Examining the lines they quickly learned that tempers weren't the only thing
that had frayed on the climb. The television crew chief's belaying rope had
parted. Jason had fallen away down the steep northern face of the Mountain of Pain, to vanish forever in the storm.
Before Annja even caught her
breath Baron had his men busy checking all the other ropes.
"Are you all right?" Levi asked, hunkering down beside her. His skin
looked paler than normal behind his goggles and he was breathing raggedly
through his mouth.
From somewhere he pulled his red asthma rescue inhaler and took a puff. His
breath came in such short frenzied chops he could barely hold the medicine in
for an entire second. The thin air was torture to Annja, who was in splendid
shape. It must have been unimaginably brutal for him. Even though she'd
performed more strenuous activity than the rabbi, fear and panic and the strain
of clinging to her had to have left him starved for air.
"I'll be fine, Levi, thanks," she managed to gasp. "But no. I'm
not all right." He collapsed beside her, wheezing like a landed trout.
Desperate guilt about Jason's death all but overwhelmed her. Part of her knew
that was irrational. She'd never had the slightest chance of doing anything to
arrest his fall. A far greater argument could be made that she was culpable in
Fred's death. But not Jason's.
And yet…they wouldn't be here if it weren't for me, she thought. Steeling
herself she glanced toward Trish and Tommy. Their duties to record the
expedition forgotten in disaster's bare face, they huddled together up against
the cliff face like lost puppies. They didn't even glance her way. Somehow that
hit her harder than reproachful stares or even words would have.
She became aware of a big shape looming over her. It was an effort to raise her
head and look up.
"Thanks for saving me," Robyn Wilfork said. Then he lumbered off to
sit down somewhere.
If he planned to take a hit from his hypothetical hidden hip flask, she
reckoned, he was entitled to it. She wished she could find such easy sanctuary.
Baron was a whirlwind of activity, a raging demon. Or as he'd probably put it,
an avenging angel. Though his Young Wolves were themselves completely wrung-out
and shaken he raged at them until Larry Taitt volunteered to climb down and
search for the fallen man. Red-headed Eli Holden would join him; the twins
would belay from above. Meanwhile Thompson and Fairlie could begin pitching
tents.
The ex-SEAL seemed to blame Fairlie for causing the disaster. Or else he
thought it was a good motivational technique to lash him with it. Maybe it was.
The pallid, evidently exhausted young man picked himself up and shambled off to
work assiduously in the inadequate atmosphere by the light of chemical glow
sticks.
The climbers sent to search for Jason wore more chemical sticks looped around
their necks like ravers. Larry and Eli carried flashlights as well. Their beams
swept the cliffs and vertical ice sheets as they descended.
But a layer of clouds, deceptively fluffy but looking so dense it seemed as if
you ought to be able to walk across them, hung a few hundred feet below. Dead
or alive—and Annja, for one, couldn't imagine the cameraman and crew chief
could possibly still be alive—Jason Pennigrew lay below those clouds. Loath to
leave a man behind, Baron ordered the searchers to keep going down through the
cloud layer to search for him or his body.
With visible reluctance, and generally green around the gills, Bostitch
countermanded the order. "We can't risk anybody else, Leif. Especially in
the dark like this."
Shaking his head in disgust, Baron told the twins to reel Larry and Eli back
in. Then he walked off muttering to himself, as far away from the others as the
ledge's small area permitted. He and Jason hadn't had much use for each other,
and neither had seemed to exert himself too much to hide the fact. But Leif
Baron seemed to take his loss personally.
He was reacting in a way, Annja couldn't help notice, that he hadn't done when
his own man was killed by somebody Baron had not only hired but also entrusted
with his own life, along with everyone else's. Maybe this was his graceless way
of overcompensating.
In desolated silence they ate their wood-flavored self-heating rations. They
had broken into small groups. Bostitch and Baron sat with Wilfork; the
surviving acolytes huddled together against the cliff twenty feet away from
Tommy and Trish. Annja ate with Levi. The rabbi kept looking at her and bobbing
his head as if wanting to say something soothing to her, but unable to think of
what. She found it comforting rather than annoying.
Later she made her way alone among the tents, cautiously, heading back to bed
after relieving herself. A dark figure suddenly loomed in the darkness. The
stars shining from a mostly cloudless sky were all that enabled her to see
anything.
Annja recoiled. She started to form her right hand into a partial fist. At the
last moment she caught herself. She made herself relax.
"Why so tense, Ms. Creed?" asked the goofily genial voice of Charlie
Bostitch. "Afraid of the abominable snowman?"
"There's no such thing," she said quickly. "And not on this part
of the Eurasian landmass in any event. It's just that you startled me. I'm a
bit tightly wound up."
He laughed disarmingly. "Aren't we all. Hey, I just wanted to talk to you
for a few minutes."
"All right."
