Summit: A Novel

by Harry Farthing

  Taking out a small note pad and silver fountain pen from an inner pocket, Himmler jotted a note to himself.

  “I myself will speak to Reinhard Heydrich of the SD and the acting heads of both the gestapo and the kripo to obtain details of any current detainees that might have the necessary skills for the type of project you suggest. Once we have a list, you will obtain the dossiers on them and their families and select the most suitable candidates. We will review progress of this project in two weeks. Now let us move on to other matters.”

  “Berg heil!” said Pfeiffer, invoking the traditional German salute to the mountains as he began to neatly refold the map.

  The light glinted off Himmler’s spectacles, hiding the eyes but accenting the faint smile on the lips below, as he picked up the photograph of Everest. With his still-open pen, he slowly and carefully inscribed the two sig runes of the SS on its very apex before blowing gently on the photograph to dry the ink. Handing it back to Pfeiffer, he said, “Sieg … heil, my dear Jurgen. Sieg heil!”

  19

  Everest North Base Camp, Rongbuk Valley, Tibet—16,980 feet

  May 29, 2009

  8:54 p.m.

  Ahead, the large geodesic tent at the center of the No Horizons Base Camp glowed with yellow light, an illuminated blister on the moonscape of the Rongbuk Valley. Slowly, Quinn, Dawa, and Pemba continued to pick their way toward it through the dark, careful to avoid tripping over the guy ropes of other tents, wary of the vicious mastiff dogs of the Tibetan yak herders that always lurked around the edges of the camp.

  Every muscle and joint in Neil Quinn’s body was aching as if he had been pulled apart on some medieval torture rack. He had experienced the heavy fatigue that follows an Everest climb many times before. Usually he ignored it, brushing it aside with optimistic thoughts of home or the next trip, but this time it was different. The exhaustion and the pain were extreme, unlike anything he had ever felt before, amplified still further by other feelings—feelings of shame, regret, and failure. It had taken him all day to walk back down the glacier. Dawa could easily have gone on ahead quicker, but Quinn had insisted the Sherpa stay with him and Pemba. Not because he needed his help, but because Quinn wanted to be the one to meet Sarron face-to-face first. He had to be the one.

  Quinn stopped for a minute to catch his breath in anticipation of what was going to happen next. Nothing in Sarron’s habitually aggressive demeanor suggested that it was going to be an easy or a civilized encounter. Breathing deeply and slowly as if in preparation, he looked around at the other groups of tents that dotted the valley floor. Many of them were also lit; most of the teams were off the mountain now. A post-climb party was underway in one of the larger mess tents. He could see people spilling out of the tent, despite the bitter cold, drinking and dancing to the loud hip-hop music being played inside. They were rapping along to it, shouting words about being on “top of the world” at the top of their voices, raising beer bottles and glasses toward the summit, ecstatic that they had been there, that they had survived, that they too were now Everest summiteers.

  There would be no such party in the tent to which Quinn was headed, summit or no summit. The thought spontaneously made him turn back to the mountain, almost vainly hoping the kid was going to be there, just walking up the trail behind him, one more Everest summiteer ready to celebrate.

  But the trail was empty.

  The kid is dead.

  Accepting it meant it was time to face very different music.

  Quinn painfully walked on.

  I did everything I could.

  Finally arriving at the mess tent, they dropped their rucksacks outside and Dawa unzipped the curved fabric door to let the three of them in. Inside, the big domed tent was empty except for Wei Fang, the team’s Chinese liaison officer, and Phinjo, the expedition’s youngest cook boy. Fang, technically from the Chinese Himalayan Association and there to assist the expedition with its logistics as part of the CHA’s expedition permit, was really a low-pay-grade spy with the mission to prevent anything that might harm Chinese control of the region: no smuggling refugees into Nepal, no “Free Tibet” propaganda, no displaying the illegal Tibetan flag—particularly not on the summit of Qomolangma, most supreme of Chinese mountains.

  Fang was completely drunk, face pitched forward on the large trestle table that stood in the middle of the tent, its incongruous flower-patterned vinyl tablecloth littered with opened Pabst beer cans and half-full bottles of whiskey and vodka. The little cookboy was trying to clear the empties without disturbing the comatose Chinaman. Seeing the three of them enter, Phinjo stopped and looked at them as if he were seeing ghosts.

