No Way Down

by Graham Bowley

  And besides simply being in the Death Zone, you couldn’t rely on the snow up here. Mandic looked at the rough surface beneath his boots. You could see blue ice shining under the snow. If a climber was unprepared, he could slip, easily, and it was a long way down. Probably sensible to go slowly. But then again this delay was ridiculous. The Serbian team had calculated they would be on the summit by 9:30 a.m. That is what Shaheen Baig had told them was possible. Mandic wished Shaheen was still with them.

  Mandic checked his watch. It was already 11 a.m. In his down suit, he could hardly stand the warmth of the day. He stared out at the sea of white mountains around him, their slopes striped by brown and black rock and coverings of snow, with trails of clouds spreading between the peaks.

  It was so hot, Mandic noticed, that a Norwegian climber called Cecilie Skog, who was standing only a few yards away from him, had taken off her purple jacket. Diminutive and pretty, the Norwegian woman was wearing dark sunglasses, and her long hair curled from beneath her helmet down onto her shoulders. From Norway’s western oil coast, the thirty-three-year-old climber had come to K2 with her husband, Rolf Bae, who was not far below in the line on the rope in the gully.

  About twenty or thirty feet below the little rock ledge where Mandic was waiting, three climbers finally let their frustration get the better of them and took matters into their own hands. They unclipped from the rope and began free-climbing in a snow channel up the side of the Bottleneck—as if there were no ice to worry about, and no drop below them.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Wilco van Rooijen called, as he clambered up the side, passing some of the climbers still on the rope. He made it clear to anyone who would listen that he had invested a lot of time and money to get to K2 again, and that he didn’t think highly of the expertise of some of the other expeditions.

  In his rush, he tried to pass Mandic’s colleague Iso Planic. As he did so, he fell off balance and slipped backward, catching the Serbian’s jacket with the sharp crampons on his boot. He was stopped by the arms of a Sherpa standing behind him who grabbed Van Rooijen’s jacket around his waist. Open-mouthed, Van Rooijen stared up in shock at Planic, whose coat had been ripped on the left shoulder; the inner lining was coming out. The Serb’s skin was also cut.

  Mandic noticed the small confusion below and tried to see what was happening. But the next second his attention was diverted away when the line of climbers suddenly began to move ahead across the Traverse.

  He saw his chance at last and scrambled across from the rock shelf where he had been standing, then moved up onto the tall ice wall. Then, to his frustration, within a few minutes the line of climbers stopped and he was blocked again by the knot of bodies in front of him.

  Looking back, he saw that his friend Planic had climbed up onto the ledge among the waiting crowd. Instead of turning left toward the Traverse, his colleague had climbed over to the opposite side to a free space where it looked like he was going to try to change his oxygen bottle. He had already begun to wrestle the cylinder from his backpack.

  Mandic decided that was a good idea; he would escape the crowd and join his friend. But when he turned around, he immediately came face to face with Cecilie Skog. There had been calls for more rope from the Traverse, and Skog, who was carrying a length of rope over her shoulder, was marching toward the Traverse like she meant business. Two thin oxygen pipes looped from her backpack to her nose. She said something about wanting to stash the rope in her backpack while she climbed across.

  “I’ll help you,” Mandic said, mouthing the words through his frozen balaclava and indicating with his hand.

  She nodded. Thank you.

  Mandic unclipped his carabiner from the line so Skog could get past him. He stepped gingerly behind her while she turned her back to him to offer her rucksack. He pulled his sleeve across his forehead, which was damp from sweat.

  As Mandic took another step to pass her, he felt his boot slide on the ice beneath the snow and suddenly his leg flew from under him. He fell forward onto Skog, pushing her down onto the ice, his body slumping heavily on top of hers.

  Shouts of alarm filled the air around them. From below, Skog’s husband, Rolf Bae, cried, “Hey Cecilie!”

  Bundled together on the ice slope, Mandic and Skog began to slide. They were on a steep slope and within a few seconds they would be going too fast to stop themselves. Below them was the three-hundred-foot drop of the hard Bottleneck and its sharp rocks.

