The Climb Page 5

  “Run!” bellowed Cicero.

  No instruction was ever less necessary. There was a mass stampede for the Nuptse side of the valley. Perry stumbled, but Sneezy hauled him up by a fistful of sweatshirt and dragged him out of harm’s way.

  The avalanche thundered down to the Cwm, kicking up a cloud of ice crystals that rose hundreds of feet in the air. The churning wall of snow pounced on Camp Two, shattering the outer ring of tents and leaving the others half buried.

  Then, all at once, it was over. The silence of the Cwm belied the furious activity of the previous moments.

  The head counts began. The various expeditions took inventory of their snow-covered personnel and reported no one missing. Except —

  “Wait a minute!” Cicero’s voice rang out. “Where’s Moon?”

  Desperately, Babu, Sneezy, Tilt, and Perry searched faces. Sammi was nowhere to be found.

  “Sammi!” Cicero raced for the compound, wading through thigh-high powder. Using his hands as a shovel, he dug out the tent flap and zipped it open.

  There sat Sammi Moon, cross-legged on her air mattress, completely lost in the musical world of her Walkman. Through the pummeling beat and raging guitars of Green Day, she had simply not noticed the avalanche.

  Weak with relief, Cicero reached out and snatched the headphones from her ears. “Hey,” he said hoarsely, “ever consider turning down the volume on that thing?”

  “Thanks, Dad,” Sammi grinned. She looked up at him and stared. The team leader was frosted white from head to toe. “Man, that must have been some snowball fight. I miss all the good stuff.”

  Climbers and Sherpas alike set about the task of digging out the tents. In a few hours, Advance Base Camp was up and running again.

  Although no one had been injured, four campsites had been destroyed. One of these belonged to This Way Up. So Ethan, Nestor, and their teammates and Sherpas headed back down toward the Icefall. With Ethan’s departure came a release of tension in the SummitQuest group. Most of them suspected Ethan of leaking information about them to the National Daily. Only Tilt knew the truth.

  Porters continued to plod up the Cwm, carrying loads destined for Camp Three on the Lhotse Face and Camp Four on the South Col. ABC was the obvious rest stop, and it was not uncommon to see as many as thirty Sherpas sitting on the snowpack, eating candy bars and drinking tea.

  Cicero and Sneezy were huddled over the video camera, examining the day’s footage. The images they chose would be E-mailed by satellite phone directly from Camp Two to Summit’s Web site designers in Colorado. Scenes from the expedition could be on-line in a matter of hours.

  Babu tapped Cicero on the shoulder. “Got a minute?”

  “What’s up?”

  “I’ve been hearing the Sherpas talking about someone they call the ‘little sahib.’ The word is there’s this kid — just a boy — who’s been helping them carry loads through the Icefall for the last couple of days.”

  Cicero’s face flamed red. “I’ll kill him!”

  “That’s impossible!” exclaimed Sneezy. “How could it be Dominic? The kid was in a Gamow bag a week ago.”

  “Then who is it?” snarled Cicero. “One of the dozens of other thirteen-year-olds hanging around Mount Everest?”

  “For what it’s worth,” added Babu, “they say he climbs like one of us.”

  Cicero reached for the radio and hailed Base Camp. A moment later, Dr. Oberman answered his call.

  “This is Andrea.”

  “Where’s Dominic?” Cicero practically barked at her.

  “He’s around somewhere,” came the reply. “You know Dominic; he marches to the beat of a different drummer. He’s made friends with some of the Sherpas, and they honestly seem to love him.”

  “Of course they love him!” howled Cicero. “He’s been doing their work for them!”

  “What work?”

  “He’s carrying loads up the Icefall!”

  There was a pause, then the doctor’s voice said quietly but clearly, “I’ll kill him.”

  “Get in line!” growled Cicero. “Listen, if you find him, sit on him. I’m coming down.” He began to strap on his crampons.

  Babu reached for his own gear.

