The Edge (12 page)

I was shocked at how big an eagle looks when it's trying to knock you off a vertical wall of rotten rock. On the first pass, it hit me with its wings.

“Whoa! Missed it!” JR shouted.

I was dangling by one hand. After three flailing tries, I found a narrow chink with my free hand, saving myself from falling to my death on the sharp scree hundreds of feet below.

“I'm going to swing to the right so I can get a wide shot,” JR said.

“A wide shot of what?”

“Of the second attack.”

“I don't think there will be a second attack.”

“Oh, yeah there will,” JR assured me.

JR swung out on his rope and caught the edge of a cave thirty feet to my left, then heaved himself into a sitting position on the lip. It was an impressive and dangerous move. I wondered if he would have attempted it if there hadn't been the possibility of getting a shot of me being peeled off the face of the cliff by a bird of prey.

I looked behind. JR was right about me getting hit again. There were now two eagles and they were both circling back toward me. I looked up. My cave was still thirty feet above me. Below, Alessia and Rafe were already setting up their tents. I thought about rappelling down to Alessia's cave and waiting for the eagles to calm down, but as pleasant as that would have been, there wasn't time. I needed to get up to my perch before sunset. We had used most of our daylight during the slow ascent. Plus there was a good chance that the eagles wouldn't settle down until we were off their cliff.

“I'd get scrambling.”

Mom. On the radio. She and Zopa were three hundred feet below, shading their eyes with their hands and looking up. Phillip was standing next to them with a pair of binoculars. I knew what he was hoping for.

“Move. Or brace yourself for impact.”

Duh, Mom.
I couldn't free up a hand to answer her. I scrunched up as best as I could on a vertical wall and shoved my face into a narrow crack to stop my eyeballs from getting plucked out. I felt the air from the first bird's wings a second before it smashed into my helmet. This was followed by another hit on my pack, much harder than the first.

“That was outstanding!” JR shouted.

I didn't take the time to call him a jerk. I started scrambling up before the next attack.

“Zopa says the birds don't like your red helmet and pack,”
Mom said.

A lot of good that did me. I couldn't dump the pack. My tent and gear were in it. Without the gear there would be no
A.

“He says the birds have completely ignored the other climbers.”

Bad luck for the red climber,
I thought. Rafe probably had his fingers crossed, hoping I'd get scraped off.

“Peak! Slow down, man! I need to film you reaching your cave!”

Sorry, JR. Not happening, man!

I started climbing faster. Just as I made it to the lip of my cave and began pulling myself up, I heard an eagle scream. A second later I was slammed in the back. My helmet bounced off the lip. I fell backward and was barely able to prevent a fall by jamming my index and middle fingers into a crack. I'm sure Mom was having a heart attack. I thought I might be having a heart attack. I grabbed a rotten rock with my free hand. The rock crumbled into rust colored chalk. I grabbed another rock. It held, thank God, or the Buddha, or whoever. I pulled myself up to the lip again, got a knee up, then . . .

Bam!

The second eagle hit me in the butt. I flew into the cave, smashing my face on the back wall, which was only six feet from the opening. I scrambled to my feet, shrugged out of my red pack, tore my red helmet off my head, then leaned out of the cave and waved so Mom knew I was alive. Alessia, Rafe, Aki, Choma, and the film crew were all leaning out looking up at me.

“I got the butt strike,”
JR said over the radio.

Great. I unclipped my radio. “If you put it on YouTube, I will kill you.”

“Roger that,”
JR came back, then laughed.

“I'm not kidding.”

Alessia's voice came over the radio.
“Are you okay, Peak?”

It was good to hear her voice. It was good to hear anyone's voice.

“I thought I saw blood on your face.”

I wiped my hand across my face. There was blood. Quite a bit of blood.

“I'm fine.”

I looked out from my perch. The eagles were still circling, but they no longer seemed interested in me.

“Okay, people.”

Phillip. Only he called people “people.”

“Let's put that little excitement behind us and get back to the shot.”