  Skog fell for about three feet but her harness was still clipped to the rope and it stopped her. Mandic, however, had unclipped. As Skog stopped, he continued to slide, quickly.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Pedja Zagorac saw something falling. It shot along the side of the line of climbers and down the gully like a bullet.

  Then he heard the yelling, “That’s Dren! Dren! Dren!”

  He watched as the figure slipped farther down the Bottleneck, turning around and at one point cartwheeling all the way over, head over heels. After about four hundred feet, Mandic slowed and stopped.

  Mandic was going to be all right, one of the climbers assured Zagorac; in the Alps, people fell like that all the time. It was no worse than a tumble on a ski slope. A few said they would climb down to help the fallen climber.

  But as they were talking, Mandic stood up. Was he waving at them? Zagorac’s whole body flushed with relief. Thank God! On the way down, his friend hadn’t hit any rocks or anything.

  The next moment Mandic seemed to fold over and he slid again. Not so far this time, maybe three hundred feet, but he went down over some rocks and when he stopped he lay on the ice and didn’t stand up.

  Zagorac strained his eyes to see. Someone on the line shouted, “He’s moving! He moved his leg. I saw him.”

  He could hear people shouting into their radios. He’s moving.

  Zagorac felt himself shouting too, but he wasn’t sure what he was saying. He was crying. The Serbians’ HAP, Hussein, who was standing near him, was also shouting at the top of his voice. Zagorac wasn’t going to waste any more time. The climbers waiting around him moved aside, and he turned to face the mountain and rappelled down, praying under his breath and hoping he was not too late. He focused on breathing steadily and moving his legs fast. Let me be in time.

  It took him about fifteen minutes, but he eventually reached the end of the second length of fixed rope, where Mandic lay in the snow, his body pointing down the mountain. Panting heavily, Zagorac knelt down beside his friend. He stared at Mandic’s gray face. His head was beaten up. There was a lot of blood.

  “Dren!”

  He couldn’t believe that this was what had become of his friend. Zagorac quickly turned Mandic over and gave him mouth-to-mouth. Oh God. Help me. Help Dren.

  Mandic’s skin was warm. Zagorac waited for him to breathe. He put his mouth over the open lips once again. Come on, Dren. He pressed his fingers against Mandic’s neck, searching for a pulse, but he could feel nothing. As soon as he had seen him, Zagorac had known his friend was dead.

  After a few minutes, Hussein and Planic rappelled down to join Zagorac. They all stared blankly at Mandic’s body, catching their breath, looking at one another.

  What do we do?

  They felt sick. They got on the radio to tell Erdeljan the news. Erdeljan knew right away what to do.

  “Down now!” His voice crackled on the radio. “The expedition is over! Get down!”

  From a backpack, they unfolded some sponsors’ flags and a Serbian flag they had intended to take to the summit and laid them over their friend, trying to cover his injuries from view.

  Zagorac and Planic knotted a thirty-foot rope to Mandic’s safety belt. They were going to get him down and give him a decent burial. It was unusual and dangerous to lower a corpse from a 28,000-foot peak—a first rule of mountain rescue was never allow an injured or dead person to become the cause of multiple casualties. But they were not leaving him there.

  Preparing to set off took longer than they
had expected. They felt so numb and shaken. They always knew death was a possibility on the mountain, especially on K2. But they never imagined it would happen to them.

  Hussein took the backpacks and they stepped down the slope toward Camp Four, Zagorac and Planic carefully letting the rope out before them. It was hard work and they said little.

  It was not long before they saw a figure walk out from Camp Four and begin moving toward them over the Shoulder.

  Meanwhile, up on the Bottleneck, a single climber in yellow emerged from the people waiting on the ropes and began to climb down. He was a Balti HAP working for the Frenchman, Hugues d’Aubarède. Up close, it looked to some of the climbers on the ropes as though he was slightly disoriented, like he might have had altitude sickness. As the HAP passed the teams on the line, opening and closing the small metal clip of his jumar ascending device, he elicited calls of protest from some who said the jumar should really only be used for climbing up.

