The Broom of God

By John Bragg

Patagonia. Chile. An unexplored mountain range on the edge of the vast continental icecap. A remote basecamp. A brutal murder.
Todd Miller, elite alpinist, is found with an ice-axe buried in his back.
Inspector Juan Antonio Paz is sent from the capital city of Santiago to lead an investigation that will pit him against the rugged landscape and raging storms of Patagonia, the violent political history of Chile, and the dark secrets of an isolated village.
And will test him in ways he never knew possible.
Patagonia: a land of myth, of soaring granite towers, tremendous glaciers, immense lakes, of rugged beauty and hidden cruelty, and a wind so strong it is called the Broom of God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Bragg
• Release date: Sep 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9780996452915

John Bragg

John Bragg, renowned climber and mountaineer, was captivated by Patagonia during his first expedition in 1974. He has returned again and again, exploring and climbing in both Argentina and Chile. His articles have appeared in a variety of climbing publications. This is his first novel. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife, three dogs, two cats, and a flock of chickens.

Book preview

…

Es dificíl

acostumbrar los huesos

a perderse,

los ojos

a cerrarse

pero

lo hacemos

sin saberlo

todo erla vivo

vivo, vivo, vivo

...

Past

…

It is difficult

to teach bones

to dissappear,

to teach eyes

to close

but

we do it

without knowing

all was once alive

alive, alive, alive

...

Pablo Neruda

Plenos Poderes, 1962

Chapter 1

On board the workboat La Patria, out of Puerto Verde, Patagonia, Chile, Inspector Juan Antonio Paz of the Policía de Investigaciónes de Chile vomited into the toilet as the boat tossed and lurched in the wind. He’d been sick on and off all day. The bathroom was cramped, fetid. He stood, looked in the cracked mirror at his grey skin and sunken eyes.

Jesus, what am I doing–

The boat surged forward, dropped.

His stomach heaved again. Bile rose to the back of his throat. He steadied himself against the tiny sink. He splashed water on his face, rinsed the last bits of breakfast from the stubble on his chin. He straightened his shirt collar, adjusted his jacket, ran his fingers through his dark hair, ducked to clear the doorway, and headed back to the deck.

He stood at the rail. The boat rose, fell, crashed through another wave. He held tightly to the railing, leaned out, vomited. There was nothing left to come up. He took a deep breath. The cold air raked his throat, but helped to calm his stomach.

This is a lake? It seemed to go on forever.

All day they had plowed west on Lago O’Higgins into the constant headwind, hammered by the countless waves. It made him realize, again, how little he knew the country of his birth. He took another deep breath. His hands started to cramp; he changed his grip on the rail. Flakes of rust came off in his hands. He stared at steel-grey water flecked with whitecaps. A wall of mountains rose in the far distance. Grey stripes of cloud fanned out across a pale-blue sky.

Why had they sent him here?

Despite what they said, no one at headquarters really gave a shit about what happened to a single gringo. He was being punished.

Inspector Paz pulled himself forward into the wind. Spray blew up into the air and soaked his nylon windbreaker. He came abreast of the bridge, wrestled the door open, and was almost catapulted into the cabin as the wind slammed it behind him.

Better? the captain said.

Vivo. I’ll live.

They crashed through one wave after another. The prow of the boat sent vast curtains of spray up into the air. Water streamed down the windows blocking his view. His stomach churned. The windows cleared, but all he could see were waves and more waves lined up one behind the other racing toward them.

How much further?

Tienne corazón, Inspector. When we pass that point, the captain pointed ahead to a dark spit of land that jutted out into the lake. It will calm. He lit a cigarette. From there to Bahía Santa Lucia is not far.

The smoke drove Paz back to the rail and the weather.

He had returned to Chile after a seventeen year absence in 1990. The son of a Chilean man and an American woman, he had left as a boy of twelve of the Chilean upper class, and returned as a man, a lawyer, and a strange hybrid of Chile and the United States.

