The Contest

by Gordon Korman

  “Bryn!” he roared. “Bryn, can you hear me?”

  The form below them was still.

  Now Sammi was crying. “She said she’d be okay once the pressure was off! I believed her. I’m so sorry….”

  Cap Cicero had no time for tearful apologies. He was a veteran climber in an emergency. Blame was irrelevant now. There were no should haves, only have tos. Nothing mattered except extricating Bryn from the envelope of ice and, if she was alive, getting her off the mountain and to medical attention.

  As panic overtook the others, a calm professionalism descended over him, and he began to bark orders. “Andrea, get on the horn and see when the rangers can get us a helicopter. Lenny, I need crampons, a harness, and some rope.”

  Perry was wide-eyed as the guides sprang into action. “You’re not climbing down there?”

  “If you can think of a better way to get her out, I’m all ears.”

  Sneezy reappeared, his arms laden with gear. As the team leader affixed a top rope to a sturdy boulder, Dr. Oberman returned to the scene, the long-range cell phone at her ear. “They’ll give us a chopper, but the pilot won’t go close to the mountain until sunup. Around ten o’clock.”

  “Tell them we’ll be waiting,” confirmed Cicero, clipping his harness onto the fixed line.

  The doctor relayed the information and then called, “They also want to know if we need a medical team for the injured climber.”

  “I’ll let you know in a minute,” Cicero replied grimly, and was gone.

  Dominic watched in awe as the renowned alpinist rappelled expertly from the top of the shoulder. Cicero covered the distance in a few seconds and stood on the lip. Easing himself into the narrow gap, he began to descend to Bryn.

  From above, the others looked on breathlessly. Cicero’s lower body disappeared into the opening. But he went no farther.

  “Why’s he stopping?” asked Sammi.

  It was Dr. Oberman who put two and two together. “He’s stuck! The gap is too small.”

  And with that, Dominic was pounding across the shoulder to camp. At the tent, he grabbed his helmet lamp, shrugged into his climbing harness, and strapped on crampons. The sharp points grated jarringly against the naked black rock, but he barely noticed, running as fast as his awkward footwear would allow. There was an unwritten rule of climbing: The job falls to whoever can get it done. Right here, right now, thirteen-year-old Dominic Alexis had an advantage that even the great Cap Cicero couldn’t match.

  “Dominic — come back!” Dr. Oberman cried.

  She ran to stop him, but he clipped onto the rope and lowered himself over the side.

  Free fall. He swung himself into the cliff face, pushed off with his feet, and dropped some more. The feeling of gravity on his body gave him confidence. The axis of motion was vertical, and Dominic was in his element.

  He dropped to the lip to find Cicero chipping at the thick ice with his ax.

  He gawked at his youngest team member. “Get out of here, Alexis! I’ve lost one climber already! No way I’m going to risk a double whammy!”

  “I can get down there!” Dominic panted, catching his breath. “I’m smaller than you!”

  “Forget it!” roared Cicero. But he examined Dominic’s slight frame and mentally pasted it into the narrow passage of uneven ice that stood between Bryn and any chance of rescue. It would take hours to widen the opening with ice tools alone. Bryn — if she was alive at all — would fall victim to shock, hypothermia, frostbite. The only chance was to get her out fast.

  “All right,” he conceded. “But be careful. The last thing I need is two of you trapped down there.”

  It was like spelunking in an ice cave, only straight down, Dominic reflected. Pressed hard against the rough rock of the mountain’s granite core, he squeezed past jagged chunks of ice. The painful, awkward movements were almost comforting to him. It was the style of the Alexis brothers to take the ordinary and turn it vertical. Only this time, there was no Chris to help him, and Bryn’s life hung in the balance.

  As he descended, the rope that tethered him to Cicero wrapped around his legs. Untangling himself in the unbearably confined space was an arduous task that ate up his two most precious assets — strength and time. Finally, he reached the bottom of the chasm where Bryn lay on her side, battered and bleeding.

  The moment of truth: He bent an ear to her slightly open mouth.

  Warm breath, faint but regular.

  “She’s alive!” he howled out.

