The Man The Mountain Buried

Chapter Seven: Dawn Charges

They had until first light.

They left Veilhorn at one in the morning, two shadows crossing the slopes above the top station with their headlamps switched to dim red so nobody in the valley would see them. They carried ice screws, two ropes and Sigrid's camera in a padded case, and nothing else that would slow them down. The storm had blown itself out. The sky over the glacier was huge and black and crowded with stars, and the cold was the kind that made the inside of your nose crackle when you breathed.

They barely spoke. Sigrid led where she knew the snow and Luca led where he knew the ice. Once she stopped on a slope she didn't like, dug a quick pit with her gloves and studied the layers in the red glow of her lamp, and he waited without a word until she nodded and moved on. They didn't need to discuss it. That was the hardest part, Luca thought, how easily they fit together.

At the Seam, they set two anchors with ice screws in the old hard ice back from the edge. Sigrid clipped in beside him, and they went down together on two ropes, side by side into the blue dark.

They passed the ledge where Tomas had lain, with a dark stain still frozen into its lip. Below it the walls narrowed and Luca's lamp found the orange glove again, a meter deep in the ice, exactly where he had left it two nights before. Sigrid looked at it and said nothing. Then the crevasse turned beneath them, and opened.

It was a cave of blue ice, a hollow under the glacier as wide as a chapel, its walls glowing faintly where their lamps touched them. The air was utterly still. Their boots crunched on the floor, and the sound came back to them from every side.

The faces were there, just as Tomas had said.

Four rescuers lay in the far wall in their orange jackets, side by side, pressed into the ice as if someone had arranged them. Luca knew every one of them before his lamp reached their faces. He knew them by the set of their shoulders, the way you know people you have carried and been carried by. There was his medic, who had always held one shoulder higher than the other after a bad fall in Norway. There was his rope lead, broad and square as a door. There was his avalanche tech, tall and narrow, with her head turned slightly to the left. And there was the youngest, who had joined them only that winter and still laughed too loudly on the radio.

Their wrists were bound with plastic ties. The white cable ties had cut into the orange sleeves, pulled tight behind their backs.

Nobody bound the hands of people who died in an avalanche. These four had been taken, tied and carried up here, and they had been dead before any snow ever fell on the north face. Luca had known it since the night he found the glove, but seeing it was different. He took off one glove and laid his bare hand flat on the ice in front of his medic's face, and he kept it there until the cold burned.

Sigrid came up beside him. She didn't touch him or say she was sorry. She lifted the camera and started to work, photographing every face, every tie and every patch on every shoulder, her flash lighting the cave in bright blue bursts. Luca was grateful for that. It was the only thing either of them could do for the dead.

Then she moved deeper into the cave to photograph the far wall, and she stopped.

Alone in the ice, apart from the others, lay a woman in an old red ski suit. The style was fifteen years out of date. Her pale hair was spread around her head, and her eyes were closed, and her face looked almost peaceful, as if she had only lain down to rest.

Sigrid didn't move. Luca came and stood behind her and held the rope, and he said nothing, because there was nothing in the world that could be said. He had told a hundred families the worst news of their lives. He knew that sometimes the kindest thing was silence and a hand on the rope.

After a long moment, Sigrid raised the camera. Her hands were steady. She photographed her mother's face through a meter of blue ice, once, twice, then a third time. Then she lowered the camera and pressed her glove flat against the wall, over her mother's cheek, and held it there.

They were packing the evidence when Luca heard it.

Sigrid had sealed the memory card in a waterproof pouch and zipped it inside her jacket, and Luca was coiling the spare rope. At first it was only a flutter at the edge of hearing, so faint he thought it was his own pulse. Then it grew into a beat, steady and heavy, rolling over the glacier above them.

Rotor blades. And far too early.

He looked up. High above, through the long slot of sky at the top of the Seam, the stars were only just fading into grey. Dawn was still half an hour away. Lights moved along the lip of the crevasse, several headlamps, and he heard a man's voice shout something the wind took away. Reinholt's men were up there.

The ropes went slack in Luca's hands.

He felt it before he understood it, the tension he had been holding simply gone. Then the cut ends came slithering down out of the dark and fell in loose coils around their boots. Someone had cut both lines at the anchors.

Sigrid stared at the ropes, then up at the lights. "They know we're here," she whispered.

Before Luca could answer, the first charge went off on the slope above.

It was a flat, hard thump that he felt through his boots and in his teeth before he heard it. He had heard that sound in a hundred mountain ranges, from the Andes to the Caucasus, and he knew exactly what came after it. A second charge followed, then a third, and then a deep groan ran through the whole mountain as a hundred thousand tons of snow broke loose and began to move.

Luca grabbed Sigrid by the jacket and dragged her deeper into the cave, away from the opening, as the roar came down the slope like a train. The ice around them shook. Above their h

eads, the mouth of the Seam filled with white.