Descent

by Roland Smith

  “That slide doesn’t look good,” I said, but I couldn’t really tell how bad it was from that far away. The rocks may have settled with gravity and weather. It could be that Duga was there before nature had worked its magic. “Why don’t you guys go down for a closer look? I’ll stay up here for a bit and scan the wall with the binocs for possible routes to the top.” It’s a lot easier to pick a route from a distance than it is standing right next to the slab.

  “Don’t stay too long,” Yash said, and led Norbu and Duga down the hill.

  The left wall looked better than the right. There were more hand- and toeholds and it was about fifty feet shorter. Both walls seemed relatively free of loose rock, although I wouldn’t know for certain until I was up there grabbing them if we had to climb a wall, which I hoped we didn’t. The walls were at least two thousand feet tall. I seriously doubted that Norbu and Duga would make it to the top before dark.

  They were standing at the bottom edge of the slide, watching Yash struggling to get up the rockpile. A stream of rocks was rolling down behind him. It looked like he was trying to crawl up a bumpy treadmill, losing two feet for every foot he gained. He stopped about twenty feet up, sat down facing my direction, and made a throat slashing motion with his index finger. We were climbing a big wall.

  By the time I got down to them  Yash had most of the gear laid out on the ground and was reminding Duga and Norbu what each piece of hardware was used for. I pulled the gear out of my pack and added it to his collection, then tossed the pair of shorts to Duga.

  “Put these on and tuck your robe into them,” I said.

  “Left side or right side?” Yash asked.

  “Left side. It’s shorter.”

  “Are you leading the way up, or do you want me to?”

  I was faster than Yash, and maybe a little better at route choice, but he was stronger and better at slamming in protection. “You take the lead,” I said. “I’ll follow Duga and Norbu and help them if they get jammed up.”

  Yash nodded and started belting the hardware he thought he would need. I helped Norbu and Duga into their harnesses, tightening Duga’s new shorts with a length of rope. By the time I finished getting them rigged,  Yash was thirty feet up the wall.

  I turned to Duga and Norbu. “I don’t know what to tell you guys,” I said. “I’m hoping we top the wall before Shek appears, but if we don’t, you’re both going to have to show more climbing confidence than you feel. I don’t want to scare you, but you’re trying to pass yourselves off as two of the best climbers on earth. Josh and Zopa could free solo this wall half asleep. Keep a close eye on what Yash does. Study his moves. When you get to a challenging spot, and there will be plenty of those, try to copy how Yash got around it. You’ll be roped in, so there’s not much chance of you hitting the ground. But even a ten-foot drop on a rope hurts. We don’t have helmets, so try to protect your head. I’ll be coming up behind you, pulling our hardware so Shek can’t use it. If you somehow get frozen and don’t know what to do, I’ll climb up and talk you through the problem. I guess that’s it. You’d better get going.”

  “Will we reach the top before dark?” Norbu asked.

  I wasn’t going to say anything about this, but now that he brought it up, I had no choice. “That depends on how fast you and Duga are able to climb, and what we run into on the face. It’s a big wall with a lot of technical problems to solve. Let me see your headlamps.”

  They handed them over. The LEDs were pretty bright, but there was no way of telling how long the batteries would last. “You seem to have plenty of juice left,” I said, not wanting to scare them. “I like climbing with a headlamp. It keeps me focused on the little moves I need to make rather than the overwhelming wall. It’s time to climb.”

