Powder Burn (Burn with Sam Blackett #1) (10 page)

Sam was asleep when Pete returned. It was completely dark, and he knocked her legs as he dropped to his knees to get inside the tent door. She started awake. She sat up.
“Well?” she said, unable to hide the accusing tone.

“
I’m staying with you, like I said, we have to do what we can.”

She took a few moments to digest this.
“I’m sorry, I thought you’d go with them ...”

Pete turned to sit beside her.
“I don’t want to split the team up, but I don’t want anyone to talk about me the way they talk about some of those guys on Everest these days either. My old man taught me: you help out people in trouble, doesn’t matter where you are, what you give up. If Tashi can move, we’ll start out for the border tomorrow. If he can’t ...”

“
We’ll worry about that when it happens,” she said, looking over her shoulder at him. “Do you think Lens will change his mind?”

“
I doubt it. We agreed to talk about it again in the morning, but I think he’s just making the right noises.”

“
Exactly,” replied Sam.

“
Are you concerned about your article?” asked Pete, after a pause.

“
Uh-uh ...”

“
You can still write something about Shibde, just like we talked about, you don’t have to give any detail on those two,” he said.

“
I don’t know. Jortse doesn’t want it at all. I think they’ve been fighting the Demagistanis, but ...”

“
What?”

She hesitated
. “I don’t know, something isn’t right about those two.” Had Jortse’s threat been real? She was exhausted, it had been a long, traumatic day – there was no need to go creating fears where there were none. “The fact that they speak such good English is strange, and that one of them should come down with altitude sickness.”

“
That’s not so weird; I’ve read about Sherpas from mountain areas going down. So I guess it can still happen, even when they’ve lived their whole lives up here. And I’m sure there’s a perfectly good explanation for their English, which they’ll tell us when they’re ready. Living in an occupied country isn’t going to give anyone the most trusting of personalities.”

“
That’s true,” she said. She lay back beside Pete. “But you’ll miss the mountain, you’ve worked so hard for this. I’m grateful,” she told him.

“
You don’t have to be, it’s the right thing to do,” he replied.

“
Well, thanks anyway,” she said, and leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. In the darkness she couldn’t see his response, he didn’t move. Then a long shiver gripped her. “I’m freezing,” she said, “I should have got in the bag hours ago.” She quickly unlaced her boots, then wrestled herself, fully dressed, into her sleeping bag. She lay still and listened as Pete wriggled out of his jacket and boots and into the sleeping bag beside her. It grew quiet and she reached out, found something that felt like an arm and squeezed, gently. “Thanks, Pete, sleep well,” she said, then rolled away and closed her eyes. She was gone in a moment.

“No! No! I don’t believe it! Those idiots!”

Sam sat bolt upright, disorientated at being woken by the sudden commotion.

“They’ve gone, they’ve bloody gone!” Pete’s voice raged from outside the tent.

She wrestled her arms clear of the sleeping bag, and twisted round to poke her head out of the unzipped door. Lens and Vegas
’s tent was gone. Pete was staring up towards the notch in the valley.

“
I think I can see them, they must have started in the middle of the night – they’re just below the foot of the rock slab.” Pete turned back to the tent.
“NO!”
He slammed his hands into his forehead. “They’ve taken my climbing gear!”

“
What?” Sam was starting to realize she had a grinding headache, and her mouth felt dry and caked with mucus.

“
It was here by the tent,” retorted Pete.

“
Well, if for once in your life you’d tidied something up and put it inside ...” she said, pushing the heels of her hands into her eye sockets to try to clear her vision.

“
Oh, Miss OCD, like someone was going to steal it.” Pete waved around at the utterly empty landscape.

“
Someone did steal it,” she said.

Pete glared back at her.

“Huh, sorry,” she grunted, and retreated inside the tent and pulled the sleeping bag off. Now her brain was starting to work, worrying about what he’d do next, if he would want to go after them.

She pushed herself off the ground sheet and out of the tent door, boots balanced on her toes, knocking over the water. Pete was kicking stones into the distance. She glanced over to the others. Jortse was kneeling beside Tashi, holding a leather water bottle for him. She hurried over, trying to push her feet deeper into the boots as she went.
“How is he?” she asked.

Jortse was as impassive as ever.
“He can tell you himself.”

Sam dropped to her knees beside Tashi, peering out from the blankets.
“I’m Sam,” she said.