  “How about you?” asked Cicero from twenty feet above.

  “I’m fine!” Dominic gulped air. “What now?”

  The team leader lowered a warm blanket to Dominic, who wrapped it around Bryn’s unmoving form. Next, Dominic secured her with three slings — one at her shoulders, one supporting her back, and one at her knees. Cicero tied the tops of these lines onto a single rope dropped from the shoulder above. There, using a rounded rock as a pulley, Dr. Oberman, Sneezy, Sammi, and Perry began to haul her up.

  Bryn rose about seven feet before snagging in the jagged ice.

  “Stop! Stop!” cried Dominic. “She’s stuck! You’re crushing her!”

  He scrambled up his own rope and tried without success to maneuver Bryn around the protruding chunk of ice. Then he pulled out his ax and began hacking at the obstruction.

  “How does it look?” Cicero called down to him.

  “Bad.” Dominic could hear the panic edging into his voice. “This could take hours.”

  “We’ve got hours,” he soothed. “Six before the chopper gets here. I’ll start cutting a path from the top.”

  Dominic had been climbing since he was four years old, but this was something he never could have imagined — trapped in the ice on a hostile mountain, chopping away at a two-foot-thick outcropping in a race against the elements and the clock. Each strike of the ax chipped a millimeter or two away. Barely a hair. Dust.

  An hour passed. Then two. The repetitive motion of swinging the tool made his shoulder socket throb with pain. He shivered in the forty-below cold as he worked, and ice fragments from Cicero’s efforts rained down on him from above.

  And then, a voice from a place buried so deep inside him he wasn’t even sure it really existed: Rest.

  “Never!” he seethed, enraged that he would entertain such a thought when Bryn’s life was at stake. He began to flail his ax wildly. Thunk! Thunk! Thunk! The teeth bit repeatedly into the ice until he realized that the passage was clear and he was exhausting himself for nothing.

  “Okay!” he rasped, his voice barely audible. Louder: “Okay! Ready to lift!”

  Cicero echoed the call, and a moment later, Bryn began to ascend once more. Dominic followed beneath her, kicking his crampons into the ice wall for leverage as he guided his unconscious teammate up through the narrow pathway.

  They were getting close. He could see flashes of Cicero’s helmet lamp in the thin strip of dark sky above. Then, just a few feet below the lip, Bryn got hung up again. Dominic tried every which way to finesse her around a protruding ice boulder, but it was no use.

  The news was grim from above as well.

  “I just talked to the ranger station,” Dr. Oberman called down to Cicero. “Bad weather on the way!”

  Sammi was right beside her. “Well, duh! It hasn’t stopped snowing for five seconds since we got here!”

  “They grounded the chopper?” Cicero asked in dismay.

  “We’ve got a helicopter window from ten to ten-thirty!” Sneezy supplied. “After that, the high winds come, and we’re on our own. The National Weather Service is calling for a foot of snow.”

  Cicero checked his watch. It was seven-forty. “Take the kids and get down.”

  Perry was appalled. “But what about Bryn?”

  “Don’t worry about her,” Sneezy said seriously. “She’ll be riding in a nice warm chopper while we bust our butts on that wall!”

  Sammi was uncertain. “If there’s a chopper!”

  The c
ameraman grabbed her by the arm and began dragging her back toward camp. “If you’re still hanging off that cliff face when the storm hits, you’re going to learn the true meaning of extreme!”

  That was enough for Perry. “Let’s get out of here!”

  But Sammi dug in her heels. “What about Dominic?”

  On the lip thirty feet below, that was the very subject under discussion. “Kid, there’s a storm coming, and I’m sending everybody down,” Cicero called down through the ice. “That includes you.”

  Dominic was horrified. “You’re going to leave her?”

  “I can get her out myself,” Cicero assured him. “The chopper’s giving us till ten-thirty.”

  “You won’t make it! We’ve got four feet of ice to cut through!” He swung his ax harder, faster.

  “Forget it, Alexis, I’m not risking you!”

  “No!” A whirlwind of activity beneath the ice. Thunk! Thunk!

