Eye of the Cobra (2 page)

June

Yosemite Valley

California

The walls of stone soared upwards, away from the pines towards the piercing blue sky. From far away they appeared smooth and insurmountable, but when you were close, right up against them, you could feel the roughness of them, the life in them. High up, Wyatt saw the brightly coloured dots against the stone, a thin umbilical cord of rope running between them.

He looked down at the earth beneath his feet, glanced at his watch, then dipped his fingers into the chalk-bag suspended from his belt.

He indicated to Suzie that she should start feeding the rope out to him from where she was belayed on the ground. A short sling attached her climbing-harness to a piton driven into a crack at the base of the rock face. She finished tying her long blonde hair into a pony-tail, and fed the two nylon ropes, one red and the other blue, through the aluminium figure-of-eight attached to her waistband.

‘You’re on belay,
ja,'
she said. Her English was precise, the German accent distinct.

He’d met her on another face the previous day. She’d been climbing solo, and he’d been impressed. He needed a partner for this route and everyone had turned him down. She’d accepted with a flash of those strange eyes - blue flecked with green. Maybe she was as crazy as he was. Apparently she was nineteen, two years older than he was.

He caressed the rock and moved rhythmically up the face, hardly pausing on the almost smooth surface. He began to relax as the danger increased and his mind focused on staying alive. There was nothing between him and the ground except the two thin ropes.

The exposure of the face provided the surge of adrenalin that spurred him on as the pines began to look like model trees on a toy landscape.

He was alone, in control and doing what he loved more than anything else in the world - pushing himself to the limit. The thoughts that crowded into his brain disappeared, to be replaced by a total awareness of his surroundings.

There was a lot he needed to forget, especially one memory. Tracking the road in the darkness, pulse racing, body buoyed up with excitement - and then the loss of control. The lights twinkling in the harbour. The smashing and tearing of metal. His father’s face at that moment, still, even calm, then his own head smashing hard into the steering-wheel.

He’d been lying in his hospital bed when she came in, her face red with crying.

‘You killed him, you bastard! Oh God, I hate you. I hate you!’

The words echoed round his brain.

Shit. He swung out, nearly losing his right handhold as he pressed his right foot against a tiny indentation in the rock.

Shit, he was coming off!

Then he recovered his balance.

Focus. Focus.

He pulled himself in, his mind clear, and stared up at the route above.

The brightly coloured dots were now two people, climbing slowly above him. He felt exhilarated. He was making good progresss. It would only be harder later, when he came up against the toughest section of the climb, high up the face.

‘Off belay!’

Suzie detached herself from the piton at the bottom of the face and untied the figure-of-eight from the ropes. The slack was taken in as he pulled in the rope. Then she looked above her, searching for this distracted young man she’d only known for a day.

There he was, spread-eagled across the living rock, hanging like some insect from the wall of a room, unconcerned and unafraid. She shifted her legs as she imagined him astride her. He would stroke her forehead, look into her eyes and then kiss her softly. Perhaps he would have a way of making love that would make her lose control. Always she was in control. He was here for the same reason she was: to forget.

He had a long, lean body, with a boxer’s legs. His hands were unusually large, but it was the grace and confidence of his movements that was most surprising. She thought of his face - the face of a hawk. Sometimes his face was an angry, troubled mask through which she could see nothing. But when he smiled, that was when she liked him most. The skin around his dark eyes would wrinkle up into faint crow’s-feet and his mouth would lengthen into a devastating smile. She wanted to run her hands through his unruly dark hair.

Strength, that was the word that came to her mind when she thought of Wyatt Chase.

She felt the tug on the rope and cleaned her rubber-soled climbing-boots against the face. Then she started to climb.

He passed the other climbers just after mi
dday - two men in their thirties. He understood their resentment; he was using less protection than they were, was less afraid of falling. And he was climbing with a girl who was better on the rock than either of them.

He understood them, because he had been like them several years before. He had confronted the fear of dying and overcome it. His father had taught him to do that. Oh God, he didn’t want to think about his father any more. Sweet Jesus, why had his father asked him to drive?

‘Fucking teenagers! Fucking lunatics!’

The words drifted upwards, muttered by one of the two climbers below him. He belayed himself at the next bolt and tugged on the rope for Suzie to start climbing. To block the thoughts of the accident that kept coming back to him, he focused on her progress.

The men were watching her, her body undisguised in black lycra climbing-skin. Her long legs stretched out against the rock, the muscles taut, pressing her hard into the face. She leaned out to reach up for another hold, licking her lips, and he felt himself going hard as he saw the form of her breasts pressing through the thin nylon.

Then she was next to him, tying herself onto the belay as he moved up to tackle the next section, the midday sun burning into his deeply tanned face.

No one had ever climbed this route free. No one had ever dared. And he hadn’t hit the worst of it yet. That came near the top, over a thousand feet off the ground, where the rock bulged outwards, forcing the climber to negotiate a terrifying overhang. But he didn’t think about that. All that mattered now was moving. He was fighting himself in a race against time. He and Suzie would be at the overhang by four, and after that it was into the unknown. At that point most climbers would pull out the nylon webbing slings and move through the overhang, resting on them for support.

He would attempt this section without assistance. His name and Suzie’s would go down in the route-book as having made the first ascent free of artificial aids, without using the slings for support.

