PROLOGUE

The Mountain of Makalu

1981

A huge gust slammed Christopher Anderson hard against the French Couloir. The snow crust fractured, chunks sliding down the icy chute to oblivion far below. The American climber pulled down hard on his axe and dug in his spiked crampons to stop himself from doing the same.

Beneath a fall of freezing spindrift, Anderson pushed in close to the mountain’s white mantle. His tinted goggles blanked as he leaned his face into the ice and—pinned to the mountain—shivered the hold. The empty gray of the ski mask began to flicker like a screen coming alive with grainy images.

Faces.

People. Friends. Enemies. Some true. Some not.

Places.

Countries. Mountains. Jungles. Some real. Some not.

This is nothing new.

Anderson had pushed himself beyond twenty-five-thousand feet enough times to recognize the mental kaleidoscope of an oxygen-starved brain, the cascade of unsought images, as happens in those final seconds before sleep, before death perhaps. He drew in a long, deep breath, as much to drag his brain back into his skull as to fill his chest.

Colder than its nitrogen, the thin air threatened to shatter his teeth as his lungs strained to absorb every chill molecule. He answered the pleural scream for more, permitting himself another nine breaths and counting each one. His head cleared, a little.

Anderson lifted his face back up, shook the snow from his body, and looked around. To his right, that dark cliff that they had identified in their black-and-white reconnaissance photographs jutted from the white snow like a brutal compound fracture. While the rock lacked the red ink of the pictures’ route markings, he could imagine the bleeding, the rivers of red arterial blood cascading down the stone gullies, running, falling, dripping . . .

You need to move!

Wearily the American tugged the steeply angled head of his Terrordactyl free from the ice only to heft the stubby pick in again, three feet to the right. More snow shattered and collapsed as it stabbed into the hard ice beyond. Below, a spiked boot reached similarly sideways and kicked into that same frozen spine as hard as the tired leg muscles and bruised toes permitted. The other slowly followed.

Pull. Stab. Kick. Kick. Hold.

And again.

Pull. Stab. Kick. Kick. Hold.

And again.

For this is my mantra . . .

Foot by foot, Anderson crabbed across the treacherous snow face until, finally, he could hook his axe onto an edge of solid rock and haul himself up onto it, muscles screaming. The grimace of effort split his congealed upper lip and real red blood oozed out, the only warm thing in that forsaken and frozen place.

Wind pummeled the American as he took momentary sanctuary in the solidity of his new perch. He rewarded himself with ten more shuddering breaths before he continued to claw his way up the jagged rock in bullying, hard climbing that tasted of blood and bile.

Anderson lost himself in the relentless stop-start progress, until he reached the shelter of the gully riven into the rock that they had both identified in those same photographs. In the lee of the rough granite cliff, he spiked his toe points into cracks, locked his legs, and unhooked a piton from his waist harness. Probing its flat blade into the tightest fissure before him, he hammered it home. A gloved, wood-stiff hand hooked a carabiner into the piton’s protruding, beaten eye, then pulled down on it as hard as possible.

The anchor didn’t move a micron, bombproof solid; “bomber” as those two English brothers used to say before the mountains blew them both away. Uncoiling a purple 11/16 sewn sling, he quickly tethered himself to the piton and, trusting the nylon umbilical, leaned back to sling his backpack from his shoulders and hang that also from the same anchor.

Now free to work, he began to dig the axe’s pick deep into another, bigger crack that horizontally split the rock, scraping it free of snow and ice until he could push an arm far inside to be sure it was good for his purpose. It was, so he bent down to pull from his backpack a football-sized bundle tightly wrapped in olive green gabardine and bound with bright red cord.

He rotated the package carefully with both hands, thumbs gently pushing on the surface to feel the form within as the wind picked up around him once more to pummel and pound, ice crystals drilling against his jacket. Satisfied he was holding the bundle correctly, Anderson defiantly lifted it up high into the angry air, pointing it toward the distant northern horizon, toward Tibet.

For a long, cold minute he just held it there. “See this, you fuckers? Because it sees you and everything you do,” he shouted into the north wind, then lowering the green package, he twisted it around and firmly pushed it into the mountainside. The fit was perfect.

When Anderson’s empty hands reappeared, he lifted his axe again. The sharp pick scraped and gouged a design into the stone, one that roughly mirrored the outline of the smallest of the many embroidered patches stitched to his climbing jacket.

Finished, Anderson pulled back a glove cuff to look at his battered Benrus. Peering into the watch’s scratched crystal as if looking into a frozen lake, he murmured to himself, “It’s okay. There’s still time.”

The American climber turned his face upward to see the remainder of the route they had chosen together to be his variation to the summit of Makalu. His eyes stepped into the sky seeking holds, suggesting moves.

He only caught a glimpse of the tumbling shadow before the image of a woman’s face flashed in front of it; the woman he loved.

Another.

An aspen lined valley; the place where he had grown up.

Another.

A Tibetan face, that of a child; he didn’t recognize it.

Faces.

Places.

Some known.

Some not.

Before sleep.

Before death.

The falling rock killed Christopher Anderson instantly.