“Thanks.” The two-person shelter was empty and had obviously been so all day. The stove was cold, and a tin cup sat on the nylon floor. It was half full of soup, now frozen solid.
Possibilities popped into his head, all of them worst-case. When the shrimp ran out of O’s, he collapsed, and Zaph wouldn’t leave him. Or he got lost, and Ethan was looking for him. Or he was so impaired that Ethan had to drag him, inch by inch, all the way back to Camp Four.
It didn’t matter which scenario was the right one. None of this would be happening if Tilt hadn’t tampered with Dominic’s oxygen cylinder.
I only meant to turn the kid around, not kill him!
And now Ethan was missing, too, thanks to Tilt.
The irony of it nearly tore him in two. Here he was, at the greatest moment of his life, poised to drink in the sweet nectar of fame and fortune he had always craved. But how could he face himself, knowing that his success had been paid for with the lives of two innocent people?
If they die, I killed them!
A rush of adrenaline sent him pounding across the black rocks to his tent. He shook the layer of frozen perspiration out of his wind suit and dressed at lightning speed. Outside, he strapped on crampons and stuffed his pack with a walkie-talkie, spare helmet-lamp batteries, and two oxygen cylinders.
It occurred to him only briefly that it might be foolhardy to be climbing again so soon after a fourteen-hour round-trip sprint to the summit. The caution seemed far less important than the two alpinists he had deliberately put in danger.
Hang in there, shrimp! I’m coming to get you!
No one saw him hit the snowy slope. He was moving so fast that he was soon out of sight among the lengthening shadows.
The call came over the radio at six o’clock. Dorje, SummitQuest’s Base Camp Sirdar and cook, sounded worried. A howling blizzard was dumping heavy snow on the Khumbu glacier. How were conditions at Camp Four?
Cicero peered through the flap. Light flurries had begun, but this was common on the Col. There was no sign of severe weather.
“We’re fine up here,” Cicero reported. “And you should be, too. If that squall was anything to worry about, the forecasting services would have given us a heads-up.”
Perry looked around the cramped space. “Where’s the sat phone?”
The team leader finally found it in the other tent, beside Sammi’s slumbering form. It was still hooked into Tilt’s computer. The second he pulled out the jack, the phone began to ring.
Cicero picked up the handset. “This is Cap.”
It was the American forecasting service. They had been calling for hours. A major storm had formed unexpectedly, rising from the Khumbu valley right up to Mount Everest.
“So batten down the hatches,” the meteorologist advised. “It’ll be over by morning, but it’s going to be a real interesting night. Your people are all off the mountain, right?”
“Of course,” Cicero replied. Then it hit him. Where was Tilt?
Sammi stirred. Sleep was elusive, even for the weary, at twenty-six thousand feet. “What’s going on, Cap?”
“Have you seen Crowley?”
“He’s probably learning German so he can brag in every camp on the Col.” She sat up. “He can’t be far. His computer’s still on.”
“Don’t you kids ever shut anything off?” Cicero asked irritably. Electricity was precious on the mountain, where the extreme cold drained batteries four times faster than normal. He opened the screen and reached for the power switch.
The E-mail recipient’s address jumped out at him:
[email protected] The National Daily!
Rage filled him. It was Tilt leaking information about SummitQuest to the National Daily! Tilt always screamed the loudest whenever Sammi tried to blame it on Ethan Zaph. And it was Crowley all along!
I should have known! Cicero ranted inwardly. Who else would do something this lousy? And keep on doing it when he saw how much trouble he was causing. Thanks to Tilt and the National Daily, poor Dominic was sitting at Base Camp, heartbroken!
The part that really burned Cicero was that Crowley was now the star of SummitQuest. They were all going to be expected to smile and pat him on the back while telling reporters what a great kid he was.
Instead of throttling the no-good …
Then he read the E-mail.
“Dominic?”
“Yeah, he really missed out,” Sammi said wanly. “I wish I’d made it to the top, but I’d feel worse stuck on the sidelines.”
Cicero bounded out of the tent, pulled aside his oxygen mask, and began to bellow, “Crowley! Crowley!”
