Saturday Evening Post

 

1.

The delta tamed the flood, spreading the water out in a great fan-shaped lagoon in the valley under the mountains.  Under grey skies, the great shallow ponds were turbid and brown, but when the sun shone, the flood reflected the serrated escarpments of the Himalaya.  Motor-scooters and small cars were overturned in the mud and there were dead cows strewn around like boulders, tin roofs of houses, and  corpses cracked and broken like plaster statues.

The NATGEO Tv crew had come up from New Delhi, three days drive by lorry.  The wheat fields at the base of the mountains were underwater and the roads choked with mud and debris.  The crew’s drivers plotted routes around the inundated delta but these were not main highways and, so, were slow, passing through innumerable villages in the foothills.  On the terraces on the hillside, the trucks stopped and the camera crew surveyed the flooded land and shot some footage.  It was beside the point of the expedition, but, perhaps, the film could be used to make a point about global warming or climate change for another documentary.  A half-dozen acres of glacier had broken loose from the snow-cap high in the mountains, impounded a river behind the ice-jam, and, then, ruptured.  Floods like this happened sometimes in the Spring but it was Rabi, the cold season, and strange that such a disaster would occur at this time of the year.  

The outlet of the river gorge was scoured to the bed-rock.  When Carter’s team reached the canyon’s outlet, the Dhauli Ganga was no longer a raging torrent.  Some cold rivulets of water ran among cairns of rock tangled with uprooted brush.  Between boulders, icy ponds filled potholes.  The dams and hydro-electric plants higher up the canyon were sheared apart and the road winding along the side of the river had been mostly washed away.  Standing in the rock ravine, Carter could see a few traces of the highway, broken hyphens of concrete, clinging to high cliff walls, but most of the road bed was gone.  NDMA teams were combing through the mud fanned out across the plain.  Many of villagers were almost naked, wading in the muck, but the NDMA workers were wearing orange haz-mat suits. 

They camped near an intact village at the mouth of the canyon.  Bells tinkled in the cool air.  At night, the mountains breathed with chilly adiabatic winds rushing down the hillsides.  

Carter sent a couple men into the village to buy some food and bottled water.  The villagers said that there was poison in the glacier and that it was rotting so that the water from the mountains was deadly.     

NATGEO had hired four helicopters to lift the production crew up to the head of the gorge and the Valley of Flowers.  They were supposed to be hunting for evidence of the Yeti, or Abominable Snowman – monsters were good for ratings.  The next morning, the helicopters arrived and, after loading the gear, whisked them up to the monastery near the border with Tibet.  The ‘copter pilots commented that several of the crates of camera gear were exceedingly heavy.  Carter knew that the crates contained automatic weapons but it was best not to say anything on that subject.  

The Dhauli Ganga river gorge was a raw scar beneath the helicopters.  Fragments of villages clung to the sheer rock walls.  Landslides of yellow and ocher mud colored the ravine.  Glaciers ringed that plateau crouching like white sphinxes under the high peaks.  Nanda Devi, the mountain of the bliss-bestowing goddess, rose like a blue shark’s tooth over the border with Tibet.  

 

2.

Snow dusted the village.  Goat hoofprints tattooed the hillside.  By noon, the sun was bright and the snow gone.

With Enrique, Carter walked through the town.  The disaster in the gorge made the way into the mountains impassable to tourists and so the lanes between the old houses and shops were empty.  A sad-looking woman sat on a stool behind the counter at the Yeti Snack Bar.  Normally, guides gathered there to meet tourists and climbers that they were taking into the hills.  Except for an old man reading a newspaper, there was no one in the place.   

At the monastery, prayer flags slapped against the stucco facade.  The place was like a school but built without windows.  A porch extended from the front of the monastery supported by ox-blood red pillars.  The cornices supporting the roof were also red.  The abbot sat on a wooden bench under the porch smoking a cigarette.  A clinic made from whitewashed concrete blocks was next to the monastery and there was a wood-frame dormitory for the novices built into the side of the hill behind the medical building.  