In Santiago, Deputy Chief Inspector Jose Luis Villanueva had said his perfect English would make it easier to deal with the Americans. Paz was not fooled. The chief promised a crime scene team would meet him in Coyhaique. They didn’t. Paz was not surprised. They were putting him in his place. Perhaps it was the recent investigation he had, against orders, pursued too far. Perhaps it was the innate Chilean distrust of anything or anyone different. Most likely, it was both. Whatever it was, he flew south alone, sent away from the capital so he could cause no more trouble. Far away. Far, far away.

Don Pedro Enrique Fierro sits his horse, Lunita, high on a rocky promontory and watches La Patria, a twenty-meter former fishing trawler, as it labors westward struggling against the constant winds for the second time in just three days.

This, he knows, is not usual.

In the city of Coyhaique to the north, he was Pedro Fierro; to the job bosses there, just Fierro. In Patagonia, on his land, he is Don Pedro, hombre de campo, man of the land, a gaucho.

He looks west across the turquoise waters of the great lake toward the glaciers and beyond to the icecap, the Hielo Continental, with its distant froth of white cloud. To his right, plumes of cloud stream out high over the lake from the summits of two hulking mountains that rise above Bahía Santa Lucia—Los Mellizos, the twins—near the base of which, in the beech forest, the gringo climbers are camped.

It is to them, he assumes, that the boat is heading.

Thin, wispy clouds cross the sky from the south; dark clouds gather above the icecap. The wind pushes his horse sideways.

A storm is coming.

To his left, across the turbulent waters of the lake, a thin column of smoke rises from the Rio Manso Valley into the azure sky and blows away to the east. Sepulveda burned the forest again and still the valley smolders. What is there left to burn?

They say in the village of Puerto Verde that the government will stop paying to clear the land by fire.

Don Pedro surveys his holdings, some 100 hectares. He loves too much this land given to him by the government to work and settle: the lakeshore, the open beech forest, the small meadows of grass. Beyond his land, the rocks and glaciers and mountains are tierra fiscal, federal lands, but he regards these as his as well, for, after all, who had ever been there but he?

And now, the gringos are camped in his forest and the boat has returned for the second time in three days.

In those woods, his cows graze. He feels again a gnawing kernel of doubt. What sense does it make to clear the forest to raise cows, to leave them here in these mountains to get lost, to fall prey to the puma? But, this is his pueblo, his place, this is what he was meant to do. He looks again at the forested hills rising up toward the mountains. No, this is not much of a place for cows. Not like the vast grasslands of the Argentine pampa of his childhood memories.

In all that he sees there is no trace of man save the workboat–the only transport to and from the outside world.

It usually comes only twice a month.

Sprays of water crash over the bow soaking the entire boat. A tiny figure appears briefly on deck, then is gone. He watches as the boat passes the point and disappears behind a rocky headland.

Why has the captain returned so soon and in such weather?

Lunita, normally a calm beast, senses his unease, turns skittish. His two dogs whine nervously. The horse paws the ground, kicking up dirt and gravel that is swept away by the wind. He quiets her, turns her away from the lake, and guides her slowly down the narrow, rocky trail.

Sergeant Miguel Hernandez of Carabineros stood near the rocky shore of Bahía Santa Lucia. Behind him, layers of rock–tan, red, black—ringed the bay and rose in broad, flat steps dotted with small wind twisted trees, the fallen weathered trunks of larger trees, and, here and there, piles of rocks, a large boulder, more rocks.

The sergeant could hear the boat in the distance. He paced, stopped to light a cigarette, but his lighter would not work in the wind. He crouched down behind a huge boulder, cupped his hands around the flame, pulled the smoke into his lungs. He’d smoked his first cigarette at the age of ten. Everyone in Chile smoked then. Now, it was different. He knew he should quit, but hadn’t been able to. He stood, flicked a bit of ash from his trousers.

He paid a woman in town to custom tailor his uniforms tight to his weightlifter’s body. He worked out almost every day in a converted room in the carabineros’ stables. What else did he have to do?

