sling from his rifle and was quickly looping it into two knots, a few inches apart. He drew the sling in front of Rega’s face so that there was a knot in front of each eye socket. There was a pause, then Rega screamed as his whole head was yanked backwards with a violent jerk. The soldier twisted the sling round like a tourniquet, tightening the pressure with each turn.
Rega clawed behind him with useless hands, the scream dying on his lips. His cheeks tightened, trying to resist the immense pressure as the knots burrowed deeper and deeper into his skull. With another half-turn, the knots sank further still until his eyeballs imploded, a viscous, cloudy liquid streaming down his cheeks.
Rega let out a gurgling sound as he went limp on the floor.
Those beautiful, burning rooftops were the last thing he’d ever see.
Chapter 1
20 April 2005
It was six in the morning and dawn had just broken over the roof of the world. Tawny fingers of light filtered down past the jagged peaks of the Himalayas, lending a luminous glow to the orange tents staked down on the dark scree.
Luca Matthews unzipped his tent and, still in his thermal underwear, stepped out into the freezing mountain air. He was tall with a powerful back that stretched the fabric of his thermals as he unfolded himself from the tent. Scruffy, dark-blond hair fell across a face that was deeply tanned by the intense mountain sun. Only his eyes were ringed with paler patches from where he had been wearing his glacier goggles.
For a few moments he stood there, sipping coffee from a tin mug and savouring the feeling of being the first up. He only ever needed a few hours’ sleep each night and often found the morning’s silence one of the rare moments in the day when he felt truly calm. As he breathed in the tingling air, the heat from his mug eased the swelling in his knuckles. Peeling some dead skin off the pads of his left hand, he ran his finger gingerly over a cut that stretched all the way back to his wrist, and shook his head. Bloody climbing injuries. They just never seemed to heal in the dry mountain air.
Grabbing a sheepskin coat that he had bought for a few hundred rupees from one of the market stalls in Kathmandu, he weaved past the smouldering remains of the campfire, balanced his mug carefully on a rock, and urinated. When he was younger, his father had impressed upon him the importance of having a good view when taking a piss. Little did Luca know then it would turn out to be one of the only things that he and the old bastard would agree on.
Crooking his neck to one side, Luca yawned and massaged a shoulder blade. After five days of lugging provisions up to base camp, the straps of his rucksack had bitten deep into his back. No doubt about it, this was the most thankless part of the climb: effort without technique or reward, encouraged only by the sight of an occasional peak piercing the blanket of cloud overhead.
Hopping on to another boulder, he sat down and wrapped his arms round his legs, drawing his knees up under his chin in his habitual pose. His eyes followed the incline of the mountain as it curved up for two or three miles before hitting the first glacier, a snub nose of pitted ice gleaming brilliantly in the morning light. Beyond it, range after range of mountains extended back to the horizon, their pinnacles reaching high enough to be whipped by the ferocious winds of the earth’s Gulf Stream.
Two and a half thousand metres above him, the summit ridge finally came into view; the last stretch of ground between him and the top of Makalu, the fifth highest mountain on earth and Luca’s second eight-thousand-metre peak.
Normally the sight would have given him a jolt of pure excitement but this morning Luca felt distinctly unsettled, a jittery unease that seemed to seep from his stomach into his bones. Flicking the rest of his coffee on to the ground, he watched it steam for a moment before striding back to the tents.
Getting to that ridge was going to be the most dangerous part of the climb.
‘You planning on sleeping the whole day, princess?’ Luca called, banging on the frame of one of the tents.
The snoring inside stopped and there was a shuffling noise, then the sound of a throat