by Rick Chesler
Zack took one final look skyward. Dark clouds had swallowed Everest’s summit.
The storm was coming in. Fast..
* * *
At the bottom of the Second Step, Zack led Tashi to safety. Then he lifted his ice ax and returned to the base of the ladder.
“What are you doing?” Francesca shouted from behind her oxygen mask.
With his ice ax, Zack swung at the ropes that held the new aluminum ladder in place. “If the yeti can’t get down the Second Step, he can’t follow us,” he said, as a second rope split into two. Zack struck the ladder again, this time knocking off one of the aluminum steps.
Francesca stepped toward him. “You really think that thing uses a ladder?”
“It’s hardly a thing,” Zack said as he raised the ice ax again. “And yes, I do.”
“He’s right,” Dustin said, rushing over to help Zack rip the ladder from the face of the mountain. “It’s intelligent, probably every bit as intelligent as you or me.”
“But,” she said, “it is an animal.”
Zack lifted the ice ax and shredded a stubborn rope. He set the ax down and turned to her. “We all are.”
Zack and Dustin pulled the ladder from the face of the mountain with all their might, Zack willing his frozen right hand to aid him. It took every last bit of muscle he had, but the ladder finally tore free. Together they tossed it aside, down the North Face of the mountain. The sound of the crash was drowned out by the increasing winds, coming in harder and faster with each passing minute.
Zack checked the gauge on his oxygen tank. The O2 was all but gone.
“We have to hurry,” Dustin shouted, lifting his gear. “No ladder might slow the beast down, but it’s not going to stop it. Sure as hell isn’t going to save us.”
Zack peered up the now featureless thirty-foot wall. “How do you know?”
Dustin’s face was grim. “Because it didn’t save George Mallory.”
* * *
Dustin sighed heavily at the bottom of the Second Step.. He didn’t have time to fully explain, so he gave Zack the shortened version.
Back in the cave at Kala Pattar, the infant had been bleeding from the gunshot wound to its chest. So Dustin grabbed the first thing he came across, a worn piece of fabric he found on the floor of the cave. He crudely swaddled the infant in the material and ran.
It wasn’t until hours later when the sun rose over Base Camp and he finally felt somewhat safe that he examined the carcass of the infant. It truly represented a missing link between ape and man. A yeti, yes. At least that was what it would be called by a layman. But scientists, himself included, would forever refer to it as something else.
But that wasn’t pertinent just now. What was significant was the fabric in which he’d wrapped the infant . Upon closer inspection he saw it was in fact an old flannel shirt. A flannel shirt with a fragment of a laundry label still sewn to the collar. And a name.
A. IRVINE
“Andrew Irvine,” Zack said, his mouth agape, his oxygen mask hanging around his neck. “George Mallory’s 1924 climbing partner.”
Dustin nodded. “When I returned to the States, I did some research. I learned everything I could about Mallory and Irvine’s last climb. And I don’t think it’s mere coincidence that the Kodak Vestpocket camera Mallory carried was never found.”
Mallory and Irvine had last been seen high on the Northeast Ridge by their climbing partner Noel Odell, who was stationed with a telescope at one of the lower camps. Seventy-five years later, the Mallory and Irvine Research Expedition that discovered Mallory’s body concluded in their investigation that Odell likely last saw Mallory and Irvine at the Third Step. Which meant they had been less than five hundred feet from the summit when they vanished from view behind the clouds. Dustin was of the feeling that the 1924 climbers did make it to the top. That Mallory and Irvine perished not on the way to the summit, but on the way back. And that they didn’t simply fall. Especially not George Leigh Mallory with all of his skill. Dustin believed they had help.
Whether Mallory and Irvine were pushed, Dustin didn’t know. Perhaps they’d been chased, much in the same way he and Zack and Francesca and Tashi were being chased now. Pursued. By something that didn’t want to be found.