Oh, yeah, Phillip? You weren't up here being attacked by eagles.

“You all need to get your tents up so we can get an idea of where to put the cameras. I need the film crew down here for a meeting. Pronto.”

Pronto? What was the matter with him?

I keyed the radio. “Peak here. If it's all the same to you, I'd like to wait until after dark before I set up my tent. I think Zopa called it right about the eagles being ticked off over the red.”

I saw Mom and Zopa talking to Phillip. The film crew were rappelling down the cliff. Pronto.

My radio crackled.

“Uh, yeah, Peak. Phillip here. I'm not convinced it's the red that got them excited. I think it might be your proximity to their nest, which is about twenty-five feet above your current position. Do you copy?”

Actually, if I had leaned over the ledge, I could have copied it without a radio. He was standing a hundred yards away and almost shouting into the radio as if I were deaf.

“Yeah, Phillip. I got that. I'm still going to wait until after dark to set up my tent. Don't want to risk having it shredded before you get your shot.”

This was followed by a long radio silence. Blood was dripping onto my lap from a cut on my chin. I rummaged through my pack for the first aid kit.

“Roger that, Peak. But as soon as it gets dark, set up your tent. Everybody else? Get your tents up pronto, so we can start framing the shot. Put them as close to the edge as possible. And make sure your letter is clearly visible. You can move the tents back from the edge after the shoot.”

I pulled all of the gear in as far as it would go and leaned against the back wall. There was a small mirror inside the kit. The slice on my chin was deep. If I'd been in the city, I'd have gone to the hospital and gotten a couple of stitches. But I was in a shallow cave in Afghanistan. No stitches. I managed to cinch the slice together with butterfly bandages.

How'd you get that scar?

Attacked by an eagle in Afghanistan.

I was kind of looking forward to that exchange.

There were at least two hours before nightfall. I couldn't say the cave was cool, but there was a slight breeze drying my sweat, which made me feel cooler. The adrenaline from the near fall was quickly replaced by sheer exhaustion. Phillip and the other climbers were chattering away on the two-ways. I switched my radio off and closed my eyes.

I open my eyes. I see stars against a black sky. Cave. I'm in a cave. The temperature has dropped by several degrees. I look at my watch. Ten o'clock. I've been asleep for five hours? Why didn't they wake me? Why is it so quiet? I turn the radio on, expecting to hear Phillip shouting at me to set up my red tent. But there is nothing. I check the battery. It's fine. I key the mike . . .

“
GUESS I FELL
asleep.”

Silence.

“This is Peak.”

Silence.

“Copy?”

Silence.

I scrambled to the ledge. The wall and the ground were as dark as the sky.

“Yo! Can anybody hear me? My radio isn't working.”

Silence.

I wondered if I was having a nightmare. I touched my chin. The butterfly bandages were still in place.

“Is anybody there?”

Silence.

How could twelve people simply vanish without a trace? Impossible.

I spent another five minutes shouting.

Nothing.

I put my headlamp on. I still had a short coil of rope. It wasn't long enough to get to the ground, but it was more than long enough to reach the other caves. The only problem was that it was pitch-dark. I couldn't see the ground. I couldn't see ten feet below my cave. The sane thing to do would have been to wait until morning, but the situation was crazy and called for insane action. I tested the anchor Zopa had set on the lip of my cave, ran my rope through, then lowered myself into the dark.

I went to Rafe's cave first, because his was the easiest to get to. His yellow tent was still up. The only thing inside was a small lantern hanging from the roof pole. His pack and gear were gone. There was a white
E
attached to the outside of the tent facing toward the cave opening. By sticking my head out over the edge of his cave, I could see now that all of the tents were lit from the inside.

P-E-C-E.

The bright letters gave me an idea. If everyone disappeared the moment I fell asleep, which seemed unlikely, they would just be getting to base camp, providing that was where they were going. The point was, they might have been able to see the lit tents from wherever they were. I looked at Rafe's lantern. Of course it was the best that money could buy, and of course it had an emergency strobe mode. I switched it on, hoping that if I got all four tents flashing, they'd know I'd been in their caves, that I knew they had vanished.

