Powder Burn (Burn with Sam Blackett #1) (11 page)

“
And?” asked Sam, turning her attention back to Jortse.

“
I had to kill a man,” he said, the pale eyes gazing straight into hers.

“
I shit you not, that is the most radical thing I have ever seen,” said Lens. It was ten in the morning and this was their first sight of Powder Burn and its opening section. Beginning far above them, the narrow gulley ran almost dead straight between deepening rock walls for about half a mile. Then, some five hundred yards above, the rock disappeared from the side of the gulley opposite them. The mountain had cracked and split, turning that boundary into a cliff. The one-sided gulley then widened gradually, turning into a ridged field of snow that ran down past their position and on for another five hundred yards before rocks started to push through the snow and break it up.

Vegas rolled the pack off his back and pulled out the binoculars.
“I’m gonna ride this sucker at warp factor nine, dude,” he said, then stopped to clear his nose into the snow. He wiped his mitten on his trousers. “Goddamn, I’m getting a mofo cold. I reckon I got it from those monks.”

“
I don’t think those two were monks,” said Lens.

“
Whatever, I don’t need it,” retorted Vegas, sniffing as he settled down with the glasses.

“
It’s going to need even more commitment than we thought,” said Lens, shaking his head in wonderment. “The worry will be if you get any loose snow running with you and it starts to build, there’s nowhere to go to let it roll past. We don’t want to kick off an avalanche.”

“
No shit, dude,” grunted Vegas. He looked and then pointed below him. “I should be able to get on top of one of those little ridges and let any sloughy snow go by either side – but man, I tell you, I’m coming straight down that gulley, no turns. Screw turning, that’s for girls.”

“
Whoa,” breathed Lens, “all right, bro.” If Vegas was going to ride it as fast as he was suggesting, then this was going to make for a spectacular film. “Can you see where to start it?” he asked.

“
Maybe. If I follow the gulley all the way up it looks OK to get down into it just below the top,” replied Vegas, peering through the binoculars.

“
How does the snow look?”

“
Can’t tell, dude.” Vegas handed over the glasses, and then looked back down into the gulley. “We’ll check it out down here in a minute, but all the loose stuff from that storm a couple a days back should have gone.”

“
Weather’s still settled too,” said Lens, casting an appraising eye skyward into the cloudless blue.

“
Bitchin’ – we got lucky.” Vegas held up a hand and Lens high-fived him.

“
Do you think you can stop somewhere between here and the end of the actual gulley, where the cliff starts on the other side?” Lens asked.

“
Depends. What you thinking?”

“
I can get some great close-up action from somewhere along this section. It would be like shooting a bowling ball coming at the pins – but only if you can stop and wait while I move down below that next rocky section for the rest of the run,” said Lens.

“
Don’t see why not,” replied Vegas.

“
Cool.” Lens scanned up the mountain, silent for a while, then he dropped the binoculars from his eyes. “If you’re happy with this bit, then we should head down below the rocks and pick a line through it. Then we can hike back up to here, there’s a decent flat spot just over there where we can camp tonight. Do the run tomorrow.”

“
With you, dude. So stash the gear here?”

“
Yeah, leave it where we’re going to camp. If you wait till I get there, I’ll shoot you walking towards me.” Lens stood, hauled his gear up and led off.

Sam eased the backpack strap off her left shoulder, and then started to let the other slide down her right arm. But it was heavy and she was tired; the pack slipped onto the dirt with a thud, a sound that slid just as easily out into the still silence of the valley. She straightened her back, the vertebrae cracking as they unloaded. She felt a heady lightness on her feet now the weight was gone. She turned to check on the others; they were a long way behind. So she sat down on the rock, whose armchair-like proportions had led her to pick this spot in the moonscape for a rest, opened her pack and pulled out the water bottle, stove and pan.

She set the water to heat and sat back again, feeling the warmth from the sun on her face. The clear sky promised fine weather for a while yet. She waited patiently, feeling herself slowly cool down as the water heated up. By the time the others were close, the water was almost boiling and she was cold. She watched their approach
; it was still desperately slow, but the path was swinging to the south, towards the other valley and the final climb to get across the border to safety. She dropped her head into her hands and gently massaged her forehead.

“
Sam?”

She looked up to find Pete watching her.
“I was miles away,” she said.

“
How’s the soup?”

She tucked her knees up to her chest, put her arms around them.
“Nearly there,” she said. Then, “I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t try walking after dark, make sure we aren’t seen by any Demagistani patrols.”

“
Yeah, I thought about that, but it’s a lot colder,” he replied. “It’s OK if you can just keep walking, but every time Tashi rested we’d all cool off pretty fast. And anyway, there are very few places where we could camp in this valley where we wouldn’t be seen by a helicopter or patrol in daylight. Best thing is just to haul ass as fast as we can and get over that border.”

The pot started to rattle its lid
, and Sam eased off the rock and squatted down. She poured the packet soup into the boiling water and stirred, a chemical beef smell drifting up.

