Vertical Limit - Softcover

Foothills of the Himalayas, Pakistan, 14,500 feet
Three Years Later

Peter Garrett remained stationary inside the blind, staring at his subject on the mountainside through the zoom lens of the camera mounted on the tripod. He kept the cross hairs centered but moved through the zoom magnification at the touch of a button. He took a few shots of the whole meadow and the high mountains beyond, then closed in till only the brown hare filled the lens.

The hare sat beside a clump of vegetation, cautiously eating tender shoots of grass. Its ears twitched nervously, searching for any sound of warning.

The hare didn't hear the snow leopard padding cautiously and patiently through the grass behind it. The big cat crept along, flowing like a river of muscle and reflex. She was long and lean, a study in grace and economy as she moved. Her gold, white, and black pelt had shed its winter coat and now looked sleek and shiny. The pictures, Peter knew, were going to be great, just one step short of savage.

The leopard stayed low to the ground as she moved. Peter shot carefully, bringing the focus in tighter as predator closed on prey.

Then the big cat settled down on her haunches, ears flattened back on her massive head. Her tail stiffened, then twitched once, twice, and she sprang between heartbeats.

Peter captured frame after frame as the auto-advance whirred to keep up with him. Some sixth sense must have warned the hare that death was upon it, because it broke and ran while the leopard was in the air. Skittering crazily, the hare tried broken-field running, but its speed was no match for that of the leopard.

The big cat landed where the hare had been, then dug her claws into the ground and took off in pursuit. In three long strides, muscles bunching and flaring explosively, she snatched the hare up by the back of its neck. The hare's eyes dilated, knowing death was upon it.

Peter watched the hare's eyes, captivated for a moment. It knows, he couldn't help thinking, and a chill dawned at the base of his spine that had nothing to do with being inside the blind.

Death came too quickly for the hare to contemplate, but the animal looked surprised. It's worse, Peter reconciled himself, if you know death is coming. Worse if you actually see death coming. His father's eyes still haunted his dreams, still kept him up nights.

Peter knew what his father's eyes had looked like when he'd accepted death. But the thing that bothered Peter most was wondering what his father had seen in his own eyes. There had been no words; there couldn't have been. His vision blurred for a moment, and he suddenly realized he'd lost sight of the snow leopard.

Forcing his mind out of the past, he concentrated on the meadow, regretting again how limiting the blind could be. The low-ceilinged structure that had been half home and half workspace during the last few months had a view that stared out over the harsh, broken foothills of the Himalayas. A small heater in the corner of the lean-to raised the temperature only to barely tolerable. Empty supply boxes served as meager furniture.

After only a moment of searching, Peter spotted the leopard slinking through the brush. The bloodied hare hung limply from her maw. Peter heaved a relieved sigh through the slit in the wall that overlooked the meadows that he'd come to know intimately, and his breath turned to a gentle, eddying white-gray fog. He'd spent months watching the big cat, and today was going to be one of the payoffs. National Geographic was generous with the funding for the photo spread he had going.

The leopard continued on her way, twisting and turning her head to either side. She was at the top of the food chain in the area, and she'd laid claim to a large amount of territory. There wasn't much she had to worry about and she knew it. However, the hare was also a valuable commodity and hard to replace.

Peter continued following the leopard, finishing off the roll of film. He took another roll from one of the loops on his jacket and opened the camera. He flipped the exposed film back to Aziz, his Balti porter. The porter caught the film deftly and put it into a bag with the others.

Peter reloaded the camera and looked through the viewfinder again. C'mon, he thought tensely. It's a nice day. Let the kids come out to play.

The snow leopard kept moving sedately. Peter knew there were less than six thousand of the big cats left in the wild. Scientists kept track of the snow leopard numbers also because they were considered to be an indicator species -- one that gave information about a particular environment's general health. National Geographic had sent Peter to the Himalayas partly for research and partly to capture the beauty of the animal.

Spring had come to the mountain foothills, melting the snows into rivers of near-freezing water. Barren rocks and boulders jutted up like miniature islands from the newly greened land, and white frost clung to some of the boulders because the chill had not quite given in to the seasonal change. A riot of colorful flowers spread across the meadow, yellows and reds and whites that Peter's film captured perfectly.

