“He’s in Base Camp,” snapped Cicero as the younger official began peering into faces. “Are you happy?”
“Our concern is for young Dominic’s safety first and foremost,” the senior officer informed him.
“I’m all choked up,” Cicero snorted, and led his team onto the ice.
The two government men waited until the SummitQuest climbers had disappeared into the blue crystalline wilderness above. Then, dizzy and gasping from the thin air, they piled back into the chopper and begged the pilot to get them out of there.
* * *
It was a thousand times harder than Dominic had thought it would be.
He lay in his sleeping bag, the heavy down fabric tucked up to his chin despite the warming morning. Icy droplets rained down on him as the sun thawed out the frozen condensation in the tent. Khumbu water torture, the climbers called it.
No torture could compare with the agony of staying behind.
All at once the flap was flung aside, and light flooded the small shelter. “Suit up, Alexis,” announced Ethan Zaph. “We’ve got a mountain to get on top of.”
“No offense, but go away,” Dominic grumbled. “You should be halfway to Camp One by now.”
“I’m serious,” Ethan persisted. “The Icefall gets unstable as the day heats up.”
Dominic cast him a resentful look. “Don’t pour salt in my wounds, okay? You know I can’t climb.”
“You can’t climb with Cap,” Ethan amended. “Nobody said anything about climbing with me.”
“And I’m sure those Nepalese officials are going to see the difference,” Dominic said sarcastically.
“Those Nepalese officials went home,” Ethan pointed out. “But, yeah, they’ll see the difference. How can they blame Cap when he doesn’t even know you’re up there? You’ll climb with This Way Up, with our equipment, eating our food, sleeping in our camps. Nestor isn’t here, remember? I can’t think of anybody who deserves to take his place more than you.”
Dominic stared at him, thunderstruck. It was true. Nestor Ali was home after a week in a Kathmandu hospital. There was a spot open on This Way Up. “But — ” he managed, “you could get in big trouble.”
“I was in big trouble,” Ethan reminded him. “Three weeks ago, I was at 27,700 feet, flat out of steam, with an unconscious partner. And a thirteen-year-old kid convinced his team to come up and get us. Dominic, do you honestly think there’s anything the Nepalese can do to make me worse off than I would have been if it wasn’t for you? You saved my life; I’m saving your climb. Small payback, but you’ve got to let me.”
Dominic rose on unsteady legs. He felt dazed, as if he had just woken up from a deep sleep. Convincing himself that his Everest dreams were over had taken so much willpower that he now considered it an unchangeable law of the universe: Two plus two equals four; Dominic doesn’t climb.
Yet here was Ethan with an idea….
“You were right,” Ethan finished. “Nepal is Cap’s whole life. But it isn’t mine.”
Dominic felt his brain and body coming alive again as he examined the plan from every angle. It could work! If Cicero didn’t even know he was on the mountain, how could the team leader possibly be held responsible? Dominic would just have to avoid the SummitQuest people at the camps along the route. They might bump into one another on the narrow ridges leading to the pinnacle. But that high up, they would be hidden behind wind suits, goggles, and oxygen masks — passing astronauts on a landscape so forbidding it would make the surface of the moon seem like a resort hotel. And anyway, in the throes of exhaustion, Cicero probably wouldn’t even notice him. The team leader had said it himself: “Past twenty-eight thousand, you wouldn’t recognize your own mother if she came at you with a Thermos of chicken soup.”
Dominic regarded the bigger boy with tears in his eyes. “Give me ten minutes to get suited up.”
“You’ve got five,” said Ethan.
He was ready in three.
Mount Everest has claimed many lives in its history, but the Khumbu Icefall is its bloodiest battleground. Here the Khumbu glacier — really a frozen river — drops over a steep cliff. This sends millions of tons of slowly advancing ice careening down a half-mile escarpment. The glacier shatters into thousands of huge seracs, some of them the size of twenty-story buildings. It makes for spectacular scenery — a towering forest of jagged prisms the size of condominiums. But breathtaking as it is, the Icefall is not a place for sightseeing. The whole arrangement is moving, falling. The massive blue-white megaliths that lend the place its beauty might topple over without warning. Any unfortunate caught beneath an avalanching serac would be crushed like a bug.