Tashi managed a weak smile. His breathing was still rapid and shallow, but easier, and there was no sign of blood around the lips.
“Thank you for helping, you and your friends. I think you saved my life,” he said.

Sam’s face broke into a radiant smile.
“Pete, Pete, come over here.”

“
What?” He looked up from staring at the spot where the other tent had been.

“
Have you been introduced to Tashi properly?” she said.

Pete walked over and squatted down on the other side of him, elbows on his knees, hands clasped.
“How’re you doing? I’m Pete,” he said.

“
Better, thanks to you,” Tashi replied. And although the voice was thin and hoarse and threaded through fast, anxious breaths, she couldn’t help but notice that his accent was English.

“
Do you think you can walk?” asked Pete, his scowl beginning to dissolve.

“
Didn’t I walk yesterday?”

“
With some help.”

“
Not so much help today.”

“
That’s good, because we don’t have it,” replied Pete.

“
The others?” asked Jortse.

“
Gone. We came here because of a mountain over there.” Pete pointed as he spoke. “It seems that to them it’s more important than helping you.”

“
Like a pilgrimage?” replied Jortse.

Pete smiled.
“Kind of, yes, a lot like a pilgrimage – but we should move lower if we can, we need to bring his breathing back to normal. Let’s have some breakfast and then give it a try. We’ll rest as much as we have to, try to keep Tashi stable.”

“
You’re still with us?” asked Sam.

“
Of course,” said Pete. “I keep saying.”

“
I’m sorry,” said Sam.

“
Where are we going?” asked Jortse.

Pete described the route.

“The gap between Peak Three and Peak Five?” asked Tashi when Pete got to the climb up and over the border.

“
Yup,” said Pete.

Tashi blinked his approval.
“Good.”

“What is that smell?” asked Sam, forty-five minutes later.

Pete was taking one final glance around the campsite to make sure they hadn’t left anything. He looked up and sniffed.
“Their breakfast – tsampa, it’s roasted barley flour mixed with yak-butter tea.”

“
Oh, that’s what it is, I always wondered. They both smell of it,” said Sam, nose wrinkling despite herself.

“
It’s disgusting, pretty rancid. If they offer you any it’s rude to refuse, but make sure you take as little as possible.” He turned to look up to the rock slab.

“
Wish I’d told that prick about
Altitude
when I had the chance,” she said, adding, “I didn’t think of it last night.” Pete didn’t reply, but she could see the hint of a smile. “See them?” she asked.

“
No, they must be in that shadowed section under the slab. I haven’t seen them move across the ice field yet. They’ve got the binoculars too.”

“
Maybe they’re waiting to see what we do,” she said.

“
Because once they’re across the ice field we can’t follow them?” replied Pete. “Do you think they’d wait if we started after them?”

She was silent, wishing she’d kept her mouth shut.

Pete kicked a rock. “I hope they’re going to be all right up there. They don’t even know what they don’t know.”

She moved to stand beside him. Pete had his hands in his jacket pockets
, and she linked her arm round his. “They made their own choice. Tashi didn’t choose to get sick. We’re doing the right thing,” she said.

“
I know ... but I wanted to do that run.”

“
I know you did, but it’ll be here next year, we could come back.”

Pete turned to look at her.
“I said the first descent didn’t matter, didn’t I?”

“
You did,” she said.

Pete took a deep, slow breath and let it back out.
“Next year seems like a long way away when we’re this close.”

She turned to look at him.
“It’ll still be there next week, next month and next year. We’ll come back.”

“
You said, ‘we – we’ll come back.’ Twice, you said it.”

Sam arched an eyebrow, gazing into the deep-set blue eyes.
“I did, didn’t I? Fancy that.” And she guided him away from the mountain, and walked him over to where Jortse was struggling to get Tashi to his feet.

High above the valley floor, at the start of the crossing of the ice field, Lens had sat with Vegas and watched the little encampment break up.

“
What are they doing?” asked Lens; he could see that the tent was down.

“
Heading back up the valley.” Vegas handed over the binoculars as he spoke.

“
Goddamn. I was hoping he’d come up after us,” said Lens, with as much sadness as anger. Perhaps he shouldn’t have let Vegas talk him into this, but Pete had seemed so certain that he wouldn’t leave the Shibdeese. It had been pretty easy to believe that only something radical would shock him into joining them. Lens had thought that the sight of them halfway up to the notch with all Pete’s gear might just do it, but it hadn’t, and now he wished that they had stayed till dawn and tried to talk him round.

