The Best American Crime Reporting 2008
Page 34
In May 2007, Benitez made it to the top of Everest for a sixth time, and he did it from the Nepal side. Normally wasted but ecstatic atop the roof of the world, Benitez says that this time he experienced disappointment.
“I realized I’m not a fireman or a policeman or anyone else who saves lives,” he says. “I’m just a mountaineer, part of a substrata of society that people can’t peg. What happened on Cho Oyu made me realize that there’s something more important than just reaching the summit. So I stood on top of Everest and thought, What’s the point of this?”
JONATHAN GREEN is an award-winning journalist who has reported on jihadist militias in Sudan, corruption in oil-rich Kazakhstan, the destruction of the rainforest in the Borneo jungle, and Tibetan refugees in the high Himalaya, among other subjects and places. He has won several journalism awards, including the American Society of Journalists and Authors award for reporting on a significant topic for his piece “Hooked on the Gold Rush,” an investigation into human rights violations connected with gold mining in west Africa.
He has written for Men’s Journal, the New York Times, Best Life, Reader’s Digest, British GQ, and Esquire, among many other publications. He is writing a book based on this piece, Murder in the High Himalaya, which will be forthcoming from PublicAffairs.
Coda
Shortly after the shooting, my editor at the Mail on Sunday espied a small newspaper item on the incident. She called me to see if there was a deeper story worth investigating. I knew nothing about Tibet, but discovered that the murdered nun was just one of thousands of refugees fleeing oppression to freedom along a well-trodden trail. What was extraordinary was that while many wanted to flee the oppression, others would risk everything to meet the Dalai Lama in exile in northern India only to return to Tibet. For some Tibetan Buddhists, meeting the Dalai Lama for even a few short seconds is worth risking their lives on the high passes and against the guns of Chinese soldiers.
Roughly two months after the shooting, I was in the high Himalaya on assignment. I had been on the trail in Nepal’s Himalaya for days, trekking up to fifteen thousand feet along knife-edge ravines and scrambling over rocks and boulders attempting to avoid the Maoist insurgents who controlled the mountains and had killed thirteen thousand so far in their bloody campaign for power in this tiny, poverty-stricken country. Heaving for oxygen in the thin air, we had hiked to the Chinese-occupied Tibetan border from Namche Bazaar, a mountain village at eleven thousand feet and a hub for the Sherpa communities. It’s the last place to hire porters and supplies before Everest base camp.
My Sherpa guide Ramesh, Tibetan translator Kunchok, and I were all trying to blend in as tourists and mountaineers. But while others went east to Everest base camp from Namche, we scurried west toward China. We were searching for Tibetan refugees escaping the murder, torture, and ethnic cleansing that were driving them from their homeland to the relative safety of neighboring Nepal, and then into safety in exile in northern India.
High up in the mountains in a hamlet called Thame, I was ushered into some traders’ tents under cover of darkness. I met two brothers, their faces lit by a flickering yak-dung fire, who were helping their three sisters, quietly observing me, escape from China to live peacefully as Buddhist nuns. The same two brothers were camp cooks with the expedition that observed the killing at Nangpa La Pass. After the shooting, they realized Tibet was becoming increasingly dangerous under the Chinese, so they wanted their sisters to have the chance of a better life.
The brothers also told me that two years ago they had worked with a climbing expedition and encountered a seventeen-year-old girl who had fallen down a crevasse while fleeing Tibet. “The people she was with tied clothes together and tried to pull her out but it wasn’t long enough,” said one brother, Tsering. “The other refugees could only string prayer flags over the hole, drop some barley for her to eat, and watch as the girl was swallowed alive as her body heat melted the ice and she slipped further and further into the crevasse. The climbers watched through binoculars and did nothing,” says Tsering. “They had ropes but they climbed the mountain instead.”
It disgusted me. When I returned home I also dug into the story of the climbers who witnessed the shooting.
After the story was published, the mountaineering community polarized around the issue. Some readers wrote in to cheer Luis’s brave whistle-blowing. But privately, still more attacked him for speaking out against his fellow climbers and the “brotherhood of the rope.” “This is a very dark secret at the heart of our community,” said Benitez. “I have been getting flak from a lot of people to keep my mouth shut. But this is a story that needs to be told. It’s just sad that more aren’t rallying around the cause. I have no regrets. I would do exactly the same again if I had to.”
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ABOUT THE EDITORS
JONATHAN KELLERMAN received his Ph.D. in psychology at the age of twenty-four. In 1985, his first novel, When the Bough Breaks, became a New York Times bestseller, was produced as a TV movie, and won the Edgar Allan Poe and Anthony awards for best first novel. Since then, he has written twenty-seven bestselling crime novels, including, most recently, Compulsion.
OTTO PENZLER is the proprietor of the Mysterious Bookshop, the founder of the Mysterious Press, the creator of Otto Penzler Books, and the editor of many books and anthologies, including the annual Best American Mystery Stories.
THOMAS H. COOK is the author of twenty-one books—two works of nonfiction an
d nineteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair, which won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, and the recent Master of the Delta.
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The Best American CRIME REPORTING
Editors
2002: NICHOLAS PILEGGI
2003: JOHN BERENDT
2004: JOSEPH WAMBAUGH
2005: JAMES ELLROY
2006: MARK BOWDEN
2007: LINDA FAIRSTEIN
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Cover design by Allison Saltzman
Cover photograph © Geostock/Getty Images
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THE BEST AMERICAN CRIME REPORTING 2008. Copyright © 2008 by Otto Penzler and Thomas H. Cook. Introduction copyright © 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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*The victims’ names have been changed to protect their identities.