Chapter 24

So began the descent through nightmare.

Through snow and keening wind and rapidly failing light, Annja rappelled down the merciless mountain. Her legs worked mechanically as pistons, flexing as she came in contact with the sheer face of ice and rock, driving her away again to plummet breathtakingly through the white vortex and the gathering darkness. She used her descenders sparingly to brake her speed, though it made her gut clench painfully at every push off, never knowing where she might hit. Or what might hit her. A broken leg or even a badly twisted ankle would doom them both.

But so would getting caught by moving too slowly. Caution was not survival positive. It was a pure example of a choice between bad options.

She left Levi at the top of each stage, allowing him to believe he was belaying her, although that was hardly necessary. She worried about leaving him closer to their pursuers.

But they couldn't have it both ways. She was by far the better equipped to find a place to anchor for a new stage before the rope ran out. So it was Annja who launched herself again and again into deepening darkness at frightening speed.

She took them through three breakneck descents, each to around the one-hundred-foot capacity of the doubled rope. It would be easy enough for the pursuit to follow, since she didn't move laterally away from their original line of descent. But she knew that it would take some time for the Young Wolves, fit and eager as they were, to get organized to safely start after her and Levi.

Baron was far too professional to let his pack just swarm howling down the cliff after the fugitives. That could lead to disaster as readily as it might yield success. Too-reckless hunters could be ambushed by their prey; marooned on the cliff face in a blizzard with no way to move in any direction; or get racked up by accident, dead or disabled, for simple failure to respect the mountain. At the very least, they'd quickly spread out and become scattered beyond hope of recall or tactical direction. Annja wanted to take advantage of that organizing interval to produce some separation.

Also they had to do something with Charlie Bostitch. They couldn't very well leave him on top of the damn mountain by himself; he'd never consent to stay alone, and their own numbers were too few to spare anybody to babysit him. Despite the fact he'd gone through the Rehoboam mountaineering program, and held up surprisingly well on the climb, he was overweight and middle-aged and had to be feeling the effects of effort and altitude more than his keen young followers. Baron would probably send two of his bully boys down fast to scout for their quarry. But he wouldn't let them get too far from the rest, either. So Bostitch was going to act as a boat anchor for his crew.

After her third drop it was almost pitch-black. Not even the faintest glow came from the sun at her back. But she found the tiniest of rock ledges running more or less horizontally around the mountain to her right. South.

"We need to shift sideways so they can't just drop blindly in on top of us, Levi," she said when he joined her, faithful and uncomplaining. "Can you follow me?"

"Sure, Annja." He gazed at her with a look that reminded her disconcertingly of a Labrador puppy.

She studied him for a long moment in the gloom, the faint crepuscular glow that lingered on the mountain. The wind had subsided but the snow continued to fall. She could barely make out anything but his eyes, long-lashed and shining at her through goggles and thick glasses.

If he falls, he'll take me with him, she thought grimly. No matter where they moved laterally across the ice wall she didn't dare set an anchor to fast rope down and rapidly increase the distance between them and those who sought their lives. The anchor would give away their new line of descent, and defeat the whole purpose of moving sideways in the first place.

From above Annja heard voices. So she thought. It might have been a trick of what was now a breeze, questing curiously around the sheer mountain face.

"Okay," she told the rabbi. "Stick close."

She started moving crabwise to her left. Levi did as she said. Fortunately he had sense enough not to crowd her; if he bumped her he could send them both hurtling to destruction.

But perhaps his very otherworldliness was their salvation. He understood intellectually quite well what an awful fix they were in. But he didn't seem to feel the threat viscerally; it wasn't as real to him as his books. Or the weird little narrow-arrowhead markings pressed into the ancient clay tablet that now rode in a plastic bag in a pocket of his pants, as safe as he was, anyway. So while Levi still wasn't very coordinated he tended to keep his presence of mind, as she had noticed before, in even the most extreme circumstances. She thought he was quite a remarkable man.

And as her self-defense instructors had always emphasized to her, the biggest single predictor of survival in lethal danger was presence of mind. It had been her own personal, private edge long before she came into possession of the sword.

It turned out the sun hadn't yet completely been swallowed by the Urartu badlands behind them. As the snow thinned a faint crimson glow found its way to them, like the light of some alien red-dwarf star. As she edged sideways Annja saw by the dim forge glow how purple—blue in more normal light—the knobbly, skinny fingers of Levi's hands were. The cold must be agonizing for him.

But she needed her own gloves. Her own climbing skill—such as it was—augmented by natural athleticism and rigorous training, offered their sole hope of survival. To give him her gloves would be to increase his comfort at the seriously increased risk to both their lives.

