by Rick Chesler
Irate he could handle, Ian told himself. Grief he couldn’t. That was really what he feared most. The grief of a wife for her husband, of a mother for her son. He couldn’t live through another conversation like the one he’d had with Liz when Luke fell from K2.
He lifted the sat-phone. His left arm hurt so badly he didn’t think he could dial; limply it hung in the air like a broken branch ready to fall.
Just then the radio buzzed to life.
“Base Camp,” said a familiar voice racked with shivers. “Please to come in. This is Tashi.”
Ian instantly dropped the sat phone and reached for the transmitter. Like a drunk thirsty for his third scotch, he eagerly lifted it to his lips.
“Furst here,” he rasped. “What’s your status, Tashi? Over.”
“We are moving slowly along the Cornice Traverse toward the base of the Hillary Step, boss.”
Ian’s first thought was, what the hell was Tashi doing moving up the mountain, into the storm? His sirdar was smart; he knew the mountain. He could see the bloody sky if not the weather report.
Then something else registered. What in the hell did he mean by we?
“Who’s with you, Tashi?”
There was a long moment when nothing was said. An array of faces rushed like a river through Ian’s head, among them Blaisdell and the Italian, Simon and his clients.
But Tashi said: “The American, boss. Doctor Hitchens.”
A swell of excitement filled Ian’s chest. But then: “What in the hell are you doing advancing on the summit in a bloody storm? You were specifically ordered to retrieve Hitchens and bring him back down.”
“No choice, boss.” The Sherpa’s voice betrayed the fact he was fighting for each breath. “It’s below us.”
Ian struggled to keep his composure. He glanced at his monitor. There it was, plain as day. “The hell it is,” he rasped. “The bloody storm is above you and moving fast.”
A long silence. Then: “Not the storm, boss.”
Ian shot a look at Aasif, trying like hell to comprehend. The doctor shrugged and shook his head.
“Tashi,” Ian said, “this is no time to be cryptic. Please explain. What in the bloody hell is below you?”
Another long silence followed. When Tashi’s voice returned it was even lower, nothing more than a frightened whisper.
“Kang-mi.”
“That’s–” Aasif started.
“That’s the Sherpa term for snow man, yes, I know,” Ian said, his chest tightening. “Tashi’s bloody hypoxic.”
Ian put the mic to his lips again. “Listen to me, Tashi. There is no kang-mi. Whatever you think you saw or heard was merely a hallucination caused by the altitude. You need to descend to breathe in more oxygen. There’s no time to delay.”
“It’s below us, boss,” Tashi said again.
“Nothing’s below you but safety, Tashi. You and Hitchens need to descend. I say again, there is no kang-mi. The snow man is only legend.”
Over the radio came a hideous high-pitched shriek that pushed Ian back in his seat.
“What the hell was that?” Patty asked . “Radio feedback or interference?”
Ian shook his head in the negative. A long, drawn-out silence ensued in the communications tent.
Then Tashi’s voice whispered: “We must to move forward, boss. It’s coming back.”
Chapter 29
Hillary Step
Zack’s head swung around when he heard the monstrous shriek. It seemed to emanate from just below them.
Tashi had heard it too, his eyes scanning the traverse like a frightened cat. Then into his walkie he said: “We must to move forward, boss. It’s coming back.”
Moving forward along the four hundred-foot long Cornice Traverse was no fun prospect. In fact, this was easily for Zack the most terrifying part of the climb. The traverse was a knife-edge ridge of ice and snow that would send any incautious climber sliding eight to ten thousand feet down either the Southwest or Kangshung Face, depending upon which direction they fell.
Fortunately, there were fixed ropes, placed along the route earlier in the expedition by the Sherpas.
Zack searched for signs that Dustin and Francesca had come this way, but there were none to be found. A light but steady snow already fell, filling in Zack and Tashi’s footsteps as they plodded along the route.
Together they moved on.
