that they had finally made it. The wind was now blowing so hard that both he and Jillian had to shout to be heard above it. Snow began to fall, and the icy crystals, propelled by the wind, tore across their faces like shards of broken glass.

  Harvath got as near to the left side of the pass as he dared, dug in his crampons, and tried to peer over the edge, but he couldn’t see a thing. After checking both his GPS unit and the satellite imagery one more time, he began unloading his pack. He laid out four fifty-meter coils of rope and then pulled out a pair of lightweight Alpine sit harnesses. As he helped Jillian into hers and began tightening it, he noticed her wince. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  Though Jillian had never climbed before, she seemed more than physically capable, but that wasn’t what Harvath was concerned about. Climbing, while demanding stamina, was an absolute mental game and required one hundred percent concentration. He had given her several chances to back out, and she had passed on every one of them. If there was a find down there of any sort, she wanted to see it for herself.

  In answer to Harvath’s question, Jillian looked him right in the eye and said, “Just tell me what to do.”

  He had to hand it to her. She had guts. There was no question in his mind that she was scared—any sane person would be frightened by the prospect of what they were about to do. Even Harvath’s adrenaline was flowing, but the difference between a successful climber and a dead climber was what he did with that fear. Would Jillian allow the fear to eat her up and paralyze her the way he’d seen it do at Sotheby’s and the department store in London, or would she turn the fear to her advantage and make it work for her?

  In all fairness, what had happened at Sotheby’s and Harvey Nichols had involved guns and bullets, not ropes and mountains, but Harvath wasn’t taking any chances. The entire time they had been climbing, Harvath had been going through a mental checklist of the ways in which he could safely facilitate Alcott’s descent into the chasm. The first and most obvious option was for him to lower her down himself, but now without either a line-of-sight visual or proper communications gear, that option was fraught with too many potential problems and was scratched from the list. The next option was for both of them to rappel on the same line, but it would undoubtedly require Harvath to go first, and if Jillian froze for some reason above him, he’d be lucky as hell to get both of them back up to the pass. The option that made the most sense was for them to rappel side-by-side at the same time.

  Harvath examined the rock above the pass and looked for anchor points for his hardware. While he decided on the right items to use, he also kept one eye open for anchor points that Bernard might have previously established. The fact that he didn’t spot any told him that either they were totally in the wrong location and Bernard had never climbed here, or someone had done a very careful cleanup job. Though Harvath hated to think about it, he had a bad feeling that the latter was probably true.

  After establishing anchor points with a combination of pitons and spring-loaded camming devices, Harvath tied a double rope and threw the excess over the side of the pass and into the chasm. He gave Jillian’s harness a final check and then his own. Running one of the ropes through her harness, he drew it tight and had her lean back into it while she stood there on the pass, just getting used to it. “Remember, we’re going to do this nice
and easy. It isn’t like you see in the movies. There’s not going to be any of that pushing way out from the wall kind of stuff. You just sit back in your harness and we’ll lower ourselves slowly, okay?”

  Jillian nodded her head, and as an added safety measure, Harvath connected her harness to his own with a long piece of nylon known as a leash.

  With their backs toward the drop-off behind them, Harvath gave everything one last check, swung his pack over his shoulders, and then talked Jillian through what was always the most terrifying part of a descent—stepping out and over the edge.

  Her feet may have been hesitant, but to her credit, Jillian did everything she was told to do and never stopped. Like many novice climbers, she was afraid to trust the full weight of her body to her harness and ended up gripping the rope a lot tighter than she needed to. Harvath encouraged her to relax, but it wasn’t until her hands and the muscles in her arms started to ache that she allowed herself to sit all the way back in the harness.

  With the howling wind buffeting their bodies and threatening to slam them into the sheer cliff face in front of them, it wasn’t the optimal condition for a first-time descent, but Jillian was doing surprisingly well. Harvath could tell she was scared, but she was keeping her fear at bay by focusing on everything he had told her to do. She was an exceptional student.

  Harvath, on the other hand, had several concerns of his own regarding their descent, not the least of which was that due to the weather conditions, a mountain fog had moved in and was making it impossible to see anything beneath them. There was no telling if they would reach any sort of foothold before they ran out of rope, which was all the more reason to take it easy. The last thing they needed was for one of them to end up breaking a leg, or worse.

  Twenty-five meters later, the fog diminished slightly and they could make out a wide, sloping shelf of ice ten meters below. Harvath unleashed himself from Jillian and gently increased his speed. By the time she made it the rest of the way down, Harvath’s crampons were already firmly planted on the shelf.

  “Did we make some sort of mistake?” said Jillian as she stood up and looked around, disappointed. “There’s nothing here.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” said Harvath as he removed one of the satellite images from inside his parka and studied it. “It’s been over a year. When it comes to snow and ice, a lot can happen in that time.”

  Jillian watched as Harvath withdrew two more coils of rope from his pack and established another set of anchor points by hammering pitons into the rock face behind them. He secured the ropes they had used to climb down from the pass so they wouldn’t blow away and then got back to work, readying for the next stage of their descent.

  After first securing Jillian’s rope and harness, followed by his own, Harvath looked at the shelf they were standing on. It sloped upward, away from the mountain, and the number one question on Harvath’s mind was Where did it lead? Removing what looked like a collapsible ski pole from his pack, he extended the telescoping avalanche probe to its full length and leaned it against the cliff face.

  “What are you doing?” asked Jillian.

  “You see how the ice slopes up like that?” he said as he pointed at the shelf in front of them.

  “Yes.”

  “That ramplike or wave formation can happen when there’s a lot of freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw kind of weather. It builds up very quickly and can be extremely fragile.”

  “So what are you going to do, walk out there and test it?”