  He replied tartly that he did it all the time, and carried on awkwardly down the gully toward the group surrounding Mandic.

  CHAPTER THREE

  11:30 a.m.

  Since the record for climbing the tallest mountain on each of the seven continents had already been claimed, Fredrik Strang had traveled to K2 from Sweden as the first stop in an attempt to climb—and make a documentary about climbing—the second-tallest summit on each continent. Up at Camp Four, one of the first things he did, as news of Mandic’s fall spread, was set up his video camera and point it toward the Bottleneck. He zoomed in, trying to locate the fallen mountaineer.

  A few of the other climbers who rushed out from their tents also felt compelled to capture the moment, including a twenty-three-year-old American from Los Angeles, Nicholas Rice. Nick Rice had turned back from a summit attempt five hours earlier after he spilled melted water on his socks and had never warmed up again, and now he began snapping photographs. Other people held up their digital cameras, peering through the lenses to get a better look.

  Swearing in the zero-degree air, Strang interviewed Eric Meyer in front of his video camera.

  “People are dying up there and we are doing nothing!” Strang said.

  He and Meyer took a break from filming to gaze up the long, slanting avenue of the Shoulder. Mandic had tumbled down the Bottleneck and was lying prone at the bottom tip of an outcrop of rocks. If he was dead, they knew, they were not going up. But if there was hope he was still alive, they would try to rescue him.

  “Looks grave,” said Meyer.

  He waited and watched. The doctor’s climbing coat was unzipped and he was chewing gum. He said he thought he could see movement in Mandic’s arms and legs.

  A voice came on the radio from up in the Bottleneck. It was Chhiring Dorje, the Sherpa from the Americans’ team.

  “Yes, Chhiring, this is Eric at Camp Four. What’s happened?”

  Like Pemba Gyalje in the Dutch expedition, Dorje was in his thirties and an established Sherpa, with his own guiding business back in Nepal. He had come to K2 as a climber in his own right and more or less on equal terms with Meyer and the other members of the American team, although Meyer had loaned him several thousand dollars to get there.

  “One of the Serbs, he fell down,” said Dorje over the radio. “His leg is still moving.”

  Meyer had the radio pressed to his mouth and communicated the news to everyone on the frequency. “We can see a lone figure down at the bottom of the Bottleneck. He is moving, over.”

  After a few minutes, however, the body appeared still. Voices on the radio were now saying he was probably dead. But Meyer thought they could be mistaken since it was possible to miss a pulse if it was low in these temperatures.

  They tried to figure out what they should do. Should we go up? They had already climbed out toward the Bottleneck once today and they had to think of their own survival at this altitude. Yet on the other hand, a human being was out there and needed help.

  Strang got on the radio again and spoke with climbers still down at Base Camp whose minds were not as clouded as their own by altitude. He asked them whether a rescue attempt was wise. He was told they should try to help. Go fast. Take care.

  They knew it was the right thing to do.

  “If he is alive, he won’t be ambulatory,” Meyer said to Strang.

  They packed extra rope, oxygen, tubular nylon webbing, and a mattress pad for a sled to drag Mandic down. They also threw in a flask of warm water with electrolytes, a foil sleeping bag, and some energy bars. Strang packed his smaller lightweight Canon camera. Meyer spent a few extra minutes in his tent getting his medicines together—amphetamines, to help against the altitude, pain pills, suture supplies—so Strang set off first.

  He was in good shape and moved fast up the Shoulder, blowing out his cheeks, feeling the cold ripping through his lungs. Some people, when they reach the Shoulder, see the Bottleneck and then the serac and the upper mountain beyond, and say it looks like another mountain stacked on top of the first below. Strang was glad he didn’t have to go any higher than the Shoulder to drag the Serb down.

  After about half an hour, he noticed the three climbers from the Serbian team who had descended from the Bottleneck. They had already reached their fallen colleague. Strang hoped he would be in time to help the poor guy.