Between the clinic and dormitory, a basketball hoop mounted atop a metal frame with wheels rested on a slab of concrete.  The novices in their saffron robes were shooting baskets.  Carter heard the sound of the ball bouncing on the concrete or reverberating against the backboard.  He nodded to the old abbot and saw that his head was enveloped in white vapor – it was either his breath freezing in the cold air or smoke from his cigarette.  Above the dormitory, at the crest of steep hill, Carter saw the profile of a stupa, a stack of old adobe bricks supporting an onion dome with a spike on its top.  The stupa looked like a public lavatory in Delhi or the helmet of a German soldier from the Great War.  

Carter and Enrique made their way past the novices playing basketball.  Sloan was seated at a picnic table beside the improvised court.  They shook hands and, then, Sloan led them among a half-dozen houses assembled like lathe and stucco ladders against the steep hillside.  All of the houses were equipped with satellite dishes except the place where Sloan lived.  Carter commented on the fact that Sloan didn’t have the ear of dish on the side of his home.  

Sloan gestured to the spire of Nanda Devi jutting into the sky above the grey, swirling mist lapping at the sheer cliffs that rimmed the valley.  Some tatters of mist clung to the blue blade of the peak.

“The view’s better than TV,” Sloan said.  “It never gets old.  And the reception up here is lousy anyway.”

The house with bright with big windows.  Sloan had a Nordic Track exercise machine facing the picture window displaying the mountain.  His wife looked ancient with leathery skin and dark eyes like obsidian flints.  She served them buttered tea.  Carter couldn’t abide the stuff.  He sniffed at his cup, tasted the tea with the tip of his tongue to be polite and, then, put it aside.

Carter asked what the “package” was like.  

“It doesn’t matter,” Sloan said.  “You’ll never find it.”  He told Carter and Enrique that he had some good pictures at his office down in the village and that, after their visit to the monastery, he would show them the images.  Sloan worked for an NGO, the UNESCO office that administered the Valley of Flowers and Nanda Devi national park.  

“Anyone else showing interest?” Carter asked.

“Not from this side of the peak,” Sloan said.  “If you want to get to Nanda Devi from India, there’s no way up except through the gorge and this village.  So I know the traffic to and from.”

“Well, we know there’s interest on the other side,” Enrique said.

“So I’m told,” Sloan said.  

“We don’t know their imaging capability,” Carter said.  “It’s possible they’ve got eyes on the prize from one of their satellites.”

“I doubt that very much,” Sloan said.

They talked about the original mission.  Sloan wasn’t on the first ascent but he knew the intelligence.  In 1964, the Chinese were testing atomic bombs above the Tibetan plateau in the western Himalaya.  The CIA devised a sensor battery-powered by six small plutonium cores.  The specifications were lost and there was some question whether the batteries ran from plutonium or enriched uranium, but the result was the same: the sensor was loaded with fissile, bomb-quality fuel.  During the ‘64 climbing season, some CIA mountaineers with their Sherpas lugged the sensor up the flank of Nanda Devi.  The idea was to use the device to eavesdrop on the Chinese nuclear tests.  But at 24,000 feet, the expedition encountered bad weather.  The situation became deadly and half of the agents died.  The sensor was abandoned on the upper edge of a glacier, removed from its wooden crate and perched on a metal tripod.  

The next year, Sloan was part of another ascent, tasked with retrieving the sensor.  When they reached the place where the sensor had been abandoned, the terrain was different – huge blocks of ice studded with rock had fallen from the peak.  Searching a mountainside at 6400 meters above sea level is difficult.  Another storm blotted out the expedition.  Sloan was one of the few survivors, although he lost all of the toes on his left foot.  

A couple years later, another nuclear-powered sensor was placed on a nearby peak.  The device stopped working and a team was sent to pull it off the summit.  The sensor was leaking radiation and had eaten out a hollow pit in the ice-cap forty feet deep.  There were signs that the radioactivity was breaking down the granite around the sensor – or, at least, the rock had become brittle due to freeze-thaw cycles.  The device was boring down into the mountain.  The retrieval team wrapped the device in lead-lined blankets and got it off the mountain.  But the price was high – most of the team members succumbed to particularly malignant cancers within the next two decades.

  

“Obviously, if the weapons-grade fuel in the sensor falls into the wrong hands, we will have an incident” Carter said.