A series of loud cracks punctuated the silence as hard glacial ice split and splintered beneath their feet. “Dangerous,” Pasang said ominously. “No good climb so late in Icefall.”
Ethan shot him a cockeyed grin. “You could have gone earlier. You wanted to wait for Dominic.”
Pasang looked sheepish. There had been genuine dismay among the Sherpas when their “little sahib” had been grounded by the authorities. Pasang was privately determined to be at the boy’s side all the way to the top. Dominic had many strikes against him, but the Sherpas of Everest were behind him one hundred percent. The SummitQuest Base Camp staff had even agreed to pretend he was with them whenever Cicero radioed in from the mountain.
“I’m just happy to be climbing,” said Dominic. “All the way from Base, I was holding my breath. I half expected the entire Nepalese army to descend from the sky and arrest me.”
“Well, they’re sure not going to come looking for you up here,” said Ethan. “So you’re safe.”
Crack!
A thin bridge of ice disintegrated beneath Dominic, and he was falling, dropping like a stone, straight into a crevasse. Desperately, he flailed with his ice ax, but he could not make firm contact with the dark wall.
He felt no fear, but only disbelief. Not that the mountain could kill, but that it could strike so fast — and without warning.
All at once, he came to a sudden jarring stop and dangled there, turning lazily.
The rope! he thought. I’m still clipped onto the rope! Without it, he would surely be dead.
You’re not safe yet! he reminded himself. This line isn’t made to handle that kind of jolt.
“Dominic!”
He could barely hear Ethan’s voice, although it was pretty clear that the older boy was screaming. “Dominic!”
He tried to yell, “I’m okay!” but it came out a high-pitched wheeze. He hacked madly at the glassy wall with his ice ax, but could not penetrate its smooth finish. He fared no better kicking with his crampons. Suspended in midair, he had no power behind his thrusts.
How can I get some of my weight off this rope?
His new teammates gave him the answer. Strong pulls on the line enabled him to get himself swinging. A stabbing kick with his right foot planted one front point; that purchase gave him the stability to stick the other.
With Ethan and Pasang steadying the rope from the surface, Dominic literally walked out. Pasang grabbed him by his wind suit and pulled him over the lip, where he collapsed on the ice.
Nobody spoke. There was nothing to say. There were certain near misses in mountaineering, mishaps that took climbers within a millimeter of disaster. Yet the only real damage they inflicted was to confidence. Physically, he was unharmed. This was exactly the same Dominic. Or was it?
“Okay,” Ethan said huskily. “Your call. Was that a deal breaker?”
Dominic shook his head vehemently and panted. “Just give me a minute.”
Ethan put an unsteady arm around his shoulders. Pasang squeezed Dominic’s climbing mitt and would not let go. All three knew it had been that close.
www.summathletic.com/everest/abc
The final summit push begins with a daylong ascent, bypassing Camp One to Camp Two, or Advance Base Camp (ABC). Here in the radiant solar heat of the world’s highest canyon, a team normally pauses for a day befor
e taking on the upper mountain. But for the youngest expedition in Everest history, there will be no rest. Their weather window is razor thin, leaving no margin for error. They will climb tomorrow and the day after, followed by a summit marathon that will test them as they have never before been tested. CLICK HERE to see them preparing for one last shot at the peak. None of them will ever know such tunnel vision again. Every effort, every action, every breath is bent to the task of reaching the world’s pinnacle. Not so much as a single thought is wasted on any other purpose.
Perry sat in the small tent, crouched over his laptop computer.
Dear Uncle Joe,
Before I set out for the highest point on the planet, there’s something you should know: I’m no climber. What’s more, I never was one.
It’s not your fault, but in a way, it is. Because you never really asked how I felt when the crags got tougher and the cliffs got steeper. I just wanted to spend time with the uncle I idolized, and climbing was the way to do it. But somewhere in there, the cost of a mistake went from a few scrapes and bruises to my bones and maybe even my life.
