The Summit

  It was going to be a long night.

  * * *

  It turned out to be Ethan who drew the last lungful of bottled O’s from their single cylinder. Dominic recognized the little choking gurgle that came from his companion.

  “Empty?” he asked.

  “Done.” Panting, Ethan shrugged out of the apparatus and let it drop to the rocks.

  It was not their first piece of bad news. As night finally enveloped the top of the world, they had switched on their helmet lamps to discover that only Dominic’s was still working. One less asset. One less lifeline.

  And the storm. It had begun slowly, but soon made up for lost time. The gale drove snow into their faces, standing them erect as they struggled to hunch forward. Powder covered the rocks almost immediately, making the route slippery and even more dangerous.

  “What happened to Cap’s cliffs?” Ethan shouted over the wind.

  Dominic cleared the snow from his watch. They were just above twenty-eight thousand feet. He had read about the famous Steps of the north side. He wrestled with his hazy memory, trying to think back — trying to think period! The uppermost of the two cliffs — surely they should have reached it by now….

  “But how could we have missed it?” he asked.

  “We veered east!”

  “Yeah?” In the blinding blizzard, Dominic had no trouble believing it. But with a flutter of panic, he realized that it would have made just as much sense to him if Ethan had said they’d wandered to the west. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so!” The older boy seemed less certain, confused.

  They spun around desperately. The storm surrounded them like the curtain ringing an old-fashioned bathtub. Even with his helmet lamp, Dominic couldn’t see much farther than a few feet through the squall. The more he looked, the more disoriented he became, until all directions seemed equally promising.

  He was relieved when Ethan started off again. Dominic hurried ahead, leading the way with his torch.

  The ground grew more jagged and unpredictable. For over an hour, they slowly descended. Dominic trained his helmet lamp downward, focusing on one footfall at a time. Ethan followed right behind, step-by-step in Dominic’s tracks in the accumulating snow. It was the only safe course.

  All at once, a blast of wind was followed by an instant of calm, creating a small gap in the blizzard’s cloak. Dominic saw … nothing!

  No rock. No ice. No slope, gentle or steep, unfolding ahead.

  He got down on his hands and knees and crawled forward. Stupid, he scolded himself. It was probably a hallucination.

  And then the beam of his helmet lamp shone on snow-covered ground — sixty feet straight down.

  The cliff! They weren’t lost after all!

  The celebration was short-lived. Ethan and Dominic peered over the lip and examined the obstacle below. The step was formed by the crumbly mustard-colored rock of the Yellow Band. Ethan reached out and grabbed a handhold experimentally. It disintegrated in his hand.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said in answer to Dominic’s apprehensive look. “We can’t stay here.”

  Using the blunt end of his ice ax, Ethan pounded a piton into the top of the cliff. The rotten rock shattered around it. He tried several other places with similar results.

  “Let me try.” Dominic threaded a line through the peg’s ring, and tightly wound it around a bulbous outcropping of limestone. Then he hammered the piton into a small crack beneath the boulder.

  Ethan tested the cord, pulling with his full weight. Amazingly, it held. “I’ll lead.”

  While Dominic shone his light on the route, Ethan attached his harness to the top rope and began to rappel carefully down. Whenever his crampons made contact with the brittle limestone of the cliff, he would dislodge a cascade of pebbles. Other than that, the descent was routine, and he was at the bottom in a matter of minutes.

  “It’s okay!” came the call from below.

  Dominic clipped onto the line and heaved himself over the side.

  The feeling of the rappel buoyed Dominic’s spirit, dissipating the dread that gripped him. This was something he was good at, something he had control of. He stopped on a narrow, snow-covered ledge halfway down to catch his breath. But when he pushed off again, he was instantly aware that something was not right.

  High above, a weak spot in the anchoring rock gave way under his weight. The outcropping broke in two, sending a large chunk of limestone tumbling over the lip of the cliff. He saw the boulder hurtling down at him for just a second before the piton popped out, and he was falling, too.