He has to do what he can to keep frostbite from setting in, she thought. But even fingers were a small price to pay for life. She only hoped he saw it the same way—and more, that it wouldn't come to that.

Painstakingly, checking frequently on her companion, Annja moved what she judged to be about seventy-five feet to the north around the mountainside. There some dark rock projected through the ice sheet, looking deceptively bare. She knew they concealed patches and pockets of ice that would shed a hand or booted foot as a duck's back did water, if she weren't cautious. But they offered at least the thin hope she'd be able to climb down.

And thin hope was all the hope they were liable to get.

Working as quietly as she could Annja planted some purely temporary protection devices to hold Levi in place and belay her. He assured her he'd be able to recover the pitons and camming devices and follow her down, using a rappel descender to brake him if needed. He even promised to retrieve the protection she sank on her climb down. That mattered less than making sure they left nothing here on this ledge, which though it was little more than a hint would be glaringly obvious to climbers as seasoned as Baron and his crew seemed to be. Even with night settling in to stay for a while, the Young Wolves wouldn't feel constrained about using powerful lights to aid them.

For that matter Annja and her companion didn't have any powerful lanterns. Allowing herself a morale-boosting moment of self-congratulation at having crammed the cargo pockets of her pants, jacket and even climbing harness with everything she thought she might need in a pinch, she dug out a small chemical light stick, cracked it into a gentle orange glow and hung it around her neck.

The odds of its faint light being seen from above were real but small. The odds of her falling if she tried climbing totally blind approached dead certainty. With definite emphasis on dead.

Thinking of the gear bulging out her pockets and hanging tinkling like chimes from her harness, she realized as she worked her way down the rock protrusion that they were running short on rappel anchors, which they couldn't recover the way they did pitons.

It was just one more thing to worry about. On the other hand, if their sideways shift had thrown off the pack, they could afford to descend at a more deliberate pace. And maybe even snatch a few minutes' desperately needed rest. After all, we'd just barely finished climbing up the damn mountain, she thought.

She returned her attention wholly to the task at hand, and foot. She concentrated on picking her way down the rock by the inadequate gleam of the light stick, forcing herself to move deliberately in the face of the need for speed whose urgency threatened to vibrate her clean off the cliff by itself. She made herself pause at intervals to drive in protection. It was as imperative for them to remember always to respect the mountain, and gravity, as it was for their enemies.

After what seemed only a couple of eternities, Annja's boots found another ledge beneath them. By that time her light stick had died to little more than a ghost of luminance past. She could still see that the ledge ran down and to the right. It wasn't much to e-mail the bunch back home about. But it seemed solid, and was close enough to level to afford some relatively easy lateral motion.

She secured herself to belay Levi as he picked his way down. He didn't have a light to help him. But evidently he'd watched carefully as she picked out her route, as well as having the rope as a rough guide. He was moving with more surety although she was certain his hands were stiff and painful. Somehow he dutifully recovered each and every safety anchor as he passed by.

Annja felt an explosive impulse to shout at him, "Hurry! Hurry! They'll catch us!" She bit her tongue to hold it inside.

After another few eternities he settled on the little ledge next to her. He gave her a goofy grin by the last few lumens from her stick. She gripped his shoulder.

"Great job, Levi. Now follow me."

She roped him to her and led them along the ledge by pure feel. After another fifty or sixty feet it both widened and ended. For the first time Annja allowed them to sit, rest, sip water from bottles and chew ration bars with the consistency of asphalt and the taste of wallboard.

By the narrow blue beam of the LCD pin light she always carried in a pocket she checked her companion's hands. She didn't dare use its tiny intense illumination to help climb for fear it would be spotted from above. If a light like that was pointed just right you could see it from ten miles away or more. As it was she dared only use the flash in quick pulses to confirm Levi's fingers weren't going white. Thankfully they seemed free of frostbite. But she winced to see how raw and bloody they'd become from being rasped by rope and rock.

"Do you have some kind of cloth, handkerchiefs, anything you can wrap around them?" she asked.

"How about my spare socks? I always carry a pair."

"If you can still grip the rope with them on."

"Oh, yes." He dug in his pants pockets and came out with a pair of insulated socks. He unrolled them and pulled them on his hands. Then he held them up and flexed them, peering at them. "I wish I'd thought of that sooner," he said, sounding relieved nonetheless.

After a few quiet moments he spoke again. "It's pretty dark, Annja," he said, sitting and gazing out into what was now lightly falling snow. "Are we going to stop here for the night?"

"No," Annja said reluctantly. "We're not going to stop at all."

"Really? Because we'll freeze to death if we go to sleep?"

"That's a myth. Some explorer with an Icelandic name I can never remember debunked it back in the early twentieth century. You actually radiate a lot of heat when you're moving. Sleeping helps conserve body heat.