  “It’s all right, Phinjo. Can you go and tell Sarron that we are here?” Quinn said to the lad who instantly put down the tray and left the tent. To break the silent wait that followed, Quinn said to Dawa and Pemba, “Let me do the talking, okay?”

  Before the other two could even answer, the rip of the zip announced Sarron’s arrival.

  Ducking into the tent, the Frenchman looked first at Quinn and said, “Damn fucking right you’re going to be doing the talking.” He turned and shouted at Dawa and Pemba, “You two, get out!”

  The two Sherpa didn’t move, looking only at Quinn for instruction until he nodded that they should go. But before Pemba could step outside, Sarron pushed in front of him, blocking his way and shouting into his face, “Don’t think I’ve finished with you yet, you little fuck. I haven’t even started. You fucking want to sit up there in the Glacier Camp telling everyone my oxygen is bad. That it was all because of my fucking Os. You think you’re going to get away with that?”

  Instantly irritated, Quinn pushed between them. “Look, all Pemba was saying was that something felt wrong up there.” Even as he spoke, Quinn could smell the alcohol on Sarron’s heavy breath. He must have been keeping Wei Fang company.

  Staring back at Quinn, Sarron said only, “What?” Seemingly winded with rage, the Frenchman began to bite his lower lip, fixing his wild eyes on the Englishman until he could finally shout at the two stopped Sherpa, “Dawa, Pemba, I thought I said ‘Get the fuck out!’”

  “Mr. Neil?” Dawa asked.

  “It’s all right. Just wait outside for now,” Quinn answered.

  Trying to defuse the tension, Quinn raised both his hands as the Sherpa left and said slowly, as calmly as possible to Sarron, “Look Jean-Philippe, be calm. We had a bad day, a terrible day, I’ll admit it, but you know how it is up there; things can and do go wrong. I did everything I could to save that boy from the moment he went down on the summit. All Pemba was saying was that something was off, we don’t know what but there was something, maybe the kid had a heart condition, I don’t know, but make no mistake, it shouldn’t have end—”

  Before Quinn could finish, Sarron moved in close, angling his enraged face up at him and screaming, “TA GUELLE! C’EST DE CONNERIES!”

  Quinn, clearly unable to reason with the incensed Frenchman, shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.

  “What the fuck does that even mean? Look, I’m trying to explain what happened up there.”

  “IT … MEANS … ‘QUINN, … SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH YOUR BULLSHIT!!!’ I don’t want to hear about your bad fucking day, about Pemba being sick, or the oxygen, or the kid’s shitty gloves, or your lost ice axe, or any of the other pathetic excuses that have been filtering down from the Glacier Camp for the past twenty-four hours because you were too shit-scared to come and tell me yourself. I may have listened to you this morning but it’s too fucking late in the day now. It’s done. The kid is fucked. And now his rich papa is going to see that I am also. He won’t pay me what he owes on the expedition. He won’t pay any of it. I needed that fucking money. It was important. Getting that boy to the top and back safely was why I employed you, one of the reasons that Tate Senior chose my expedition above so many others, and you screwed it up completely.”


  For a second, what he was hearing reminded Quinn of the $100,000 summit bonus—all that Sarron could talk about before the climb. Wondering if such an amount of money could really be that important or if it was the drink making Sarron so crazy, Quinn told himself, once more, to try and stay reasonable. “Well you obviously don’t want to hear me out but I’m telling you something was wrong. Maybe we should try and do this tomorrow. You are clearly in no condi—”

  Again Sarron interrupted him, this time apoplectic, shouting so loud that the whole Base Camp must have heard.

  “THE ONLY THING THAT WAS WRONG UP THERE WAS YOU, YOU IDIOT! YOU KILLED MY CLIENT! YOU AND YOUR FUCKING SHERPA FRIENDS ABANDONED NELSON TATE JUNIOR ON THE SECOND STEP! YOU MUST HAVE! THAT BOY DIDN’T WEIGH MORE THAN A FUCKING CHICKEN. A GUY LIKE YOU—YOU COULD HAVE CARRIED HIM DOWN BY YOURSELF!”