Himalaya translated as "Land of Snow." In the beginning months of Peter's stay in Pakistan deep in the foothills of the Himalayan Mountains, the name had been appropriate. The nights in the great Asian mountain system had been long and freezing, and the days hadn't been much better. He'd been told about the beauty of the coming spring season, but he hadn't believed it until he'd seen it for himself.

The snow leopard started down the slope away from Peter.

Don't do that, Peter silently entreated. It's a nice day. And there's nobody here to threaten you. Just one photographer looking for a way to earn a bonus check. He shifted the camera carefully, aware that the sun was behind him now; there was no chance that the sun would ruin a shot or reflect off the lens and spook the big cat.

Aziz breathed behind Peter, moving quietly as he shifted so he could peer through the slit as well. The porter was there for the bonus as well. Despite their long months together, Peter still didn't know much about the man. Part of it was due to the language barrier. Peter spoke hardly any Urdu, and Aziz spoke very little conversational English. That suited Peter, though. These days he wasn't much of a conversationalist anyway.

The snow leopard paused along the ridgeline, the massive snow-covered mountains far in the distance serving as a spectacular backdrop. Peter didn't hesitate to burn film, snapping off frame after frame. Photography was skill; every photojournalist knew that. But grabbing a prize-winning picture required a lot of luck as well.

Then the snow leopard hunkered down, laying her prize before her. In the next instant, three cubs came charging into the clearing. One of them had a very distinctive ring around its eye, giving it a swashbuckler appearance.

Peter smiled, warming to the work. He manipulated the zoom automatically, as if it were a part of him. He took a few shots of all three cubs streaking across the clearing, then closed in, photographing each in turn. He had names for them all, but they weren't going into the article.

He extracted the finished roll and flipped it back. Aziz caught it even as Peter slid another roll into the camera. Peter shot the cubs eating the hare till they had their fill. National Geographic might pass on the shots, but Peter never tried to outguess them. He captured everything with the lens.

After their meal, the cubs turned to play. Under their mother's watchful eyes, the three cubs pursued and wrestled one another. They instinctively worked on perfecting the stalking techniques their mother had used to bring down the hare.

Finished with another roll of film, Peter removed the exposed roll from the camera and tossed it back. While he was loading fresh film, watching the cubs jump and nip at one another, the sound of ringing metal filled the blind and carried out into the meadow.

The sound was alien to the mother snow leopard. She moved instantly, chasing her cubs to cover with a growling, spitting snarl. All four of them vanished into the brush in an eyeblink.

No! Peter stared in disbelief at the empty meadow for a moment. Then he glanced back at Aziz.

One of the heavy-duty metal canisters they used to protect the film lay on the cold stone floor between the porter's feet. Aziz looked apologetic, but Peter waved the incident away and blew out a sigh of resignation.

They'd try again tomorrow. He had nothing but time on his hands these days.

Peter settled the weight of his pack across his shoulders as he crested the ridge above the campsite. Aziz led the way, obviously uncomfortable with his pack as well. Every time they made the trip back and forth to the blind, Peter became aware again of how heavy the cameras and film were. And why is it the packs always seem heavier on the way back?

He gazed up at the mountains ringing the area. The Himalayan Mountains formed a broad fifteen-hundred-mile half-moon through northern Pakistan, northern India, southern Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan. North of the mountains lay the high plateau of Central Asia, and to the south were the fertile Indian plains.

There were fourteen mountain peaks in the world that were more than twenty-six thousand feet high, and nine of them were in the Himalayas. Mount Everest at 29,035 feet was the tallest, but K2, the second tallest mountain in the world, was the nearest to the campsite.

Not once did Peter ever think about climbing the mountains. Those days were over. A lot of things were over.

He turned his eyes down, watching his step on the treacherous ice-covered rocks. Here on the north side of the slope, the winds sometimes froze the smaller streams trickling down from the upper mountains.

He glanced ahead at the three tents that made up the campsite. They were tucked between a bubbling stream that served as their fresh water supply and a boulder as big as a school bus. The boulder knocked most of the wind off when it was headed in the right direction.