It took an hour to check the other three caves. Tents. No gear. Nobody home. All the caves were shallow. No back doors. The only way out was to climb down the wall using Zopa's anchors.

Zopa.

It wouldn't have surprised me if Zopa had left me stranded in a cave. I expected odd behavior from the mysterious monk. But Mom would never have done this. Not in a million years. If there had been a problem with the radios and they had to suddenly leave, she would have scaled the cliff in the dark, unprotected, to reach me.

If she were able to.

I had seen the word
dread
a thousand times, but until that moment, I had no idea what it really meant. It felt as if someone had kicked me in the stomach. For a moment I couldn't move. I thought I might puke.

Breathe.

I was no good to anyone if I was scared out of my mind.

Move.

I was in Aki's cave. Blue
P.
His rope was still fixed to the anchor at the entrance. I tested it by jerking on it as hard as I could. It was solid. I snapped it into my harness, leaned back, and stepped into the black void, taking short hops, five or six feet at a time, making sure of my footing before pushing off again. I reached a second fixed rope in less than five minutes. I wasn't sure if Zopa had set the anchor. I tested it before hooking on, which got me thinking about why the ropes were still there. You don't leave hundreds of dollars' worth of rope hanging on a wall, even if you didn't pay for the rope. When I got to the bottom of the cliff, I hoped that Mom and the others would run up to me and ask where I'd been. But no one came out of the dark. The base of the cliff was as empty as the caves. To mask my disappointment and fear, I retrieved the ropes and tied as many of them to my pack as I could. That done, it was time to look around and see if I could figure out what had happened to everyone.

I started where I had last seen Mom, orienting myself by the bright blinking
P-E-C-E
above. It was easy to find, because smashed on the rocks in thousands of pieces were what looked like every two-way, cell, and sat phone. I stared down at the broken plastic.

Someone is coming our way,
Zopa had said. It looked like they had arrived. Nobody in our group would have smashed the phones and radios.

I walked over to the spring. I wish I hadn't.

Ebadullah and Elham are lying next to the cool water.

Their throats are slit.

The fronts of their kurtas are covered in dried blood.

Their beards are caked in gore.

Their eyes are open in surprise.

Their rifles are gone.

Their prayer rugs are unrolled.

They were murdered during
isha
.

The only dead people I had ever seen were on Everest. They were frozen. They didn't look real. They looked like marble statues. Ebadullah and Elham look like dead people. I turned away, stifled a gag reflex, and sat down on the cool ground. Actually, I collapsed. My legs wouldn't hold me. I barely knew Elham and Ebadullah, but no one deserved to be brutally murdered while praying.

What if others had been murdered? Mom. Zopa. Alessia . . .

This got me back on my feet. I began to search.

The backpacks had been ransacked, the contents strewn all over the ground, but the packs were gone. The only things that seemed to be missing were the food, headlamps, stoves, a few ropes, and the film crew's cameras and recording equipment. Everything else was left behind.

I searched the area around the spring. No more bodies. The others had been taken. I'd slept through an abduction. Now what?

I looked up at the cliff.
P-E-C-E
flashed over and over again. It could probably be seen for miles.

Mistake. What was I thinking? That everyone just wandered off and left me alone? If our group could see the flashing letters, the kidnappers could see the letters. They might be headed back to the cliff right now.

I scanned the dark scree for lights. No one could traverse the loose rocks without headlamps or flashlights. It was difficult enough during the day. I didn't see any lights, and was thinking that I was probably safe, when I heard a sound behind me that nearly put me on the ground again. A scream. It wasn't human. I whipped around and came face-to-face with a wet pair of camel lips, bad breath and all, which did put me back on the ground again—not the breath, unpleasant as it was, but the bellowing face in the dark. It wasn't being aggressive. I think it was happy to see me. The donkey trotted up behind the camel and started braying.