The Eiger Sanction (11 page)

From across the strip, a new but battered Land-Rover darted out between two corrugated metal hangars, skidded in a right-angle turn that sprayed dust over complaining mechanics, bounced with all four wheels off the ground over a mound of gravel, narrowly missed a Piper that was warming up, triggering a vigorous exchange of abuse between driver and pilot, then bore down on Jonathan with a maximum acceleration until, at the last possible moment, the four-wheel brakes were locked and the Rover screeched to a side-slipping stop, its bumper only inches from Jonathan's knee.

Big Ben Bowman was out before the Land-Rover stopped rocking. “Jon! Goddam my eyes, how are you?” He ripped one suitcase from Jonathan's grasp and tossed it into the back of the vehicle with scant concern for the contents. “I'll tell you one thing, ol' buddy. We're going to drink a bunch of beer before you get out of here. Hey!” His broad hairy paws closed down on Jonathan's upper arms, and after an awkward crushing hug, Jonathan was held out at arm's length for inspection. “You're looking good, ol' buddy. A little soft, maybe. But goddam my ass if it ain't good to see you! Wait till you see the ol' place. It's got...” The scream of the CII jet taxiing to take off eclipsed all sound, but Big Ben talked on insouciantly as he loaded Jonathan's second bag and grappled its owner into the Rover. Ben hopped around to jump in behind the wheel, slapped into gear, and they jumped off, bouncing over the drain ditch beside the field as they described a wide skidding turn. Jonathan gripped the seat and shouted as he caught sight of the CII jet roaring down on them from the left. Big Ben laughed and made a sharp cut to the right, and for a moment they raced parallel to the jet, under the shadow of its wing. “No chance!” Ben shouted over the combined din, and he turned left, passing so close behind the jet that Jonathan felt the hot, gritty blast of its engine.

“For Christ's sake, Ben!”

“Can't help it! Can't beat a jet!” Then he roared with laughter and jammed down on the gas pedal. They cut around the random scatter of airport buildings without using the designed roads, leaped the curbing to the main highway, and knifed through traffic with a U-turn that made brakes squeal and horns bleat angrily. Ben gestured classically to the offended drivers.

About a mile out of town they skidded off the highway onto a dirt road. “Just a piece down this way, ol' buddy,” Ben shouted. “You remember?”

“About twenty miles, isn't it?”

“Yeah, about. Takes eighteen minutes, unless I'm in a hurry.”

Jonathan gripped the “chicken bar” and said as casually as he could, “I don't see any special reason to hurry, Ben.”

“You won't recognize the old place!”

“I hope I get a chance to see it”

“What?”

“Nothing!”

As they raced along, bouncing over chuckholes, Ben described some of the improvements he had made. Evidently the whole character of his climbing school had changed to some kind of resort ranch. He looked at Jonathan while he talked, only glancing at the road to make corrections when he felt the wheels go into the soft shoulder. Jonathan had forgotten Ben's crisis-style of driving. On a sheer face with nothing but rotten rock to cling to, there was no man he would rather have beside him, but in the driver's seat...

“Oh-oh! Hang on!”

They were suddenly in a cut-back turn and going too fast to make it. The Rover bounced over the shoulder, and the wheels on Jonathan's side dug into the soft sand. For an interminable moment they balanced on those wheels, then Ben whipped to the right, slamming the wheels back to the sand and beginning a fishtail skid. He steered into the skid and pressed down on the gas, converting the skid into a power slide that spun them back up onto the road. “Goddam my ass if I don't forget that turn every time!”

“Ben, I think I'd rather walk.”

“OK, OK.” He laughed and slowed down for a time, but by inevitable degrees their speed increased, and it was not long before Jonathan's hands were white-knuckled on the chicken bar again. He decided there was nothing to be gained by wearing himself out trying to guide the Land-Rover by positive concentration, so he relaxed fatalistically and tried to empty his mind of thought.

Big Ben chuckled.

“What is it?” Jonathan asked.

“I was thinking about the Aconcagua. Remember what I did to that old bitch?”

“I remember.”

They had met in the Alps. The gulf between their temperaments suggested that they would be an unlikely team, and neither had been pleased when they were thrown together because their partners were unavailable for climbs they had set their hearts on. So with formidable misgivings they decided to make the climbs together, and they treated each other with that politeness that substitutes for friendship. Slowly and reluctantly they discovered that their polar talents as climbers meshed to create a powerful team. Jonathan attacked a mountain like a mathematical problem, picking routes, evaluating supplies against energy, against time; Big Ben pounded the face into submission with his uncommon strength and indomitable will. Fanciful fellow climbers came to refer to them as The Rapier and The Mace, which nicknames caught the fancy of writers who contributed articles on their achievements to Alpine journals. Jonathan was particularly suited to rock work where the minute tactics of leverage and purchase fitted his intellectual style. Big Ben took over when they were on ice and snow where he would pant and bull through the drifts, breasting an upward path like an inevitable machine of fate.

In bivouac, their differences of personality again operated as a lubricant for the social friction these cramped and sometimes dangerous quarters induce. Ben was older by ten years, loquacious, loudly appreciative of humor. So divergent were their backgrounds and values that they were never in social competition. Even in the lodge after a victory they celebrated in their different ways with different people, and they rewarded themselves that night with different lands of girls.

For six years they passed the climbing seasons together, bagging peaks: Walker, Dru, the Canadian Rockies. And their international reputations were in no way diminished by Jonathan's contributions to mountaineering publications in which their accomplishments were recorded with calculated phlegmatic understatement that eventually became the stylistic standard for such journals.

It was quite natural, therefore, that when a team of young Germans determined to assail Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, they contacted Jonathan and Ben to accompany them. Ben was particularly enthusiastic; it was his kind of climb, a grinding, man-eroding ascent requiring little in the way of surface tactics, but much in the way of endurance and supply strategy.

