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‘But they are not yet ready to get rid of Lopez,’ she said. ‘My uncle would spoil their plans – he would get rid of Lopez and the government, too. He would hold elections for the first time in nine years. So the communists are trying to stop him.’
‘And you think Grivas was a communist?’ queried O’Hara.
Forester snapped his fingers. ‘Of course he was. That explains his last words. He was a communist, all right – Latin-American blend; when he said “vivaca” he was trying to say “Viva Castro”.’ His voice hardened. ‘And we can expect his buddies along any minute.’
‘We must leave here quickly,’ said the girl. ‘They must not find my uncle.’
O’Hara suddenly swung round and regarded Rohde, who had remained conspicuously silent. He said, ‘What do you import, Señor Rohde?’
‘It is all right, Señor O’Hara,’ said Aguillar weakly. ‘Miguel is my secretary.’
Forester looked at Rohde. ‘More like your bodyguard.’
Aguillar flapped his hand limply as though the distinction was of no consequence, and Forester said, ‘What put you on to him, O’Hara?’
‘I don’t like men who carry guns,’ said O’Hara shortly. ‘Especially men who could be communist.’ He looked around the cabin. ‘All right, are there any more jokers in the pack? What about you, Forester? You seem to know a hell of a lot about local politics for an American businessman.’
‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ said Forester. ‘If I didn’t take an interest in local politics my corporation would fire me. Having the right kind of government is important to us, and we sure as hell don’t want a commie set-up in Cordillera.’
He took out his wallet and extracted a business card which he handed to O’Hara. It informed him that Raymond Forester was the South American sales manager for the Fairfield Machine Tool Corporation.
O’Hara gave it back to him. ‘Was Grivas the only communist aboard?’ he said. ‘That’s what I’m getting at. When we were coming in to land, did any of the passengers take any special precautions for their safety?’
Forester thought about it, then shook his head. ‘Everyone seemed to be taken by surprise – I don’t think any of us knew just what was happening.’ He looked at O’Hara with respect. ‘In the circumstances that was a good question to ask.’
‘Well, I’m not a communist,’ said Miss Ponsky sharply. ‘The very idea!’
O’Hara smiled. ‘My apologies, Miss Ponsky,’ he said politely.
Rohde had been tending to Mrs Coughlin; now he stood up. ‘This lady is dying,’ he said. ‘She has lost much blood and she is in shock. And she has the soroche – the mountain-sickness. If she does not get oxygen she will surely die.’ His black eyes switched to Aguillar, who seemed to have fallen asleep. ‘The Señor also must have oxygen – he’s in grave danger.’ He looked at them. ‘We must go down the mountain. To stay at this height is very dangerous.’
O’Hara was conscious of a vicious headache and the fact that his heart was thumping rapidly. He had been long enough in the country to have heard of soroche and its effects. The lower air pressure on the mountain heights meant less oxygen, the respiratory rate went up and so did the heart-beat rate, pumping the blood faster. It killed a weak constitution.
He said slowly, ‘There were oxygen cylinders in the plane – maybe they’re not busted.’
‘Good,’ said Rohde. ‘We will look, you and I. It would be better not to move this lady if possible. But if we do not find the oxygen, then we must go down the mountain.’
Forester said, ‘We must keep a fire going – the rest of us will look for wood.’ He paused. ‘Bring some petrol from the plane – we may need it.’
‘All right,’ said O’Hara.
‘Come on,’ said Forester to Peabody. ‘Let’s move.’
Peabody lay where he was, gasping. ‘I’m beat,’ he said. ‘And my head’s killing me.’
‘It’s just a hangover,’ said Forester callously. ‘Get on your feet, man.’
Rohde put his hand on Forester’s arm. ‘Soroche,’ he said warningly. ‘He will not be able to do much. Come, señor.’
O’Hara followed Rohde from the cabin and shivered in the biting air. He looked around. The airstrip was built on the only piece of level ground in the vicinity; all else was steeply shelving mountainside, and all around were the pinnacles of the high Andes, clear-cut in the cold and crystal air. They soared skyward, blindingly white against the blue where the snows lay on their flanks, and where the slope was too steep for the snow to stay was the dark grey of the rock.
It was cold, desolate and utterly lifeless. There was no restful green of vegetation, or the flick of a bird’s wing – just black, white and the blue of the sky, a hard, dark metallic blue as alien as the landscape.
O’Hara pulled his jacket closer about him and looked at the other huts. ‘What is this place?’
‘It is a mine,’ said Rohde. ‘Copper and zinc – the tunnels are over there.’ He pointed to a cliff face at the end of the airstrip and O’Hara saw the dark mouths of several tunnels driven into the cliff face. Rohde shook his head. ‘But it is too high to work – they should never have tried. No man can work well at this height; not even our mountain indios.’