“Well, it’s an incident for the next 25,000 years,” Sloan said.

Enrique corrected him: “The half-life for plutonium-238 is about 24,000 years.”

Sloan had been in the village for almost 20 years.  When he retired from the Agency, they posted him to the base of Nanda Devi to keep an eye on things.  

“Sometimes, I don’t believe any of its true,” Sloan said.  “But when I look at my left foot, I can see proof-positive.  It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff.  Like something you’d read in the Saturday Evening Post.”

Carter didn’t get the reference.  “Saturday Evening Post?”

“It was an old magazine.  Used to publish adventure stories.  I think it folded awhile ago,” Sloan said.

“Famous for its Norman Rockwell covers,” Enrique said.

“Who?” Carter asked.

 

3.

They said goodbye to Sloan’s wife and walked down to the monastery.  The Abbot was still sitting on the porch with his ashtray full of cigarette butts.  Carter noticed that Sloan limped due to the injury to his left foot.

In the monastery, it was dim.  The gilding on the lacquered wood Furious Deities shimmered in candle-light cast by small lamps burning ghee.  Someone was chanting in a wavering voice in the corner of the hall.  Carter saw little urns packed with rice sitting in front of the idols.  Many arms cast shadows on the red and yellow screens behind the figures.  The shadows were those of giant spiders.  

In a small sacristy, the Abbot showed them the relic.  It was a large skull-cap with a furry crown adorned with golden tassels on its brim.  

“So this is supposed to be a Yeti scalp?” Carter asked.

“Indeed,” the Abbot said.

The agreement was that the NATGEO crew could take still pictures of the artifact, but not moving images.  Enrique took his camera from its case and took about fifty photographs of the skull cap from various angles and distances.  

“It would be great to get a tiny sample for DNA testing,” Carter said.

“Forbidden, I’m afraid,” the Abbot said.  He had studied at Oxford and had a British accent.

“No harm in asking,” Carter replied.

“It’s obviously from a Himalayan snow bear,” the Abbot said.  “But there’s no need to slander the faith of the pious.”

“Understood,” Enrique said.

After photographing the shaggy skull-cap, Carter with Enrique and Sloan shook the Abbot’s hand and walked down to the UNESCO office for the National Park.  

“Will there really be a documentary?” Sloan asked.

“Sure,” Enrique said.  “It’s not just a cover.  National Geographic has worked with the Agency for as long as there’s been an Agency.  Hand-in-glove.  We’ll deliver the documentary and get the package off the mountain as well.”

“That’s the mission,” Carter said.  

“Well, when the show gets on satellite dish up here, let me know and I’ll go to the neighbors to have a look-see,” Sloan said.

“We need to have this cover for the mission,” Enrique said.

“Everyone in town knows why you’re here,” Sloan said.  “TV crews don’t arrive in military helicopters.”  

“I questioned that detail myself,” Carter said.  

4.

Stately cedars enclosed the parking lot at the UNESCO office.  On a terrace below the lot, a dense brushy mass of rhododendrons were blossoming, purple froth blurring the tips of the shrubs.  Some dirt-bike trails were cut through the rhododendrons and Carter could hear the chain-saw sound of Vespa motors churning through the undergrowth.  

“A half-dozen Australians are trapped up here,” Sloan said.  “As you know, the roads are out and the lads can’t get down to Delhi.”

“I can hear them zipping around in the woods,” Carter said.

“They’re bored and pretty soon troubles with the local girls will start and, then...” Sloan told him.

“I suppose,” Enrique said.

“It’s a headache,” Sloan replied.

The UNESCO park office was closed.  Sloan had slung a sign across the door that was printed with yellow letters that read: WILL BE BACK AT ------   The sign was made so that a grease-pencil could be used to set a time, but nothing was written in the blank space.

In the office, there was some communication equipment, large photos of the mountain and its glaciers and a relief map on which trekking trails were marked.  Maps and postcards were for sale.  

Sloan led them into a small conference room, excused himself for a minute, and, then, returned with some 1:24,000 topographic maps.  He took some pictures from a file on the table and spread them out on the surface.  

The sensor was a stout tripod supporting a barrel-shaped core something like an aluminum beer-keg.

