uncoiled as it arced outward and down to the target ledge, sinuously outlined in the light of the dropped flare.
"I'm going to double-line you down." Jon Smith twisted a loop of the rope through a carabiner on Valentina Metrace's climbing harness. "I'll be supporting most of your weight on the safety line." He snapped the second rope into place. "All you have to do is back down the bergschrund and keep the main line untangled as it feeds."
"Fine. No problem. What's a bergschrund?"
Smith smiled patiently in the glow of their lum sticks. "It's the interface between the mountain and the glacier." His beard-darkened features looked tired but also confident, as if he had every certainty in the world she could pull this off. Valentina wished she could feel the same.
"I'll take your word for it. And then?"
"I'll use the main rope to lower the packs and rifles to you. Haul the gear well away from the glacier side. It looks a little unstable and we might have an icefall or two."
She felt her eyes widen, and she glanced toward the glacial lip. "An icefall?"
Again came that steadying smile. "Then again, we might not. But be ready to duck, just in case."
"You may rest assured!" Valentina knew flippancy was inappropriate at the moment, but she had used it as an effective screen for personal self-doubts and fears for so long, it was a difficult habit to break.
"I'll send Smyslov down next. Secure him well clear of the glacier face as well. And Val, remember, he is a prisoner."
She started to flare but caught herself. After all, she'd been the one to inject that concern into the proceedings. "That's now a given, Jon."
"Good enough. After that, I'll rappel down to join you on the ledge. Then we're out of here and on our way."
Valentina suspected that for all Smith's confidence it likely wasn't going to be all that easy.
The black drop down the trough between stone and ice, with the winds clawing at her and nothing at her back but a long fall, was easily one of the most terrifying things she had ever done, and she had lived a life that held many moments of terror. Yet she could view the act almost in the abstract. Valentina Metrace had long ago learned to compartmentalize her fears, locking them up to scream and weep in their own little mental cage while the remainder of her being dealt with the necessities of survival. She could do the same with pain, compassion, or any number of other emotions when needs required. As with her sophisticate's humor, she found it a useful mechanism.
Still, 120 feet could take a century to descend. Twice, loose ice slabs broke loose beneath her boots, crunching and clattering away to shatter on the ledge below. In each instance she paused, took a deliberate, steadying breath, and continued.
Finally, she stood on rock once more. The target ledge left a great deal to be desired. At its glacier-side end, it was barely as wide as a man was tall, and slick with glaze ice. Yet it was still an improvement over dangling at the end of a rope. Pressing back against the cliff face, she unlatched from the main line and gave it a signaling tug. It slithered back up the edge of the glacier and out of her light stick's illumination.
Valentina closed her eyes to the wind- and snow-wracked blackness of the night and took a moment to slap down that shrieking, weeping thing in the back of her mind.
A few minutes later the first of the packs skidded down to the ledge. Signaling for more slack on the safety line, she dragged the equipment to a wider section of the ledge, beyond her judged reach of any avalanche, methodically repeating the process with the other packs and the cased rifles as they were lowered. Pausing, she studied the mound of equipment and weapons for a moment. This wasn't a particularly auspicious environment for controlling a hostile and potentially dangerous prisoner.
"Damn it, Jon," she murmured, "this could have been so much easier-just scrick, and over and done with."
She took a piton and a rock hammer from the gear stack and hunted for a fissure in the cliff face at about head height. Finding one, she sank the piton into it. Taking a short hank of loose rope from one of the packs, she ran it through the fixed ring of the piton, whipping a loop and slipknot into one end.