He had been disappointed, then angry, when posted to the remote village of Puerto Verde. He’d grown up in a rough part of Santiago, seen what crime did to the families of the barrio, and seen what happened to his older brother when he fell in with the wrong crowd. He joined the police not only to escape the streets but to satisfy some vague urge to protect the people of his neighborhood, not to spend time in a desolate border town guarding against an invasion from Argentina that existed only in the imagination of politicians, but one did not argue with an order in Carabineros.

Nothing of importance ever happened here—an occasional fight, a domestic incident, a lost tourist—until now.

He wished he could say that he had sensed trouble when the Americans first came to him with their permit from Santiago, but he hadn’t. He made it clear that if there was a problem in the mountains he and his men could be of no help and thought that would be the end of it. Then, orders came directly from General Santos—the Americans have called on their satellite phone, there has been trouble, you must secure their camp immediately. When informed that Investigaciónes would send a team to take over, he had resented the implication that he could not handle his territory of responsibility. Now that he had seen what they were dealing with, he was quite happy to hand this mess to someone else.

He had been stationed in Puerto Verde for almost two years, but this was the first time he had been outside the village and its immediate environs. He was a man of the city; he did not like these mountains. The days were cold and blustery, the nights long and mysterious.

Hernandez watched the workboat round the low ridge of hills that sheltered the cove from the wind and come into full view. He moved to the water’s edge and came to parade rest on a flat slab of orange rock, his arms behind his back, legs spread wide.

The workboat idled close to shore. A deckhand paddled a small dinghy around from the stern. A man in a blue jacket with the bold yellow initials of the PDI lowered himself into it and was rowed ashore. Sergeant Hernandez came to attention. He didn’t know this man from the capital; it could not hurt to show respect. The man climbed gingerly out of the boat and almost slipped on the smooth rock. Hernandez stepped quickly forward to help, but was waved off.

I am Inspector Juan Antonio Paz of Investigaciónes.

Sir. Hernandez saluted smartly. Welcome to Bahía Santa Lucia.

Inspector Paz extended his hand. No need for the military stuff. You are?

Sergeant Miguel Hernandez, sir.

The sergeant studied this tall man sent all the way from Santiago: creased tan slacks, white shirt, tie, a handsome face gone a little bit soft, eyes a startling blue beneath dark, almost black, hair. Hernandez looked at the Investigaciónes insignia on the front of the man’s nylon windbreaker. He glanced at the workboat.

The others? Santiago said there would be a team.

They were delayed.

You have more clothing? It can turn cold at any moment.

The boatman handed Hernandez a black duffle.

I’ll be fine, Paz said. How far to the camp?

Just two or three kilometers.

When?

Four, maybe five days past.

What do we know?

Cuatro horas, nada mas! the boatman shouted.

They had four hours.

The sergeant hoisted the duffle of gear and summarized the details as they hiked up the rocky hillside above the cove: an American climber had been found dead in his tent by his three comrades.

Murdered.

Chapter 2

The skull lay by the side of the trail, sun-bleached, chalk-white.

They had crested a rocky bluff and the cordillera, a massive wall of dark rock, silver ice, and white snow, loomed in full view. A bank of cloud surged behind the mountains and spilled over the ridge like a wave cresting the shore. Spits of rain blew in from the west. Waves of white raced down the cold blue waters of the lake far below.

Inspector Paz stopped to catch his breath. He was relieved to be off the boat, his legs had stopped quivering and his stomach was beginning to settle, but he felt weak. His hands shook as he drank from a water bottle. As a boy growing up in Chile, Paz had heard much of the mythic south—a land of giant men who walked barefoot in the cold, of wild beasts, of almost constant storm. Though he’d seen no giants or wild beasts, the immense emptiness of the land, the cold, the relentless wind exceeded even his boyhood fantasies.

Paz looked down. One side of the skull was stove in, one of the horns broken off.

Cow, Hernandez said. These hills are littered with bones.

They were buffeted by the wind. Bits of something somewhere between rain and snow stung their faces.

Down a narrow gully they came to an area that had been sculpted by the wind: grass hummocks carved into undercut pillows of green, sand-flats scraped clear of all topsoil, trees that leaned to the east, their branches growing horizontally as if trying to flee the ever-present wind.

