The harness jerked tight across Brian’s chest and under his arms. Compared to the throbbing pain in his legs and the ache in his back, however, the new agony was endurable.
He was surprised that he was still conscious—and alive.
Unclipping his flashlight from the tool belt that encircled his waist, he cut open the perfect blackness around him with a blade of light, and torrents of snowflakes gushed over him.
Trying not to think about the icy sea below, he peered up at the ledge that he had overshot. It was four feet above his head. A yard to his left, the gloved fingers of George Lin’s inert right hand trailed over the shelf.
Brian was swinging in a small arc again. His lifeline was scraping back and forth along the ledge, which had not been melted by burning gasoline. It gleamed sharply. Splinters and shavings of ice sprinkled down on him as the rope carved a shallow notch in that abrasive edge.
A flashlight beam stabbed down from above.
Brian raised his eyes and saw Roger Breskin peering at him from the top of the cliff.
Lying on the ice, his head over the precipice and his right arm extended with a flashlight, Roger cupped his free hand to his mouth and shouted something. The wind tore his words into a meaningless confetti of sound.
Brian raised one hand and waved weakly.
Roger shouted louder than before: “You all right?” His voice sounded as if it came from the far end of a five-mile-long railroad tunnel.
Brian nodded as best he could. Yes, I’m all right. There was no way to convey, with only a nod, the degree of his fear and the worry that was caused by the lingering pain in his legs.
Breskin shouted, but only a few of his words reached Brian: “Going … snowmobile … reverse … draw you … up.”
Again, Brian nodded.
Roger disappeared, obviously hurrying back to the snowmobile.
Leaving his flashlight on, Brian clipped it to his tool belt, with the beam shining down on his right foot. He reached overhead and gripped the taut line with both hands, hoisting himself slightly to take a measure of the strain off his upper arms, which were on the verge of dislocating from his shoulder sockets.
The snowmobile drew up some of the line. The movement was smooth compared to the style of his descent, and he was not thrown against the cliff.
From the knees down, his legs were still below the ledge. He swung them up and over, planted both feet on the narrow shelf of ice, crouching there. He let go of the rope and stood up.
His ankles ached, his knees felt as if they were made of jelly, and pain laced his thighs. But his legs held him.
He took a large piton—a five-inch shaft tapered to a sharp point, topped by a one-inch diameter eye loop—from a zippered pocket of his coat. He freed a small hammer from his tool belt and pounded the pin into a tight crack in the face of the cliff.
Again, Roger’s flashlight shone down from the top.
When the anchoring pin was secure, Brian unhooked an eight-foot-long coil of nylon rope from this belt. Before descending, he had knotted one end of it to a carabiner; now he linked the carabiner to the piton and screwed shut its safety gate. He tied the other end of the line around his waist. The resultant tether would bring him up short of death if he slipped and fell off the ledge, yet he was free enough to attend to George Lin. Thus belayed, he untied the knots that held the harness together across his chest and under his arms. When he was free from the main line, he coiled it and hung it around his neck.
To avoid some of the wind’s vicious force, he got on his hands and knees and crawled to Lin. Roger Breskin’s light followed him. He took his own flashlight from his belt and placed it on the ledge, against the cliff face, with the beam shining on the unconscious man.
Unconscious—or dead?
Before he could know that answer to that question, he had to get a look at Lin’s face. Turning the man onto his back was not an easy chore, because Brian had to be careful that the scientist did not roll off into the abyss. By the time Lin was on his back, he’d regained consciousness. His amber skin—at least those few square inches of his face that were exposed—was shockingly pale. Against the slit in his mask, his mouth worked without making an audible sound. Behind his frost-spotted goggles, his eyes were open; they expressed some confusion but didn’t appear to be the eyes of a man in severe pain or delirium.