He seemed taken off guard by her simple response. "Out here? I mean, we're
out in the open right by a sheer drop—"
"Does it make any difference to what you want to talk about?" Annja
asked.
He shook his head. It seemed to weigh heavily on his neck. The notion of his
own possible smuggled-along stash of alcohol sprang into her mind. She shoved
it aside. We're above ten thousand feet here, she reminded herself. And we've
had a hell of a day. Don't go multiplying explanations.
"I'm tired, Mr. Bostitch. All respect, can't we please just make this
quick?"
To her astonishment he burst into tears. "Please, Annja. Please! You got
to help me."
He dropped to his knees in the snow in front of her and grabbed her gloved
hands with his own. "I don't have anywhere else to turn," he sobbed.
"I'm at the end of my rope. I'm the worst sinner in the whole world. I
need
this to be the Ark. Don't you see? It's my last hope of redemption."
"No," Annja said. "I don't see." She found herself, totally
embarrassed, more dragging the big man to his feet than helping him up.
"You probably think I'm a wealthy man," he blubbered. "And I've
been a wealthy man. Very wealthy. But then came the recession, and I made some
bad, bad choices…Annja, I tell you, I'm busted. Worse than that. I'm so deep in
debt I can never swim out. Not without a miracle.
"I need you to bring me this miracle, Annja. You're the only one who can
deliver it. Deliver
me
. You and the rabbi have to help me. I need to
redeem myself."
"You think if we find the Ark it'll get you out of debt?" Annja
asked.
"It can't hurt, can it? And it'll be a sign of the Lord's favor. And maybe
it'll be the sign that's needed, just the missing piece to help Our Lord come
back to judge the world in fire before the world's descent into wickedness and
sin make Him turn His face away forever in disgust. Maybe it's up to you to
open the way so our Lord and Savior can return to walk the Earth once more.
Think of it, Annja! Think of it!"
"Wait. Are you talking about financial rescue or Armageddon?" Annja
asked, wondering what he was talking about.
"It's all tied up together. Don't you see? This is my shot at
forgiveness."
She shook her head. If anything, she saw less than she had before. She wondered
if the altitude really was getting to him.
"All I can do is what you hired me to do, Mr. Bostitch," she said wearily.
"Which is to search for whatever's up there, and if we find it, I'll
examine it as thoroughly and professionally as possible. And then I'll report
the truth. Whatever it turns out to be. Whoever's ox it gores—yours, mine,
whoever's. Wouldn't that be what your Lord would want?"
"Oh, sure, sure. He's the Way, the Truth and the Light. He wouldn't hold
with lies," Bostitch said feebly.
"Then you and He should be square, whatever. Because no matter what the
truth is, doesn't He already know it? It's not as if, whether that's somehow
really the Ark or just a rock formation, or even something else entirely, it's
going to come as a big surprise to Him, is it?" Annja said.
"You're right. Of course you're right. You're a young woman of really
remarkable wisdom, Annja, you know that?" Bostitch said.
He enfolded her in a vast and clumsy bear hug. "You comfort me," he
said, disengaging with obvious reluctance. "Could you maybe see your way
clear to coming back to my tent with me and talking a little longer? It would
give my soul ease, I have to tell you."
"I'm flattered," Annja said, quickly stepping back. "But I'm
afraid I have to get back to my own tent and my own sleeping bag before I fall
down. My body needs
its
ease. Or I won't be in any shape to make the final
push to the Ark tomorrow."
And before he could protest she turned away and slipped into the mouth of the
small tent she shared with Levi. The rabbi already lay softly snoring on his
back with his mouth open. His hands were outside the bag, clutching his
dog-eared paperback like a teddy bear. She smiled at him, climbed into her own
bag with every muscle in her body screaming in agony, and was asleep in
moments.
* * *
THE FINAL ASCENT WAS ON ICE.
Whether it was the glacier that crowned much of the vast high cinder cone and
held the Anomaly in its slow cold embrace, or just a random stretch of rock
sheathed in ice, Annja didn't know. Their path had circled clear around the
northern side of the main peak to come up at the Anomaly from almost directly
below, on the mountain's northwest face.
How they had settled on the route Annja was unsure. Hamid had obviously had
some input into selecting their initial path up the mountain, which she didn't
find too reassuring. Still, Baron remained briskly confident and in charge. It
wasn't her decision to make. And frankly she was glad. It was painful enough
just taking part in this ordeal without bearing the ultimate responsibility for
it.
The sun, peeping up over the mountains of Iran and Azerbaijan but hidden from them
by Ararat's bulk, filled the world with bloodlike red. Above them the sky was
an almost cloudless mauve, shading into peach, that promised metamorphosis into
that almost-painful blue the sky sometimes takes on above high mountains. As
the party stood staring up the wall to the summit, the ice tinted delicate
rose-pink with side-scatter dawn, Levi said, "It's strange, you
know."