Paz followed the uniformed back of Sergeant Hernandez along a narrow track that crossed a wide, flat plain of gravel toward a distant wall of green. They passed into the open beech forest—the sound of the wind more distant—and came to a grassy clearing. In it was a rough corral made of aging logs and a small crude shack, a puesto, both empty. Further, they came to another open space in the forest and the camp of the American climbers.

A large orange dome tent dominated the clearing. Next to the dome was a smaller pyramid tent of white and green colored panels. In the clearing’s center, four uniformed carabineros squatted around a fire drinking maté. Freshly cut firewood was stacked nearby. They glanced briefly at the sergeant, ignored the inspector next to him, and returned to their maté.

Two of the Americans—wearing bright nylon parkas: one red, one pale green—sat huddled under a clear plastic tarp suspended between trees. A third, in a dark blue jacket, stood off to the side. They looked up expectantly.

A carabinero stood guard in front of the orange dome tent, arms behind his back.

Where is the body? Paz asked Hernandez.

In the orange dome, Inspector.

Call me Paz.

Si, Inspector.

Has anyone moved the body?

No.

Four smaller tents, all different colors, were pitched here and there around the perimeter of the clearing.

Which was the victim’s?

The blue. Sergeant Hernandez pointed toward a tent tucked in a small group of trees.

Paz hesitated.

He had served on the staff of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation formed by President Patricio Alwyn in 1992 to investigate the crimes of the dictatorship and proved to be a tireless researcher able to pursue the thinnest of threads through hours of testimony, pages of documents, and years of history to the truth behind a disappearance or death.

More than ninety percent of the crimes investigated were attributed to the military, yet no perpetrators were named and no charges filed. Tormented by the criminals left unpunished, he enrolled in the National Police Academy to pursue a career were he could hold those he investigated accountable for their crimes.

He’d been a successful investigator in the financial section of the organized crime division of Investigaciónes for almost fourteen years, advancing to the rank of Senior Inspector. Two weeks ago he was transferred to homicide.

He had no experience in crime scene analysis. None. That would have been the ECI team’s responsibility—if they were here. The fact that they weren’t, and that Santiago had sent only him, raised troubling questions, but those would have to wait. In the mystery novels he read as a young man, the detective always had a careful look around before interviewing witnesses, so that’s what he would do.

He looked over at the Americans. Sergeant, can you tell them I will be with them shortly?

They have no Spanish. The unspoken being that the sergeant had no English.

None?

The dead one was fluent, the others ... none.

Do your best.

He was reluctant to face what was inside the orange tent, and turned instead to the pyramid tent next to it. It was filled with neat stacks of rope, hardware, climbing tools, plastic bins of food. Next to the tent was a small satellite dish. Next to it, a solar panel was angled north toward the sun. A wire lay on the trampled ground heading back toward the dome tent.

He stopped at each of the four smaller tents in turn, unzipped the door, leaned down, and looked inside. The first was tidy, sleeping bag and pad laid out, several books in a stack off to the side. He turned to read the titles: novels, literature mixed in with science texts: glaciology, climate studies. The next tent was a complete mess, the sleeping bag lumped in a corner, clothes strewn about, a few battered paperback thrillers.

The third was neat, a brightly colored sleeping bag carefully folded, clothing in tidy stacks, pink, teal, yellow. Clearly a woman’s. The areas around the first two tents were worn with well-trod paths, but the grass around this tent was still fresh and green. It had not been in this spot as long as the others, or had not been used as much.

The blue tent was bigger. He ducked through the door and could almost stand up inside. There was not only the usual sleeping pad and bag, but a low folding nylon chair in the corner and a small aluminum table. The books here were hardcover science texts as well as paperback novels. Two journals, one black, the other red, lay on the floor in the corner near the sleeping pad. He made a mental note to review these later. Outside, the area was trampled like the others, but just a few feet away was a flattened rectangle of bare earth. There had been another tent next to it.

He crossed the clearing to the dome tent. A gust of wind and splatters of rain slashed across the open space.

He could sense three pairs of eyes following him.