“That’s the package,” Sloan said.  

The device came to the height of a man’s chest in the black-and-white picture.  In the photograph, Carter saw the fuselage of a smashed plane.  

“What’s this?” he asked, pointing to the shattered aluminum cocoon.  

“I don’t know,” Sloan said.  “It’s illustrative only.”

He showed them pictures taken on the mountain.  They showed icy cliffs and ragged glaciers.  

“It’s not like Everest,” Sloan said.  

Carter and Enrique had both been on Everest.

“Everest is a stroll at high altitude,” Sloan said.  “Nanda Devi is the Matterhorn but three times as high.  It’s all technical.  You sleep on shelves two feet wide.”

“We’re prepared,” Enrique said.

Sloan unfolded the topographic map and showed them the location where the device had been lost.  Carter and Enrique entered the GPS coordinates into their phones.

“Are you reasonably certain as to the site?” Carter asked.

“I lost half my toes up there,” Sloan said.  “You don’t forget after a thing like that.”  

Later that afternoon, Sloan phoned Carter and told him that there was satellite confirmation that the adversary was advancing from the Tibetan side.  He said that pictures showed five two-ton trucks parked along a high pass on the other side of the border.  “There may be two separate parties on the ascent,” Sloan said.  “It looks like you’ve got a reasonable window in the weather.”

“We best be going,” Carter said.

5.

The mountain made weather.  The great blue prism of rock scooped at the jet stream and deflected the icy blast down and across the steep apron of snowfields.  Carter crouched on the arete with a savage wind clawing at his back.  On both sides of him, snow blazed like a torch against the ridge-top.  The vantage overlooked a hollow cirque carved into the side of the mountain, a narrow tilted bowl 150 meters deep chiseled into the peak’s flank.  A climbing party was slowly ascending the steep snowy amphitheater, moving step by step up a 45 degree slope.  Carter estimated the climbing party to be 500 meters away.

Below the arete, on the escarpment opposite the cirque, Carter’s Sherpas were huddled in a rock shelter.  They were about 100 feet below Carter’s position, squatting around the package.  A black body-bag was strapped with bungee cords into a telescoping aluminum toboggan that was now fully extended.  The ridge cast a shadow down the cliff-side and the Sherpas were huddled in bluish darkness.  If the sun had probed their shelter, the edges of the aluminum toboggan would have reflected beams of light and exposed the hiding place.  But the shadows were now long, flooding that side of the mountain with cold, blue-grey darkness.

Carter could see the decoy flag that Enrique had stabbed into the snow.  The climbing team was slowly ascending toward the little orange pennant that hung slack in the center of the snowy amphitheater.  The wind that tormented Carter didn’t penetrate into the cirque and it was still there.  About a hundred yards uphill from the flag, Enrique had collapsed and lay face-down in the snow, arms outstretched ahead of him.  A half-hour earlier he had tried to rise and writhed in the snow, lifting up his buttocks as he flexed his knees, but each of these efforts had failed and now he was motionless.  The night before Enrique told Carter that he felt like he was drowning.  His face was grey.  In his tent, he could not rest on his back because the fluid in his lungs was suffocating him and so he had tried to sleep sitting upright, a space-blanket draped over his shoulders as he coughing for hours head tilted down into his lap.  The dexamethasone hadn’t helped his headache and, when he skidded down the side of the arete to place the decoy flag, dropping through clouds of displaced snow, Carter thought that it was unlikely that he would be able to climb back up to the serrated ridge where he was positioned.  And, indeed, as the climbers inched up the center of the cirque, Enrique lay face-down and motionless on an icy terrace above the flag.  

Carter kept his mittens on his hands as he assembled the AW 50.  He slid the butt-stock into the bolt action firing mechanism.  Then, he rested the muzzle on the bipod spread between two bluish-grey boulders.  The crest of the arete was serrated with places where the knife-edge of rock had fallen away.  Where Carter extended his sniper rifle, there was a breast-high palisade of shattered stone protecting him.  It was enough of a fortification that the mountaineers climbing the snowy canyon below could not see his location.