“
Two chances of him following,” said Vegas, “Bob Hope and no hope. She was never going to leave those other two, and he was never going to leave her.”

“
I thought this mountain meant a lot to him – as much as it does to you and me. We’ve put all the effort in.”

“
Yeah, but he was a penniless nobody before this started, and if he doesn’t ride it, nothing’s changed. He’s got nothing to lose. And she’s got him whipped, has ever since he clapped eyes on her in that bar.” Vegas got to his feet. “We should never have brought her, told you it was dumb bringing a chick along on a gig like this.”

Lens didn’t remember the decision quite like that, but hindsight was 20/20 perfect. He looked up at Vegas.
“You’re going to be all right on that climb on your own?”

“
Dude. Dumb-assed question. I told you last night.”

Lens looked down through the binoculars again at the retreating backs of his former colleagues.
“It would’ve been better with two of you,” he said.

“
Hell, he’d only slow me down. Now let’s get this done.”

“Hey, what are you eating?” Sam asked Pete. Like Tashi and Jortse, he sat just a few feet from her, propped against one of the many boulders scattered across the pale dirt and patchy frozen snow of the valley by some long-since retreated glacier.

Pete looked a little defensive.
“Chocolate.”

Sam’s eyes widened.
“I thought we hadn’t brought any, to save weight!”

“
This is special chocolate. I like a little hit before I ride. Want some?”

“
Do bears poop in the woods?” she replied. Pete snapped a row of squares off the slab and threw them over. “Ohhh,” she sighed, as the chocolate melted in her mouth. “That’s how it starts, you know,” she told him. “A little hit before you do a big run, and before you know it you’re in the Betty Ford clinic with Vegas.”

Pete smiled.
“How’s the headache? You’re still coughing.”

“
Getting better. Maybe we’re losing altitude faster than we think,” she said, fiddling with her dark mass of hair and adjusting her hat.

“
Maybe,” said Pete. He held out the rest of the bar. “We might as well finish it.”

She looked at it, feeling guilty.
“I guess you’re not going to be needing it.”

“
I guess not.”

She shuffled across the gap between them on her knees and took the bar.
“This is a good thing you’re doing, the right thing.” Sam snapped off the penultimate row of squares, gave the rest back and sat down beside him. “We couldn’t manage without you.”

Pete didn’t respond.

She squeezed his forearm. “Hey, if we get these two across safely, you’ll have done something much more amazing.”

Pete nodded, a reluctant half smile finally appearing.

Sam turned to Tashi. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

Tashi nodded, too exhausted to speak. Jortse replied for him.
“He is tired, but we must push on.”

“
Why the rush?” she said.

“
It is only a matter of time before they search this sector of the border.” He waved his hand across the valley. “There aren’t many good places to hide. It would be easy to be caught in the open by a patrol.”

Sam gazed at him.
“I think you should tell us all about why they’re searching for you,” she said.

Jortse glanced down at Tashi. The movement put his face in the shade of the hat brim. After a moment he said,
“I told you, it’s better that you don’t know.”

“
I’ve heard that before,” said Sam, glancing at Pete. “That’s how I got myself into this situation.” She shook her head. “Not this time.”

Pete rubbed his nose, sniffed and said nothing.

“The less you know the better, in case you are ever questioned. At the moment you know nothing and are safe,” repeated Jortse.

“
Not that safe,” replied Pete. “We sneaked over the border.”

“
We can’t afford to get caught either,” she added. “So you might as well tell us why they’re looking for you. I think we deserve to know.”

Jortse scratched at his thin beard, eyes moving from one to the other.
“The information still puts you at increased risk. Why take that chance?”

“
It’s our choice, we’re making some big sacrifices to help you, we have a right to know why,” said Pete.

Jortse adjusted his hat, then looked back and forth to the pair of them one more time.
“This can never be written about. You understand that? I have your word?”

“
Yes,” replied Sam.

“
All right. I told you that we have been trying to inspire resistance against the men that have invaded my country.”

Sam nodded.

“This was to be passive, peaceful resistance, no matter how much they provoked us. This is the way in Shibde. We are Buddhists.” Jortse hesitated. “But it didn’t happen quite like that.”

A shadow flickered over the group and they all jumped, staring up
– an eagle drifted down the valley.