  The warning formed in his mind: Ethan, run! In the blinding blizzard, his companion would not see him until it was too late. But the drop took away what little breath he had left.

  Ethan cried out in shock as the younger boy landed on top of him. Dominic felt his ankle twist — a sharp, searing pain shot up his leg. The visible world lurched violently as his helmet lamp was jarred off his head. There was a sickening pop as the plummeting rock shattered the torch as if it had been aimed by an evil spirit.

  The North Face went dark.

  * * *

  “Shrimp!!”

  Tilt blundered around in the blizzard, his crampons plowing through nearly a foot of new powder to bite into the ice below. Last night, he had been charged with such high excitement that he had barely noticed a mountain beneath his feet. But now, Everest was making its presence felt. The steepness. The altitude. The weather. Ugh!

  “Shrimp! Zaph!”

  He knew that the chance that the two boys might hear his cries was outrageously slim. But what else could he do? It was his fault they were in trouble in the first place.

  Keep moving. One foot in front of the other. No pain.

  The howl of the gale abated for a moment, and Tilt could make out Cicero raving at him through the walkie-talkie. “… this-is-no-joke-Crowley-the-mountain-doesn’t-care-that-you’re-only-fourteen-you’ve-got-to-descend …” Briefly, a smile replaced the grimace of fatigue on Tilt’s face. The team leader was begging again. Just a few minutes ago, it had been gruesome tales of frostbite. Before that, threats. The climbers at Camp Four were trying to talk him down, too. He found their pleas kind of entertaining.

  It’s about time I got some attention on this expedition!

  “Whoa!”

  The beam of his helmet lamp illuminated his boot, frozen in midstride, about to step off the edge of the Kangshung Face.

  In a panic, he overbalanced backward, and tumbled to the snow. He slid a little, then jammed his ax into the ice. At last, he stopped, his heartbeat a drumroll.

  Man, that was close!

  He got up again, dusting the snow from his wind suit. Where was he? The ascent to the Balcony was a straight shot from the South Col. It came nowhere near the Kangshung Face.

  I must have wandered off. Understandable in the blinding snow.

  Carefully, he climbed a few yards and began to retrace his steps. His tracks were already half buried under a coating of new powder.

  As he headed back to the main route, a feeling of powerlessness took hold in the pit of his stomach. Getting lost in the blizzard was that easy — a single wrong turn had brought him within inches of disaster. Zaph and the shrimp could be anywhere, scattered over hundreds of millions of square feet of snow-obscured mountain.

  Was there really any chance of ever finding them?

  In the smothering dark at the base of the cliff, Ethan and Dominic took stock of themselves.

  Dominic’s ankle was sprained, but he could still walk in the tight supporting boot. Ethan’s situation was more serious. A crampon point from Dominic’s flailing foot had made a deep gash in Ethan’s thigh. The cut itself was not an immediate danger. At this altitude, blood was the consistency of molasses, so bleeding was extremely slow. The problem was the slit in Ethan’s wind suit, and in his sweatpants and thermal underwear underneath it. An Everester climbs in a cocoon. Once that shell is breached, there is no protection from the arct
ic cold of the Death Zone.

  The contents of Ethan’s knapsack were transferred to Dominic’s. The younger boy wrapped the empty pack around Ethan’s wound and lashed it on tight. They set out again, both hobbling — baby steps down the world’s highest mountain. In the pitch-black, progress was almost nonexistent. Three painful, limping hours brought them only to 27,600 feet — the height of the Balcony on the south side. To keep from wandering in the zero visibility, they committed themselves to a narrow rock trench. It was a screaming wind tunnel in the gale, but at least it led down. They prayed it was in the right direction. The gully was so thin that they bumped and scraped their sides and shoulders on jagged formations of rock.

  Another hour passed. The luminescent dial of Dominic’s watch hovered before him like a floating spirit in the inky night. The blowing snow glowed an eerie green before it.

  They held a nervous conference.

  “Where’s the second cliff?” panted Ethan, sucking air. “We should be there already.”

  “We must be off course,” Dominic gasped. “Which means we’ll never find that camp. We’re going to have to bivouac.”