The wind howled and the rifle trembled on the bipod.  Carter slipped the magazine onto the rifle, hands still mittened.  Then, he tilted the muzzle down toward the climbing party.  Through the telescopic sight, Carter counted five men, all of them roped together and moving slowly, one laborious step at another up the steep slope.  The men wore white Winter combat gear and their eyes were hidden behind opaque black goggles.  The gun was bolt-action with de-icing features and Carter inspected the mechanism.  It looked operable despite the bitter cold.  He peered through the telescope, aiming at the man in the center of the rope-line.  Carter couldn’t manage the trigger wearing his mitten and, so, he slid his hand out of the nylon and cloth glove.  The metal on the gun burned his finger like a flame for a second, but, then, his hand became numb.  

The first and second shots missed.  The climbing party stopped and looked around them.  The report from the gun ricocheted off the rock and ice cliffs and the men below couldn’t determine the source of the sound.  The third shot went through the head of the central climber and he dropped to the side.  The rope tautened and the man above him, as well as the climber below, were yanked off their feet.  The fourth shot took off the head of the lead climber.  The fifth shot was another miss.

Carter put the second five-cartridge magazine into the sniper rifle.  He took a deep breath, held it in his lungs, and shot the last man in the climbing party.  This left two climbers intact, but snared by the rope, their bodies slithering down the slope.  Carter waited for the roped men to stop sliding downhill.  Flat layers of snow surfed down the slope below them.  When their descent had stopped, Carter shot the other two climbers, missing only once in the course of three shots.  

The dead men had been shot through their skulls and, from the arete, the climbing party looked like a necklace strung with bright red rubies thrown down on the glittering white fan of snow.  

Carter slung the rifle still attached to the bipod over his shoulder and picked his way between slabs of fallen rock down the steep wall of the ridge.  When he reached the rock shelter, one of the Sherpas pointed to his right hand.  It was bare.  Carter had left his mitten at the top of the arete.  The lead Sherpa shook his head sadly.  Carter turned to scale the ridge, but the Sherpa tapped him on his shoulder and pointed to the hollow in the hillside.  Carter unzipped his coat and put his numb right-hand in his armpit.  The Sherpa climbed up to the spine of serrated boulders, found the mitten, and, then, skidded back down to where the others were waiting with the package.

6.

The day before, the team had located the package in a glistening ice alcove at the lower edge of a hanging glacier.  The snowfield above clung to an almost vertical pinnacle of blue rock, but at its base the ice was honeycombed with small grottos and a lattice of deep fissures.  The sensor was half-crushed at the base of a wet hollow cistern.  Obviously, radiation had melted an abscess into the glacier around the foreign object embedded in its icy depths.  

Carter was suffering from altitude sickness and had a blinding headache so some of the details of the find were unclear to him.  The sensor’s tripod was shattered into pieces but its metal staves were thrust into the ice near the device like grave-markers.  It seemed to Carter that there was some sort of fur tangled around the tripod’s broken legs.  He wondered if a marmoset or snow fox had been killed by the radiation.  There was also a reddish-brown wreath of fur garlanding the barrel full of plutonium battery cells.

There was no need to retrieve the tripod legs and so they were left staked into the ice.  The Sherpas bundled the keg-shaped sensor into a body-bag lined with a light sheet of woven chain-mail lead.  Then, they extended the aluminum toboggan and strapped the black bag into the sled’s shallow trough.  

The surveillance satellite sent a text-message to Carter’s cell-phone.  The message reported that a team of climbers, probably from the Chinese army, was ascending the mountain and were above the ice-fall at about 22,000 feet.  Carter responded that he would neutralize the Chinese climbers.  An hour later, there was another message: a third team was below at 14,000 feet, a vertical half-mile beneath the ice-fall.  These climbers had not come from the Tibetan side of the mountain and, it was thought, that they were Iranian special forces.  

“We will try to avoid them,” Carter texted to his handlers.   

7.

By the time, they reached the ice-fall, the moon was shining in the blue sky above the spike of the mountain.  It had been a sunny day and, no doubt, the maze of broken ice was slippery and unstable.  Carter said that they would camp on a rib of rock above the ice-fall and make their way through the labyrinth the next morning, just before dawn, when the badlands of ice were frozen solid.  

