The Climb

  Dominic felt his legs begin to wobble. The victim seemed to be male, although it was impossible to tell. The face was partially mummified by the blistering cold, flesh receding to reveal the contours of a human skull. A death mask in the sky.

  For the SummitQuest climbers, already at the outer limit of their endurance, the shock of it stopped them in their tracks. They knew that there were many such grisly sights in the Himalayas — alpinists who lost their lives so high up that their bodies could never be safely recovered. But to crest a rise and find yourself staring directly into the face of death was something no mountaineer could ever be prepared for. Even Tilt was visibly shaken, his eyes wide with horror, wheezing into his oxygen system.

  “It’s Nestor!” Perry was blubbering. “We’re too late! He’s dead!”

  Sammi grabbed him by his shoulders. “It can’t be! This guy’s been here for years! Look at him!”

  “No!” He shook her off angrily, but he knew she was right. So much deformity could not possibly have happened so quickly. Yet this news, which should have heartened him, only wrenched even more sobs from him.

  “Shut up! Shut up!” Tilt was yelling more from fear than anger. If this wimp doesn’t stop crying, I’m going to lose it! “It’s just a dead guy with freezer burn!”

  “There was a team up here in the mid-nineties,” Dominic babbled, none too steady himself. “Italians, I think. This could be one of — ”

  “You shut up, too!” Tilt roared. “If you all don’t shut up, I swear I’ll — ”

  And then they heard it, faint but crystal clear — a distant voice calling, “Hey!”

  Sammi’s keen eyes spotted the dim amber ghost of a fading helmet lamp, a half-mile farther up the ridge. “Ethan,” she breathed.

  The body forgotten, they rushed along the jagged slope with the renewed vigor of climbers on a mission. They stopped only to remove their crampons for better progress on the bare rock. Here, any snow that touched Lhotse was immediately flung out over the Kangshung glacier by wrenching wind gusts that threatened to dislodge the rescuers from the mountain.

  The four bent into the gale and sped up. They had seen death; it had almost overwhelmed them. But now they reached down deep and found hidden reserves of strength because they didn’t want that fate for their fellow climbers.

  “Ethan!” shouted Sammi.

  “Over here.” Now the response was close. It was a sound they had not heard before — that famous voice, hollow with exhaustion and defeat.

  And suddenly, the two lost climbers were right in front of them. Dominic hardly recognized the top young mountaineer in the world. Ethan sat cross-legged, meek and trembling over Nestor’s unmoving form. The journalist’s face was white as chalk under his oxygen mask.

  Ethan regarded Dominic without recognition at first. Then, “You! Are you everywhere or something? How could you be — ?” He seemed to lose his train of thought partway through the question. He had been in the Death Zone without oxygen for more than eleven hours.

  Sammi and Perry hooked up the spare breathing rig and placed the mask over Ethan’s mouth and nose. He perked up immediately. “We couldn’t wake him up,” he said, pointing at Nestor. “We were at the summit — wait, no. On the face — no — ” His oxygen-starved brain could not seem to organize his thoughts.

  “I’d be getting ready for a summit bid if it wasn’t for you,” Tilt accused, which only confused Ethan further.

  Sammi and Perry rolled Nestor onto his side, allowing Dominic to turn the flow on his gas regulator up to four liters per minute — the maximum.

  The back of Nestor’s wind suit and his knapsack were crusted with tiny red crystals. “What’s that?” asked Perry.

  “Blood,” replied Sammi. “Frozen blood.” She turned to Dominic, perplexed. “He was hit by rockfall. The injuries should be mostly internal, right?”

  Dominic tried to remove the knapsack. It wouldn’t budge. Frowning, Dominic zipped it open and fumbled around inside. His mitts fell on a coil of some kind of wire. He pulled it out to realize he was holding Nestor’s summit Slinky. The unimaginable cold of the Death Zone had made the thin metal so brittle that it shattered in Dominic’s hands.

  There was something else in there. He adjusted his helmet lamp and shone it inside the small pack. The others gathered around. In an instant, the nature of Nestor’s injury became completely clear.

  “Oh, my God,” gasped Perry.