Sammi was mystified. Of all people, Cap Cicero knew that no voice would carry very far through the screaming winds of Camp Four.
That was when she realized something she had not noticed before. She poked her head out the flap. “Cap!” she called up at him. “Tilt’s wind suit! It’s gone!”
Impossible, thought Cicero. There was no way the kid could have the strength to climb. Besides, where would he go? He had already made the summit.
He grabbed a walkie-talkie, feeling foolish. “Crowley,” he mumbled. Then, louder, “Can you hear me, Crowley? Are you there?”
He was just about to put the handset away when Tilt’s tired voice replied, “Hi, Cap.”
“Where are you?” barked Cicero. “Why aren’t you in camp?”
“The shrimp is out here somewhere,” Tilt explained breathlessly. “He shadowed us up the mountain with This Way Up. With Zaph.”
Cicero struggled for calm. “If they’re climbing, they’ll be coming back soon — ”
“They should have been down hours ago!” Tilt interrupted. “They had oxygen trouble at twenty-eight thousand!”
“Oxygen trouble?” Suspicion edged into the team leader’s voice. “And you know this because …”
Muffled sobs carried from the other end of the connection. “I didn’t mean to hurt anybody! I was just trying to keep him off the summit! I wanted to be the youngest — I need to be the youngest — ”
“What did you do?”
“I cranked his gas up to full.” Tilt was weeping openly now. “Just to turn him around before the top! But something must have gone wrong!”
Of course something went wrong! Cicero wanted to howl. Climbing Everest is hard enough when everything goes right!
Money — that was the cause of all this. Oh, how Cicero yearned for the old days! Before the endorsements and the magazine covers and big companies like Summit that were willing to pour millions into no-holds-barred assaults on the great peaks. Back then, alpinists were dirt-poor fanatics who lived on macaroni and cheese until they could sign on with an expedition. Booby-trapping a teammate’s oxygen was unheard of, because it didn’t matter who was youngest or fastest or first. Records were for bragging rights, period. Yes, Tilt had done something terrible. But the real culprit was the cash and glitz that could turn athletes into terrorists.
With much effort, he swallowed his rage. Wherever Dominic was right now, it wasn’t going to help the kid if Tilt got himself killed. “Listen, Crowley,” he said through clenched teeth. “No one is blaming you. The stakes are as high as the altitude, and people do crazy things. But you’ve got to come back to camp. There’s a storm brewing — a bad one. If you get caught out there, I can’t help you.”
Tilt was aghast. “The shrimp!” he cried, and the connection was broken.
“Crowley!” Cicero exclaimed, but there was no one on the other end.
Cap Cicero was renowned for coolness under fire, but right now he was anything but cool. Part of him was aware that he wasn’t making much sense as he babbled a short explanation through the flap of the guides’ shelter. “Talk that idiot down! Lie to him! Whatever he wants to hear! Just get him back!”
The snow was growing in intensity as he bounded across the Col to Angus Harris’s tent in the This Way Up camp.
Harris was in his bedroll, just drifting off to sleep after eighteen hours on the mountain, w
hen Cicero barged in.
“You let my kid climb without telling me?” Before the semiconscious Harris could manufacture a single word of reply, Cicero grabbed the other team leader’s walkie-talkie. “Zaph, this is Cap Cicero! Can you hear me?”
“Let me explain — ” Harris began groggily.
But right then Ethan’s excited voice crackled from the handset.
“Cap, we’re on the summit!”
It had taken Ethan and Dominic more than four hours to ascend the summit ridge — double the usual time. One of them was always climbing in oxygenless slow motion. They passed the breathing apparatus back and forth, eating up valuable minutes.
At the Hillary Step, Ethan had tried to lower the rig to his companion. The cylinder slipped out of the loop, dropped forty feet, and disappeared into deep powder. In his fevered state, Dominic could not seem to locate it. Far above, Ethan pointed and screamed while the younger boy dug through the snow. By the time he had retrieved the bottle and jumared up the Step, another precious hour had passed.