He had a bad night in his tent.  He now knew what Enrique had been suffering before he died.  When Carter tried to rest on his shoulders, his throat filled with fluid and he coughed until he vomited.  So he had to sit upright in the tent, feverish and shivering in his sleeping bag.  The night seemed endless and, when he crawled outside to vomit, the mass of the mountain loomed over him, a great black pier thrust out into a sea of innumerable stars.  He didn’t think that he slept but must have – he opened his eyes and saw a faint pinkish light reflected down into his tent.  Creeping through the flap, he saw the summit shining rose-red in the light of dawn.

“We’ll leave the camp behind,” Carter said.  “Either we get down the mountain to a better elevation or we all die up here.”  The Sherpas said that they agreed with him, but they silently struck camp anyway, loading the gear into their backpacks.  Then, the men roped themselves together and gingerly walked down the slope in the grey shadow of the mountain.  

8.

On the ascent through the ice-fall a couple days earlier, they had left some orange flags tacked to cairns of rock.  At first, they couldn’t find the markers, but, then, one of the Sherpas sighted a flag amidst the crumbling pillars of ice and they went that way.  Along with some provisions, there were a couple of aluminum ladders for crossing ravines.  The seracs were blue in the half-light, crowding around the slits in the ice through which they made their way.

Then, the sun was overhead.  The ice-fall creaked like a sail boat under heavy wind.  They heard the ice crumbling and drizzling down onto the glacier with a sound like breaking glass.  In the blue gorges, the ice sang out with sharp cracks and guttural groans.  Rivulets of bright water slid down grooves in the glacier.

They moved in single-file through a slot canyon under a pale ribbon of overhead ice-bridge.  Carter could see that they were near the base of the ice-fall.  A hundred meters below, the obelisks and spikes of ice were sculpted to strange shapes, clusters of glazed pinnacles that looked like monks or half transparent women.  Beyond, the glacier extended its paws like a crouching lion, rounded hillocks with talons of ice at their base  were brown and grey with matted debris. Braided streams glinted in the bright sunlight, silver ropes unraveling across the skirt of gravel descending to the valley below.

On the terrace above the amphitheater of eroded seracs, the twisting trench by which they were descending was split cross-wise by a deep crevasse.  The fissure seemed bottomless with glistening sides constricting over black, wet cavities in the ice.  The Sherpas extended the ladder over the crevasse and two of them crawled on hands and knees over the metal bridge.  It was too dangerous to remain roped together and so they detached themselves from the nylon line.  Carter knelt to cross the ladder.  It flexed under him and his right hand, ruined by frost bite, couldn’t take hold of the rail.  He inched forward.  Somewhere, in the ice gorges above them, there was the rattle of an avalanche, a spitting sound of ice popping apart.  Carter looked to his side and saw the Sherpa kneeling along the edge of the fissure suddenly billowing blood.  The man pitched into the crevasse and the package on its toboggan slithered sideways, tilting into the ravine.  A bullet hit the Sherpa across from Carter, bent forward to hold the ladder in place.  The man recoiled backward and the aluminum span tilted, the forward edge slipping down the side of the crevasse where it jammed into a crack in the ice.  For a moment, Carter clung to the ladder rail and rungs but, then, he fell, slamming his head against the sheer side of the fissure.  

The ladder was a little above him, speared into the side of the ravine.  Carter had fallen onto a spiky ledge and, when he breathed, it seemed that his ribs were broken.  The gunfire continued in spurts.  Another Sherpa fell into the pit, swimming downward through the blue shadows and, then, vanishing into a keyhole-shaped aperture below.  Carter looked  along the slit in the ice and saw the package, like a black teardrop hanging in a chimney of ice.  Something yielded, and the body bag dropped out of sight.

A head appeared in the ribbon of blue above.  Then, bullets splashed off the side of the crevasse.  Ice shrapnel burst around him.   Carter heard voices.  Above a man leaned forward to seize the upper end of the ladder but he couldn’t reach it.  Someone must have gripped the man by the ankles because half of his body hung over the fissure.  Still, he couldn’t reach the ladder.     

For a long time, voices called across the top of the crevasse.  Then, it was silent.

9.