After all, only three years before Mallory and Irvine vanished, a Lt. Col. Howard-Bury, on approaching Everest, watched a group of ape-like beasts on a snowfield above twenty-thousand feet, through binoculars. Later he and his team found their tracks on the spot.
Two years later, members of an Everest expedition saw a “great hairy, naked man running across a snowfield below,” at seventeen thousand feet.
That the beast could climb and breathe as high up as the summit now was no surprise. At least not to Dustin. He’d read that climbers Tim McCartney-Snape and Greg Mortimer had discovered unexplained tracks near the summit of Everest over a quarter century ago.
Dustin now believed that Mallory and Irvine saw more than the summit itself on that June day in 1924. Snapped photographs of more than just themselves on their climb. He believed Mallory’s camera held more than simple proof he and Irvine were the first men in the world to reach the Earth’s highest peak. In the process, they’d also solved one of the planet’s greatest mysteries.
“The yeti?” Zack asked in wonderment.
Dustin nodded again. “What they would’ve called the abominable snowman.”
Chapter 33
North Face
“We need to rest.”
Zack guided Tashi toward a large rock and assisted him into a sitting position.
“But the kang-mi...” Tashi protested.
“Zack’s right,” Dustin said. He lifted his glacier goggles and gazed up at the sky. “We’re gonna lose daylight soon.”
Zack stared up at the thickening clouds, surprised the storm had held out this long.
According to Dustin they were approximately where Camp V would have been on the North side, still above 27,000 feet. Still in the Death Zone.
“But we have barely any oxygen left,” Francesca pointed out. “We will never last the night.”
Dustin shrugged. “We have no choice. We’re also fresh out of batteries and we can’t climb down a mountain in the dark.”
Zack scanned the area, trying to imagine a bivouac, some sort of man-made shelter in the snow. He and Nadia had built snow shelters with the aid of their guides on Denali, but here in the Death Zone on Everest, Zack didn’t have a clue. They weren’t prepared. They had no shovels, no snow saws. Just a few ice axes and four pairs of hands, some of which were already frozen.
Whatever they built, it would be crude. Nothing like the igloos he and Nadia learned to make in Alaska. Zack got down on his knees and began digging with his hands in the snow.
It’s useless, he thought fifteen minutes in. Whatever we do, we’ll be exposed.
* * *
Darkness didn’t wait for the foursome to finish building their rudimentary shelters. It fell on them like a curtain after the show.
They’d constructed two snow trenches, barely large enough for two people each. Francesca climbed into Zack’s, leaving Dustin to join Tashi a few feet away. If anything, it would be body heat that would save them from freezing to death.
But few people survived a night in the Death Zone without oxygen. And between the four of them they had not a single full bottle left.
* * *
The storm hit the North Face a few hours after the darkness arrived. The snow fell thick and hard and soon covered the would-be camp fully. Temperatures plummeted, though Zack had no thermometer, no way of knowing how low they would go.
He pressed his body up against Francesca’s the way he had against Nadia’s that night at 17,000 feet on Denali. Their faces were touching, just a thin sliver of skin on each exposed to the other.
When she spoke, Francesca’s voice was muffled. “I met him in the Italian Alps,” she said. “Near Reinhold Messner’s castle.”
It took Zack
a moment to realize she was speaking of Dustin.
“He thought Messner would partner up with him,” she continued softly. “Make the yeti discovery some sort of a joint venture. But, of course, Dustin could not get in to see him. The only climbing writer he found in the Italian Alps was me.”
“So he asked you to join him on this expedition,” Zack said quietly. “Why you?”
“The books I have written,” she said, her voice quivering, “they have been about mythology. Everything from ancient Greece to present day. Folklore passed down through the ages.” She paused. “When Dustin mentioned the yeti I was intrigued. At first I thought he was full of shit, like anyone who talks seriously about Bigfoots and lake monsters. But he was so passionate. I thought, okay, maybe he is not so crazy. Then he told me his story, revealed what happened here in the Himalayas at Kala Pattar.”