  The journalist had been climbing with his crampons in his knapsack in the rock gully near the top of Lhotse. The falling stone had struck the pack, driving the razor-sharp crampon points through the fabric of his wind suit, into his back.

  “Ouch,” commented Tilt.

  “It’s like being stabbed by ten knives,” added Sammi with a wince.

  Dominic tried again to yank the knapsack free. But the crampon points were in so deep that Nestor’s entire body was stuck to the pack and would not separate from it. Finally, Sammi, Perry, and Dominic held on to him, while Tilt, the strongest, heaved with all his might.

  “Aaaaaaaah!!” Nestor howled in pain as the crampons were torn from his flesh.

  Tilt staggered in reverse and went down, the knapsack clutched in his arms. Nestor got up on all fours. “My back! My back!”

  “Nestor, it’s Dominic! Dominic Alexis!” Breathlessly, he tried to explain what had happened during the time the journalist had been unconscious. “You’re two hundred feet below the summit of Lhotse and you’ve got ten stab wounds in your back. We’ve got to get you down to Dr. Oberman.”

  “Can you walk?” asked Sammi.

  With great effort and much assistance, Nestor struggled to his feet. “I’ll never make it,” he moaned, panting from the effort. “It hurts so much!”

  “He’s lucky he’s at this altitude,” Sammi whispered to Perry. “Blood’s thicker than mud up here. At sea level, he would have bled to death by now.”

  “At sea level, they would have sent an ambulance,” Perry retorted.

  The good news was that Ethan could now walk on his own. Nestor was another story. With Sammi supporting the right arm and Dominic under the left, he could barely put one foot in front of the other. They were facing a third of a mile of vertical descent down to Camp Four. On the tricky and perilous ridge, it might as well have been a light-year.

  They checked their oxygen equipment, replacing empty bottles and clearing ice from masks and regulator tubes. It was decided that Sammi, Perry, and Dominic would all rope themselves to Nestor. With luck, the three of them might be able to guide the injured journalist through the tough journey ahead. Tilt alone would handle Ethan.

  “You’re lucky I don’t handle you right off a cliff, superstar,” Tilt grumbled, tethering himself to Ethan’s harness.

  Progress was slow, and maneuvering Nestor down the many drop-offs proved to be time-consuming and difficult. Soon the ridge was snow-covered again, and they had to stop to reaffix their crampons. The menacing cornices called for extra-special care, which delayed them even more.

  Tilt spent the entire descent griping at Ethan. “The great Ethan Zaph. Don’t make me laugh. If you’re so great, how come we had to rescue your sorry butt?”

  Poor Ethan had no strength to defend himself. Baby steps down the ridge were all he could manage.

  Me! he lamented. The strongest young climber ever!

  He was depressed, but grateful. He knew that these kids had just saved his life. The little guy especially — I was wrong about him. Few could function at this altitude, let alone take charge. For a thirteen-year-old to show this kind of poise and ability in the Death Zone was flat-out unbelievable.

  Suddenly, the snow beneath his feet disintegrated. In an instant of exquisite terror, he realized that he was not on the ridge at all, but on a cornice curling improbably far out over the Kangshung Face. And then gravity took him and flung him downward.

  “Your ax!” bellowed Tilt, frozen with fear. In a few seconds, the rope would play out, and more than two hundre
d pounds of plummeting climber would pull him off the mountain.

  Ethan reached for his ice tool — one last chance! But as he fumbled for the handle, it was already too late. He was sliding down the rock, picking up speed, his mind empty of all thoughts but one: When you fall a mile and a half, are you still alive when you hit the bottom?

  Tilt Crowley threw himself to the snow, locked his arms around the biggest boulder he could find, and hung on for dear life.

  “Oof!!”

  The jolt slammed his face against hard granite. The force on his harness was so great that his entire body was lifted up in the air. Everything went momentarily black. But he held on to the rock, to the ridge, to Lhotse, to life.

  His eyes fluttered open. He had done it! He could feel Ethan’s weight dangling at the other end of the rope. The question remained: Was it dead weight? Had the boy survived the fall?

  A faint cry from below. “Help!”