Thoughts of the accident kept returning. He couldn’t under
stand why he could remember so little about it. The doctor said he was suffering from retrograde ammnesia, blocking out painful memories. He just wished he knew what had caused him to lose control of the car and send it plummeting over the cliff edge.

He looked below him again. The other climbers would bivouac further down the face, suspended from the bolts driven into the unyielding rock. They would sleep, pinned to the rock face, recovering their strength to tackle the overhang the following day.

He looked up and found the first traces of fear in himself as he saw the overhang. That was why he had chosen this route, to challenge himself; to try and excise the guilt. Perhaps, even, to die.

She felt the sweat on the inside of her hands. She wanted to cry, and hated herself for it. He had reached the overhang. This was the moment she had thought would be so exciting.

A free ascent meant using the slings attached to the bolts as protection against a fall, letting the rope dangle through them via the metal snap-links called carabiners. To use the slings for support or for leverage would invalidate the ascent as free. She knew other climbers would be watching them from the ground through telescopes, ready to challenge them when they came back, if they’d cheated.

She moved up to him and attached herself to the belay. The rock roof was above her head, stretching out far to the edge of the overhang.

He did not touch the bolts, placed in the overhang by previous climbers who had tackled the route with artificial aids. His ascent would be totally free. The danger would be just as much for her when she followed - if she came off, she would swing out into the void. But she did not protest. Everything in her despised weakness.

She watched him moving out, under the beginning of the overhang that ran out for over one hundred and fifty feet. He hadn’t talked about how he was going to do it, she just knew that he wouldn’t take any precautions. That was the way he was. It was all or nothing.

His foot slipped out of the crack that ran under the overhang. She gripped the ropes tightly. Could she hold him if he came off? She didn’t want to think about it.

Fight it. Fight it.

He jammed his hand into the crack and pulled up, feeling the blood running down his arm. His knuckles were raw to the bone. He glanced across at the metal eye of one of the bolts in the face of the overhang and was tempted to push a carabiner through it, attach a sling and rest, suspended in his climbing-harness. Even that desperate attempt to connect up to the carabiner might bring him off the face. He looked down at the ground a thousand feet below.

No. No. No. He would not take the easy route, he was determined to climb this overhang without any artificial aids - whatever the risks. Damn Estelle. To hell with racing.

He swung his feet into the crack, jamming them up, level with his hands. He took a last look at the bolt that offered his final chance of protection, and moved on. One hundred and twenty feet to the edge of the overhang.

Hand-jam after hand-jam, everything concentrated on moving forwards . . . His body was one single entity of pain. Then, without warning, came a loud screech that almost made him plunge towards the valley below and into oblivion. The bird burst from its nest deep within the crack and flew angrily around him, fluttering its wings.

He screamed at it, fighting his way on, focusing on the sky and the warmth of the sun-drenched rock that lay beyond the shadow of the overhang. He felt the crack narrowing and his grip reducing. This he had prepared himself for, because he knew that the last move out of the horizontal crack and up and out over the overhang was the most difficult of the entire climb.

Hanging on with his left hand-jam, he reached out into the sunlight and searched for a hold. There was none. His strength was running out, it was all or nothing. He had to reach further, so he loosened his left hand and stretched his right higher up. He knew the hold must be there, he had studied the route over and over again. It had to be there.

He further reduced the grip with his left hand, and felt himself coming off. Jesus, no.

He pushed his right hand up with one last, desperate movement and then shot off, suspended across the void as his right hand found the jug-handle grip he had been searching for. He pulled up on his right arm and his left hand shot up, searching the face, finding another grip. He moved fast, inching himself back onto the face, his feet finding a tiny ledge. At last the weight was off his arms. He found a bolt just over the edge of the overhang, belayed himself off it and then let himself down, so he could take in the ropes and guide Suzie towards him.

He felt better - and it suddenly came to him that he needed to distance himself from the world of motor-racing. There was the offer that still stood, the one he had been thinking of turning down before he went to Monaco. Then, he had thought he would choose racing rather than karate. Now he knew his decision would go the other way. Perhaps in Japan, he might come to terms with himself.

She felt cold with a fear she did not want to admit. She wondered what she would have done if he had come off. He would have cannoned down, smashing into the face. The ropes would have held him, but he would have been dead. Did he want to die?

For her, it would be different - less of a risk because he was slightly above her, taking the strain. If she came off, she would swing outwards into the void, the ground a thousand feet below her.

The rope tugged at her waist.

‘Climb!’

The word echoed coldly against the rock. He was watching her with a detached expression on his face, hanging from the edge of the overhang, one hundred and fifty feet distant.

‘If I fall I will pull you off.’ She hated herself for admitting her fear.

‘Climb!’

The rope tugged again at her waist. She felt terrified to detach herself from the safety of the belay, but there was no choice.

‘Climb!’ The rope tugged again.

‘No!’

‘I’ll drop the ropes. Then you’ll have to do it solo.’ He started to untie the two ropes.

‘No!’

He stopped. She detached herself from the belay, tears running down her face as she started jamming her way along the crack. He did not take the rope in.

‘You bastard, take up the slack.’

Long loops of rope hung down beneath her.

‘Take up the slack!’

If she fell, it would be one hundred and fifty feet - the full length of the rope. She knew what he was doing - not giving her a choice. She had to make it or they would both be killed.