  Bivouac! To hole up and spend a night outside on the mountain. It was the last resort of a desperate climber.

  Ethan was horrified. “In this cold? We’ll be dead in an hour! We’ve got to keep descending!”

  Dominic didn’t have the strength to argue. But it was becoming increasingly clear to him that descent would not be an option much longer. They had been on the go for a solid day. They were both limping, exhausted, half delirious. In the absolute blackness, how long would it be before one of them took a fatal fall?

  The gully seemed to widen as they slogged along, or at least Dominic wasn’t bumping into its sides anymore. Eventually, he felt his crampons crunching hard ice instead of snow-covered rock. His heart sank. This only proved that they were hopelessly lost. He could not recall reading about a glacier this high up on the north side.

  He was never really sure if he saw the crevasse, because that would have been impossible in the dark. More likely, he noticed his companion starting to stumble. He grabbed Ethan around the midsection, but it was too late. Ethan fell forward into the chasm with Dominic clamped on behind him. At the last second, the older boy flailed desperately at the lip of ice. His ax struck something solid and he held on for dear life. There they hung — Dominic onto Ethan, Ethan to the edge.

  Dominic wanted to reach for his own ax, but he didn’t dare release his grip on the older boy. Ethan clung to the mountain’s rind. They were stuck — stuck until he lost his purchase, and they plummeted to depths unknown.

  And then Ethan felt a front point scraping against hard ice below. “I’m letting go.”

  “Are you crazy?” rasped Dominic. “No!”

  “Hang on!”

  Dominic closed his eyes and steeled himself for the end. The drop was about six inches. The pounding of his heart reverberated in his ears. The pit was only seven feet deep.

  He looked daggers at Ethan. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Ethan managed a thin smile. “You didn’t ask.”

  By the meager light of Dominic’s watch, the two investigated their surroundings. The shallow crevasse widened on the left side of the opening. There they found a small cavelike area, enclosed by a roof of ice. The refuge was still desperately cold, but it was protected from the punishing wind.

  “Bivouac?” asked Dominic.

  “Right.”

  They sat down on the rime, huddled together for warmth. Both knew they were lucky to find shelter from the elements. They could not have lasted much longer against the storm. But a night outside in the notorious Death Zone was by no means a sure thing. They were bone weary, and had no oxygen to warm and sustain them.

  “No sleeping,” Ethan shivered. “Sleep here and you’ll wake up dead.”

  “Gotcha.” Teeth chattering, Dominic didn’t say what both of them felt: I’m not going to miss out on a second of what little time I have left.

  * * *

  Tired.

  The word had become Tilt’s universe. He was too tired to climb. Too tired to descend. Too tired to talk. Too tired to breathe.

  He sat in the fresh snow — where? He had no idea. Seven hours of wandering had brought him no closer to the depression that was the route between Camp Four and the Balcony. He was barely aware of his physical body, a being of pure fatigue.

  Sitting — that was where the trouble had started. He had plunked down in a snowdrift abruptly when his oxygen had cut out. It was no big deal — ice buildup in the regulator tube. But as of this moment, he had not yet cleared it. And it was just beginning to come through to his muddled mind that he had been stalled there for a long time.

  His walkie-talkie crackled to life — Babu, hailing Cicero. “Cap, I’m on the Balcony. No sign of him. No sign anybody’s been here for a while.”

  “Crowley!” bellowed Cicero, and kept on yelling.

  Tilt had been ignoring the team leader’s calls all night. But something told him the situation had changed.

  Pressing the TALK button on the handset took all his concentration. “Hi, Cap.”

  “Kid, where the blazes are you?”

  “I’m — I’m sitting down,” Tilt mumbled.

  “Get up!” Cicero almost screamed. “Climb up, down, sideways — just move!”

  “Funny thing,” Tilt replied in an almost amused tone. “I can’t.”

  “You have to!” Cicero begged. “That’s hypothermia talking! Climbing’s the only way to fight it off!”