Why couldn’t we just stay home and play chess or something like that? Do you even know I’m good at chess? I told you about fifty times. But you were determined for your nephew to have the alpine career you never got to have. This was always about you, not me. Fortune magazine voted you the sharpest CEO in American business. Yet you never even noticed that the higher we climbed, the less I looked down.
Well, Uncle Joe, where I’m going tomorrow, there’s nowhere to look but down. There’s a certain point where you get so scared that you just don’t care anymore. I may not have the guts to stand up to you and save myself from the Death Zone. But I’m sure not going to march to that fate without making sure you know exactly how I feel about it.
He maneuvered the trackball over the SEND icon and hovered there, trying to work up the courage to put his message through. How many others had he written and deleted unsent?
All at once, the tent flap was flung aside and a laughing Tilt dove in, nearly flattening Perry. “I just nailed one of the baboons with a snowball — direct hit, right between the eyes!” He spied the E-mail on the computer. “Hey, what are you writing?”
Red-faced, Perry slammed the screen shut. But the bully in Tilt was aroused. Whatever this was, Noonan didn’t want it made public. And that meant that seeing it was a must. He made a grab for the laptop, but Perry pulled it away at the last second, taking the brunt of the big boy’s lunge with his own body. The two went sprawling into the collapsible aluminum pole, and the tent came billowing down on them.
“What’s going on in there?” Cicero’s voice, not far away.
A second later, the orange nylon was snatched away, and the team leader stood over them, glaring down. “Anybody with sense,” he seethed, “would have better things to do with his breath up here!”
“We were just fooling around,” Tilt mumbled.
“Yeah, Crowley, you’re a real fun guy,” Cicero growled. “The next time I see you using the Sherpas for target practice, you’ll be throwing your next snowball from Base Camp.” From the remains of the shelter, he selected two large pots and shoved them into the hands of the combatants. “Go chop ice to melt for water. And not around camp, either. A hundred climbers have been using this place as an outhouse. I don’t like surprises.”
The team leader watched them storm off in opposite directions. Then he set about restoring the flattened tent. The first thing that caught his eye was the discarded laptop, which was jacked into the satellite phone.
The power light was on.
* * *
Perry got back first and placed the pot of ice chips on the camp stove. Then he turned anxiously to his computer. He frowned. It was off.
He booted the machine up again, but the message had disappeared.
I’ll write it again, he thought urgently.
But he could already hear Tilt’s crampons crunching on the glacier outside.
“Forget it,” he mumbled aloud. His courage had vanished as completely as the E-mail he would never have been brave enough to send.
* * *
It was dusk when Dominic, Ethan, and Pasang marched into ABC. Dominic made sure to steer clear of the SummitQuest camp. He did catch a glimpse of Sneezy filming the sunset, but the sight depressed him. For months he had been part of this family, and now he was expelled, banished practically. He felt lonely and disconnected.
Except for Ethan, the This Way Up climbers ignored him as if he had leprosy. He was an illegal member of this team, and nobody wanted to risk trouble with the Nepalese authorities. Dominic understood, but he didn’t like being an outcast.
When he thanked Angus Harris, the This Way Up expedition leader, for giving him this last chance at the summit, the burly Scotsman replied, “Sure thing, Nestor. Good luck up there.”
Dominic just stared at him, bewildered.
“You see, when I look at my climbing permit, the name says Nestor Ali,” Angus explained. “So that has to be you, if you catch my meaning.”
“Got it.” Dominic turned to walk away.
“Hey.” Angus put a beefy hand on his shoulder. “If you happen to see the lad Dominic Alexis, tell him we’ll never forget what he did for our people on Lhotse. He shouldn’t take it personally if we’re not sticking our necks out to be his best friend. He’s aces with us.”
“I’ll give him the message,” said Dominic.
The stone was the size of a cantaloupe. It fell from near the summit of Lhotse, and by the time it appeared out of the low overcast, it was traveling at close to two hundred miles per hour.
Babu saw it first and sounded the warning. “Rockfall!”
The climbers flattened themselves to the slope of the Lhotse Face. The lethal projectile rocketed into their midst, whizzing by a bare six inches from Sammi’s ear.