Back on the South Summit, Tashi had saved Zack’s life. The Sherpa brought him to with a timely injection of dex, then fed him warm water made from melted snow. Tashi had helped him to his feet, carried him away from the dome of snow, until Zack could walk on his own.
Now Zack was searching for Dustin and Francesca, Tashi for Egger and Norbu, Vergé and Ruiz. Both, it seemed, fled from whatever it was Zack had seen below, though neither man once spoke about it to the other.
Zack vaguely recalled the image now, hoping it was only an hypoxia-induced hallucination. But that didn’t explain the revolting high-pitched shriek.
Or that sickening smell.
Zack breathed in the bottled oxygen. Each step required a rest, each rest several deep breaths before he could move on again. If there was a more hellish place on the face of the earth, Zack thought, he hoped like hell he’d never see it.
Slowly he and Tashi pushed through the clouds, pushed against the driving snow. The weather was worsening. Ian had been right--a storm was coming.
Zack completely lost track of time, but it seemed like days had passed since Tashi rescued him from the South Summit. Now that they were finally almost upon it, Zack could see in all its misery the forty-foot spur of snow and ice known as the Hillary Step.
He turned to Tashi. The Sherpa’s eyes seemed locked not on the Step itself but on a spot on the icy rock near its base. Zack tried to follow his gaze.
Then he saw it, too.
Before Zack could react, Tashi was tearing the glacier goggles from his face and moving as quickly as he could toward the Step.
“Tashi, wait,” Zack hollered from behind his oxygen mask, but the Sherpa moved too fast.
Zack followed him.
The body was curled up with a yellow oxygen tank, still hugging it as a child would a teddy bear. Its leg was bent backward in a way that was all at once fascinating and grotesque. The face was mercifully coated with snow.
But there was no mistaking the dead man’s identity.
Tashi dropped to Norbu’s side and even above the roar of the worsening wind, Zack could hear the sirdar cry.
Zack stood stock still, unsure what to do next. The clock was ticking. He and Tashi had a limited amount of oxygen on their backs, and if they ran out high on the mountain both men would surely die. But he couldn’t very well pull the Sherpa from his friend. He’d give him five minutes, he thought.
Then Zack lowered himself to sit down for a rest.
As he did, he felt something crack under his weight, and he leapt up so fast he nearly tumbled down the Southwest Face. Through his snow-covered glacier goggles he could barely make out its shape, something buried just below the surface of the snow.
Tentatively, he dusted some of the white away, revealing a bright yellow fabric that he’d seen a lot of the past forty-five days.
Zack didn’t need to see its face to know that it was the body of Kurt Egger.
Zack tried to summon his hate, but he felt nothing but sympathy for the fallen Austrian. For Egger’s fiancée. He breathed in as much oxygen as he could and turned away.
“We have to keep moving, Tashi,” he shouted.
The Sherpa didn’t put up a fight. He pointed up the Hillary Step and explained the rope could only handle one climber at a time.
Zack took the lead. Tashi followed right behind.
* * *
At the top of the Hillary Step, Zack and Tashi were met with another grizzly scene: Gaston Vergé and Miguel Ruiz melded together like strips of sheet metal, their faces black with frostbite, their eyelids frozen closed.
So th
is was how lives ended high on Everest, Zack thought.
He looked up at the sky, thankful the weather was holding out. The sun had even pierced through the clouds, enough to make Zack glad he had his glacier goggles.
He glanced at Tashi, at his naked eyes. The Sherpa’s goggles lay somewhere below the Hillary Step.
“We’re there,” Tashi announced.
Zack scanned the horizon and though he knew it to be true, he could hardly believe it. No more obstacles challenged them. The road to the roof of the world was hereafter unimpeded. With a rush of excitement and a wave of relief, Zack positioned one foot in front of the other and climbed toward the summit. All he had to break past now were clouds, as he trudged through the freshly fallen snow at his feet.
Visibility was poor but now Zack, though he’d never been here before, was almost acting on instinct. It was as though the peak were magnetized, Zack a piece of metal. The summit continued, as it had all along, to somehow draw him near.