One of the tents served as a darkroom for shots Peter wanted to develop himself before sending them to the magazine editors. The other two were private quarters for Aziz and himself. The small satellite dish was inside Peter's tent, but the mast stood up tall in the circle of tents. The latrine was farther downstream. There were no neighbors.

It wasn't home, and Peter never intended for it to feel like home. He trudged down the slope, still filled with dark thoughts and painful memories. He concentrated on the fact that hot stew warmed on a tiny butane stove would take away most of the chill that had ached within him all day. Then, as if to spite him, the wind picked up suddenly, gusting wildly as it sometimes did this high up.

Raising an arm to ward off the vicious wind, Aziz slipped on an ice-covered boulder and went down in a tangle of flailing arms and legs, sliding a few feet to the bottom of the slope. He hit hard, crying out in pain. Bone snapped with a brittle pop.

Peter trotted forward immediately but took care with his own steps. When he saw the angle of Aziz's lower leg, he knew it had been broken.

Aziz screamed hoarsely, but there was no one around to hear but Peter.

Dropping his pack, Peter reached into it and took out the emergency medical kit. "Hey, take it easy," he said as calmly as he could. "We're going to be okay here." He removed a morphine ampoule from the medical kit, filled a sterile hypodermic needle with the drug, and jabbed the needle into Aziz's thigh.

The porter held his leg, his breath coughing from him in great, gray gusts.

Peter stayed beside the man, waiting for the painkiller to kick in. He glanced at the northern ridge, at the unforgiving mountains, and knew that under normal circumstances Aziz would probably die there, unable to make it back to any kind of civilization. At the very least, he'd lose his foot, maybe his leg to frostbite. The icy mountains weren't gentle to interlopers. But for now help was only a phone call away.

Yammering helicopter rotors woke Peter the next day. He blinked sleep out of his eyes as he rolled out of the sleeping bag on the tent floor. A glance at his watch told him it was after twelve. He automatically checked the fuel reservoir on the tent's heater. Frostbite was a real killer at these heights and sometimes didn't get noticed until gangrene set in.

Still dressed in the clothes he'd put on the night before so he'd be ready to move at a moment's notice, Peter stood and checked on Aziz as the helicopter came closer. The porter was still asleep on Peter's cot, heavily drugged by the painkillers. His injured foot was encased in an inflatable cast and elevated by pillows.

Aziz hadn't been lucky at all. The fracture was a greenstick break, an irregular crack that ran diagonally through the bone. The jagged end had pierced the flesh near his ankle. The heat of the leg above the cast told Peter that infection had started setting in despite the antibiotics.

When he'd called the Pakistani military rescue base camp for assistance, the dispatch officer had told him they couldn't send the helicopter till the morning due to the high winds and availability of craft. The night had been long for Peter. Even though Aziz had been on painkillers, he'd needed water at regular intervals to help keep the fever down. Peter hadn't slept well.

He pulled on his coat and went out to meet the helicopter. The rotor wash picked up snow and loose bits of debris, pushing them back over him and the tents.

The Augusta-Bell AB 205 multipurpose utility helicopter bore the familiar gray-green coloration of the Pakistani army and the green-and-white moon and star flag on the tail fuselage. The pilot expertly dropped the skids to the ground and left the rotors turning, then went to the rear of the helicopter and opened the cargo door.

Peter moved toward the pilot, ducking below the rotors. "Hey, Rasul. Thanks for coming."

"No problem," Major Kamal Rasul answered. He was in his early thirties, with neatly cropped black hair, compact and lean in his flying suit. He was smiling as he shoved aside cargo boxes, making room for Aziz. Rasul was Peter's usual aerial transport. "How bad is he?"

"I think he's going to keep everything," Peter replied. It was a fair enough answer.

"Excellent. He's a good man."

Peter nodded in agreement.

Rasul leaped from the helicopter and strode toward the tent. "You packed and ready to go?"

"Yeah."

"I could take him by myself," Rasul offered.

Peter shook his head. "I want to make sure he's okay." He followed Rasul into the tent.

The helicopter pilot checked Aziz over quickly, then looked up at Peter. "If we tie him to the cot, he'll be safe enough and comfortable enough for the trip up the mountain. That way we won't have to move him from the bed."

"Sounds...