“
I’ve been watching Jortse, and he never lets that long, thin bag out of his sight,” he said. “I think he’s got a rifle in there.”

“
Really?” She looked up as she spoke.

“
He must be carrying some kind of weapon if he killed someone.”

“
Not necessarily, he could have dumped it, or just strangled them,” she replied, then added, “I wish he’d told us a bit more before he clammed up.”

“
Yeah,” he agreed, “but I still think that’s a rifle. I hope he doesn’t start shooting if there’s trouble, or it’ll get really ugly.”

“
Yes,” she said, but she couldn’t hold his gaze. The stakes had got too high – this was a rescue mission beyond the call of duty, and it was her fault. It wasn’t enough that she’d made him give up Powder Burn, now she’d got him tangled up in a murderous insurgency. And she might even have created a situation where she couldn’t write anything about Shibde or Powder Burn at all. She dipped the spoon into the soup and took a sip. “It’s ready,” she told him, stirring again, with a listless, tinny clatter.

Lens shifted and let out a moan
. He’d sat still for too long, joints had stiffened in the cold. He thought he’d found the most fantastic spot from which to film the first part of Vegas’s run down Powder Burn – a cramped ledge, perched out over the gulley, right before the cliff started on the other side. He just hadn’t been expecting to be sitting and waiting for hours in the freezing cold. He wrestled his mitten off and checked his watch; six hours had passed since sunrise. And the radio had been silent since he’d switched it on, expecting Vegas’s check-in call with the dawn. Now the battery was so low he couldn’t even risk further transmissions.

Not for the first time in the past couple of days, he wished to hell that Pete was with them. It had been too late when he realized that they had no backup plan if things didn’t go smoothly. He should have organized a radio check with Vegas every hour so he could track progress. It was the kind of detail that Pete was so good at. Instead, here he was, helplessly wondering what the hell had happ
ened. Broken radio, broken neck or just slow? And if Vegas was just slow, then there was the avalanche risk to assess – that would have been Pete’s call too. They couldn’t exactly dial 1-800-AVALANCHE, so now it was up to Vegas.

They had reckoned that the run would be in the best condition just after dawn, with the snow still locked together by the overnight cold. Now dawn was six hours ago, and he glanced up at the line of sunlight shining directly onto the snow – too much more of that and it would be very soft and loose, dramatically increasing the risk of a slide. Perhaps they’d had too much already.

“Lens. Lens.”

The radio crackled to life with Vegas’s voice, and Lens grabbed it up
. “Vegas, Vegas, this is Lens, read you loud and clear, buddy, where are you?”

“
Er, yeah ... Lens ... dude, are you there? Is that you? Come back.”

“
Read you loud and clear, Vegas, where are you?” He waited, the relief starting to ebb away. Vegas couldn’t hear him; there was something wrong with his transmission. It was probably power – he had enough juice to receive, but not enough to transmit. He tried again anyway. “Vegas, this is Lens, do you copy?” He tweaked the squelch down a little, and then the volume up. And up a bit more as he waited for a reply.

When the radio did burst back into life
, it was so loud that the little speaker just buzzed with overload. He missed the first few words as he fumbled to turn the volume down.

“
... cold up here, not hearing you at all. Hands are cold, very cold. Need to go, you ready?”

Something wasn’t quite right with Vegas. It wasn’t that he wasn’t making sense, because he was; but the words were a touch slow, not slurred, just ... it could almost have been the radio. Or it could have been the first debilitating symptoms of altitude sickness. Lens tried again.
“Vegas, this is Lens, do you copy?”

“
Lens, where the frick are you? I’m up here and ready to go,” came the response.

“
Vegas, this is Lens,” he almost yelled into the radio. “I want you to abort the run, abort the run, do you hear me? Start climbing down, Vegas, it’s too late to ride Powder Burn today.”

There was another long silence, and he fought his impulse
either to transmit again or to crank the volume up. Then the radio spoke for the last time: “Lens, this is Vegas. I can’t wait any longer, it’s cold up here. I’m coming down on ten.”

He dived for the camera, hit power and cursed as it went through the overlong start-up routine, counting under his breath. At six he had an image. At eight he had the top of the gulley framed. At ten he had it at full telephoto. He couldn’t see much in the tiny viewfinder, but he didn’t expect to – he just needed to see movement. He was ready; for better or worse, it was happening. It would be all right. Vegas was indestructible. Lens barely knew it, but he was holding his breath.

He held it for maybe twenty seconds. And then he breathed, a loud gasp of thin air. Another one. Sixty seconds passed. The ten-second warning turned into minutes. Lens was just about to try the radio again when he saw the movement. He had been waiting a year for this moment, and as Vegas swept into full view, Lens’s concentration was absolute; there was only one chance, he was not going to blow it. He picked out the markers he’d planned, changed the angle, slowly pulled out the telephoto, and then everything accelerated until the action was just a blur, as Vegas smoked under the ledge and onwards to where he would stop.