  “I feel pretty warm,” Tilt said in slight surprise. And he did. The bone-cracking chill of a few minutes ago seemed to have let up. His hands and feet felt numb rather than cold. Numbness of the extremities — that was important somehow. A serious problem. But he couldn’t for the life of him remember why. Nor did he remember the first rule of the Himalayas — that Everest’s deadliest weapon was not a crevasse or an avalanche or a collapsing serac. It was what was happening at this very moment: An exhausted alpinist, every milligram of energy wrung from his soul by a monstrous and indifferent mountain, simply ceases to fight.

  Cicero was still yelling, but the voice seemed distant now. Had Tilt looked down, he would have noticed that the walkie-talkie had slipped from his mitt to the snow.

  The weather was still unbelievably bad. Tilt wasn’t worried for himself. He was a powerful climber with incredible stamina — the youngest ever to summit this pile of rocks. But the shrimp probably wasn’t going to make it. On the way to the summit, Tilt had passed bodies, frozen solid, far too high ever to be recovered. The poor little kid would be one of those — the smallest.

  But Tilt was strong. He had to be to feel comfortable in conditions like these. Odd — the warmer he felt, the less he seemed able to move his arms and legs.

  Maybe all he needed was a short bivouac — a power nap. It might not be too late for the shrimp after all. When Tilt was fresh and rested, he would climb up and find Dominic. Wouldn’t that be something — the youngest summiteer in Everest history coming down off the mountain with a lost boy under his arm? An impossible rescue!

  As Tilt drifted off into the sleep from which he would never awaken, he was in the bright lights of that press conference. A jumble of microphones sat on the table in front of him. Reporters hung on every word to come out of the mouth of the great hero of Everest. His mother glowed with pride. The nobody from Cincinnati had traveled far and climbed high and finally reached his dream. Tilt Crowley would not be delivering papers anymore.

  Flashbulbs went off until all he could see were spreading blobs of color, disappearing into a background of black.

  The next thing Dominic felt was a sharp pain in the center of his forehead. It was a familiar sensation. Almost like …

  Brain freeze! From gobbling too much ice cream too fast. Only — the growling of his stomach told him that he hadn’t eaten ice cream — or anything else — for a long time. Where was he?

/>   He sprang up with a jolt, banging his head on the ice roof of the crevasse. A cloud of fresh snow flaked off him. No wonder he had brain freeze. He’d been breathing the stuff in all night! A half-inch layer of powder had settled over him from head to toe while he was asleep —

  “Asleep?” he cried in horror. “No!” Sunlight streamed in through the chasm’s opening. It was morning! He checked his watch: five thirty-three A.M. They had spent an entire night outside at nearly twenty-seven thousand feet!

  Ethan came awake, shaking off his own frosty coating. “What?”

  Dominic wiggled his fingers and toes. “I can feel everything! You?”

  The older boy did an inventory of his extremities. “No frostbite. This crevasse saved our necks!”

  Dominic tried to exhale and found himself puffing on the thin air. “We are so lucky!”

  “Not yet,” Ethan said gravely. He checked his pack, still lashed around the wound on his thigh. “I feel pretty good, but that’s only compared with how I felt last night. I’ll bet we’re too weak to realize how weak we are.”

  Just how weak became clear when they tried to get out of the crevasse. Two alpinists who had reached the top of the world yesterday were unable to extricate themselves from a seven-foot hole. Finally, Dominic worked his way to the surface by means of his front points and two ice axes. He helped Ethan up after him. Elapsed time: thirty minutes. It should have been thirty seconds.

  As for where they were, that was another mystery. While the upper mountain was in bright sunlight, a layer of mist hung below them at about twenty-five thousand feet. The summit of Cho Oyu, poking up through the fog, confirmed that they were on the Tibetan side of Everest. But more than that they could not tell. Their crevasse was in a hollow in the mountain’s flank, so their view of the great North Face was blocked.

  “But if this is the north, what happened to the second cliff?” Dominic asked.

  Ethan shrugged. “We must have worked around it somehow. Who knows where we were going in that crazy storm? Just be happy we can see again.”