The Games (Private #11)(4)

Gomes nodded, chagrined. “I’m a solid climber, but I only just started guiding, and I’ve never been on a rescue like this. It’s out of my league.”

Leroux hung his head, said, “She’s gonna be paralyzed.”

I ignored him, went to the rail, and saw an anchored nylon rope going over a pad on the belly of the cliff and disappearing into the void.

“Were they on this line?” I asked.

“No, that line runs parallel to their rope, offset about eight inches,” Gomes said. “Another one of our normal safety measures.”

Thinking about the position of the injured climbers, thinking about what I was going to have to do to get them off the cliff, I decided against going down the secondary rope.

I looked at da Silva and said, “I need you to make a few things happen very fast, Colonel. Two lives depend on it.”





Chapter 4



THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES later, I was on my belly on the floor of the tramcar. The doors were open. I was looking over the side, straight down more than a thousand feet, and fighting vertigo.

The second I spotted Tamara Patrick on the cliff, I said, “Stop.”

Colonel da Silva repeated the order into a radio. The tram halted and swung on the cable about twenty-five feet out from the summit station.

“How far down are they?” da Silva asked.

“I’m calling it three hundred feet,” I said, getting up to look at two Brazilian soldiers who’d come from an army base located less than a mile from the bottom tram station. They were almost finished attaching a truck winch to the steel floor of the cable car.

“One hundred meters,” I said to the soldiers. “Does it get me there?”

Tavia translated my words into Brazilian Portuguese, and they answered her.

She said, “With the extra rope, they think so.”

Gomes was checking the knots and carabiners that connected a climbing rope to the winch’s quarter-inch steel cable. I checked the space that separated the winch drum from the floor. Three, maybe four inches of clearance. With that much rope going onto the drum, it would be a tight fit.

We threaded the other, looped end of the climbing rope through a large carabiner we’d attached to a steel hook above the door frame. A closed D ring connected the rope to the harness I wore.

“Radio?” da Silva said.

I reached up and double-clicked the mike clipped to my chest.

The other people in the car—da Silva, Tavia, Gomes, the two soldiers, and the off-duty sergeant—nodded. They got in a line and grabbed hold of the rope with gloved hands.

I went to the edge of the open door, willed myself not to look down. Just before I stepped out, I said, “No slipping, now.”

Then my weight came into the harness and my legs were in space, and I was pushing off the bottom of the tram. Free of the car and dropping, I went into a slow twirl that got me dizzy and forced me to close my eyes to the jungle treetops so far below.

Sometimes I think I’m crazy. This was one of those times.

It took them a full minute to lower me the entire length of the climbing rope.

“You’re on winch now.” Da Silva’s voice crackled over the radio.

“Got it,” I said, feeling the descent go smoother and faster.

A minute later, I was almost to Tamara Patrick, eight, maybe nine feet above her and four feet out from the wall.

“Stop,” I said into the mike, and the winch halted.

“Help me!” Tamara called out weakly.

“That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “My name is Jack, and we’re going to get you out of here.”

“I can’t feel anything from the waist down,” she said, starting to cry.

“But you can feel your arms?”

“A little,” she said. “Yes.”

“Both hands?”

“The left more than the right,” Tamara said, getting herself under control.

“That’s good, that’s a start,” I said, looking down twenty-five feet to the guide hanging there limply.

“Has your guide said anything since the fall?” I asked as I started to kick and pump like a kid on a swing.

“No,” Tamara said. “How are you going to get me off here?”

“With a little imagination,” I said, swinging closer to the wall and then farther away.

On the third swing I caught that secondary rope coming down from the top. I rigged my harness to it and called into the mike, “Give me eight feet of slack, then bring the litter down.”

“Got it,” Tavia said.

I waited until a loop of rope hung almost to the injured climber before I started down. When I reached Tamara’s side, she rolled her head over to look at me, another good sign.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I hate this kind of shit.”

She smiled feebly. “And I love this kind of shit.”

“Your sister told me that.”

“Am I gonna be paralyzed, Jack?”

There was so much pain and fear in her voice and face that I felt tears well up in my eyes. I looked away and said, “I’m no doctor.”

She said nothing. I glanced at her. She was staring up.

I craned my head back and saw the stiff backboard twisting lazily on a second rope dropping from the tramcar.