He made his way back home again. He lodged with past school friends who were studying for their university degrees. Their house was a large and busy place with six people living in it. He still had some money left. Evan was exhorting him to do something dramatic before he became a silly old man. He said that he was like all the rest of them who wandered the streets. They talked to their selves or argued with their ugly wives.
He picked up a tamper’s club bulletin at a meeting. An ad promoted a journey to Nepal. He called and expressed interest. He and his flatmates arranged sponsorship for him. Before too long he'd entangle in a dramatic game of cat and mouse in the mountains again. It would have been enough for Johnny to tramp about the forested lower reaches of the mountains in Nepal. But his sponsorship recognised him as the guy who had made that record four years before. They wanted an effort equal to his experience. So the club organised an attempt of the Western Cwym of Everest.
The usual rigmarole of getting in there played out. From home it was over in a flash as if he was asleep in the plane. In the glacial wasteland beneath towering ice the party prepared for the assault. A few pitted against the mountain's reaches above. They crossed a horizontal ladder over a running river in a three-sided ice cave. Noise echoed like ghosts from beneath. Then a short climb to second camp where they prepared the ropes. A guide from Los Angeles dictated the route to the team.
Johnny got busy tying a complex knot. Its design ideal held three tons from an anchor point in the chilling temperatures. The ice anchor knot cannot slip untie when put under strain by its load. He bent low threading the rope when the team leader came over to him. He called for him to stop and then dismantled the knot. He said to other members that Johnny was an assassin and not trustworthy. The version John was tying threaded left to right. The leader reassembled it in a right to left direction. This contradicted the intent of Johnny’s route. The route went to climb to meet the anchor-man at point A. Then he was to go up it approaching from the left so that his return faced right. But the leader in a fit of anger had in his imagination reversed the direction of Johnny’s approach. It was impossible to change a mountain.
He set off up the steep face second. The first man to go was a nimble young man. Followed by Johnny they were due to meet at the anchor point and assemble it there with the knot he carried. After them came a long team of sixteen climbers, followed at the last by the team leader. He chipped and stepped and prussic hung and stepped and chipped and made his slow way up the face. He climbed for a day until he became to be within sound contact with the sprite. When he got to the point, it was almost bare of anything. There was only a single piton in an icy cliff. The other man was not visible, although he could still hear his voice coming from afar. Johnny hung onto the wall like a budgie on a perch in a cage. His hands were holding axes and his feet jammed into the wall on crampon points. The rope and its knot in his back pack were spare while he was stuck in one position and could not move. He was beneath the route. The stakes he had followed were well above his position. His concentration at the wall had fooled him into random free climbing.
Beneath him, sixteen climbers panicked at the absence of the necessary rope. It should have come down from above. All together they fell yelling and screaming the anchor-man’s name and saying, ‘Why? Why?’ Beneath them the team leader recorded the sounds. It was the sound of a group death in fright.
Johnny was the next to fall. He plunged hundreds of feet into a soft lightweight crystalline snow pocket. It broke his fall like a pillow. At the highest terrestrial altitude, this light weight snow is equal in weight to the air itself. It had collected like angel’s feathers in a large canyon, and into it Johnny plunged feet first. He closed his eyes and panicked. When he had assessed that he was no longer moving downwards, he opened his eyes inside his goggles. He saw snow. The mask he wore prevented the crystals from entering his lungs and suffocating him. He lifted his right arm and put his hand in front of his face. From the fall of the light and play of shadow, he saw that he was upright. The direction out of the cavern was in front of him as he faced. He guessed that the sunlight would not last long. Light reflected away from cliffs somewhere else above him. The weight of the snow prevented him from walking. So he reached to the backpack by bending his arm. He picked a phosphorescent flare from a tube container in the pack. With his teeth he tore the tab from off the top of the flare tube. It lit with two thousand Fahrenheit degree heat. He lifted it up above his head and while the snow crystals melted around him he walked forwards.
