The Summit Read online

  For Daisy Samantha Korman

  My Summit

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  EPILOGUE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO AVAILABLE

  COPYRIGHT

  The wind pounced on them above twenty-five thousand feet.

  As the youngest expedition in Everest history scrambled up the Geneva Spur, the onslaught began — overpowering, unpredictable gusts that threatened to pluck the climbers off the mountain and hurl them into space.

  Amazingly, this was nothing new to them. This was the second time the team had stood atop the Spur, a mammoth club of decaying black rock in the infamous Death Zone high on Everest. Their last summit bid had been scuttled when they’d been called away to perform a daring high-altitude rescue. For two very long weeks, the SummitQuest climbers had waited at Base Camp, begging fate for the weather to offer a second chance at the peak.

  Now they had it. And, as team leader Cap Cicero put it, “We’re not going to let a little breeze get in our way.”

  Clad in full-body wind suits, oxygen masks, and goggles, the SummitQuest mountaineers looked like something out of a science fiction movie. This was fitting, since the pinnacle of the world was as inhospitable a place as any alien planet.

  Bent double into the teeth of the gale, they slogged on, gasping bottled oxygen, moving slowly, but always moving. At extreme altitude, the mere effort of putting one foot in front of the other is the equivalent of pushing a boulder up a steep hill. It takes massive reserves of strength and will. And it takes the ability to fight through pain.

  A sudden howling blast drove thirteen-year-old Dominic Alexis back a step. Cicero reached out a hand to steady his youngest and smallest alpinist. Then he guided the boy into line behind him in an effort to shelter him from the worst of the fierce wind.

  Cicero’s confident stance belied an inner concern: If the blow’s this bad here, it’s bound to be murderous higher up.

  Normally, conditions like this would have sent a team back to Base Camp to wait for better weather. But it was the twenty-first of May, very late in the climbing season. Any day, Everest’s summer monsoon could begin, effectively shutting down the mountain. They climbed now because they could not be sure they would get another chance.

  The team leader had no way of knowing that summer would come late that year. Nor could he have foreseen that, before Everest slipped into the monsoon, it would claim the life of one of his young climbers.

  Camp Four was a handful of tents on the South Col, the desolate, wind-scoured valley between the titanic peaks of Everest and Lhotse. At twenty-six thousand feet, it was more than a mile higher than Mount McKinley, the loftiest pinnacle in North America, and two miles higher than any point in the lower forty-eight states.

  True to Cicero’s expectations, conditions were appalling on the Col. The air temperature was –17° F, made bone-cracking by a wind that, at sea level, would have been considered a Category 2 hurricane.

  “We can’t climb in this!” complained Perry Noonan, shouting to be heard over the howling gale. “It’s going to be a million below zero at the summit!”

  “It could die down in an hour,” soothed Lenny “Sneezy” Tkakzuk, panning the bleak wasteland of rock and ice with his camera. It was Sneezy’s job to document their adventures on videotape. The footage would be E-mailed via satellite phone to their sponsor, Summit Athletic Corporation, for release on the Internet.

  “Or it could stay like this for two weeks!” Perry countered.

  “It’s not rocket science,” put in Babu Pemba, the head Sherpa guide, or Sirdar. “If it eases up, we climb. If it doesn’t, we turn around.”

  “I’m not going down,” announced Tilt Crowley defiantly. “This is our last chance. I don’t care about the rest of you guys. I’m going to the summit.”

  Cicero glared at him. “You’ll go where I tell you to, Crowley. Now let’s all try to get some rest. Standing here freezing isn’t going to change the weather.”

  It was just before three P.M. The summit bid was to begin in nine hours — an all-night marathon climb, returning before dark the next day.

  If everything goes as planned, Perry reminded himself. The problem was that in the Death Zone nothing ever went as planned.

  In the teen climbers’ tent, Tilt, Perry, Dominic, and their fourth teammate, Samantha Moon, the only girl, snacked on Summit Energy Bars and waited for the stove to melt ice. At this altitude, fire burned at such a low temperature that a simple cup of instant soup or hot chocolate could take more than an hour to prepare.

  Perry had come to detest this whole ritual. Just being in the thin air and low atmospheric pressure felt like a debilitating flu. Who wants to eat and drink when you’re sick as a dog? he thought to himself. Especially when you have to slave to boil water.

  The simple truth was that Perry was not the most gung-ho climber in the group. He had only qualified for the team because his uncle, Joe Sullivan, was the founder and president of Summit Athletic.

  Even now, at twenty-six thousand feet, probably dying a little with each bottled breath, Perry was amazed that he had never said those simple words to Uncle Joe: I don’t want to go.

  It wasn’t that his uncle was a tyrant. But the same force of personality that had built a multi-billion-dollar empire had created a man who wouldn’t dream of seeking anyone’s opinion. He was accustomed to being in charge. He would never think of asking, “Perry, do you want to go to Everest?” What climber wouldn’t?

  Perry wouldn’t. And didn’t. And he was disgusted with himself that he wasn’t safe at home right now, instead of trying to boil water in a place where water wouldn’t boil.

