High Citadel. Desmond Bagley
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he thought, might turn out to be a major problem. All he found was half a slab of milk chocolate in Grivas’s seat pocket.
Rohde came back with Forester, Willis and Armstrong and they took it in turns carrying the oxygen cylinder, two by two. It was very hard work and they could only manage to move it twenty yards at a time. O’Hara estimated that back in San Croce he could have picked it up and carried it a mile, but the altitude seemed to have sucked all the strength from their muscles and they could work only a few minutes at a time before they collapsed in exhaustion.
When they got it to the hut they found that Miss Ponsky was feeding the fire with wood from a door of one of the other huts that Willis and Armstrong had torn down and smashed up laboriously with rocks. Willis was particularly glad to see the axe. ‘It’ll be easier now,’ he said.
Rohde administered oxygen to Mrs Coughlin and Aguillar. She remained unconscious, but it made a startling difference to the old man. As the colour came back to his cheeks his niece smiled for the first time since the crash.
O’Hara sat before the fire, feeling the warmth soak into him, and produced his air charts. He spread the relevant chart on the floor and pin-pointed a position with a pencilled cross. ‘That’s where we were when we changed course,’ he said. ‘We flew on a true course of one-eighty-four for a shade over five minutes.’ He drew a line on the chart. ‘We were flying at a little over two hundred knots – say, two hundred and forty miles an hour. That’s about twenty miles – so that puts us about – here.’ He made another cross.
Forester looked over his shoulder. ‘The airstrip isn’t marked on the map,’ he said.
‘Rohde said it was abandoned,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde came over and looked at the map and nodded. ‘You are right,’ he said. ‘That is where we are. The road down the mountain leads to the refinery. That also is abandoned, but I think some indios live there still.’
‘How far is that?’ asked Forester.
‘About forty kilometres,’ said Rohde.
‘Twenty-five miles,’ translated Forester. ‘That’s a hell of a long way in these conditions.’
‘It will not be very bad,’ said Rohde. He put his finger on the map. ‘When we get to this valley where the river runs we will be nearly five thousand feet lower and we will breathe more easily. That is about sixteen kilometres by the road.’
‘We’ll start early tomorrow,’ said O’Hara.
Rohde agreed. ‘If we had no oxygen I would have said go now. But it would be better to stay in the shelter of this hut tonight.’
‘What about Mrs Coughlin?’ said O’Hara quietly. ‘Can we move her?’
‘We will have to move her,’ said Rohde positively. ‘She cannot live at this altitude.’
‘We’ll rig together some kind of stretcher,’ said Forester. ‘We can make a sling out of clothing and poles – or maybe use a door.’
O’Hara looked across to where Mrs Coughlin was breathing stertorously, closely watched by Miss Ponsky. His voice was harsh. ‘I’d rather that bastard Grivas was still alive if that would give her back her legs,’ he said.
II
Mrs Coughlin died during the night without regaining consciousness. They found her in the morning cold and stiff. Miss Ponsky was in tears. ‘I should have stayed awake,’ she sniffled. ‘I couldn’t sleep most of the night, and then I had to drop off.’
Rohde shook his head gravely. ‘She would have died,’ he said. ‘We could not do anything for her – none of us.’
Forester, O’Hara and Peabody scratched out a shallow grave. Peabody seemed better and O’Hara thought that maybe Forester had been right when he said that Peabody was only suffering from a hangover. However, he had to be prodded into helping to dig the grave.
It seemed that everyone had had a bad night, no one sleeping very well. Rohde said that it was another symptom of soroche and the sooner they got to a lower altitude the better. O’Hara still had a splitting headache and heartily concurred.
The oxygen cylinder was empty.
O’Hara tapped the gauge with his finger but the needle stubbornly remained at zero. He opened the cock and bent his head to listen but there was no sound from the valve. He had heard the gentle hiss of oxygen several times during the night and had assumed that Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin or Aguillar.
He beckoned to Rohde. ‘Did you use all the oxygen last night?’
Rohde looked incredulously at the gauge. ‘I was saving some for today,’ he said. ‘Señor Aguillar needs it.’
O’Hara bit his lip and looked across to where Peabody sat. ‘I thought he looked pretty chipper this morning.’
Rohde growled something under his breath and took a step forward, but O’Hara caught his arm. ‘It can’t be proved,’ he said. ‘I could be wrong. And anyway, we don’t want any rows right here. Let’s get down this mountain.’ He kicked the cylinder and it clanged emptily. ‘At least we won’t have to carry this.’
He remembered the chocolate and brought it out. There were eight small squares to be divided between ten of them, so he, Rohde and Forester did without and Aguillar had two pieces. O’Hara thought that he must have had three because the girl did not appear to eat her ration.
Armstrong and Willis appeared to work well as a team. Using the axe, they had ripped some timber from one of the huts and made a rough stretcher by pushing lengths of wood through the sleeves of two overcoats. That was for Aguillar, who could not walk.
They put on all the clothes they could and left the rest in suitcases. Forester gave O’Hara a bulky overcoat. ‘Don’t mess it about if you can help it,’ he said. ‘That’s vicuna – it cost a lot of dough.’ He grinned. ‘The boss’s wife asked me to get it this trip; it’s the old man’s birthday soon.’
Peabody grumbled when he had to leave his luggage and grumbled more when O’Hara assigned him to a stretcher-carrying stint. O’Hara resisted taking a poke at him; for one thing he did not want open trouble, and for another he did not know whether he had the strength to do any damage. At the moment it was all he could do to put one foot in front of the other.
So they left the huts and went down the road, turning their backs on the high peaks. The road was merely a rough track cut out of the mountainside. It wound down in a series of hairpin bends and Willis pointed out where blasting had been done on the corners. It was just wide enough to take a single vehicle but, from time to time, they came across a wide part where two trucks could pass.
O’Hara asked Rohde, ‘Did they intend to truck all the ore from the mine?’
‘They would have built a telfer,’ said Rohde. ‘An endless rope with buckets. But they were still proving the mine. Petrol engines do not work well up here – they need superchargers.’ He stopped suddenly and stared at the ground.
In a patch of snow was the track of a tyre.
‘Someone’s been up here lately,’ observed O’Hara. ‘Supercharged or not. But I knew that.’
‘How?’ Rohde demanded.
‘The airstrip had been cleared of snow.’
Rohde patted his breast and moved away without saying anything. O’Hara remembered the pistol and wondered what would happen if they came up against opposition.
Although the path was downhill and the going comparatively good, it was only possible to carry the stretcher a hundred yards at a time. Forester organized relays, and as one set of carriers collapsed exhaustedly another took over. Aguillar was in a comatose condition and the girl walked next to the stretcher,