The guard stepped aside. Paz unzipped the door to the tent. He prepared himself for what was to come—thankful it had been cold—then stepped into the tent to face his first murder scene as a homicide inspector.

The orange nylon of the tent’s canopy filtered the daylight and cast a strange hue on the scene within. Blue was green, white was yellow, red was a ghastly orange-brown, and all glowed with a surreal, unnatural sheen. The body of a man lay face down in a large stain of dried blood, his left arm twisted awkwardly under him, a leg splayed. The back of his head was caked with blood, his hair dark and matted. The pick of an ice-axe was buried deep between his shoulders, the handle almost parallel to his back.

Despite the cold, the smell of imminent decay permeated the tent. Paz kneeled, taking care to avoid the blood, and looked closer. There was a deep gash in the back of the man’s head. He had probably been well on his way to being dead before the ice axe had been buried in his back. Had the second blow been superfluous, a punctuation of anger not yet satisfied? A pair of headphones connected to an iPod lay in the middle of the dark brown bloodstain. He had not heard his killer approach. Somehow this simple device, this music player caked with the blood of its owner, seemed almost sadder than the body itself.

Paz wondered what this American, this climber, had been listening to. What was the last thing he heard?

An impressive array of electronics covered a lightweight aluminum table: laptop computer, satellite phone, modem, fax machine, a wireless hub with twinkling green lights. A chaotic mess of papers covered the middle of the table; fist sized rocks acted as paperweights. The fax machine was pulled sideways, half off the table, held up by a tangle of wires. On the other side of the tent there was a makeshift kitchen on another aluminum table: two burner cook stove, propane canister, pots, pans.

He needed that crime scene unit—technicians, forensic experts—but, of course, he had none of those.

He stepped back outside.

Sergeant, have you any crime-scene training?

At Carabineros.

In other words, thought Paz, no.

Has anyone touched anything inside?

No, sir.

The Americans?

They say no, but ...

That was a problem, but what could he do? He took a digital camera out of his duffle bag, handed it to the sergeant.

I need pictures—the camp, the dome tent, inside, outside, the grounds—everything. He didn’t know what good it would do, the scene was hopelessly compromised, but he would try. They would do their best.

Once you’ve photographed it all, have the men pack up everything. What experience have they?

The same.

You must oversee it all. Understand? First, the dome tent. Take special care inside. Pack and label it all. Mark where each item was, list everything. And then, the blue tent. Bag each item separately. Use the plastic bags from my sack. There are gloves in my case.

It was time to face the three climbers, three with the entitlements and connections that all North Americans seemed to bring with them, one of whom was quite possibly a murderer.

He would have to tread carefully indeed.

A man and a woman sat in low canvas chairs under the makeshift tarp staring dejectedly at a small cold camping stove hanging from a tree branch. They looked bedraggled, lost, in shock.

I am Inspector Juan Antonio Paz, from—

Simon Langdon, Inspector, the man interrupted, stood, reached out his hand. Thank goodness you speak English.

Langdon was bare-headed, grey-haired; dark stubble covered his face.

Paz ignored the extended hand. Who found … what is his name?

Todd Miller, Simon Langdon said. We all did, really. We came down from the mountain and there he was.

Miller was here alone?

The three of us were together on the mountain … have no idea what happened.

But … The woman looked up at Langdon. The collar of her parka was zipped up to her chin, a pale-blue knit cap pulled low on her forehead. Only her eyes—bright blue, rimmed red—showed. She had been crying. She hugged herself with gloved hands.

Who was the first to go in the tent?

I was, the woman said. I called for him … got no answer, thought he was writing with his headphones on, so I went in the tent— Her voice caught.

Your name?

Zoe … Zoe Karras.

Did you touch the body?

His shoulder … I thought he might be alive.

Why was he here alone?

He got sick at high camp and turned back, Langdon said.

We never should have let him come back alone … she said.

Like we could have stopped him. The man who had been standing alone joined them. Miller always did what he wanted.

Your name?

Righetti. He had long sun-streaked hair, unkempt full beard.