  They started their ascent. It wasn’t pretty. It took Norbu three tries before he was able to get both feet off the ground. Duga was behind him and did a little better. It only took him two tries. Yash was twenty feet above them, hammering in an odd route obviously dictated by safety, not speed, which I hoped wasn’t obvious to Shek or his men. Joshua Wood, and Zopa to a lesser extent, were all about speed, because almost every route they took was safe due to their climbing chops. I waited for Norbu and Duga to get thirty feet up, which seemed to take them forever, before starting my ascent. The rock was granite, but it felt like brittle limestone, making every hand- and foothold a little dicey. Yash was having to hammer in the pitons to the hilt to get them to stick, which made them difficult to pull. I didn’t have a lot of experience with pitons because before I was born they were replaced with nuts, cams, and chocks, which were a lot easier to retrieve. But you climb with what you have, and what the monastery had were boxes of rusty iron pitons. I had to hammer the piton eyes back and forth several times before I was able to pop the spikes loose. I wasn’t pulling them because I wanted to be a responsible climber. I was pulling them so Shek couldn’t use them to his advantage.

  Fifty feet up, Norbu knocked some rocks loose, sending a shower of projectiles down on Duga, which peeled him off the wall. I guess I should have told them to shout Rock! but I doubted Norbu even knew he had started a little avalanche. Duga was safe, but he was in a precarious position. He was dangling upside down from his harness ten feet away from the wall and couldn’t figure out how to right himself because his robe had come untucked and was covering his head. If he didn’t stop struggling, he was going to pull out the piton holding him and fall another ten feet to the next piton, or worse, snap the rope and die. To complicate things further, Norbu had realized what he had done and was trying to climb down to Duga, sending even more rocks down the face.

  “Freeze!” I shouted. “Both of you!”

  Yash was fifty feet above them. He knew something had gone wrong but he couldn’t see what it was from where he was hanging.

  “Okay?” he shouted.

  “I have this!” I called back up.

  “Do you want me to wait?”

  “No! Keep climbing.”

  Duga looked like a big orange spider dangling from a silk thread. Norbu was ten feet above him, plastered against the wall like a patch of lichen.

  Under control, I thought. For the moment.

  “Duga,” I said. “I’m coming up to help you. You’ll be fine. Norbu, I don’t need your help. Keep climbing.”

  I reached Duga in five moves. I grabbed his rope and pulled him close enough to snag his harness. I got him upright and freed his robe, expecting a look of horror, but instead he was smiling.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I will be. The blood rushed to my head. I am still a little dizzy.”

  “No rocks hit you?”

  “Just little ones. I fell because I was startled. That would not have happened to Zopa.”

  “Anyone would be startled. Even Zopa. You just need to remember that you’re on a wall with limited options for getting out of the way.”

  “I will remember.” He tucked his robe back into his shorts. “Shall I continue?”

  “If you’re ready.”

  He started back up. I stuck to him closely to make sure he was okay, and when I was confident he was, I backed off and started pulling pitons again. Yash was well ahead. I had no doubt he was going to top the wall before dark and that we’d be up there soon after dark.

  I was thinking that we might just pull this off when Yash yelled, “Shek!”

  I looked down. Shek and his men were at the bottom of the wall, already harnessed. The green monk was not with them, which didn’t surprise me. He and the other watchers were no doubt on their way back to the crater, and we were on our own.

  Panic Bear

  “You are under arrest!” Shek shouted. “Climb down!”

  I climbed up.

  “Stop or I shoot!”

  I continued climbing, thinking that they were too close to the wall to get a good angle on me. A shot rang out. I don’t know where the bullet went, but it wasn’t anywhere near m
e. Above me Norbu and Duga were slowly making their way up the wall. Yash was maybe two hundred feet from the top, moving quickly, as surefooted as a mountain goat. The shot must have been a bluff. Shek didn’t want to kill us; he wanted to capture us. At least, I hoped that was his plan. He and his men had started up the wall. Shek was ahead of them and was using a different route from his men. He was clearly a much better climber than they were. His men were fixing ropes; he was free soloing without protection as if he were pursuing a world speed record. What was he thinking? How was he going to arrest me, or any of us, on a giant wall? Then I realized what he was doing. He was taking the route I would have chosen if I had been with experienced climbers. He was trying to get to the top before us so we’d be sandwiched between him and his men. He wouldn’t beat Yash to the top, but he would certainly get there before Norbu, Duga, and me. I glanced down at Shek’s men. They were having a difficult time. What was slowing them down was hammering in protection, and their climbing skills weren’t much better than Duga’s and Norbu’s. I was glad I had pulled the pitons. If I could beat Shek to the top, Yash and I might be able to delay him long enough for Norbu and Duga to join us.

