Warlock by Dean Koontz Read Free Book Online Page A

into view through the thick fog. He was working carefully from piton to piton, taking no chances now that there was no safety rope to save him, should a foot slip on the icy iron spikes. It was impossible from that angle for the commander to recognize the man, but he wasted no time in ordering a coil of heavy rope, from which a loop was made and passed downward to the struggling mountaineer.
        
        As the group on the cleft watched with a barely restrained tension and agony of sympathy, the man held to a piton with one hand, his right foot on one below him, and grasped the proffered loop. Doing a balancer's act beyond match, he managed to slip the loop through the jaws of a spring clamp on his belt, making himself safe against a slip.
        
        There was a collective sigh of relief above him. A moment later, he had reached the ledge and collapsed full length in exhaustion: tired, but alive.
        
        “Cartier!” Richter said, bending on one knee next to the man who had just scrabbled to safety. “What happened? The rest of them?”
        
        After he had gulped a great many lungfuls of watery air and some color had returned to his face, Cartier managed to sit up, holding to the commander's shoulder, and look about himself in bewildered anger and sorrow. “Gone,” he said. “All of them. Tumbled to the bottom of the falls and smashed and drowned.”
        
        “What happened?” Richter pressed.
        
        Cartier shook his head as if to clear it of the vision of dying men. “I was the last on the team. When it happened, I was holding onto a spike, which was all that saved me, no doubt to that. I heard Bennings, the top man, scream. Then the second man screamed too, and it was clear what was happening. That moment Bennings fell by me, his face a terrible sight, absolutely horror-stricken. The third man must have been trying to hold tight, but he was ripped loose too. There were two above me yet, Cox and Willard. I heard Cox go and knew Willard would follow immediately. He couldn't hold the weight of all those men himself. I thought fast, and had gods' grace, I tell you. I pulled my knife from its sheath and severed the line between Willard and me. Not a breath later, he went, and all of them dropped by me like stones.”
        
        “Get this man to shelter,” the commander ordered. “Some hot soup should help his nerves, I daresay.”
        
        When Cartier had been helped away, the Shaker leaned close to the rough old officer. “I feel your suspicions still negate the possibility of an accident?”
        
        “Not negate, Master Shaker. But they certainly cast dubiety on it.” The commander looked at the broken team rope which had been taken from Cartier along with the man's rucksack.
        
        “May I ask why?”
        
        “This.”
        
        “Ah, yes, Commander, but then he did say that he cut it, not that it broke.”
        
        “It is possible,” Richter insisted, “that Cartier waited until Bennings-first man on the team-was not using the team rope for support, until it was slack. At that time, he could have taken the rope in his own hands and pulled it taut. The instant he felt Bennings' weight transferred from a piton to the main line , Cartier could have given the thing a damn healthy yank, tearing the top anchor piton loose. A team rope, as any competent mountaineer knows, will take enormous weights at a steady pull-but a sharp and abrupt drag on top of the weight will pull the anchor piton loose five times out of ten: a deadly average.”
        
        “And you think that Cartier might have done this thing-and might have cut his connection to the team rope even before that?”
        
        “It's possible. Not likely, mind you, but possible. A man would have to be a fool to take such a risk even if he had cut himself free of the team line. On the bottom of the group, where he was, it was highly