‘You know this place then?’
‘I know these mountains well,’ said Rohde. ‘I was born not far from here.’
They trudged along the airstrip and before they had gone a hundred yards O’Hara felt exhausted. His head ached and he felt nauseated. He sucked the thin air into his lungs and his chest heaved.
Rohde stopped and said, ‘You must not force your breathing.’
‘What else can I do?’ said O’Hara, panting. ‘I’ve got to get enough air.’
‘Breathe naturally, without effort,’ said Rohde. ‘You will get enough air. But if you force your breathing you will wash all the carbon dioxide from your lungs, and that will upset the acid base of your blood and you will get muscle cramps. And that is very bad.’
O’Hara moderated his breathing and said, ‘You seem to know a lot about it.’
‘I studied medicine once,’ said Rohde briefly.
They reached the far end of the strip and looked over the edge of the cliff. The Dakota was pretty well smashed up; the port wing had broken off, as had the entire tail section. Rohde studied the terrain. ‘We need not climb down the cliff; it will be easier to go round.’
It took them a long time to get to the plane and when they got there they found only one oxygen cylinder intact. It was difficult to get it free and out of the aircraft, but they managed it after chopping away a part of the fuselage with the axe that O’Hara found on the floor of the cockpit.
The gauge showed that the cylinder was only a third full and O’Hara cursed Filson and his cheese-paring, but Rohde seemed satisfied. ‘It will be enough,’ he said. ‘We can stay in the hut tonight.’
‘What happens if these communists turn up?’ asked O’Hara.
Rohde seemed unperturbed. ‘Then we will defend ourselves,’ he said equably. ‘One thing at a time, Señor O’Hara.’
‘Grivas seemed to think they were already here,’ said O’Hara. ‘I wonder what held them up?’
Rohde shrugged. ‘Does it matter?’
They could not manhandle the oxygen cylinder back to the huts without help, so Rohde went back, taking with him some mouthpieces and a bottle of petrol tapped from a wing tank. O’Hara searched the fuselage, looking for anything that might be of value, particularly food. That, 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, anxiously watching him. After a mile they stopped for a rest and O’Hara said to Rohde, ‘I’ve got a flask of spirits. ‘I’ve been saving it for when things really get tough. Do you think it would help the old man?’
‘Let me have it,’ said Rohde.
O’Hara took the flask from his hip and gave it to Rohde, who took off the cap and sniffed the contents. ‘Aguardiente,’ he said. ‘Not the best drink but it will do.’ He looked at O’Hara curiously. ‘Do you drink this?’
‘I’m a poor man,’ said O’Hara defensively.
Rohde smiled. ‘When I was a student I also was poor. I also drank aguardiente. But I do not recommend too much,’ He looked across at Aguillar. ‘I think we save this for later.’ He recapped the flask and handed it back to O’Hara. As O’Hara was replacing it in his pocket he saw Peabody staring at him. He smiled back pleasantly.
After a rest of half an hour they started off again. O’Hara, in the lead, looked back and thought they looked like a bunch of war refugees. Willis and Armstrong were stumbling along with the stretcher, the girl keeping pace alongside; Miss Ponsky was sticking close to Rohde, chatting as though on a Sunday afternoon walk, despite her shortness of breath, and Forester was in the rear with Peabody shambling beside him.
After the third stop O’Hara found that things were going better. His step felt lighter and his breathing eased, although the headache stayed with him. The stretcher-bearers found that they could carry for longer periods, and Aguillar had come round and was taking notice.
O’Hara mentioned this to Rohde, who pointed at the steep slopes about them. ‘We are losing a lot of height,’ he said. ‘It will get better now.’
After the fourth halt O’Hara and Forester were carrying the stretcher. Aguillar apologized in a weak voice for the inconvenience he was causing, but O’Hara forbore to answer – he needed all his breath for the job. Things weren’t that much better.
Forester suddenly stopped and O’Hara thankfully laid down the stretcher. His legs felt rubbery and the breath rasped in his throat. He grinned at Forester, who was beating his hands against his chest. ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘It should be warmer down in the valley.’
Forester blew on his fingers. ‘I hope so.’ He looked up at O’Hara. ‘You’re a pretty good pilot,’ he said. ‘I’ve done some flying in my time, but I don’t think I could do what you did yesterday.’
‘You might if you had a pistol at your head,’ said O’Hara with a grimace. ‘Anyway, I couldn’t leave it to Grivas – he’d have killed the lot of us, starting with me first.’
He looked past Forester and saw Rohde coming back up the road at a stumbling run, his gun in his hand. ‘Something’s happening.’
He went forward to meet Rohde, who gasped, his chest heaving. ‘There are huts here – I had forgotten them.’
O’Hara looked at the gun. ‘Do you need that?’