Every instinct told Carter to pull himself up from the ravine using the ladder.  But when he rose from his ledge and reached for the aluminum rail, the ladder dislodged and dropped through his damaged right hand, plunging down into the narrow oubliette below him.  Carter nudged the ladder with his boot.  It seemed steady, speared into another ice-shelf below him.  There was nothing to do but crawl down the rungs of the ladder, deeper into the heart of the glacier.

It was horror to climb down away from the narrow band of light shining above.  Carter felt the horror in his belly and lungs and paused to vomit.  At the bottom of the ladder, he heard water rushing below.  He pulled the ladder down past his body and found a sticking point in the wall of the chimney and climbed deeper into the ice.  

The bottom of the hole was an awful place, a glassy corkscrew that twisted down into the darkness.  Carter knew that if he wormed his way down into that fistula in the ice he would not be able to climb back up again.  For a while, he wept and cursed.  Then, he lowered himself down into the twisting hole, slid for a dozen feet or so, and, then, dropped into a chamber.  Dim blue light filled the room.  Water was flowing in a trough of ice, cascading down into a large space.  

Carter waded in the stream, numbed by its hip-deep cold water.  The larger room was wet with dark puddles and big pillars of ice like piers supporting the glacier above.  Carter followed the stream, slipping and sliding downward.  In several places, the surge of water filled the tunnel.  At the first siphon, Carter paused wondering how he could go forward since the entire bore hole was throbbing with water.  The current made up his mind for him, knocking him off his feet.  He went under the frigid water, flailed at the hard ice ceiling over head and, then, felt his hands flapping in the air.  The siphon passed into a hollow space that was brighter.  Above, Carter saw translucent panes of ice, shimmering with veils of falling water.  A few feet downhill, the tunnel expanded into a narrow canyon at the foot of the glacier where water toppled in cascades down to a notch opening onto the gravel-strewn plain.  Carter came out of the darkness.  Hypothermia dazed him and he kept falling down, tripped by small rocks lying next to the stream bed.  Each time he fell, Carter thought that he should rest for a while and, even close his eyes, but something nudged him upright and he continued to stagger downhill on a tongue of pebbles between two ribbons of silvery, plunging water.  

10.

He didn’t remember much of the descent.

For a time, Carter waded through flowers, hip deep in blossoms that seemed preternaturally bright and vivid.  

At the edge of a flowering wall of rhododendron, the purple foam of blossoms parted.  Carter saw a red-haired Australian boy with freckles on a Vespa.  The boy had a mountain girl riding behind him on the motor-bike.  Carter saw her dark eyes and her arms wrapped around the young man’s belly.

He tried to smile reassuringly at them, but his face seemed all hardened, crusty and cracked.  Carter raised his right hand.  It was black and shaggy with blisters.  The boy glared at him with horror and the girl cried out.

Later, Carter lay bathed and perfumed across the bier of a hospital bed.  His right hand was heavily bandaged.  

Sloan came to see him.  

The room smelled of carbolic acid.  When the nurse had left, Sloan squinted at him and said: “ Please don’t tell me that you left six batteries of plutonium at the headwaters of the Ganges River.”

“I don’t know what happened,” Carter said.

“C’est la guerre,” Sloan remarked.

“What is that?” Carter asked.

“Shit happens,” Sloan said.

11.

Later, Carter hobbled around the village.  Some tourists had been able to ascend the canyon brought up from the plains by high-clearance four-wheel drive jeeps.

Carter sat in the Yeti Snack Bar.  He held his Taj Mahal beer in his left hand.  Most of the fingers on his trigger-hand had been amputated.  

A young Japanese man with his girlfriend sat at a table in the middle of the room.  Both of the tourists wore blue surgical masks and they were paging through a guide-book.  Beyond the open door to the café, Carter saw Nanda Devi, a great blue throne where purplish storms were seated in all their glory.

Sloan came into the Yeti Snack Bar, nodded to the proprietor and ordered a beer.

Carter said that, when they found the sensor, it was all wreathed in strands and tangles of reddish brown fur.  

“It was the exact color of that skull-cap made from the scalp of the Abominable Snow Man up at the monastery,” Carter said.

“Now that’s a real story,” Sloan replied.  “That’s a story worthy of Saturday Evening Post.”