But the summit! Dominic had seen well over a thousand photographs of the famous pinnacle. All of them, blown up to life size and arranged in a 360-degree panorama, could not begin to compare with the experience of being there.
He would not even permit himself to blink, for fear of missing a nanosecond of this ultimate experience. He and Ethan hugged and laughed like madmen, trading breaths from their single mask. The full wrath of the jet stream battered them, packing the punch of a spectacular windchill. Dominic barely noticed. The many stumbling blocks that had littered his path on this unlikely ascent fell away like the vast expanse laid out before him in every direction. Too young and too small — maybe so. But Dominic Alexis was on top of the world.
Ethan reached inside his wind-suit collar and pulled the vial of Dead Sea sand over his head. “I think this belongs to you.”
Dominic stared at the necklace. In his exhausted elation, he had completely forgotten Chris’s memento from the lowest point on the globe. It was hard to believe that its long journey was finally over. It had traveled up so many crags, so many cliffs, so many mountains. And here, seven miles above its starting point, the keepsake had risen the full range of altitude the planet had to offer.
We did it, Chris. If only you could be here to see this with me.
Dominic’s voice was hoarse as he spoke his brother’s often-repeated words to the small vial: “Far from home, baby. You’re far from home.”
That was when the call had come over Ethan’s walkie-talkie.
“Shhh!” Dominic hissed. “Don’t tell Cap I’m with you!”
“Do you think I’m deaf?” the tinny voice from the small speaker raged. “Let me talk to my climber!”
Dominic leaned over to the handset and bellowed, “No, Cap! You don’t know I’m here!”
“Forget about that!” came the impatient reply. “Don’t you see you’re in trouble? Nobody summits this late! Neither of you is going to be anywhere if you don’t get down from there!”
“We read you,” agreed Ethan, much deflated. “We’ve had some delays — oxygen problems. We’re descending.”
“Not so fast,” snapped Cicero. “There’s a blizzard coming on the south side — a monster. It’s already snowing at the Col. You can’t beat it.”
Dominic turned around. Angry dark clouds smothered the Khumbu glacier all the way into the valley, engulfing everything but the peak of Lhotse. On Everest, the storm was creeping up to the Balcony and the southeast ridge. They were trapped! “But — ” he stammered, “but we can’t just stay on the summit — ”
“There’s a British team on the North Face,” Cicero told them. “They left a camp at twenty-seven thousand. That’s a thousand feet closer, plus the mountain will block the storm for a while.”
The North Face! Most Everest ascents followed the southern approach, but there were other, even more difficult, routes to the top.
“I don’t know, Cap,” Ethan said nervously. “It’ll be dark soon, and neither of us has ever been on the north side.”
“I’ll talk you through it,” Cicero promised. “You’ll have to rappel down two big cliffs, but at least you’ll be going down, not up.”
Dominic hesitated. “Are you sure there isn’t another way?” He had faith that his body would not let him down. It was his mind he didn’t trust. In his oxygen-depleted state, did he have the powers of reason to learn a notoriously difficult new route in the dark, with a killer storm bearing down?
“Listen, kid,” Cicero said patiently. “Things happen in mountaineering. A few dumb decisions, a little bad luck; before you know it, you’re in a jam. You can survive this — but not on the southeast ridge.”
Dominic’s eyes met Ethan’s. Cicero had climbed the North Face before. If anyone could guide them, he could.
Dominic knelt down and set Chris’s necklace in the firm snow beside the Summit Athletic flag Tilt and Sneezy had planted many hours earlier. He regarded it oddly. “No,” he said suddenly, vehemently. This thing had meant good luck for him every step of the way. It had even led him to the winning entry in the contest that had qualified him for SummitQuest’s boot camp.
Sorry, Chris, but I need it more than any mountain does!
Carefully, he picked up the glass bottle, unscrewed it, and let a few grains of Dead Sea sand fall to the pinnacle of the world. Then he closed the vial and strung the leather strap over his head. “Let’s move.”
At six fifty-five P.M., Ethan Zaph and Dominic Alexis stepped into the unknown on the North Face of Everest. As they left the summit, they entered another country. The ridge marked the border between Nepal and Tibet.