  Sammi and Dominic grabbed for the rope, but Tilt pushed them aside. “I don’t need you!” He planted his crampons and got to his feet, leaning away from the precipice, two hands on the taut line. “Hey, Zaph!” he roared triumphantly out over the abyss. “You call yourself strong? You don’t know the meaning of the word! This is strong!” Single-handedly, he began hauling in the line. Sammi and Dominic joined in.

  Minutes later, a trembling Ethan, pop-eyed and ashen-faced, crested the ridge. He collapsed into Tilt’s arms, gasping and wheezing.

  “Settle down,” Tilt ordered in an irritated tone. “I don’t even like you.”

  “You don’t like anybody,” grinned Sammi. She put an arm around Tilt’s shoulders. “That was amazing — and I don’t amaze easily.”

  “The greatest belay I’ve ever seen,” added Perry.

  “Big deal,” snorted Tilt. “By the time the press gets through with it, it’ll be Zaph the hero belaying the rest of us by his nose hairs.”

  It would be a solid hour before Ethan would release his death grip on Tilt’s arm.

  * * *

  At exactly 10:30 P.M., the alarm on Dominic’s watch began beeping. A rueful laugh escaped him. In another life, on another mountain, that was the signal to wake up and get ready for their assault on the peak of Everest. It was time to melt ice to make tea and hot chocolate. Time to force down oatmeal and Summit bars, energy for the climb ahead.

  Everest. It seemed distant somehow. As if it had never been their original goal, and the plan had always been a perilous rescue on the upper reaches of Lhotse.

  Attempted rescue, he corrected himself. By no means was this a done deal. They were well below twenty-seven thousand feet now, but Ethan was flagging and Nestor was deteriorating badly. Dominic was pretty sure that if it weren’t for the physical support of his fellow climbers, the journalist would have lacked even the strength to stand up.

  No one noticed when Nestor began to gasp, sucking hungrily for oxygen that was no longer there. He tried to sound the alert, but he didn’t have the air. All that came out were two croaking syllables: “Help me.” He collapsed to the snow.

  Sammi checked for a blockage in his breathing tube, but it was clear. Perry checked the gauge on Nestor’s oxygen bottle. “Empty!”

  “We’re such idiots!” Sammi exclaimed. “He’s drawing O’s twice as fast as the rest of us! Of course he’s going to run out first!”

  Dominic fumbled desperately inside his pack, looking for a spare cylinder. This is my fault! he thought frantically, I should have known better! I should have seen it coming.

  He slapped the new bottle into place, and Sammi hooked it into the regulator. They watched expectantly. Nestor’s breathing stabilized, but he did not come to.

  For twenty precious minutes, they tried to wake him, shaking him, slapping him, screaming in his ears, and even pressing snow against his cheeks. But in a windchill approaching one hundred degrees below zero, twenty minutes of inactivity was more than a delay; it was a foolhardy risk to life and limb. In the Death Zone, climbing was the body’s natural heater, its last line of defense against frostbite and hypothermia. They had to keep going.

  Tilt grabbed Nestor under the arms; Sammi took his legs. For a while, the ridge unfolded gently before them, and they made good time. Nestor’s labored footsteps had been so slow that they were actually moving faster this way. Then they rounded a bend, and the lights of their helmet lamps seemed to disappear into blackness. Dominic looked down. They were five hundred feet above the South Col, at the apex of the triangular ice wall.

  Sammi shone her lamp over the steep slope. “Oh, boy.”

  Perry was the first to panic. “We’ll never get him down this!”

  “Wait!” Ethan pointed. “Fixed line!”

  Tilt shook his head. “Worthless.” He yanked the top screw out of the ice. The entire rope dislodged from the mountain, anchors popping down its full length.

  The conference was short.

  “We’ll have to leave him,” Sammi decided. “The guides must be back at Camp Four by now. Maybe Andrea can climb up here and give him a shot or something.”

  “Nestor doesn’t have that kind of time,” Dominic argued. “We’ve got to get him down now.”

  Tilt turned on him angrily. “How, shrimp? You know why they don’t bring dead bodies back from the upper mountain? Because it’s impossible! And unconscious guys are dead guys in training!”

  “He’s right,” said Perry sadly. “To get off this rock, you’ve got to walk off.”

