‘Now that you’ve quite finished—‘ Torrance-Smythe said politely.
“The radio.’ Smith let out a long sigh of relief. “There’s only one list of frequencies, call signs and code. Security. And that one list is inside Sergeant Hatred’s tunic.’
‘Mind if I mop my brow, too, boss?’ Schaffer enquired.
‘I’ll go get it for you if you like,’ Christiansen volunteered.
“Thanks. But it’s my fault and I’ll get it. Besides, I’m the only person here who’s done any climbing–or so I believe from Colonel Wyatt-Turner–and I think you’d find that cliff rather more awkward to climb than descend. No hurry. Let’s bivouac and eat first.’
If you can’t do better than this, Smithy,’ Schaffer said to Torrance-Smythe, ‘you can have a week’s notice. Starting from a week ago.’ He scraped the bottom of his metal plate and shuddered. ‘I was brought up in a Christian home, so I won’t tell you what this reminds me of.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ Torrance-Smythe complained. They packed the wrong size tin-openers.’ He stirred the indeterminate-looking goulash in the pot on top of the butane stove and looked hopefully at the men seated in a rough semi-circle in the dimly-lit tent. ‘Anyone for any more?’
‘That’s not funny,’ Schaffer said severely,
‘Wait till you try his coffee,’ Smith advised, ‘and you’ll be wondering what you were complaining about.’ He rose, poked his head through the door to take a look at the weather, looked inside again. ‘May take me an hour. But if it’s been drifting up there…’
The seated men, suddenly serious, nodded. If it had been drifting up there it might take Smith a very long time indeed to locate Sergeant Harrod.
‘It’s a bad night,’ Schaffer said. ‘I’ll come and give you a hand.’
‘Thanks. No need. I’ll haul myself up and lower myself down. A rope round a piton is no elevator, but it’ll get me there and back and two are no better than one for that job. But I’ll tell you what you can do.’ He moved, out and reappeared shortly afterwards carrying the radio which he placed in front of Schaffer. ‘I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the code-book just to find that some hobnailed idiot has fallen over this and given it a heart attack. Guard it with your life, Lieutenant Schaffer.’
‘Aye, aye, sir,’ Schaffer said solemnly.
With a hammer and a couple of spare pitons hanging from his waist, Smith secured himself to the rope, with double bowline and belt as before, grabbed the free end of the rope and began to haul himself up. Smith’s statement to the others that this was a job for a mountaineer seemed hardly accurate for the amount of mountaineering skill required was minimal. It was gruelling physical labour, no more. Most of the time, with his legs almost at right angles to his body, he walked up the vertical cliff face: on the stretch of the overhang, with no assistance for his arms, he twice had to take a turn of the free end of the rope and rest until the strength came back to aching shoulder and forearm muscles : and by the time he finally dragged himself, gasping painfully and sweating like a man in a sauna bath, over the edge of the cliff, exhaustion was very dose indeed. He had overlooked the crippling effect of altitude to a man unaccustomed to it.
He lay face down for several minutes until breathing and pulse returned to something like normal–or what was normal for seven thousand feet — rose and examined the piton round which the nylon passed. It seemed firm enough but, for good measure, he gave it another few heavy blows with the hammer, undid the double bowline round his legs and secured the end of the rope to the piton with a round turn and two half-hitches, hauling on the rope until the knot locked tight.
He moved a few feet farther away from the cliff edge, cleared away the snow and lightly hammered in one of the spare pitons he had brought with him. He tested it with his hand to see if it broke clear easily. It did. He tapped it in lightly a second time and led round it the part of the rope that was secured to the firmly anchored first piton. Then he walked away, moving up the gently sloping plateau, whistling ‘Lorelei’. It was, as Smith himself would have been the first to admit, a far from tuneful whistle, but recognisable for all that. A figure appeared out of the night and came running towards him, stumbling and slipping in the deep snow. It was Mary Ellison. She stopped short a yard away and put her hands on her hips.
