Nowhere Land: A Stephan Raszer Investigation (77 page)

    
“More than something,” Raszer responded.

    
“Easy
for Shams to say,” Raszer muttered, contemplating the eight-hundred-foot wall
of rock he had been instructed to climb. “He could just beam himself up.”

    
“She’s no easy scramble,” said Dante. “It’s
like El Capitan times three.”

    
“El Capitan’s got marked routes,” said
Raszer. “This . . .” He stepped back and tipped his head as far as his neck
would allow, still not able to see the top; the wall rose sheerly up from the
ledge and teetered back at an obtuse angle. “ . . . Worries me.”

    
“Well,” Dante said, taking the monocular
from his eye after scanning the ascent, “if it’s any consolation, it doesn’t
look as if the last two hundred feet will be any harder than the first five
hundred.” He pulled out two thick coils of rope. “Let’s harness up.”

    
The previous night had been a sober one in
every sense. They’d been over the plan many times. Each round, one or more of
them brought up something they hadn’t yet considered. Katy’s rescue had begun
to look like one of those many-worlds scenarios from theoretical physics—too
many possibilities, and always the stark probability of failure. Raszer had to
keep reminding his companions that what they were attempting was not a hostage
rescue. They were neither trained nor equipped for that, and he made it clear
he wanted to see no acts of heroism. This was more akin to visiting the judge
on the eve of sentencing to plead for the life of a son. The court held all the
cards; all you could do was argue was that the consequences of a harsh decision
might come back to haunt the judge.

    
Or kill him.

    
If the Old Man were merely some wildly
inflated, mysticized version of a territorial crime boss, Raszer would have to
figure that the chances of his walking out with Katy were miniscule. He was
wagering everything on the hunch that his adversary was something more than a
thug, because, against all odds, his only card was the faith that if the Old
Man did indeed see himself as a lord, he would also grant the occasional mercy.

    
Raszer had been painfully aware since the
twin meetings in Colorado and Iskenderun that this was a one-man show. He was a
human gambit, presenting his opponents with a classic dilemma: They could kill
the pawn and risk opening their flank to a bishop or a queen, or they could
gamble on extending their domination of the board by letting Raszer claim some
small victory. In this sense, his mission was exactly like that of the
character he portrayed: the petitioning priest, sent by the king to the enemy
lines to negotiate for the princess’s release. He might return with her; he
might return without his head. Either way, as Greenstreet had said, the
presence of one man altered all the variables.

    
The sanctuary Mam Rahim had offered for
Katy’s debriefing seemed more than ideal. There was a network of caverns deep
inside the fortress mountain, used by the Kurdish fighters to cache arms and
evade Turkish attacks. Ruthie had begged to wait there with Dante for Raszer’s
arrival, rather than accompany Francesca to the village. She wanted to be the
first to see her sister free, and though Raszer’s every instinct fought the
idea, he found himself unable to say no. If he couldn’t grant such a request,
how could he expect the adversary to grant his? If Katy’s release took place by
day, they’d proceed with their escort to Hadad. If it were at night, they would
await the sunrise before moving out.

    
On the outskirts of the tiny hamlet,
Francesca would wait with Raszer’s satellite phone to relay news to the
soldiers fanned out along the road between her and town, and to Monica.
Splitting up their meager forces was designed not only to facilitate the
conveyance of information, but also to increase the chances that in the event
of a trap, at least one of them might be able to get away and bring help.

    
Where that help would come from was
uncertain, but Monica was a resourceful woman.

    
At this moment, while Raszer and Dante
secured their climbing harnesses, Ruthie, Francesca, and the wolfhound looked
on from thirty feet below, on an overlook that aproned off the main path. Their
instructions were to wait until Raszer was on the wall and Dante had descended
before moving out. Francesca had his journal and all his documents; Dante had
the rest of his belongings. Raszer had taken nothing with him but a liter of
water, his cigarettes and Zippo, a photograph of Katy, and a paperback copy of
the Qur’an. It never hurt to cite scripture or sura when arguing for the
unthinkable, even when the hearer was only nominally pious.

    
Preparing for the ascent was painstaking.
Dante placed a top anchor at about eighty feet, where the first serviceable
ledge was located, and belayed Raszer up. They were able to make another
hundred feet that way, ledge by ledge, before the wall began to bulge out at
something in excess of twenty degrees. There were entire hours when they were
barely able to cover twenty feet.

    
The composition of the rock was
inconsistent: Most of the steel stoppers held firmly in good cracks, but a few
tore brutally through surfaces that looked and felt solid but proved to be
little more than sun-kilned clay. That meant finding much deeper fissures and
placing the much larger cam anchors, of which they had only a modest
complement. On top of this, Raszer was making a vertical climb at the age of
forty-four and after a strenuous four-day trek across mountainous terrain, and,
as fit as he was, he felt it.

    
At 260 feet, with only the tiniest dimple
as a foothold and little more than a hair’s width for his fingers above, his
strength gave out, and with a shout he flew back from the wall, watched the
closest of his stoppers pop out with the force of shrapnel, and then dangled in
clear blue over the chasm, well beyond the overlook where his companions waited,
and probably a quarter mile from the closest landing. If the second anchor did
not hold, he was gone. And that would be the end of it.

    
Below, Ruthie screamed, and Raszer’s gut
froze. The whole point of this rear entry was surprise, even mystification. If
someone threw a spotlight on him before he’d made it to the top, he might as
well have rung the doorbell.