  “You little snot, where do you get off telling me how to run my expedition? I was soloing mountains before you were in diapers!”

  Thunk! Thunk! Thunk!

  The expedition leader’s face flamed red. “If you disobey this order, you’re history on this team! You’re not going anywhere with me! Not Everest. Not around the corner to buy a stick of gum. Got it?”

  Dominic barely even heard him as he hacked away. His universe, at that moment, was a four-foot mass of ice that had to be cut away in less than three hours. Compared to that, Cap Cicero, SummitQuest, even Dominic’s own safety seemed as insignificant as the price of peanuts in Peru.

  Cicero was powerless to stop him. He couldn’t reach Dominic through the narrow opening in the ice. All he could do was take out his own ax and work at the obstruction from the top. Now the chipping sound had a double rhythm — thunk-thunk! Thunk-thunk!

  Dr. Oberman lowered the long-range cell phone to Cicero, and the team on the shoulder began the long descent. There was no talk of a summit bid — not with a climber unconscious and a blizzard on the way. The video camera remained in Sneezy’s pack. This was one part of SummitQuest that the general public would never see.

  Dominic had no watch. He measured the hours by the burning fire in his arm and the numbing cold that gripped the rest of his body. His fatigue went far beyond what he had felt after ascending the four-thousand-foot wall. This was a single motion — the swing of an ice tool — repeated without rest for countless hours. Doubt and dread plagued him. Was he tiring to the point where he’d have no strength left to get himself out of this frozen tomb? And even if he could make it back to the shoulder, would he have the energy and the will to front-point nearly a vertical mile down to the glacier?

  Doesn’t matter. Not important. Keep working. Don’t stop.

  He was aware of a brightening in the sky. Sunrise, or the closest thing to it in the permanent gloomy overcast. The sound came soon after the light, low but audible, even from under the ice. Almost like a slow-motion drumroll.

  A helicopter!

  “Ten o’clock!” Cicero bellowed the time check.

  Dominic sized up the foot-thick obstruction that still imprisoned Bryn and took it apart mentally blow by blow. They had half an hour. Would there be enough time?

  There has to be!

  Brandishing the ax with both hands, he hacked with an unbridled ferocity that surprised even him. He could hear Cicero begging him to calm down, to budget his energy, but Dominic knew that right now fever pitch was the only speed for him. He didn’t dare slacken the pace for even a second for fear that his whole body would shut down.

  Thunk! Thunk!

  “Ten-fifteen!”

  It seemed to go on forever. Hours — no, they didn’t have hours. But minutes felt like hours in this endless motion, endless exhaustion, endless ice. The edges of his vision began to blur.

  Don’t faint on me now!

  “Ten-twenty-five!”

  Thunk! Thunk!

  Above him, Cicero was barking into the phone, “Give us five more minutes! Two more minutes!”

  Thunk! Thunk!

  And then: “Heads up!”

  Cicero’s boot broke through the obstruction, raining ice and snow down on Dominic’s head. Marshaling every ounce of strength he had left, the boy dug in his crampons and put his full weight under Bryn in an attempt to push her up to Cicero. The team leader grabbed the injured climber and hauled her onto the lip. “Now!” he bawled into the phone.

  Barely conscious, Dominic crawled out of the envelope after being entombed for seven hours. Wobbling on unsteady feet beside Cicero, he noted that the weather had already changed. Howling wind blew snow in their faces. Surely, the full force of the storm could not be far behind.

  When the helicopter became visible, it was a lot closer than Dominic expected. It seemed to explode out of the gray-white squall sixty feet in front of them, coming up fast.

  “He’s too low!” shouted Dominic.

  At the last minute, the pilot veered off, looping up and away from the mountain, vanishing once more. When the chopper reappeared, it was higher, descending gradually toward them.

  Cicero put an iron grip on Dominic’s shoulders and eased him to his knees to keep him clear of the spinning rotor blades. There wasn’t enough room to land on the lip, so the pilot set the nose wheel down on the rim of ice and hovered — a difficult and treacherous piece of flying. The helicopter was “parked,” but it couldn’t stay that way forever.