“About the infant,” Zack said.
He felt her nod her head, her covered face brushing against his.
“Dustin told me it was an accident, that he never meant to kill anything, and I believed him. And I still do today. The damage, it was already done, so I decided I would like to be a part of this great thing, this unveiling to the world of a new primate species.”
Not a new species, Zack thought. A rediscovered species.
Zack had read the words to his students a countless number of times: The absence of a fossil record is not necessarily evidence of extinction. What Zack himself had seen high on the south side of Mount Everest was not a hypoxic hallucination after all. It was the descendant of the largest primate that ever lived. A missing link in the complex chain of human evolution.
A descendant of Gigantopithecus.
More than ten feet in height, with a weight of well over one thousand pounds. He recalled the enormous head, the thickset jaw. There was no question in Zack’s mind. What else in the world could it be?
True, there was little known about the great ape’s skeletal anatomy. The first massive mandible was discovered in the late 1950s. Two more jaws were recovered, along with hundreds of isolated teeth. But that was it.
And because nothing further was found, scientists could only guess at whether the ape walked upright or on all fours. Zack felt he knew the answer to that question tonight. Gigantopithecus was - is - bipedal.
And when provoked, Zack thought now, it is, predictably, a man-killer.
* * *
Dustin sunk deeper into his trench and tried to tune out Tashi’s incoherent murmuring. For the briefest of moments, Dustin wished the Sherpa would die.
Careful what you wish for, he thought, as the winds picked up and raked the North Face. Tashi and the others were still Dustin’s best hope to get down the mountain alive.
The yeti hunter was certain if he died, his discovery would die with him. The remaining yeti would recover the body of its son and disappear, perhaps forever.
Only the legend of the abominable snowman would live on.
What most laypersons and even some scientists didn’t understand was that unlike the Rockies and Alps, which were ravaged by the ice ages, the Himalayas had no such interruption. When glaciers swept across the globe during the last ice age, obliterating all life, they left the Himalaya mountains virtually untouched. Life in these mountains has therefore been evolving for literally millions of continuous years. The isolation of this majestic range has protected at least one prehistoric form of life, one ancient primate that was thought to be extinct everywhere.
But Dustin was about to prove once and for all that it was extant, not extinct. And its name was - is - Gigantopithecus.
The great ape no doubt sought refuge in the valleys of the Himalayas during the Pleistocene period. Its size permitted the beast to easily adapt to the cold. Like the Sherpas, its lungs evolved to allow it to exist at high altitudes.
“But why in the mountains?” Francesca had asked Dustin when the pair first met in a pub in the Italian Alps.
Dustin swallowed his beer. “They went into hiding.” ”Wouldn’t you? After all, these intelligent creatures walked alongside Homo erectus, the antecedents of humans. They watched as our ancestors wiped out every single species similar to man.”
“Darwinian?”
Dustin set down his beer and nodded. “Natural selection. Species adapt to their environments over time. Only the strongest survive.” He pointed to his temple. “And the smartest.”
The giant primates were not only intelligent but agile. They adapted. No longer able to live in trees, they sought sanctuary in the mountains, in caves. Those great apes that once lived in China found refuge in the heights of the Himalayas. There they remained out of the reach of their enemies - our ancestors - and they survived in isolation just as Orang Pendek did in the marshy forests of Sumatra.
“So we are its only enemy,” Francesca had said, pushing away her glass of wine.
Dustin frowned and shook his head. “We’re not the yeti’s enemy.”
In the snow trench, huddled next to Tashi, he said the words again. Though he wasn’t sure he believed them any longer.
“It was an accident,” he whispered to himself. “We’re not the yeti’s enemy.”
He closed his eyes. “It was an accident,” he said again.
* * *
Mercer. Todd Mercer.