Jonathan's response was cooler. As was just, considering that they had conceived the plan, the Germans were to be the primary assault pair. Jonathan and Ben working in support and going after the peak only if something untoward happened to the Germans. It was fair that it should be so, but it was not Jonathan's way. Unlike Ben, who loved each step of a climb, Jonathan climbed for the victory. The great expense involved also dampened Jonathan's exuberance, as did the fact that his particular talents would be of secondary importance on a climb like this.

But Ben was not to be denied. The financial problems he solved by selling the small ranch that was his livelihood; and in a long telephone call he persuaded Jonathan by admitting that, considering his age, this would probably be the last major climb he would ever make.

As it turned out, he was right.

From the sea, Aconcagua seems to rise up just behind Valparaiso, a regular and, from that distance, gentle cone. But getting there is half the hell. Its base is tucked in among a tangle of lower mountains, and the team spent a week alternating between the antithetical torments of miasmic jungle and dusty ravines as they followed the old Fitz-Gerald route to the foot.

There is in this world no more demoralizing climb than that vast heap of rotten rock and ice. It destroys men, not with the noble counterstrokes of an Eigerwand or a Nanga Parbat, but by eroding a man's nerve and body until he is a staggering, whimpering maniac. No single stretch of the hill is particularly difficult, or even interesting in the Alpine sense. It is no exaggeration to say that any athletic layman could handle any given thousand feet of it, if properly equipped and conditioned to the thin air. But Aconcagua rises thousands upon thousands of feet, and one climbs hour after hour up through shale and ragged rock, through moraine and crevassed glacier, day upon day, with no sense of accomplishment, with no feeling that the summit is nearing. And time and again, the flash storms that twist around the peaks pin the climbers down for who knows how long. Maybe forever. And still that pile of garbage left from the Creation goes on and upward.

Within three thousand feet of the summit, one of the Germans gave in, demoralized with mountain sickness and the bone-deep cold. “What's the use?” he asked. “It really doesn't matter.” They all knew what he meant. So slight is the technical challenge of the Aconcagua that it is less a cachet to a climber's career than an avowal of the latent death wish that drives so many of them up.

But no bitch-kitty of a hill was going to stop Big Ben! And it was unthinkable that Jonathan could let him go it alone. It was decided that the Germans would stay where they were and try to improve the camp to receive the new summit team when they staggered back.

The next fifteen hundred feet cost Ben and Jonathan an entire day, and they lost half of their provisions in a near fall.

The next day they were pinned down by a flash storm. Saint Elmo's fire sparkled from the tips of their ice axes. With wooden fingers they clung to the edges of the strip of canvas that was their only protection from the screaming wind. The fabric bellied and flapped with pistol-shot reports; it twisted and contorted in their numb hands like a maddened wounded thing seeking vengeance.

With the coming of night, the storm passed, and they had to kick the canvas from hands that had lost the power to relax. Jonathan had had it. He told Ben they must go back the next morning.

Ben's teeth were clenched and tears of frustration flowed from the corners of his eyes and froze on the stubble of his beard. “Goddam it!” he sobbed. “Goddam this frigging hill!” Then his temper ruptured and he went after the mountain with his ice axe, beating it and tearing at it until the thin air and fatigue left him panting on the snow. Jonathan pulled him up and helped him back to their scant cover. By full dark they were dug in as comfortably as possible. The wind moaned, but the storm remained lurking in ambuscade, so they were able to get a little rest.

“You know what it is, ol' buddy?” Ben asked in the close dark. He was calm again, but his teeth were chattering with the cold, and that lent a frighteningly unstable sound to his voice. “I'm getting old, Jon. This has got to be my last hill. And goddam my ass if this old bitch is going to bust me. You know what I mean?”

Jonathan reached out in the dark and gripped his hand.

A quarter of an hour later Ben's voice was calm and flat. “We'll try tomorrow, right?”

“All right,” Jonathan said. But he did not believe it.

The dawn brought ugly weather with it, and Jonathan surrendered his last feeble hope of making the summit. His concern now was getting down alive.

About noon, the weather healed up and they dug themselves out. Before Jonathan could phrase his reasons for turning back, Ben had started determinedly upward. There was nothing to do but follow.

Six hours later they were on the summit. Jonathan's memory of the lastetape is foggy. Step after step, breaking through the wind crust and sinking up to the crotch in the unstable snow, they pressed blindly on, stumbling, slipping, reason reduced to concentration on the task of one more step.

But they were on the summit. They could not see a rope's length out into the swirling spindrift.

“Not even a goddamed view!” Ben complained. Then he fumbled with the drawstring of his plastic outer pants and dropped them away. After a struggle with his wool ski pants, he stood up free and expressed his contempt for the Aconcagua in ancient and eloquent style.

As they plunged and picked their way back down, eager to make time, but fearful of setting off an avalanche, Jonathan noticed that Ben was clumsy and unsteady.

“What's wrong?”

“Ain't got no feet down there, ol' buddy.”

“How long since you felt them?”

“Couple of hours, I guess.”

Jonathan dug a shallow shelter in the snow and fumbled Ben's boots off. The toes were white and hard as ivory. For a quarter of an hour Jonathan held the frigid feet against his bare chest inside his coat. Ben howled with vituperation as feeling returned to one foot, replacing numbness with surges of pain. But the other foot remained rigid and white, and Jonathan knew there was nothing to be gained by continuing first aid. But there was great danger of a fresh storm catching them in the open. They pushed on.

The Germans were magnificent. When the two came staggering into camp, they took Ben from Jonathan and all but carried him down. It was all Jonathan could do to stumble along behind, broken-winded and half snow-blind.