  It took Strang one and a half hours to ascend from 25,600 feet to 26,600 feet. When he was less than two hundred feet away from the group, he realized they were already dragging the Serb down.

  He was breathing hard when he reached them. The two Serbians, Predrag Zagorac and Iso Planic, were holding a rope, which was tied around Mandic’s harness, and they were sliding the body down the mountain in front of them, or sometimes behind. Their faces were mostly covered in balaclavas and goggles. Two yards to their left, their Pakistani porter, Hussein, was keeping his distance, unable, it seemed, to look at the corpse.

  Strang told the Serbians who he was but they reacted dully. He also took out his camera to film the scene. When the Serbs looked up questioningly, Strang said he needed the film for the record.

  “So we don’t repeat this!” he said. “So we learn about human nature.” He also wanted to avoid being accused later of doing something wrong. “Everything is recorded now,” he said. “Every single word.”

  The group took a rest, drinking some water and eating the chocolate the Swede gave them. Strang asked what had happened. He knelt down and felt Mandic’s cold skin but it was clear the Serbian was dead. A terrible fracture cut across Mandic’s skull. He was only half covered.

  One of the Serbs said they wanted to take the body at least to Camp Four, and perhaps all the way to Base Camp.

  Strang thought he must have misheard him, or that the Serb was delusional. Getting the body to Base Camp would be next to impossible. He would rather have left the body where it was but the Serbs were insistent and he felt sympathy for them. Their friend had died. They were in shock.

  “Look, you guys are tired,” he said, trying to reason with them. They stood in front of him, while beside them Hussein crouched in the snow. They were on a steep slope and the mountains were beautiful all around them.

  “You are on oxygen but I am not,” Strang said. “Let’s just focus on reaching Camp Four and we can give him a proper burial there. Even that’s dangerous.”

  The two Serbians agreed. Strang took out the pieces of rope and the mat and the nylon webbing and the foil sleeping bag to wrap the body.

  He looped the ropes around Mandic’s chest. He told the others they could take one end of the rope and he would hold the other. But he warned the Serbs that if there was any sign that Mandic was slipping out of control, they had to release him, unless they wanted to be dragged off the mountain.

  “Guys, if you do fall, you release. Okay? It’s our lives too. Okay?”

  As they had been resting, a figure dressed in yellow had approached slowly down the slope from the Bottleneck. The Serbs said the lone climber had been following them for some ti
me but that he had stayed about 100 feet behind them. From the way he was dressed—hand-me-down hat and boots, secondhand suit, it seemed—they thought he had to be one of the Pakistani HAPs. When he came up to them, they saw it was Jahan Baig, a thirty-two-year-old HAP, one of three who had been working for Hugues d’Aubarède.

  Baig was a farmer, with two sons and one daughter. He was a cousin to Shaheen Baig. He came from the same village, Shimshal, as Shaheen and several of the other HAPs. It was such a small village that Jahan, Shaheen, and d’Aubarède’s other porters, Qudrat Ali and Karim Meherban, shared the same grandfather. Qudrat, the most experienced, had started a climbing school in Shimshal, which his cousins had attended. Shimshal was about one hundred miles from K2, close to the Chinese border. Baig had been taken on by d’Aubarède after a Singaporean expedition fired him for refusing to carry equipment up to one of the high camps in bad weather. No Nepalese Sherpas were being asked to climb up, which Baig had said was unfair.

  Commercial mountain guiding had less of a tradition in these western flanks of the Himalayas than it did in Nepal, where the Sherpa reputation had grown over the years. But HAPs like Baig and Qudrat Ali were trying hard to develop a local industry and make it pay. It was a chance to make a decent living, and bring in foreign currency, in what was a poor region. Still, the HAPs were generally regarded as inferior to the Sherpas and sometimes there was rivalry between the two groups.

  Unlike most of the other HAPs, who often seemed overeager to please their clients, Jahan Baig was less accommodating. He rarely ate with the mountaineers in their tents, though that may have been because his English was poor; he spoke mostly Balti or Urdu.