Zack had never heard the name before a few months ago. Now he heard it as loud as a jackhammer every time he was about to sleep. The son of a bitch had crawled out of a bar, out of his own pathetic world and into Zack’s and Nadia’s just long enough to swipe their lives from them.
Mercer. Todd Mercer.
What was it the lama at Tengboche had said?
“Those who are free of resentful thoughts surely find peace.”
Peace. Was that really what Zack sought? Was peace really what he was after? Wasn’t peace what was taken from him this past December? Peace couldn’t be restored simply by releasing his bitter feelings toward Todd Mercer. No sense of justice, no sense of peace could be reestablished unless Zack were able to wreak his own havoc. Like the yeti, he thought. Why repress all this rage, why run away, when it’s not peace but vengeance you seek?
Zack shook Francesca and reminded her not to sleep. Reminded himself. Chances were, if they slept in this blizzard, in the oxygen-starved air, they would never wake. And they still had a job to do. They still, all four of them, had to get off this damned mountain in one piece.
Well, maybe not one piece, Zack thought, as he reflected on his frostbitten right hand. At least one or two fingers, maybe more, would have to be amputated. Zack suddenly flashed on Marvin Combs’s short feet.
Well, I’ll be damned.
Francesca’s body was shivering. Zack pressed harder against her. For a moment it felt as though he were snuggling with Nadia, not at high camp on Denali, but in their Grand Cayman hotel suite overlooking Seven Mile Beach.
For the first time Zack wondered if life could ever start over without Nadia. Whether Francesca could reestablish order, whether she could restore peace.
* * *
Hours later, as Zack held her body close to his, Francesca’s shivering finally stopped.
Zack breathed a sigh of relief.
“Are you all right?” he said softly.
She whispered something to him in Italian.
He tried to chuckle, but with his frozen lips it came out all wrong. “You’ll have to speak English,” he said. “I’m not quite the world tr-traveler, like you.”
Something again in Italian. Something confused.
Zack hugged her tightly to him. Her body felt rigid. He could no longer hear her labored breathing, could no longer feel her warm breath on his sliver of exposed skin.
“Francesca?”
Chapter 34
“Ian is dead,” Patty said into the satellite phone.
She waited out the silence on the other end of the line as Aasif circled the communications tent, arms folded across his chest, moisture welling up in his eyes.
Patty fi
nally sighed, no longer able to withstand the quiet. “I’m sorry, Liz,” she managed, her voice cracking. “For everything.”
Patty knew Liz blamed Ian for Luke’s death on K2. And Patty had always had this strange feeling that Liz also knew about her sleeping with Ian. Before Luke’s death, it had never particularly bothered her. But Ian was supposed to be on K2 with his son the year that Luke fell. Patty had talked Ian into switching mountains with his Number Two. She had always enjoyed working with Ian on Everest, sleeping with him at Base Camp and as high up as Camp II. In a way, she loved him. And she’d always wonder whether Ian’s not being on K2 with his son had made any difference. Whether her selfishness, her desire for Ian to be with her on Everest, had somehow resulted in Luke’s death.
Aasif paused and rested a dark hand on her shoulder as she hung up the phone.
Patty stood and draped her arms around the doctor, sobbing into his chest.
“I’m sorry, Patty.”
“You did everything you could.”
She finally tore herself away and stepped outside the tent into the biting cold air of Base Camp. It was dawn and the media would be ascending soon, cornering Patty with questions she couldn’t answer. Reluctantly, she glanced at the mountain, which had wrapped itself in layers of thick black clouds. The scene was eerie. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have guessed Mount Everest was on fire.
But it wasn’t a blaze that had consumed the mountain, she knew. It was a blizzard. Storms of the relatively recent past still haunted the mountain—years like 1996, 2014. But this was worse. Much worse.
She crossed the camp, ducked into her tent and wrapped herself in another layer of clothes, wishing she could lie down and remain asleep for the rest of the day. Away from the sea of media, out of sight of the raging tempest.