“Missed me!” she sang out defiantly.
The Face was the most grueling part of the climb — a mile-long skating rink tilted sixty degrees. Its icy steepness could be safely attempted only by jumar, a device that allowed a mountaineer to ascend a fixed line, but locked up automatically in case of a fall. Each agonizing step gained six or seven inches of altitude along a single rope.
When Camp Three appeared, it always seemed close enough to touch. Yet the slant of the Face had a foreshortening effect. For two solid hours the image of the tents teased them, elusive as a desert mirage. Sneezy got there first and pointed his camera unsteadily down the incline as the others struggled up to the tiny platform chopped into the ice.
Meetings at Camp Three were held lying down with the climbers’ heads sticking out of the tents, facing one another.
Dr. Oberman shone a penlight into the teens’ eyes and began to ask a series of simple questions: “What is your address?” “How many seconds are in three minutes?” “Spell ‘spaghetti.’ ” “What is your mother’s maiden name?”
“Tilt doesn’t have a mother,” put in Sammi. “He was hatched.”
“I’ve got a mother,” growled Tilt. “And she could beat you to a pulp even easier than I could.”
“If they’d let her out of solitary,” Sammi returned.
“What are you laughing at?” Tilt boomed at Perry, who was snickering into his bedroll.
“They’re fine,” Dr. Oberman assured the team leader with a tolerant smile. “They’re the same pinheads they were before we dragged them down to Gorak Shep.”
“All right, we’re still acclimatized,” decided Cicero. “But no one can acclimatize to the summit ridge, so I want everybody on bottled O’s starting now. We hit the Death Zone tomorrow, and we only get a few hours’ rest before we push for the top. It’s our last chance; let’s make it count.”
Later, Sammi hunched in her oxygen rig, the Scuba-like echoes of her breath resounding in her ears. She was bent over her laptop, pounding out a last-minute E-mail to her parents while waiting for the satellite phone to connect her to the Internet. The device bec
ame temperamental at altitude. Camp Four was even worse. Last time, Sneezy had waited over an hour to send his footage to Summit’s Web designers in Colorado.
As if on cue, the link was established. Sammi blinked. There was a message from Caleb waiting for her. She clicked on it.
Hi, Sammi,
Sorry I haven’t gotten back to you sooner. Things have been crazy around here. Not Everest crazy, I guess. But a lot has happened since you left for Kathmandu.
Remember Myrna Applebaum? It’s weird — you know how we always used to laugh at her? Well, I met her skateboarding a couple of weeks ago, and it turns out she’s pretty cool. Her cousin runs the pro shop at that half-pipe in Lawton, so she gets a lot of practice and she’s awesome! She’s never been climbing, but I told her where you were, and we checked you out on the SummitQuest Web site….
Sammi’s brow furrowed as she continued to scan the message. For two weeks she’d heard nothing from Caleb. Now he finally E-mailed her, and this was what he had to say?
I’m at twenty-four thousand feet on Mount Everest. Why would Caleb think I care about Myrna Applebaum?
When the truth hit, she reacted not with shock or even hurt. It was pure amazement. He’s dumping me!
Then, even more astounded: He’s dumping me for Myrna Applebaum!
She was oddly sympathetic at first. She’d been gone for nine weeks now. A month of boot camp before that.
Her second thought was more to the point: That jerk!
If it comes down to being Caleb’s girlfriend or being extreme, it’s a pretty easy choice to make.
She reached into her knapsack and came out with an eight-by-ten glossy photograph protected by a Zip-loc plastic bag. It was Sammi and Caleb skydiving. Their chutes hadn’t opened yet, so the two were captured in free fall, hands tightly clasped.
Sammi didn’t even look at him. It was her own blissful smile that saddened her. Her anticipation not just of this jump, but of a whole future that would never come to be.
Hey, loser — think you’re going to the summit of E? In a single motion, she ripped the picture in half, cleanly separating herself from her ex-boyfriend. Then she folded his image into a paper airplane, and sailed it down the steep pitch of the Lhotse Face.