He listened to Tashi’s footfalls as the Sherpa followed him.
As they slowly closed in, Zack heard something else. Muffled voices. Words no doubt muffled by oxygen masks coming from the direction of the peak.
Zack wiped at his goggles and fought through the clouds.
The voices grew louder. One unmistakably male. The other unmistakably Francesca.
Before Zack could even see him, he recognized Dustin’s voice call out through the mist.
“Welcome to the top of the world, Professor.”
Chapter 30
Top of the World
29,035 feet above sea level. The highest point on earth.
It all seemed so surreal that Zack thought he might still be stranded on the South Summit, hypoxic and hypothermic, hallucinating all this, collapsed in the snow waiting to die. Or maybe back in Kathmandu, under the raging feet of police and protestors, his face smashed to a bloody pulp, his mangled mind preparing to shut down. Though even that seemed preposterous. No, chances were he was still in Bristol, unconscious on the filthy floor outside his classroom, under the glare of the flickering fluorescent lights, Arnold Peavy and Officers Lake and Stinson trying to revive him.
Then he saw the blur of purple next to the blur of blue, both faces hidden behind oxygen masks and glacier goggles, and it suddenly seemed too real to be an illusion.
“Dustin?” Zack said. “Francesca?”
“Congratulations, Zack,” Dustin said, extending a gloved hand. “You did it, pal. Made it to the roof of the fucking world.”
Even before Zack had released Dustin’s hand, Francesca was in his arms. She felt warm and comfortable, even here, at the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner.
“Felicitazione,” she said from behind her oxygen mask. “Congratulations, Zack.”
Then, as the winds ripped the peak, threatening to blow the four climbers off their feet, she pressed her oxygen mask against his, gripping his back, pulling him toward her in a fantastical embrace. Zack instinctively closed his eyes behind his goggles, madly wishing the masks away, even as he knew they were both enveloped in a pocket of air as thin as though it weren’t there.
In their way, they kissed.
A chill ran through Zack that for once had nothing to do with the forty-below-zero temperature or the approaching storm, a chill that had once frozen him in ninety-degree heat on the New England beach where he’d first kissed Nadia.
But a storm was indeed approaching. And fast. Zack gazed to his left and saw it coming, sure as a man stuck on tracks must see the titanic train barreling down on him.
He’d better act fast and do on the summit what he’d come here to do.
Abruptly, with no small degree of regret, Zack released Francesca and tore off his rucksack. He unzipped it and dug in, feeling around for the urn. And then his hands were around it, lifting his wife’s remains from the pack.
He glanced around. There was no privacy to be had on the summit of Everest. Roughly the size of a large picnic table, the snow-covered peak sloped steeply away in all directions. Venture too far any which way and risk a ten-thousand-foot fall, or more.
Zack cautiously pushed toward the assortment of offerings, the prayer flags and photographs, the letters and mementoes left behind by previous climbers. It was here he removed the top of the urn and released her ashes, the fierce wind picking them up and carrying them east toward Kanchenjunga.
Silently he said goodbye.
But wasted no more time. Digging into a small compartment of his rucksack he retrieved his wallet. Without a thought to the killer chill, he removed one glove to flip through his pictures. He snatched Nadia’s photo and instantly saw that stuck to it again was Corinne’s. Back-to-back, it seemed both women were destined to remain frozen together forever on the summit.
It was then he noticed that two of the photos resting on the summit were framed, to protect them from the elements. The glass and plastic were cracked and split, the metal massacred, the pictures inside already yellowed and frozen, but at least the framed photos remained. Zack felt a pang of regret, of guilt. Felt instantly foolish and incompetent, as he had when he handed the Abbott dollars instead of rupees.
Meanwhile, his bare hand had frozen. He could no longer control its movements, not so much as wriggle his fingers. He grasped the photos in his claw like an eagle might carry its prey.