They had only been descending for twenty minutes when Cicero’s voice on the walkie-talkie began to grow more faint amid the crackling static.
Ethan was alarmed. “Cap! We’re losing you! The mountain’s blocking the signal!”
“It doesn’t work that way, kid,” Cicero soothed.
But as they continued to negotiate the rocks, the team leader faded into the howl of the jet stream.
“You’re gone! You’re totally gone!” Ethan shouted into the handset. “Cap! Can you read me?” He shook the unit violently. “This isn’t supposed to happen! I can’t even hear the static anymore!”
Dominic’s mind wrestled with the altitude. “Dead batteries?”
“We’ve got no spares!” Ethan held the handset close enough to swallow it. “Cap! We need you! You can’t leave us!”
But the walkie-talkie was silent. They were on their own on the treacherous North Face. Dominic felt the absence of Cicero’s voice as sharply as if the team leader had been climbing right beside them.
He passed Ethan the oxygen mask, and the older boy gratefully took a gasping suck.
To their left, the peak of Cho Oyu, the sixth highest mountain on Earth, fell into darkness as the sun dipped farther beneath the horizon. Soon it would be Everest’s turn.
Several hundred feet below them, the sullen gray clouds of the storm began to wrap around the base of the summit pyramid.
“Kid? Zaph?” In a rage, Cicero bounced the walkie-talkie off the wall of Angus Harris’s small shelter.
“What?” the This Way Up team leader asked anxiously.
“Keep trying to reach them!” Cicero tossed over his shoulder as he scrambled through the flap. “I’ve got another missing kid to check on!”
Outside, the blizzard was revving up to its full fury. The rocks of the Col were already covered with three inches of fresh snow.
He could barely squeeze himself into the jam-packed SummitQuest guides’ tent. Sammi had joined the vigil around the radio. Dr. Oberman hunched over the set, pleading with Tilt.
“Climbing is suicide in this weather!” she shrilled. “You summited; you’re a star! Don’t throw your life away just when you’ve got everything you always wanted!”
“I want the shrimp,” Tilt panted in reply. “And Zaph. I’m not coming down without them.”
Sammi grabbed the microphone from the doctor’s hand. “Tilt, it’s Sammi. Listen, Dominic and Ethan are safe on the Col.”
“You’re lying.”
“They’re at the Germans’ camp,” Sammi insisted. “Hanging with some of their Sherpas. You know Dominic and the Sherpas.”
It brought a rueful laugh over the speaker. “Nice try.”
Cicero considered giving Tilt the news that Ethan and Dominic had already summited and were currently descending the North Face, far out of anyone’s reach.
No, he thought. The kid’s consumed with guilt. He might try to climb the mountain again and chase them down the other side.
He hefted the microphone. “Crowley, if you don’t get your butt down to Camp Four, I’m coming up after you.”
“It’s about time,” Tilt shot back. “But don’t worry about me. Find the shrimp.”
And he broke the connection.
Nearly flattening Sneezy with a knee, Cicero began to pull on his wind suit. Babu reached for his own gear.
“This isn’t smart,” Dr. Oberman said seriously. “You guys are as good as it gets, but in these conditions, the mountain always has the upper hand.”
Cicero could only shrug helplessly as he continued to dress. That had been the problem with SummitQuest from the beginning. The rules and procedures on Everest had been established for decades. But it was always assumed that the alpinists were adults. Certainly, if Tilt were twenty-four and not fourteen, no rescue party would be sent until after the storm. A ninth grader was a whole new ballgame.
Outside, they strapped on crampons and plucked helmet lamps from the equipment dump between the two tents. Babu switched his on. The sudden light only underscored the horrible weather. Driving snow blew horizontally across the Col. Visibility was practically zero.
Babu hesitated a moment. Then he selected an oxygen rig from the pile and shrugged into it, fitting the unfamiliar mask over his mouth and nose.
Cicero watched him soberly. In all the decades the two men had climbed together, Babu Pemba had never once breathed bottled gas, not even at the summit. That he felt the need to do so now was as urgent a warning as any forecasting service could ever give.