‘Well!’ He could hear her teeth chattering uncontrollably with the cold. ‘You took your time about it, didn’t you?’
‘Never wasted a minute,’ Smith said defensively. ‘I had to have a hot meal and coffee first.’
‘You had to have–you beast, you selfish beast!’ She took a quick step forward and flung her arms around his neck. ‘I hate you.’
‘I know.’ He pulled off a gauntlet and gently touched her disengaged cheek. ‘You’re frozen.’
‘You’re frozen, he says! Of course I’m frozen. I almost died in that plane. Why couldn’t you have supplied some hot water bottles–or–or an electrically heated suit or– or something? I thought you loved me!’
‘I can’t help what you think,’ Smith said kindly, patting her on the back. “Where’s your gear?’
‘Fifty yards. And stop patting me in that–that avuncular fashion.’
‘Language, language,’ Smith said. ‘Come on, let’s fetch it.’
They trudged upwards through the deep snow, Mary holding his arm tightly. She said curiously: ‘What on earth excuse did you give for coming back up here? Lost a cuff-link?’
‘There was something I had to come for, something apart from you, although I gave a song-and-dance act of having forgotten about it until the last moment, until it was almost too late. The radio code-book inside Sergeant Harrod’s tunic.’
‘He–he lost it? He dropped it? How–how could he have been so criminally careless!’ She stopped, puzzled. ‘Besides, it’s chained–‘
It’s still inside Sergeant Harrod’s runic,’ Smith said sombrely. ‘He’s up here, dead.”
‘Dead?’ She stopped and clutched him by the arms. After a long pause, she repeated : ‘He’s dead! That–that nice man. I heard him saying he’d never jumped before. A bad landing?’
‘So it seems.’
They located the kit-bag in silence and Smith carried it back to the edge of the cliff. Mary said: ‘And now? The code-book?’
‘Let’s wait a minute. I want to watch this rope.’
‘Why the rope?’
“Why not?’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Mary said resignedly. I’m only a little girl. I suppose you know what you’re doing.’
‘I wish to God I did,’ Smith said feelingly.
They waited, again in silence, side by side on the kit-bag. Both stared at the rope in solemn concentration as if nylon ropes at seven thousand feet had taken on a special meaning-, fulness denied nylon ropes elsewhere. Twice Smith tried to light a cigarette and twice it sputtered to extinction in the drifting snow. The minutes passed^ three, maybe four: they felt more like thirty or forty. He became conscious that the girl beside him was shivering violently–he guessed that she had her teeth clamped tight to prevent their chattering–and was even more acutely conscious that his entire left side–he was trying to shelter her from the wind and snow–was becoming numb. He rose to leave when suddenly the rope gave a violent jerk and the piton farther from the cliff edge was torn free. The loop of the rope slid quickly down past the piton to which it was anchored and kept on going till it was brought up short by its anchor. Whatever pressure was on the rope increased until the nylon bit deeply into the fresh snow on the cliff-edge. Smith moved across and tested the pressure on the rope, at first gingerly and tentatively then with all his strength. The rope was bar-taut and remained bar-taut. But the piton held.
‘What–what on earth–‘ Mary began, then broke off. Her voice was an unconscious whisper.
‘Charming, charming,’ Smith murmured. ‘Someone down there doesn’t like me. Surprised?’
‘If–if that spike hadn’t held we’d never have got down again.’ The tremor in her voice wasn’t all due to the cold.
‘It’s a fair old jump,’ Smith conceded.
He took her arm and they moved off. The snow was heavier now and even with the aid of their torches visibility was no more than six feet, but, by using the rocky out-crop as a bearing, it took Smith no more than two minutes to locate Sergeant Harrod, now no more than a featureless mound buried in the depths of the snow-drift. Smith brushed aside the covering shroud of white, undid the dead man’s tunic, recovered the code-book, hung the chain round his neck and buttoned the book securely inside his own Alpenkorps uniform.