It took Lens several moments to realize that Vegas was no longer in the picture. He saw the spatter of snow from the first turn, and then a much bigger plume that he thought was Vegas power-sliding to a halt as they had planned – but as the air cleared, he realized that Vegas wasn’t there. He looked up from the camera and confirmed that he was gone. His initial reaction was that Vegas had forgotten that he was supposed to stop. From where Lens was sitting the mountain dropped away steeply and he couldn’t even see the rest of Powder Burn, never mind film it. Anger rose
– Vegas had better have remembered to stop before he got too much further, they’d come too far to screw this up now.

Cursing fluidly, Lens stuffed the camera, radio and his water-bottle into his backpack and started to climb off the ledge. He scrambled through the crack that led upwards, then onto the top of the side of the gulley to stare d
own the mountain. Nothing moved. He closed his eyes, almost overcome with fury. “Well, you’re just going to have to do it again,” he yelled at the empty snow.

Still muttering a stream of obscenities about jumped-up jocks, Lens hurried lower, head down, following the line of the gulley below him. He was almost at the campsite before he happened to glance down and across at the snow. What he saw, or rather what he didn’t see, stopped him dead. Vegas had left no track. The snow glistened pristine, crystal perfect and untouched across its entire width. A cold thought clutched at his brain and became real with the words that tumbled out involuntarily.

“Holy shit, he went off the cliff.”

He stared at the snow in the gulley, absolutely aghast, stunned, disbelieving. No, not Vegas. Something else, some other explanation. He turned and looked back up the mountain
. The sun had lit it perfectly now, just past the noon peak of its path. And as far up as he could tell, the snow was unmarked.

He threw the pack off his back and scrabbled for the binoculars
; in a moment he had them trained on the exit from the gulley, close to the ledge that he had been sitting on ... there, he had it, a clear track. He followed it down, saw the first turn, then the path straightened and headed for the cliff ... and what looked like the start of a tiny avalanche. A flurry of snow had run down from there, but there was no more track after that. He could remember what was over that edge on the satellite photos – a vertical cliff. There wasn’t even a ledge to bounce on.

The binoculars dropped, his legs gave way and he sat down hard. He fel
t his breathing accelerate and his head spin in a rush of nausea and panic. He leaned on an arm, but that felt as weak as his legs. He slumped and curled up in a ball. A chilled sweat cooled on his face. He started to shake ... this could not be happening. It could not be happening. He moaned, rocking in time to a soft keening.

It was
the helicopter that broke through, the beat of the rotors and roar of the engine. The
whump-whump
got louder, and a tiny internal voice started to tell him that he was deep in the Himalayas, in Shibde, where helicopters only meant one thing – a Demagistani army patrol. He looked up. The noise was coming from the other side of the cliff, below him. Someone had seen Vegas fall. They were coming to look for companions.

He stumbled to his feet and
staggered the short distance back to their campsite. He barely noticed the pain shooting out from his stiff, cold body when he moved. He hauled everything out of the tent, his mind still half-way between reason and utter panic. The activity was helping though, he focused on the actions, on packing the gear, on collapsing and rolling the tent up. The helicopter thumped out its beat ominously, below and somewhere to his left. What would he need, what could he carry alone?
Think, damn you, think!

He had Pet
e’s crampons, harness and axes. He grabbed a rope and a sling so he could use a safety line on the ice field. The helicopter was getting louder, now it sounded like it was trying to gain altitude up the cliff. The rotor blades would struggle for grip and lift in the thin air, giving him a chance.
Come on, come on
. He stuffed as much food as he could into his pack, then took the handful of clothes and other items that Vegas had left behind and rammed them into the sleeping bag. The helicopter noise had stabilized. Lens glanced over at the edge of the cliff but couldn’t see anything.

He threw his pack onto his back, took one quick look about him to check that he’d left nothing behind and grabbed the sleeping bag. Then he stumbled as fast as he could, struggling under the weight, back up towards the notch in the crest of the ridge. The helicopter engine noise was growing again. He turned
– it was moving left to right below the edge of the cliff. He cast about him for somewhere to hide and saw an unruly splintered rock jutting out of the landscape. He dived towards it as the noise reached a crescendo, expecting at any moment a loudspeaker voice or, worse, a warning shot.

There was none of that
; in fact, the noise was receding again, moving away to the right now. The rotors were struggling, the pilot couldn’t get it up to this altitude. He was moving along the cliff face until it got low enough that he could get over it. Lens stuffed the sleeping bag full of Vegas’s gear deep under the cracked rock. After a moment, he decided to keep his snowboard – if they saw him they would have to come after him on foot or skis, and the board would give him a final chance to escape. He swung his pack up, shrugged into the straps and started to climb. Only a few yards to the top of this bit, he thought, then once he got onto the far side he could make more height and still have a good chance of ducking out of sight of the chopper when it did edge up over the cliff.