Then he sunk to his knees, ripped the photos from his frozen fist with his gloved hand and set them down in the snow.
He closed his eyes and said again, “Goodbye.” Then he slowly reopened them.
From behind his glacier goggles, Zack’s gaze caught on one of the framed photos. A picture of someone he thought he recognized. He lifted the frame and dusted off some of the snow.
It couldn’t be, he thought.
Couldn’t be.
But it was.
* * *
“Last we heard,” Ian rasped into the satellite phone, “he and my best Sherpa were nearing the base of the Hillary Step.” He sighed, bile rising in his throat. “That was some time ago. Haven’t heard anything since.” Ian paused, trying to catch his breath. “I’m sorry to say, it doesn’t look good for him, mate.”
“My god,” whispered the voice on the other end. “What have I done.”
Ian winced at the sorrow in his friend’s voice. If he could have, he would’ve reached through the sat-phone and pulled the brazen bastard into an embrace, the kind they shared together years ago on the summit of this very mount.
“Can’t bloody well blame yourself, mate,” Ian said, his eyes tearing up. “Ultimately, I’m the one who talked Hitchens into going up.” He clenched his teeth and grabbed at his chest, trying to conceal his shaking hand from Patty and Aasif. “If he dies, it’s on my head, not yours.”
He was met with silence on the other end.
“Marvin?” Ian said.
* * *
Zack lifted up the photograph of Corinne Combs. Not the one he had inadvertently brought to the summit, but a framed photo aged decades but freshly laid on the peak.
In the next frame was another yellowed photo. That of a pair of men - one white, one black - embracing near this very spot, here on the summit of Everest.
Zack now knew whose visage was hidden behind the oxygen mask, whose eyes were screened behind the pair of goggles. Zack now knew who had been standing next to the great Ian Furst in that yellowing photograph behind the bar at Rum Doodle, the shot taken here on this same peak so long ago.
* * *
“Marvin?” Ian said again.
Years ago Ian himself had led Marvin Combs up this very mountain in the American professor’s quest for the Seven Summits. This following the long painful death of Marvin’s wife Corinne from cancer.
Back then the mountains had clearly changed the man, saved him from an existence of grief and anger and the futile struggle of searching for so-called meaning in life. Everest, Marvin had proclaimed on the summit, was his messiah.
So when Ian received the cal
l from Marvin earlier this year that a young professor named Hitchens was in need of the same, the expedition leader didn’t hesitate, not for a moment. Marvin promised to get the young man as far as Kathmandu. Ian would take him the rest of the way. To the Khumbu, to Base Camp, to the peak, if bloody possible.
Ian was sure that if he could get Hitchens as far as Base Camp, he could get him to climb. Certain that if he could get the bastard to climb, he had a chance at the top. A chance at destiny. But now, as they had six years ago with Luke on K2, things had gone wrong. The mountain had turned sour. Had murdered at least three of his men and maybe all of his clients. Ian’s last stand had become a bloody catastrophe.
From halfway across the world, Ian listened as Marvin quietly wept. Not sobs of sadness, but of guilt. A sound Ian knew all too well. A sound he often made himself, often in the dead of night as he thought of Luke, of Liz.
“When this ends,” Marvin said, his voice hushed, “you let me know. I’m coming to the mountain to collect his remains.”
Ian had nothing to say to that, nothing at all. His friend Marvin knew as well as he did that such an idea was ludicrous. That any attempt at such a high elevation was an attempt at nothing but bloody suicide.
“Of course,” Ian managed before he hung up the sat-phone.
Slowly he turned to Patty.
“You don’t look well,” she said, her mouth frowning in concern.
You don’t say, he thought.
But just as Ian finally parted his weathered lips to respond, the bloody radio barked to life.
* * *
“Base Camp, this is Zack Hitchens. Please come in. I need to speak to Ian.”
Zack waited on his knees, his eyes still locked on the photo of Ian’s smiling face, his arm wrapped loosely around Marvin’s.