The three men stood, towering over the seated Zoe Karras. She took off her knit cap to look up at them and a mass of blonde hair tumbled out.

Did Miller often become ill?

Never … she looked away, pulled at the tangles in her hair.

He got pretty drunk the night before, Righetti said, but that never stopped him in the past.

Have any of you touched anything in the dome tent?

They looked at each other.

Just these chairs, the stove, some pans, Simon Langdon said at last. We needed somewhere to sit, to eat. Nothing else.

Paz scowled. And in his sleeping tent?

Nothing, Langdon said quickly.

Are you American? Zoe Karras said. There was note of hope in her voice, as if the presence of an American might somehow make things better. What’s going to happen? The policemen would tell us nothing.

We will take you back to Puerto Verde. We will talk further. Paz spoke in that flat, monitory English that assumed obedience from those addressed. He paused, lost in thought. I would like to see where this climb is.

Sergeant Hernandez walked up, pointed to his watch.

Inspector, the boat.

They will have to wait, Paz said in Spanish.

It’s two days from here, Righetti said. But you can see everything from an overlook about two hours up the trail.

But, el capitán … he does not like to navigate the lake at night, Hernandez said. Too many icebergs coming off the glaciers.

Then we’ll have to spend the night.

Righetti was everything Paz expected a mountain climber to be: powerfully built, disheveled, bearded, with a sun-ravaged face.

Paz switched back to English. Mr. Righetti can you show me this overlook?

Chapter 3

Joe Righetti grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts, a fading port town north of Boston, his early years dominated by the strict Catholicism of his mother and the severe discipline of his father, Giovanni, who had come from Italy to the United States as a child, and had worked since the age of eighteen at a machine tool factory in Lowell. Giovanni Righetti was a fanatical baseball fan and loved the Red Sox almost as much as he loved a drink or two after work.

Joe chose football, not the first, nor the last time he was to disappoint his father. An undersized but fearless halfback on Beverly High School’s state champion football team, he headed west to Colorado University on a football scholarship. The first from his family to attend college.

He waited while the inspector gave last minute instructions to the uniforms.

Shit, I shoulda kept my mouth shut, he berated himself. Now I have to babysit this fucking cop all the way to the lookout.

They walked across the clearing to where a worn trail snaked up into the woods.

One minute … The inspector pointed to a collage of prints layered over each other in the packed earth of the trail. Whose horses?

Don Pedro, a gaucho, Righetti said. He has a farm—he pointed to a low ridge of sparsely wooded hills to the east—somewhere on the other side of those hills, uses the shack near that corral when he’s in this area. Most of this is his land. He’s got a bunch of cows wandering around here somewhere.

Where is he now?

Haven’t seen him for days. Can we go? Get this over with? He turned and started up the trail.

When Joe Righetti had first seen the Rocky Mountains he was struck dumb by the inescapable feeling that he had been there before though he’d never been west of Albany, New York. He lasted only two seasons on the football team, lost his scholarship, and left school before the end of his sophomore year—yet another disappointment to his father—but he found in the mountains what he had yearned for all that time in the narrow streets of his childhood surrounded by the drab double-deckers of Beverly. Freedom.

He heard heavy breathing behind him. Good, maybe I can wear this guy out and we can turn back.

The trail followed the Rio Steffens toward the mountains and then turned up into a deeply shaded park-like stand of virgin beech forest, the wind white-noise above the canopy. The forest floor, thick with verdant green moss, lay in dappled sunlight. A large magellanic woodpecker—blood-red head, black body—flitted in the shadows.

Joe Righetti had been obsessed with climbing since his first year at the University of Colorado, since that first glimpse of those mountains, since meeting Todd Miller. When he left school, Miller had continued. Righetti lived in his van at campgrounds all over the west as he became a stronger and stronger climber and a quiet, withdrawn man.

In the summer, when Miller was on vacation from his studies, they would reunite and head north to the mountains of Alaska to climb, and to sit, storm-bound, in tents and talk and dream of the greater ranges of the world. By the time Miller had finished two years of graduate school, Righetti had been climbing full-time for six years. He lived simply, climbed constantly, and became hardened like the mountains.