  Even Ethan agreed there was nothing they could do for his teammate anymore. “We’ll leave him and go for help.”

  Dominic was not swayed. Who knew for sure if Dr. Oberman was on the Col? And even if she was, it would still mean a long climb down, a longer one back up again, and then a difficult descent with Nestor.

  His eyes fell on the dislodged rope, which lay before Tilt, a loose ice screw flopped on its side. “We’ll lower him down.”

  “We don’t have enough rope,” Perry protested.

  Dominic pulled the tether cord out of his harness. “Tie them all together. We can make it.”

  “We can’t,” Tilt insisted. “We’re not even close. That’s got to be five hundred feet!”

  But Dominic was adamant. “We’ll get him down. I swear.”

  They knotted the nylon lines together and tied one end to Nestor’s harness. Then they eased the journalist over the top. Dominic followed on his front points and ice ax.

  Sammi looked at him dubiously. “I hope you know what you’re doing. You’re still way short.”

  “Trust me,” Dominic promised, and was gone.

  Tilt and Perry let out the rope, and Nestor slid slowly down the wall of ice. Dominic kept pace. Kick, Kick, thunk. Kick, kick, thunk …

  They had been descending for only about twenty minutes when Nestor’s progress abruptly halted.

  “That’s the end!” Sammi shouted down from the ridge.

  Dominic pushed his mask aside and bellowed, “Give me a minute!” He looked around and found his helmet lamp shining right at it, exactly where he’d expected it to be. There, maybe ten feet to his left, was another fixed line. It had taken Perry three pitches to reach the top of the triangular wall. This was the second length. Still another waited below.

  Front-pointing efficiently, Dominic traversed to the rope and yanked it free of the mountain’s thin rind, sending ice screws tumbling down to the Col. Now came the hard part — keeping Nestor secure while adding on the new length. He plastered his shoulder to the slope, wedging the journalist in place as he worked.

  “What’s going on?” came Sammi’s call.

  Dominic fastened the knot. “Reel it in!” he ordered.

  High above, confusion turned to dismay as Tilt and Perry hauled the slackened rope effortlessly upward.

  “What did he do with Nestor?” Tilt muttered in consternation. “What’s going on?”

  Sammi watched in bewilderment as the double fisherman’s knot rose into the glow of her helmet lamp. Her eyes widene
d in sudden understanding. “He found the second rope!”

  “And there’s another one after that!” Perry exclaimed excitedly.

  “Unbelievable!” breathed Ethan, energized by the genius of the thirteen-year-old’s plan. He flipped up his mask. “Go, Dominic! Do it, kid!”

  When they felt Nestor’s weight on the line, Tilt and Perry resumed lowering the rope. Below, Dominic continued his descent alongside the journalist’s inert form. The work was hard — front-pointing with only one ice tool was more difficult than with two. His right arm and shoulder throbbed with pain, but inside he was celebrating. It’s going to work. We’re going to get Nestor to the Col. From there, he wasn’t sure of the next step, but he was confident his friend would be in good hands. If Andrea can revive him, Cap and Babu can get him down. He’s got a chance. A helicopter can land as high as twenty-thousand feet. It isn’t easy, but it’s possible.

  So absorbed was he in figuring the angles of the rescue that he barely heard Sammi yelling. He was too far away to make out her exact words, but he realized that Nestor’s descent had been halted once more.

  His eyes scanned the ice for the final fixed rope. It wasn’t there.

  The realization was like a cannon shot to the pit of his stomach. There was no rope. It had fallen, or blown away in the permanent gale of the Death Zone. He checked the altimeter on his watch: 26,148. They were still well over a hundred feet above the Col. And Nestor was stranded, dangling like a yo-yo on a string.

  Dominic’s head filled with a blizzard of bad ideas. I’ll front-point down and look for help! But what if there was no help? I’ll climb back up again! What good would that do?

  His eyes filled with tears. Maybe they were right — the people who said he didn’t belong here. Oh, sure, he could handle himself physically on the mountain. But what about mentally? The pressure to do the right thing when someone’s life hung in the balance. Was any thirteen-year-old ever ready for that emotional roller-coaster ride?

  The last words hung meaningfully in his thoughts. Roller-coaster ride …