The snowflakes receded in front of him. He came out of the blinding mass in a canyon of ice. He made his way away from the death trap and saw in the white wasteland an igloo. It was a big igloo and he approached it. An alarm sounded out. He entered the structure through a security screen and a doctor took him under care. He had salve applied to his skin burns. They had a debriefing and the doctor told him that he was not allowed to climb.
A jet took him from an ice field runway to exit Nepal. He arrived after transfers of planes in Auckland International. He arranged the money for a taxi ride back to the students’ accommodation in Heron Bay. He lay on a divan in a hallucinatory painful condition for three days. Until the medical trainee students there did anything to help him. He recovered, over two slow weeks.
The law was not yet finished with him. He had been having a fine time in the house, drinking and listening to music and attending parties there. He had a motorbike to ride on errands around the city. He visited the neighbours and talked with them and did more when passion required.
Then a policewoman arrived and made their emergency request. She stood in the lounge and declared the situation. Violence had out broken in south downtown Los Angeles. He went with the lady and boarded a ship in the harbour. They drove at speed across the Pacific above hydrofoil propellers and wings. To a port in the biggest city on earth.
The riot defence squad was not an easy matter to take a part in. First he trod the concrete canals in the southern quarter. Defended himself from a tribe of wild dogs which came to him for his flesh. He had serious long rifle at his side and swung it around and cut through an animal. The rest backed off until the last one bit his trousers. It gnawed his leg. He retrieved his knife and stabbed it. It bled on the pavement and he walked away seen by angry shouting people above him on the canal edge. He waved a red flag at them and lifted the tip of the rifle to the sky.
He found a ladder. Climbed it to the road level. When a cop car stopped he got into it, after putting the rifle into the boot section. He had to screw off the muffler first. They drove to a factory institution where he received instructions. First, the police officers of LA. showed him an example of the nature of the emergency. Three persons were in a corner where there were no lights. They were twisting and spinning their bodies. They spoke in guttural throaty tones a language from no dictionary. The lady told him that this was evil tongues caused by crack and starvation. The condition had affected the entire city already. The fact that the population owned guns had caused the problem to be at the utmost risk.
He entered the factory and got an old friend of his out of there. They had met at school in his country. He had lived in Arana before he had accepted the offer of work and justice from an associate he had met at Paha beach. He said that he had nothing except his wage and wished that he did not have to leave his shift. Johnny told him that it was for his own protection and wished him well at the gate. When John explained why he reclaimed him, the old friend's face fell to disappointment. He realized that it was time for Armageddon. Years after the riot Johnny received a hand written letter from a jail which told what he had done during the riot.
He moved in a car which he drove to a sky tower in the districts where the riot was the worst. His job was to call out the numbers. He read out loud from a lit blue screen in the desk. From there the police communicated by remote to other control centres. Platoons on the street also transmitted comm’s. The numbers counted up in lots of sixteen and more. As bullets fired on ground level from digitalis pistols in platoons. Central controls signalled when the fire would happen. In platoons of sixteen police staff each, the rounds banged away on semi-automatic. The numbers of bullets fired reached twenty thousand. Cries of ‘Oh my God,’ and panicked orders and demands filled the room.
The officers walked into an elevator at the end of the night when another team arrived to replace them. They went into a steel and concrete bullet proof shelter and rested for the night. Schedule included doing a body count the next day. With other survivors he strode along a wire perimeter corridor. One by one they identified where and how the person had got shot. The number of bullets that hit a body counted and calibre identified by hand and eye. They wrote the details into their notebooks. Johnny felt relief that he knew nobody in the line of victims. Unlike all the other men in his team, who saw their own countrymen lying on the tarmac splattered with blood.
There was a mass evacuation of officers by airplane that night. They cursed the night before and that day. Said that they had drawn even, and close to defeat by the race rights faction. The 747 flew to American Samoa and they decamped in the tropical heat. He relaxed with a cool lemon drink before moving on back to his first nation. Street beats in a smaller city hid him. The newspaper reported twenty thousand killed in Los Angeles by the black power.