  Shek was seventy-five feet to my right on a roughly straight route to the top. I’d have to angle my way over to him to get ahead. It was starting to get dark, and with the darkness, the wind was picking up. Not ideal conditions for free soloing a giant wall that I had never climbed. Hopefully, Yash would figure out what I was doing and realize that Norbu and Duga were now his responsibility. I wasn’t going to be able to help them from where I was going.

  I put my headlamp on and switched on the lights. No use in trying to hide at this point. I hoped Duga and Norbu noticed and would do the same. This would help them see what was ahead, but more important, allow  Yash to track their ascent. If their light stopped moving for a prolonged length of time, he could rappel down and give them a hand.

  I studied my route as best as I could. It was a long traverse and I could already see some spots where I’d have to use dynamic motion, or dyno, to get where I needed to be. It’s used when there are no toeholds. It’s tough on the arms and fingers and dangerous when you aren’t roped in. I would have to add some vertical gain to the traverse to make sure I ended up above Shek when I intersected with his route. I thought about dumping my gear to lighten my load and give me better freedom of movement, but I didn’t dare do it. I had no idea what we would run into after the wall. Walkie said Arunachal Pradesh wasn’t far, but she hadn’t mentioned what obstacles we had to overcome to get there. The summit of Everest is twenty-nine thousand feet, or roughly five miles, but that doesn’t mean you can jog up to it and back in a day. We might have another mountain to get over before we reached India.

  Shek was the first to turn on his headlamp. He was closer than I anticipated and climbing strong. Shek’s men turned their lights on next. They weren’t more than fifty feet up the wall. At the rate they were climbing they wouldn’t reach the top until sunrise. Norbu and Duga’s lamps flicked on next, then Yash’s. From the position of his headlamp, it looked like he had topped the face and was peering over the cliff directly above the route he had laid for us. Pretty soon he was going to see that I had deviated and hopefully figure out the reason why. Shek was going to figure it out too.

  I unclipped and made my first move, catching a crack about three feet away with my right hand. It was a tenuous hold, but it kept me on the wall long enough to find a couple of toeholds.

  So far so good, I thought, looking down at Shek, who didn’t know the race had started. Two moves later he figured it out and started to climb even faster. He was fifty or sixty feet below me. It was going to be close, but what he didn’t know, because he couldn’t see it yet, was that he had a dicey bit of climbing up ahead. If all went well, I was going to end up twenty feet above that rough spot. It was pitch-black out now, with a crosswind of fifteen miles an hour, gusting into the mid-twenties.

  Another shot rang out, but this time I knew where the bullet had gone. Rock exploded three feet from my left shoulder, cutting my cheek. I looked down at Shek’s lamp. It wasn’t moving. He had figured out we were in a race. Was the shot a warning? Or was he trying to murder me? Either way, I wasn’t going to stop. Beating him to the top was our only hope of getting out of this. I was mad now, and I climb well when I’m mad. I wanted to get directly above him so if he did shoot me, I could grab him as I fell and take him with me. So far so good. The joke’s going to be on you, Shek. I dynoed across the smooth rock like a gibbon brachiating through tree limbs without pause, trusting that the next handhold would be there for me over and over again. It was the dumbest climbing stunt I had ever tried. If Shek hadn’t taken that shot at me, I wouldn’t have attempted it at that speed. What should have taken me twenty or thirty minutes took less than five. The only reason I stopped was that I had arrived. Shek was forty feet below me, looking up, probably wondering if I had sprinted over on a ledge. I laughed aloud. I wasn’t even out of breath. He’d never catch up to me now. He was in the middle of the rough spot, clinging on for dear life.

  “Hey, Shek!” I yelled. “If you shoot me, I’m grabbing you on the way down!”