    
“Okay,” Dante said, from ten feet above,
“this is what you need to do. You need to trust that stopper, the one on the
overhang, just above your head. It won’t fail—it’s in a good, solid crack and
it can handle 2,500 pounds of pull. You’re going to need to start swinging and
build up enough of an arc to get back on the wall. Once you’re on and you can
give me a little bit of help, I can belay you up to me.”

    
“Which means,” said Raszer, not moving,
“that you figure the stopper might not hold if you try to pull me up from a
dead hang.” The words came with difficulty. His mouth was bone dry.

    
“That’s the physics of it, aye,” said
Dante. “Sorry.”

    
“Okay. Just wanted it straight. Now, you
want me to swing . . . even though every swing will put about 1,200 pounds of
strain on that anchor?”

    
“That’s about a thousand pounds less than
if I try to pull you. Check out the angle. D’ya have a better idea?”

    
“No,” said Raszer. “I guess I don’t.

    
“Lean back, straighten your legs . . . then
push forward and pull your knees up.”

    
“Oh, Christ.”

    
“What?”

    
“I just looked down.”

    
“Don’t. The rock is life.”

    
“Do me a favor?”

    
“Anything but a lap dance.”

    
“If you have to scratch or shift your
stance, do it now, before I start swinging.”

    
“I’m good.”

    
“Okay. Here goes.”

    
“I’ve got you.”

    
“Fuck.”

    
“What?”

    
“My legs won’t move.”

    
“Fire one neuron at a time, mate. Lean back
. . . ”

    
He saw and heard it all. Saw the rope go taut
and zing the air like a violin string. Heard the anchor bite into the rock, and
the atoms of steel ping with strain. Watched the fingerhold shift in and out of
focus as he reached for it, just a little closer with each swing.

    
The air whistled past his ears. Finally, he
felt his toes touch the wall.

    
“Go!” said Dante. “Don’t wait. Power up and
over. Now. I’ve got you.”

    
In the end, it was less Raszer’s grit than
his refusal to consider rappelling back down to the ledge that did the trick.
He was up. Shame has a place in the survival mechanism. So does stubbornness.

    
There was a shelf of generous width eighty
feet below the top, which was where they’d agreed Dante would leave him. The
final leg was textbook climbing, the incline of the rock now at last in
Raszer’s favor, and they could not risk a second man’s being sighted if
Raszer’s plan for arriving out of a cloud was to be realized. They took a break
to catch their breath, and spent a few minutes in that silent appreciation of
each other’s presence that stands for sentiment among men. Then the boy began
his descent, and Raszer, with a hundred feet of rope and a small belt pouch of
climbing hardware, set his sights on the ancient wall of quarried brick above.

    
The voice came when he was still thirty feet
below the base of the wall, scraping away at a shallow fingerhold. Because it
was nasal in timbre, melismatic, and issued from an open-air loudspeaker, he
first thought it might be a muezzin’s call to prayer. Soon enough, it became
apparent that it was a woman’s voice, and that her summons was not to prayer.
He recognized enough of the Arabic to hear a kind of exhortation:
Rise up, young warriors
. The drums began
to pound in the echoes of her last utterance. It was a rhythm of carnal
command. There was a shout and a mass of voices in unison, followed by the
ccrrraack
of a multitude of palms
clapped together.

    
This, Raszer thought, must be the
equivalent of field exercises at El Mirai.

    
On the one hand, he was grateful for the
cover of sound. On the other, the presence of a very large group of people on
the other side of the wall meant that his arrival would hardly be unnoticed. He
could hang here until the crowd dispersed or, as Shams had suggested, make an
entrance. Time to rethink. Time to be in the game.

    
The stronghold’s original builders had not
anticipated attack from the steep side, but neither had they scrimped on its
fortification. The wall was not less than thirty feet high and was, in terms of
climbing difficulty, a virtual model of the rock itself. Wind had worn away the
edges of the enormous bricks, leaving just enough room for fingertips, though
precious few places to get a toehold.

    
The climb was as lateral as it was
vertical. Worse, no place was secure enough to allow Raszer to pause to restore
his strength, so by the time he was finally able to chin himself up to a crack
wide enough to offer a view of the spectacle below, all of his sinews had been
stretched to the fraying point. The ligaments in his right shoulder could not
have supported the arm of an infant. He knew well this exhaustion, this place
where there is nothing left but a spark in the mind, where flesh is simply
dragged along by the engine of the spirit.

    
This would be Raszer’s state for whatever
remained of his journey, but he couldn’t allow it to dull his edge. Even when
his body was out of fuel, his mind’s pistons would have to be firing.

    
What he saw assembled on the vast, open
parade ground of the fortress were the Old Man’s acolytes, the fedayeen of this
new order of assassins. There were no fewer than a thousand young men and
women, most within a few years of Scotty Darrell’s age. It might be a small
army, or a very large cell. Their formation was a military rectangle, two equal
groups of males flanking the smaller contingent of females. All wore the
red-sashed white robes that Scotty had worn on the rooftop in Hollywood on the
day of Harry Wolfe’s murder. They were barefoot, and not one was out of step.

    
The men had pivoted inward so that their
collective line of sight formed an equilateral triangle with a raised reviewing
platform at its apex. The women stood with feet apart and eyes forward. There
were, at that moment, six individuals on this dais, which adjoined the main
structure of the fortress. Five of the figures were draped in a finer, pale
green version of the garment the supplicants wore, and the sixth was in black.
The headdresses were distinctive, not the common
kaffiyeh
but something resembling the chain-mail helmets worn by
Crusader knights. The robes draping the man in black weren’t those of a
traditional sheikh or sharif, but more like those of a thirteenth-century papal
legate. There was a green curtain at the rear of the platform.