"Of course, if you just lie down out in the wind you're liable to freeze to death whether you're awake or not, if it gets cold enough. The bad news for us is that we can't really huddle up out here on this cliff to reduce the surface area we have to radiate heat from. The good news is the wind seems to have died to a not-too-terrible level and the cloud cover's causing an inversion. That keeps the air temperature from dropping too far and fast."

Levi took a bite of energy bar and worked his jaws patiently at it. "So why not try to sleep here?" he asked.

"Two reasons. First, the people who are chasing us have way more options than we do. If they choose to keep hunting for us in the dark, they've got more manpower. Plus they have flashlights and equipment, both to help them climb and to look for us. Although if they use those we've got a good chance to see them coming. For all the good that might do. Anyway, they can also hang themselves out in bivouac bags and get a good night's sleep, plan on making up the distance on us in daylight. We have to be ready for either eventuality."

"All right," Levi said mildly.

"Second…we don't have bivy bags. I don't know about you, but I don't think I could sleep out here on this ledge no matter how well I tie myself down. And even though exercising causes us to lose heat faster, it makes us feel warmer. It's pretty chilly for sleep. So I want to keep descending as well as we can."

It hurt her to say the words. Her body ached from cold, oxygen starvation to the muscles, fatigue poisons and the aftereffects of fear-induced adrenaline overload. Her head felt so heavy her neck could barely support it, and the lids of her eyes felt like leaden shutters.

But her companion's simple response was "Anything you say, Annja."

Wearily she grinned at him. "Surely you could argue a little," she said. "Oh, well. We're burning darkness. Let's see how well we can climb by braille."

* * *

ROPED TOGETHER JUST BEYOND arm's length apart, so as not to interfere with each other, Annja and the rabbi groped their blind way down the mountain.

Their rate of progress, either sideways or down, ranged from snaillike to glacial to nonexistent, as Annja found herself forced to rest for a few moments, or had to halt to try to figure out a survivable strategy for negotiating some particularly impassable stretch. Go back and try a different route? Keep looking—feeling—for the finger-and toeholds, the crevices in ice and stone that would securely accept anchors to allow her to move on? All with a mind that seemed to be sagging into a sort of dark, soggy useless mass like gelatin left on a refrigerator shelf for way too long.

The night passed like eons. Even with the inversion and without the wind the air stayed frigid at this altitude. The cold seeped through her muscles like venom from a hornet's sting, and made her very bones ache.

Annja tried to keep her mind focused purely on task. She worked on finding some way, some path, to put still more distance between them and the hunters. It was a salvation of sorts. She had to concentrate, focus her attention like a laser beam, because the slightest mistake could drop her off the sheer face of the Mountain of Pain.

At one point they were able to chimney down a narrow chute, and that gave them sixty more feet. Fortunately it wasn't a difficult technique to learn. Annja coached Levi down even as she descended a few feet below him. It helped keep her mind from the fact that inside the space between icy rock masses was even darker than outside, like a blind descent into freezing Hell.

They rested for a while in the cleft at the base. Annja massaged blood back into her fingers and stuck her hands inside her bulky jacket, squeezing them under her armpits to restore a scrap of warmth and circulation. Unable to feel handholds well enough through her gloves she'd had to take them off.

Annja wondered if, should she lose fingers from her right hand, she'd still be able to summon the Sword. Maybe that's not a huge loss if I can't, she decided. Considering what kind of things it seems to get me into.

Three times she peeled. Once rock broke off simultaneously beneath her right foot and left hand. Once it was what she thought was solid ice that crumbled to her weight. And once she just slipped off for no reason she could immediately perceive.

That last time she took Levi with her. Fortunately the cams they'd emplaced held, although she could hear them creak alarmingly as the pair swung side by side, banging ungently off naked rock. For a moment they stared at each other through the darkness. Annja was just able to make out the rabbi's goggled face. Then she stabilized herself with a boot against the rock face, and began feeling around for more holds to continue the descent from there.

That had to be some kind of microsleep incident, she realized with a little shock of dismay. Mind, body and emotions were all reaching the breakdown point. If I don't rest soon worse is going to happen.

"Are you all right, Annja?" Levi asked anxiously as she helped him back to his own perch. She noted that the ends of the socks on his hands had grown much darker. He was bleeding into them.

"Yeah," she said. "I'm fine."

Lying to him was like twisting a knife in her own guts. But what purpose would the truth serve? Adding to his own stress burden would only make him less able to continue.

"Let's go on," she said, in what she hoped was an encouraging tone. It didn't sound too encouraging to her. The phrase death warmed over kept creeping into her mind.