  Harvath nodded his head.

  “I was kidding,” she said. “What if it gives way?”

  Harvath tripled-wrapped his own rope around her waist and tied it with a double knot. Once he had rechecked the security of her anchor points, he said, “Then I’ll be glad I’ve got you hanging on to me.”

  After showing her how to properly feed out the rope, Harvath picked up his probe and started out away from the cliff face along the top of the shelf.

  As he walked, large sheets of crisp, ice-laden snow cracked and broke away beneath his crampons. The pop, as every footfall punched its way through the crusty snow, sounded like gunfire and could be heard well above the roar of the wind. Harvath looked back more than once, just to make sure Jillian was keeping a tight grip on his safety line.

  Using the avalanche probe to test the stability of the shelf in front of him, he took his steps one painfully slow foot at a time. It was like climbing up the side of a slick, steeply pitched, snow-covered roof. With the sharp teeth of his crampons aiding his climb, Harvath was more concerned about the entire shelf dropping away beneath him than he was about losing his footing. As he continued to move forward, he tried not to think about it.

  He developed a steady rhythm as he planted his avalanche pole, then took a step, then planted his avalanche pole and took a step. It was almost hypnotic, and Harvath literally had to shake his head to keep his mind focused on what he was doing. When he finally reached the shelf’s peak, he stopped and looked around as best he could through the increasing snow. Mount Viso towered high above while the other side of the shelf appeared to run steeply downhill into a large ice field far below.

  Harvath had explained to Jillian that when and if he signaled, it was okay for her to follow him out onto the shelf; she should untie the loops of rope from around her waist and follow exactly in his footsteps. Giving her the signal, he watched as she removed the rope and coiled the extra loops on the ground where they wouldn’t get tangled with her own. Then, like a tightrope walker, she carefully began placing one foot in front of the other and made her way toward him.

  She was doing great and was about halfway across the shelf when Harvath heard a series of rumbling noises that sounded like three mortars being loosed. Jillian heard it too and immediately stopped, frozen in Harvath’s tracks. For a moment, he thought it might have been thunder, but he knew it wasn’t. Thunder came from over your head, not below your feet. For the moment, there was nothing but silence. Even the wind and snow seemed to have died away.

  Harvath stood completely still for several seconds, as his ears strained to pick up any further sound, but there was nothing other than his own shallow breathing. After several seconds more, he signaled for Jillian to start moving forward again, slowly.

  One step. Two steps. So far so good. But three steps later, the shelf began to tremble and made a terrible groaning noise. Pieces of it splintered as if a giant hand was pushing down on it from above. Harvath yelled for her to lie spread-eagle and distribute her weight evenly across the snow, but Jillian couldn’t hear him above the noise. Suddenly, the shelf cracked apart and collapsed inward, completely disappearing from sight and taking Jillian Alcott along with it.

  FORTY-FIVE

  A s the ice shelf caved in, there was nothing Harvath could do to save her. Jillian was too far away. It was like watching someone fall through a frozen lake. As her screams echoed off the side of the mountain, Harvath was tempted to look back, but his instincts had taken over and he was totally focused on saving himself.

  Flattening his body against the upper peak of the shelf, Harvath slid his ice axes out from their holsters and swung them, along with his crampons, into the ice as hard as he could. Behind him, he could hear the sickening sound of the shelf as it wrenched the rest of the way away and collapsed into the chasm below. At least twenty feet out from the face of the mountain, Harvath said a silent prayer that the receding hunks of ice and snow wouldn’t drag his safety line, and him, down into the frozen void.

  He lay there waiting to be yanked off at any moment, but the moment never came. As the thunderous roar of the collapsing shelf subsided, Harvath began to entertain the guilty thought that for the umpteenth time in his life, he had cheated death.

  With his hands beginning to ache from the death grip he had on his axes, he knew he needed to come up with some sort of a plan, the crux of which had to be getting to Jillian to see if she was still alive.

  Looking down, Harvath saw that only about two and a hal
f feet of shelf still remained below him. From the edge of it to the face of Mount Viso, where they had rappelled down with their first set of ropes, was about eighteen feet. The shelf which Harvath had crossed, and which had swallowed up Jillian, had been nothing more than a fragile bridge of ice and snow that covered over the entrance to a deep cavern of blue-green ice. Even though his anchor was firmly established on the far mountain wall, using his rope to swing out over the open expanse, Tarzan-style, was not the best of ideas. Eighteen feet might not seem like much, but it was plenty of distance in which to pick up a full head of steam and slam into the other side. He immediately struck it from his list of possible options.

  Ice chasms in general were like a big V, wide at the top and progressively narrower as you got toward the bottom. If one were to imagine a huge triangle with its point downward, it would form a pretty good picture of what things had looked like before the shelf had collapsed. Harvath now stood at the top of the chasm looking across to where his rope was anchored on the other side. Since swinging across was out of the question, the only way he could go was down. The problem, though, was that if he established another set of anchor points on this side, when he wanted to climb back up he’d still be on the wrong side of the cavern with no way to get across. There was no telling what condition Jillian was in. He needed to figure something out quickly. Finally, Harvath had an idea.

  After pulling up the balance of his rope from where it had fallen into the cavern, Harvath set new anchor points in the ice above him. Confident that they were secure, he tied a small loop in a portion of the rope that led back across the chasm toward Mount Viso and lay between his two sets of anchor points. Then, after attaching an extra carabiner to the loop of rope, he unslung his pack and removed only the most essential items. The key was to leave as much weight in the pack as possible. It was essential for his eventual ascent that it weigh more than the remainder of the line. The few items he needed to have with him he stuffed inside his parka and then attached the pack itself to the carabiner.