  It was only fair to warn him, not that he would be able to use his rifle from where he was. That would change when he got up to where I was. The wall was riddled with hand- and toeholds. I started up. A forty-foot lead might not be enough. I was impressed with Shek’s climbing chops. I’m sure I had ticked him off with my taunt. If anger drove him like it had driven me, he might have me by the heels in minutes.

  I glanced left. Duga and Norbu were making their way toward Yash’s headlamp. They were moving at a snail’s pace, but at least they were moving. Once again, I was overwhelmed with a sense of optimism, but it was taken away by a sound from my past, something I thought I would never hear again while clinging onto a sheer wall. I turned my head and was blinded. A helicopter was flying straight at me. The sound of the rotor was loud, and it was still a few hundred yards away. I knew what was coming next.

  What seemed like a couple of centuries ago, I was climbing a freezing skyscraper in New York when a police helicopter nearly peeled me off the building. I was arrested, tossed in jail, and rescued by Josh, who took me to Everest, where I met Zopa, Sun-jo, Yash, Yogi, and Shek. If that helicopter hadn’t shown up on that freezing-cold March night, I wouldn’t have met any of them, or Alessia, or Ethan. I’d still be in New York, tagging buildings with my little blue mountain stencil.

  I found better toeholds and jammed my fingers deep into cracks. Shek was still climbing up behind me instead of anchoring himself. Big mistake. The helicopter swooped in like a steel prehistoric pterodactyl with its halogen floods lighting the wall as if it were daytime. The rotor wash slammed into me. It was all I could do to hold on. The lone Chinese pilot was illuminated by the orange instrument lights in the cockpit. It looked like he was laughing. I wondered if Shek had called him in on his two-way. Blow the kid off the wall. Hilarious, Shek. But in an instant the pilot’s expression changed from elation to complete horror. Had he nicked the wall with a rotor? Was it a mechanical malfunction? He banked the chopper away from the wall and flew off into the night as if he were being pursued by a real pterodactyl. Whatever it had been, I was relieved . . . for the moment. It was obvious that the helicopter was a latecomer to our little party. If Shek knew it was on its way, he would have jumped onboard below with his men and rounded us up when we topped the face. Maybe the military had sent the helicopter to pick up Shek and his men to take them back to their duties in Bāyī. Whatever the reason, we were in trouble if the helicopter returned, which I was certain it would.

  I looked down. Shek was no longer climbing. The reason for the pilot’s mood change and quick departure was clear. The rotor wash intended for me had knocked Shek off the wall. He was ten feet below from where he had been, dangling by two arms, desperately searching for toeholds. Climbers call this panic bear. It had never happened to me, but I had seen it on
YouTube. As far as I was concerned, it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving person. He wouldn’t last more than a few minutes. His men would never reach him in time. If the helicopter pilot returned, the rotor wash would blow Shek off the face for good.

  Bye-bye, Shek, I thought, and started climbing. There was bound to be tree cover above us. If we could reach it, there was a chance we could elude the helicopter when it returned, which I was sure it would. I looked back down at Shek. He was still doing the panic bear. It wouldn’t be long now. I continued climbing.

  Go out and do good things. Zopa’s mantra came back to me. I shook my head and continued climbing, telling myself that I’d do plenty of good things after this was over. Shek had beat up my father. He had tried to kill me. Why should I rescue him? It was probably too late anyway. By the time I got down there, he would have already fallen. There was no point.

  But that is the point, I thought. Going out and doing good things has nothing to do with convenience, likes, or dislikes. It was about doing the right thing regardless of what it might cost you. Karma. I unclipped a piton from my belt, hammered it into the wall, attached a rope, and rappelled down to my dangling enemy.

  The Good Thing

  Shek was holding on by bleeding fingernails. I couldn’t believe he hadn’t already fallen. I held on to the rope with one hand and grabbed his wrist with the other.

  “I have you,” I said.

  He took my wrist without a word. His grip was weak.