  “You know that’s not true.”

  Sarron stopped and looked at Quinn, then said with an apparent relish, “It’s what I have already told his father this evening. You should have got back quicker.”

  Quinn was stunned. “You can’t have. But if you did then obviously you do have something to hide. Maybe Pemba is right about your oxygen.”

  Something in Sarron snapped. Without warning he launched himself at Quinn’s throat.

  Together they fell, crashing back onto the table, sending bottles, cans, and the Chinese liaison officer flying to the floor.

  Hitting the ground hard, Wei Fang came to, shrieking like a stuck pig as he scrambled on all fours to the side of the tent.

  Quinn, weak from the climb, struggled to hold the rabid Frenchman above him as Sarron snatched up a fallen vodka bottle and, holding the neck, smashed it against the hard ground. It broke in an explosion of glass and clear spirit.

  Sarron thrust the jagged remnant of the bottle at Quinn.

  Desperate to keep the stabbing, razor-sharp edge away from his face, Quinn jerked his left hand up to grab Sarron’s wrist. But however hard he tried to push it away, the glass spike kept getting nearer and nearer. Sarron, strong and rested from being only at the Base Camp, was simply overpowering him.

  Just as the glass edge sliced across his cheek with a spurt of blood, the Frenchman was suddenly wrenched up and away from Quinn.

  Pemba had the arm with the bottle, Dawa, the shaft of the old ice axe under Sarron’s chin and across his neck.

  Together, the two Sherpas pulled him back and over onto the ground.

  Other Sherpas and Tibetans began pouring into the tent as Quinn got up.

  Lhakpa and a Sherpa Quinn didn’t recognize joined Pemba in holding Sarron down as Dawa stood, resting the steel end-spike of the axe on Sarron’s throat, saying only, “Stop.”

  The Frenchman wrestled once against the hold of his captors, forcing Dawa to jab the spike tighter into his throat.

  “Stop,” he repeated.

  This time Sarron did.

  “I suggest you go now, Sarron,” Quinn said, getting up from the floor, holding his bleeding face.

  Sarron said nothing, immobile, just staring back up with hatred.

  Slowly Dawa pulled the axe tip back. As he did so, the Frenchman began to speak, softer now, all the time staring at the spike of the old ice axe Dawa was still pointing at him. “C’est ma maison ici. You really think you can do this to me here and get away with it?”

  Shaking his arms from the grip of the other Sherpas, Sarron got up and, looking at Quinn, said, “Someone told me that you were crying during the descent, saying it should be you still up on the Second Step, not that kid. Frankly, my friend, it would have been better if it were. Don’t think that I have finished with you or your two Sherpa saviors yet.” Pushing through the onlookers, he left the tent.

  With the show over, the mess tent emptied as Dawa organized for Quinn’s face to be butterfly stitched and then disappeared into a group of Sherpas and Tibetans. An agitated discussion started amongst them all just outside the tent’s door. When it finally quieted down, Dawa reappeared alongside Quinn to say that between them all they were going to keep a watch for Sarron so he couldn’t try anything more that night.

  Quinn thanked him yet again for everything he had done.

  Dawa just nodded in silent response before raising up the old axe once more.

  “Mr. Neil, I keep this for you. I bring it. For you,” he said, pushing the axe toward him.

  Quinn had totally forgotten about the old axe from the gorak cave until he had seen it at Sarron’s throat. Having it in front of him now brought it all flooding back. “Sorry, Dawa, but I don’t want that thing.”

  “No, Mr. Neil. It save you twice now. I know you meant to have it,” Dawa insisted, pushing the long wooden axe into his reluctant hand.

  Quinn took it, if only to humor the veteran Sherpa. As he did so, he noticed the moon-faced Wei Fang was still there, staring intently at them both. Quinn walked across to him and, with his free hand, snatched the whiskey bottle the Chinaman had salvaged from the floor.

  “I need that more than you.”

  20

  Using the long ice axe as a walking stick, Quinn gradually left the battleground behind. A canopy of bright stars now filled the night sky curving over him and, although even colder, there was not the slightest breeze to carry away the intensifying noise from the summit party in the other, distant mess tent. It was still in full swing, probably recently reinvigorated by news of the fight in the No Horizons Tent. Everest Base Camp thrived on two things: summits and gossip.