There are climbers who are good simply at climbing, and there are climbers who excel at self-promotion. Righetti was one of the former. Those who had never climbed with him had never heard of him, but those who had, knew him to be one of the best, the perfect partner: solid, strong, patient, unflappable. And then there are those rare few who are good at both. Todd Miller had been one of those. As a team, they were unstoppable, accomplishing important first ascents in mountain ranges around the world.

The trail climbed gradually, then rose more steeply.

Righetti could hear the inspector struggling to keep up, but did not lessen his pace.

After about an hour of steady hiking, they emerged from the forest and crested a rocky ridge that angled right, gradually ascending toward a saddle between two higher hills. They followed the ridge, exposed now to the wind.

The ridge blended into a grassy slope leading to the saddle. Three cows cropped the grass just below the height of land. Every time he saw Don Pedro’s cows this far up into the mountains, Righetti was struck by the absurdity of raising cattle in this place.

He stopped at the saddle, the overlook. Looked back.

The inspector had fallen behind.

He stood, his eyes locked on the twin pyramids. He traced the route they had climbed on the south tower. It should have been easy, but turned into a total epic.

Was that where things had started to come apart?

Todd Miller had wanted to go straight up, attack the rock wall below the ice gulley that led to the summit ridge directly by linking small snow patches and ice runnels, avoid the long upward angling traverse, the rotten buttress back to the main face, but there was no way that was gonna go.

It’ll go, I’m telling you, it’ll go. That other way looks like shit, Miller had said.

But Joe had been right … again.

The wall didn’t go, they wasted a couple of hours and had to go around, and had just gained the summit ridge. It was getting late, the light was fading, the wind picking up, clouds forming out of nothingness, dropping lower by the minute, swirling, bringing a damp bitter feel to the wind, and if Langdon didn’t get his ass in gear they were going to have to spend the night on the exposed summit ridge, and that would not be a good idea.

Not a good idea at all.

Righetti belayed Zoe Karras. He sat in the snow, his only anchor a single sling looped around a point of rock frozen into the slope above him.

If anyone fell …

He looked up the ridge. The dark block of the summit appeared—close, so close—then disappeared as the clouds closed around it. Karras was climbing as fast as he could pull the rope in. She topped out the final ice gulley and sprinted up the frozen snow slope to him.

How much further? She wasn’t even breathing hard.

A couple of hundred feet, max.

Take me off.

He took her off belay. She untied, then unclipped her blue trail rope, handed it to him.

Langdon’s on this rope … I’ll keep going—

Wait—

She was off. No rope, no belay.

He looked up, all he saw was the spikes of her crampons facing him as she front-pointed up the ice above him.

The glaciers far below disappeared; they were in the clouds. He threaded the blue rope through his belay device.

On belay!

His words were carried off by the wind. He pulled sharply on the rope three times. Waited, tried to take in. Nothing.

Langdon hadn’t moved.

Hurry. The. Fuck. Up! He shouted into the clouds.

He pulled on the rope. A couple of feet, then more, another foot, two. The wait each time was excruciating. A few more feet.

He saw a figure appear out of the fog. It was Miller. Unroped.

What the—

I couldn’t wait, man. I’m freezing my ass off. Where’s Zoe?

She kept going … she’s fucking crazy

You think?

What a cluster fuck. Righetti said.

No shit.

He looked at Miller. They had been through a lot worse crap than this, but then it had just been the two of them.

Keep going. Make sure your girlfriend doesn’t screw up and kill herself. I’ll get Langdon up there somehow …

Righetti was the last, practically pushing Simon Langdon in front of him to the square top of the rocky summit. Langdon was spent; he collapsed in the snow. Miller and Karras were hugging, laughing.

Zoe Karras grabbed him, kissed him on the cheek. Her eyes were on fire, her face glowed, she bounced with excitement.

We did it! She handed him her camera. Take a picture of Todd and me.

They had climbed above the clouds. The sky was a blue so dark it was black. The clouds beneath them parted, and he could, for one brief moment, see the icecap that stretched out