  Cicero climbed into the chopper, grabbed Bryn under the arms, and hauled her aboard. Then he reached out a hand to Dominic.

  A powerful gust of wind buffeted the mountain, plastering Dominic against the rock face. The nose wheel slipped off the lip, and the helicopter seemed to bounce in the air, the deadly rotors dipping toward him.

  “Duck!” howled Cicero.

  With no time to think or even breathe, Dominic dove back into the opening.

  The lethal blades shaved the ice at the top of the lip before the pilot yanked on the control and drew the chopper up and away from the mountain.

  Falling. Dominic kicked out with both legs. Crampon points dug into the walls and he lurched to a stop. Hand over hand, he climbed back into the wind and snow. A desperate scan of his surroundings. The helicopter was gone.

  “Cap!”

  No answer. The panic began in his stomach, leaping up the back of his throat. All their lines, bolts, and ice screws had descended with the rest of the team. Could he make it down that wall of ice, alone, unroped, through a howling blizzard?

  Chris should be here. He’s the better climber. He’d find a way out of this.

  He reached inside his jacket and clutched at his brother’s vial of Dead Sea sand, which was never going to Everest. Which might not even make it off Lucifer’s Claw …

  “Dominic!!”

  The cry was so faint that he would have missed it if not for the frantic urgency in the voice. With a roar of machinery, the helicopter burst out of the driving gray snow. Cicero crouched at the hatch, dangling a rope that blew every which way.

  A screaming fight was in progress between the team leader and the pilot. How close to Dominic did they dare go?

  “If the wind currents blow us into the mountain, then none of us make it home!” the pilot argued.

  “That’s a thirteen-year-old kid out there!” Cicero shouted back. “If you land this bird without him, you’re gonna wish you’d crashed into a mountain!”

  I’m lost, Dominic thought to himself. They can’t get close enough. Not in this wind.

  No sooner had the idea crossed his mind than the wind died and there was a moment of sudden, unexpected calm. All at once, the snow was falling directly downward, and the rope hung straight and unmoving from the chopper.

  “Get him! Get him!” roared Cicero.

  Slow motion — that’s how it seemed to Dominic. Waiting for the helicopter to approach was the longest few seconds of his life. Thirty feet away … then twenty … then ten …

  As he unclipped his harnes
s from the rope, he was struck by a flash of foresight. There was no explanation for it. Call it climber’s instinct. He just knew.

  The wind’s coming back.

  Dominic Alexis took two powerful steps and hurled himself into the thin air — a spectacular dyno more than a mile above the Atkinson Glacier.

  “No-o-o!” cried Cicero in horror.

  And there, in midleap, Dominic found a strange serenity. He wasn’t in Alaska at all. In his mind he was in the valley outside the Summit complex in Colorado, making the jump that would solve the Mushroom. It was madness to spring off a mountain, but no climber could resist the move that would unravel a tough problem.

  He felt the jolt of the returning wind in the small of his back, driving him onward. When his mitts first touched the rope, he was startled for a moment, as if he hadn’t expected to make it. Then he grabbed on for dear life and hung there as the team leader hauled him aboard.

  Cap Cicero, veteran of a hundred expeditions and every tragedy and rescue in the book, threw his arms around his youngest climber and squeezed until Dominic could barely breathe. “I thought we lost you, kid!” he panted again and again. “I thought we lost you!”

  “I’m right here, Cap,” Dominic managed. “I’m fine.”

  The pilot pulled back on the controls, and the chopper swung away from Lucifer’s Claw. “Let’s get out of here,” he said, his face white. “We’ve already used up eight of our nine lives.”

  Bryn Fiedler suffered a broken arm and ankle, four cracked ribs, and a severe concussion. She also had mild frostbite on her fingers and toes, but the doctors said she would make a full recovery.

  “Doctors in Alaska see a lot of frostbite,” Cicero informed her. “So they know what they’re talking about.”

  Sammi, Perry, and Dominic visited her the next day in the hospital in Juneau. She was propped up in bed, her arm in a cast, bandages on her head, hands, and feet.