  The cut on his cheek stinging, Quinn stopped, trying to shake off the pain and the shock of Sarron’s attack. He had always heard that the guy was difficult, a tough guy, a bit of a crook even, but there were many of those on Everest and he had worked well with a lot of them. Even when people had particularly warned him about Sarron he had thought that he could deal with pretty much anyone. But he couldn’t handle this guy. He was absolutely crazy.

  But isn’t it really your own hubris that walked you into this nightmare?

  Quinn knew it was. He had told himself that after eight summits he had Everest’s number, that he could get a sixteen-year-old boy up and down it, even when inside he had serious reservations about getting involved with such a young client.

  And yes, it was also about the money.

  The expedition company that originally booked him for 2009 had folded just a few months before the season began. When he had made it known to the other outfits he was available, he thought he’d already missed out for that year, but almost immediately Sarron had jumped at the chance of hiring him. Quinn had actually been slightly flattered that the Frenchman had been so keen. Like him or not, Sarron was an important player on the mountain and the fact that he was also offering to pay him twenty thousand dollars to be the head guide, more than he was usually paid, with a bonus of another ten thousand if one client in particular was successful, made it better still. Until that season Quinn had always accepted that he was never going to be paid enough for the task of guiding on Everest. It hadn’t mattered. He made up the shortfall in his wallet in his head, with thoughts that April and May were lean months elsewhere in the mountains and that he would be doing what he loved on the greatest mountain in the world. Yes, it was true. The combination of his hubris and Sarron’s—or should he say, Tate Senior’s money—had pushed his normal standards aside.

  Unscrewing the cap of the whiskey bottle, he took yet another long swig, letting it burn, hurt even. When he pulled the bottle back down, he noticed the music from the party again. An older rock song was playing. It was called “Photograph.”

  Of course it was.

  The word immediately took him back to those chaotic moments on the summit with Dawa and the boy—dangerous, absurd, little more than a soulless business transaction.

  All for a bloody photograph.

  Quinn was still surprised and disgusted with himself that he had gone alon
g with it. With everything that had happened since, the fact that he hadn’t even looked at his camera put the futility of that summit photo into even greater context.

  But why am I so surprised?

  One way or the other, it was always about a photograph.

  Even for him.

  A photograph had brought him to that place, to mountaineering, in fact.

  Standing there, alone in the cold, drinking more whiskey, he recalled the tall-ceilinged school library where he had first seen the fateful picture. In the beginning that library had just been a place of sanctuary, a book-lined alternative to the hard walls and fickle Lord of the Flies atmosphere that otherwise pervaded the old English boarding school he was sent to at seven years old. He would hide inside its realm of utter silence, forensically working his way through the literary fads of young boys in the ’70s: hand-me-down paperbacks by men like Dennis Wheatley, James Herbert, Sven Hassel, Erich von Däniken, that weren’t even to be found on the library’s shelves but bartered and borrowed in the dangerous corridors outside.

  Whenever he finished his latest contraband text, he would be drawn to the rows of National Geographic that blocked a wall of shelves with decades of fading yellow.

  Those compact, solid journals soon became his reason to visit the library. Quinn would study them for hours, diving into the rich, glossy photographs and reading the elegant descriptions. He let them transport him far from that place, to the top, the bottom, the hottest, the coldest, the wettest, the driest, even the nothingness of outer space. He didn’t know it then, but those magazines ignited a wanderlust that would never leave him, a desire for adventure that could never be satisfied, however much he tried.

  One image appeared often. It was the perfect photograph, one of the most famous of the twentieth century. Every time he came across it, it would hold him transfixed within its sublime instant. The picture showed a man in an almost jaunty “one foot up, one foot down” pose, as if triumphantly stepping onto the shoulder of some huge beast he had hunted for years and finally felled with the perfect shot. A tight snow pyramid beneath his feet cascaded down like newly opened champagne. To each side of its sloping, white shoulders, a distant horizon was lined with the tops of other mighty, yet clearly lower, mountains. It was unequivocally the “top of the world.”