"What?" asked Wilfork, who stood aside with Annja and Levi, looking
somewhat glum, with a cream-colored band around his head and his unruly hair
tufting out the top.
"We've had alternating swings of bad fortune with good. We've been both
plagued and aided by weird coincidences and freaks of nature. It's as if gods
with differing agendas were dueling over our destiny."
"You're a man of God, Rabbi!"
The snarl made their heads turn. Baron was scowling furiously at them past his
black sunglasses. "This is not a good time to make blasphemous
jokes."
"Okay," Levi said with a shrug. He turned to Annja and gave her a
sly, shy grin. He was good at shutting up. Maybe too good, too self-effacing.
Yet under the circumstances Annja reluctantly had to admit she was glad. This
was not the time for a debate of any sort unless it concerned survival.
Levi's bearded lips moved silently. Annja was no lip-reader. But she was pretty
sure he said, But I wasn't joking.
She gave him a thumbs-up.
Eppur si muove
, she replied the same way. She
was quoting Galileo's legendary last words to the Inquisition on the question
of whether Earth was fixed at the center of creation. She wasn't sure he'd
catch it. But he laughed, still silently.
Larry and Josh helped everybody fix crampons to their boots and adjust them to
bite forward, into vertical ice. Ice axes were distributed to those who wanted
them. Annja accepted; Robyn Wilfork and Rabbi Leibowitz declined. Then Larry
led off, planting pitons and camming devices specially designed to protect the
ice from shattering around them as he climbed. Josh belayed from below.
Up they climbed by stages, roping themselves in and waiting while Josh and
Larry took turns scouting the safest routes. The sun came up without incident
in the form of either wind or threatening storm clouds.
On their third such stop, Levi looked down at Annja, hanging over the abyss
beneath his boot soles, smiled shyly and said, "I meant it, you
know."
Annja had been trying to meditate, keep a lid on her misgivings about what the
future held. Not to mention a natural apprehension about hanging like a fly on
a wall—or in a spider's web—with nothing beneath her for thousands of feet
except the odd ledge just wide enough to give her a good bone-breaking bounce,
as a sort of preview of what awaited at the bottom. Now she was confused.
"Meant what, Levi?"
"About the dueling gods. I really feel it could be true." He smiled
self-deprecatingly. "Almost, anyway."
"But you're a rabbi!" Uncomfortably she realized she'd just echoed
Leif Baron, of all people.
"Yes, but I'm a Qabbalist rabbi. Not the Madonna sort, of course. The more
traditional Jewish thing. It's a natural vice for a nerd."
"I've encountered those before," Annja said.
"So I don't necessarily believe the cranky mountain-thunder spirit a lot
of the Biblical stories are about was the one true god. He's
a
true god.
I believe he exists. So do all others. And they have their little spats."
Annja looked up and then, unhappily, down, to make sure none of the Young
Wolves was listening in. Levi was keeping his voice down, thank goodness. Only
Wilfork seemed to be close enough to overhear them easily. He seemed to be off
in a world of his own. Annja was unconvinced that meant he wasn't
eavesdropping. But he seemed unlikely to have the sort of ideological hot
buttons most other members of the expedition did.
"The being I and those who are like me worship is the Creator who is the
Universe," Levi went on, "and above such petty concerns. But He likes
a good show. Some say that's why He made the universe. Or She, or It, or
They—the important thing about the Creator is that no one can understand the
Creator without
being
the Creator. Coming to fully grasp that is the
first step of the dedicated Qabbalist."
"What's the second?" Annja asked.
"Trying our best to divine the Creator's true nature through study of what
you call the Old Testament."
"But I thought you said you took for granted you couldn't understand
God?" Annja said, trying to understand.
"We're funny that way," he said with a little shrug. It made him
twist alarmingly in his ropes. She reached a hand up and grabbed his right boot
to stabilize him. Whether the experience unnerved him or not he didn't continue
the conversation. That suited Annja fine.
In the early afternoon the storm clouds returned with a suddenness that halfway
tempted Annja to believe in Levi's dueling mountain-deities. They slammed
together overhead like leaden gates with such abrupt authority she was
surprised they didn't produce a tooth-rattling boom like thunder.
And almost the same moment a soft cry was repeated from above by Bostitch and
Baron, and Annja looked up to see Larry's head silhouetted against the ominous
boiling clouds. Although it was shadowed she could tell he was grinning fit to
split his head.
Less than five minutes later Levi and Larry were helping her scramble onto the
top of a gently sloping plain of ice, pierced by snow-mounded black juts of
rock. A mile and a half ahead of her rose the snow-covered head of Ararat,
rising another 1,300 feet above them.
And there, a quarter mile away to the south and west of them, the long, dark
mound of the Ararat Anomaly seemed to hang over the edge of the abyss.