  Sleeping in an oxygen mask was an adventure. Usually it depended on how exhausted you were. Most climbers never slept at all at Camp Four. But even for those who succeeded, it was more like a series of five-minute catnaps in the course of several hours of icy discomfort.

  Tilt was the exception. Not only did he sleep in his breathing rig — he snored.

  Sammi bounced a plastic cup off the sturdy shape inside the bedroll. At only fourteen years old, Tilt was the second youngest of the group, but he was built like an NFL linebacker.

  “Come on, Crowley! Lose the buzz saw!”

  “Don’t wake him up,” Perry pleaded.

  The red-haired boy would have given much to avoid Tilt’s in-your-face sarcasm, if only for a few extra minutes. Tilt would not have won any popularity contests with the climbers or the guides. Even the friendly Sherpas steered clear of him after they learned that he referred to them as “baboons,” a takeoff on Babu’s name.

  Eventually, they all found sleep, even Perry. His uneasy dreams placed him on a toboggan on an endless hill. The other riders were cheering.

  What are they, crazy? Don’t they see there’s no bottom?

  And then something shoved him hard from behind.

  Caught in hazy semiconsciousness, he was still plummeting down when the force struck again. This time he saw what it was. Buffeted by the howling gale outside, the wall of the t
ent was moving!

  A new and even more terrifying sensation followed — the nylon floor, skidding beneath them. He could feel the rock and ice surface of the Col passing below.

  That was enough for Perry. He started screaming.

  “Shut up, wimp — ” Tilt began.

  Then the world turned upside down. Overpowered by the wind, the light aluminum tent frame folded like a beach chair. And they were rolling.

  “Do something!” howled Sammi.

  But nothing could be done. Perry was immobilized in his sleeping bag, his face pressed against the tent floor. The others somersaulted over him as the four rattled around inside the nylon tumbleweed.

  Trussed up and helpless, Perry could only estimate how far the gale was blowing them. If they rolled over the side of the Col, his toboggan nightmare would become a horrifying reality. It would be a four-thousand-foot slide down the steep Lhotse Face.

  “Oof!”

  A heavy weight landed on top of them, and the tent stopped rolling. Scant seconds later, a knife blade cut through the windproof fabric, missing Perry’s nose by an inch and a half. Cicero was there, hauling them out one at a time, while big Babu lay across the wreckage of the tent.

  Perry stared, his thoughts a mixture of awe and relief. Another fifteen feet would have put them over the side of the Col and into oblivion.

  The instant Babu released his grip, the wind launched the shredded tent high over the Lhotse Face. The SummitQuest team watched it soar like a kite until it was out of sight.

  Hunched together for protection from the gale, they surveyed what used to be Camp Four. Not a single tent was still standing. Sneezy and Andrea Oberman, the expedition doctor, struggled to salvage equipment where the guides’ shelter had once been. Not far away, the tents of This Way Up, another expedition, were in tatters.

  Tilt was like a wild man. “Let’s go right now! Once we bag the summit, the whole lousy mountain can cave in for all I care!”

  “Tilt — think,” Dr. Oberman ordered. “Even if we could climb in this wind, we’ve got nowhere to come back to. Camp Four is gone!”

  “So we won’t stop at the Col!” Tilt raved. “We’ll go all the way down to Camp Three! We’ve got an early start! We can make it!”

  Cicero grabbed him by the front of his wind suit. “Get a hold of yourself, Crowley. You may be going to the summit someday, but not today.”

  Dominic spoke up. He was so small and so quiet that people often forgot he was there. Yet despite his youth and size, his climbing instincts were too good to ignore. “We should leave right away,” he suggested. “As it is, we’ll be descending the Lhotse Face in the dark.”

  The fear and shock in the group receded, leaving disappointed resignation. Their second failed summit bid. They knew the drill: a night at Camp Three, another at Camp Two on the Western Cwm, and then down to base through the treacherous Khumbu Icefall.

  Sammi groaned into her mask. “I can’t face Base Camp again.”

  “We’re not going to Base Camp,” Cicero informed her. “We’ll head down into the valley.”

  Tilt’s eyes bulged. “We’re leaving?”

  “We’ll lose some altitude, breathe some decent air, get some real sleep.” Cicero flipped up his goggles and regarded them intently. “Then we’ll call up Summit and see if it’s time for us to go home.”

  www.summathletic.com/everest/valley

  Foiled by the mountain a second time, the youngest Everesters in history descend into the Khumbu Valley to the village of Gorak Shep, a day’s trek from Base Camp. Here they await word from Summit Athletic headquarters. Is their adventure over?

  The answer comes back a resounding “Climb on!” But Everest itself will have the final card to play. Is there one more window of good climbing weather left this season? The team can only wait and hope.

  In the meantime, they force all tension aside and use this delay as a chance to catch up on the news back home. CLICK HERE to see the climbers chatting with families and friends on the satellite telephone — an example of how modern technology can transform a primitive setting.

  “It’s a pack of lies!” Cicero bellowed into the handset.

  On the screen of his laptop computer was a newspaper article from the National Daily, E-mailed from Summit Athletic headquarters in Colorado.