But not long thereafter, moving as if through congealing gelatin, she fetched up against a wide crack in the rock. It was a good fifteen feet wide and even in the slight starlight filtering through the cloud she could see the gleam of ice sheathing its walls. Above them overhangs jutted, more ominous than all the cathedral gargoyles of Europe. She had just clambered over one, swinging herself into a bare rock face that offered plenty of purchase.

I can't go back up over that, though, she thought, looking upward. I just don't have the strength.

"Annja," the rabbi said quietly, "I don't know if I can go on."

She checked her watch. To her surprise less than two hours remained until dawn. She'd feared to see they'd been on the run for an hour and a half or something. That was an unexpected blessing of the pinpoint focus the near-blind groping descent had required of her—time passed quickly.

The fact she wore a watch struck Annja with sudden, sinister significance. Usually she didn't wear one. She almost always carried a cell phone, which served the same function, if not a PDA or other device that could as easily tell her what time it was. There seemed no point in weighing her arm down with something that did nothing but tell time. But on a climb like this Baron had insisted that they all wear wrist chronometers they could check easily without digging in a pocket.

He was right again. That's what bothered her now. He was right way too often. He may have inherited a fortune, just like his boss Charlie, but it was clear he had neither survived as a SEAL nor expanded the private military contractor business—even in the terrific boom associated with the War on Terror—without knowing his job awfully well. And it was he who guided the pack of young, fit, eager raptors who chased them.

She shook her head as if to jar those thoughts loose. "Me, either," she admitted. "All we can do is all we can do. If exhaustion makes us mess up, the crazies on our tail won't have to finish us. We need to rest."

And so she cocooned them as best she could in ropes, facing each other, clinging like opossums to share their meager warmth. So utterly spent was she that despite the discomfort and uncertainty and looming danger she fell at once into a deep sleep.

* * *

A FAINT RED GLOW THROUGH her eyelids roused her. She forced gummy eyes open. Off over Azerbaijan, somewhere beyond the vastness of Ararat, the sun was rising. Bands of red light stretched far west over the tormented terrain of eastern Turkey to either side of them. If little light made it around the mountain's bulk to where Annja and the rabbi huddled, even less warmth did. Still, she imagined she felt warmer.

The sun did a surprising amount for her energy and morale. Meaning she felt as if she'd been dead for less than a week now.

She had a vague sense of movements large and menacing on the dawnlit ground beneath them, like Sam and Frodo surrounded by orc armies on the slopes of Mount Doom. Another volcano, she recalled, if a much more vigorous one. Also much warmer.

She shrugged the sensation off. It was only hyperactive imagination. They hung still well around ten thousand feet. There was no way she could see anything down there anyway, if something actually was happening. Still an added sense of unease continued to smolder within.

Great. That's totally what I need. More to worry about.

She looked to Levi and found herself gazing into his wide eyes. They watched her steadily through goggles and glasses. The young rabbi seemed perfectly calm and at peace.

On sudden impulse she kissed him on the tip of his cold nose. He blinked.

"What was that for?" he asked. His voice had a rusty-hinge creak to it. If he was like her it was raw from breathing the thin, icy air.

"For trusting me." She hoped that hadn't been cruel. She felt no romantic or physical attraction to him and she wasn't going to. But she felt a great surge of something like love for him. As if he were a younger brother.

He's ten years older than you, she reminded herself. But in real-world experience, she knew, she was far his senior.

Feels like centuries, she thought, as she began to disentangle them.

She checked their anchors and replaced a couple she didn't trust. Then she expanded the length of safety rope tethering them to one another to twenty feet. It should give her some room to explore for a route down. Although last night, anyway, the only route she'd been able to detect dead-ended pretty decisively against that wide icy crack in the mountain rock.

"What a difference a day makes," she muttered. "Or a little daylight." Being able to see where she was going struck her as an almost decadent luxury.

But shortly she began to frown in dismay. The ugly realization slowly suffused her mind that the only possible paths were back up over the overhang, whose underside she now saw was slick with ice, or across the yawning gap, too far to leap with any degree of safety, to a surface that looked as hard and slippery as glass. Have I trapped us here? she wondered.

Instantly her mind rebelled. There's always a way, she told herself fiercely. And I always find it.

Yet was that mere childish bravado? Her resourcefulness had always served her in tight situations. Otherwise she'd never have lived to be doing her fly imitation up here on a sheer cliff with several thousand feet to anything resembling a decent-sized nonvertical surface below the thick soles of her boots.

Everything has limits, she thought glumly. Had her resourcefulness at last done a fatal face-plant against its own boundaries?

From not far enough above her a shout pealed out like a morning bell. "There she is! There's the filthy apostate who killed my brother!"