  MIDDLE SCHOOL HIJINX AT 27,000 FEET

  The so-called mountaineers of SummitQuest continue to prove that filling a climbing team with children for the sake of grabbing headlines is more than just cynical; it is downright dangerous — not just to the teens themselves, but to other expeditions as well.

  By far the most shocking example of this took place recently when thirteen-year-old, ninety-pound Dominic Alexis took injured climber Nestor Ali on a reckless 150-foot slide high on Lhotse, the fourth-highest mountain in the world. By the time the incident was over, dozens of climbers had risked their lives in rescue attempts, and Ali had to be airlifted to a hospital in a costly helicopter evacuation….

  “I saw that slide!” Cicero raged. “It was the only way to get the guy down from there. I don’t know if I would have had the guts to do it myself!”

  “Unbelievable,” muttered Sammi to Dominic as Cicero raved into the phone. “I mean, you were the hero of that rescue. And they blame you for putting Nestor in the hospital.”

  “It’s your fault, all right,” added Perry. “Your fault he’s still alive.”

  Dominic shrugged helplessly. “They’re not lying, exactly. Everything in the article happened. It goes to show how the media can distort the truth just by the way they report the facts.”

  “I’ll tell you what it shows, shrimp,” sneered Tilt. “It shows that somebody hates us. And we all know who’s got the most to lose if we summit.”

  Sammi made a face. “Ethan Zaph.”

  The famous Ethan Zaph was a member of the This Way Up team and the current record holder as the youngest alpinist ever to conquer Everest. If any of the SummitQuest climbers made it to the top, that record would be broken. Someone was feeding the National Daily embarrassing and misleading information about SummitQuest. Sammi was pretty sure she’d found the culprit.

  Dominic did not agree. “How could it be Ethan? He was one of the guys we rescued.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Tilt. “And isn’t it convenient that rescuing those two kept us off the summit so his precious record could stand forever?”

  Even Sammi didn’t buy that theory. “I don’t think he faked it; I just think he’s a rat!”

  Tilt made no reply. He was the only one of them who knew for certain where the National Daily was getting its information. At first, he had done it strictly for the money. Not everyone had a billionaire uncle like Perry. And climbing gear and clothing was expensive stuff — more than a lousy paper route would pay for.

  But lately a second motive had taken over his secret E-mailed reports to the National Daily. Tilt’s plan was to become the new Ethan Zaph — a younger summiteer who would win even more fame and fortune. There was only one problem: Dominic was even younger than Tilt. If he summited, too, he’d be the new record holder, and Tilt would be downgraded to also-ran. Who cared about the second youngest guy to bag Everest?

  Dominic could make it, too. The shrimp led a charmed life, as if he’d been sprinkled with fairy dust or something! Every move he made turned out to be the right one; everybody loved him; the Sherpas treated him like a cherished younger brother. The only thing he didn’t have going for him was the fact that he was young and small. And Tilt made sure that the National Daily hammered that piece of information into the public’s head. Now a lot of people felt that Summit Athletic had put a baby on a mean mountain.

  The fact that everyone blamed the National Daily on Ethan Zaph — well, that was just gravy. If Cicero ever found out Tilt was the leak, he’d be off the team faster than you could say Kathmandu.

  Outside the window of this ramshackle excuse for a hotel, it was snowing. Every flake that fell here usually meant ten tons on
the upper mountain. Tilt’s brow clouded. None of this would matter if they couldn’t get another chance to push for the summit.

  Cicero slammed down the phone, fuming.

  Sammi read his mind. “I say we head back to Base Camp and squeeze the truth out of Ethan Zaph.”

  “Forget it,” said the team leader with a sigh. “In the next few days, we’re either going up or going home. What possible difference could it make?”

  Sneezy was E-mailing video footage from in and around Gorak Shep to Summit’s Web designers in Colorado when he heard the helicopter. He was instantly alert. The villages of the Khumbu region were barely out of the Stone Age. High tech around here referred to the yak trains that ferried climbing equipment to and from Base Camp. A chopper meant business, and the only big business was Everest.

  “Cap — ”

  Cicero was already at the window, watching the landing. “Here comes trouble,” he said tersely.

  The two men who strode across the hard dirt compound to the lodge wore paramilitary uniforms and black berets. They represented the government of Nepal, and had visited SummitQuest once before, at Base Camp. At that time, the articles in the National Daily had just come to the attention of the Nepalese climbing officials.

  “Where’s Dominic?” the cameraman whispered.

  “Rock scrambling with Babu and Sammi in the hills,” Cicero replied.

  And then the men were ducking through the tiny door, their faces grim.

  “Cap Cicero.” The junior officer held out a murky faxed copy of the latest National Daily article. “The boy is here?”

  “The boy is not here,” said Cicero, tight-lipped.

  “Where is he, please?”

  “The boy is not here,” Cicero repeated. “You’ve got something to say, say it to me.”

  “Three weeks ago, we came looking for the boy Dominic Alexis, and you told us he had departed. This was a lie, yes?”

  Cicero shrugged. “The kid was sick. Then he got better.”

  “You assured us he would not climb,” the man persisted. “And look what he did.”