  “God, no!” Cicero exclaimed. “I need you here to keep an eye on these three so they don’t start a summit push without us!” He shouldered a small pack. “What happened to us, Babu? We’ve been guiding this peak forever. How did we lose control?”

  Babu shrugged. “We’ve got a good system that works on this mountain, but it’s based on everybody being adults. If you tell a forty-year-old lawyer, ‘Stay out of the Icefall,’ and he doesn’t, that’s his problem. But if the same happens with a thirteen-year-old kid, you feel like it’s your fault and you’ve let him down. We’re climbers, Cap, not baby-sitters.”

  As Cicero began to descend the Cwm from Camp Two, his mind was in turmoil. Dominic. It was always Dominic. Cicero had known in boot camp that the kid was too young and too small. But the boy’s surprising skill and indomitable spirit had won him over.

  And what’s my reward for having faith in him?

  Who got HAPE on the trek? Who turned into the National Daily’s poster boy for “Send This Baby Home”? Summit headquarters had even begun to receive inquiries from the Nepalese authorities about why such a young child was listed on their climbing permit.

  And now the little brat wouldn’t stay out of the Icefall.

  So lost was he in his internal rant that he barely even looked at the line of porters passing him in the other direction. They were Sherpas, climbing under heavy packs and making it look easy. He was almost past them when, with his peripheral vision, he noticed that one of them — the smallest — was wearing a SummitQuest hat.

  “Freeze!”

  Dominic looked up, surprised. “Oh, hi, Cap.”

  Cicero went to top volume. “You were sick, mister! Do you have any idea how stupid this is? And carrying all that weight makes it twice as likely that you’ll have a relapse of HAPE!”

  Dominic shrugged, load and all. “I feel really good.”

  Cicero stared at the boy. He looked really good, too. Cicero had guided enough expeditions to recognize a climber in difficulty. Dominic was rosy-cheeked and breathing well. He moved with a spring in his step despite a pack that must have weighed forty pounds.

  But that didn’t excuse the disobedience. “When I say stay in Base Camp, what code word is in there that tells you to start climbing? And now you’re in the Cwm, so I guess the Icefall isn’t good enough for you anymore! Where were you planning to stop? The summit? Or were you going to continue on to the moon?”

  Dominic looked stricken. “I’m sorry, Cap. It just sort of got away from me.”

  Cicero was not receptive to his argument. “Too much candy on Halloween Night — that gets away from you! Not the Icefall! Climbing through the most inhospitable landscape on the planet is something you do on purpose! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t pack you off to Kathmandu right now.”

  “I’ll go down, Cap. I promise. I just have to deliver this load to the Japanese camp at ABC.”

  Cicero swallowed his exasperation. That was classic Dominic. Even when he was in big trouble, he wouldn’t duck out on his responsibilities to a bunch of Japanese climbers he had never met.

  “Give me that.” The team leader yanked the pack off Dominic’s back and hefted it himself. “You can sleep at Camp Two tonight and descend with the whole group tomorrow.” A grunt of effort escaped him. “You carried this?”

  The Sherpas laughed.

  “Little sahib strong like yak,” their Sirdar assured him. “For him, air no thin. Thick like sea level.”

  Cicero turned his face away to hide a smile of pride.

  Welcome back, kid.

  Base Camp was at full capacity, a bustling town of five hundred inhabitants, not including the porters and yak trains that arrived several times each day. Expeditions were constantly heading in and out of the Icefall. Teams
pushed to higher and higher camps to complete their final acclimatization trips. SummitQuest bounced back and forth between base and ABC, venturing as far as the bergschrund, the deep crevasse that separated the Western Cwm from the Lhotse Face. It was late April, and soon the weather windows would start opening. When that happened — when conditions on the upper mountain cleared for a brief period — everyone had to be ready. Most of the time, the Everest summit was battered by jet-stream winds so strong that they could be heard in Base Camp, more than two vertical miles below. The sound was like the roar of a freight train.

  Dominic had been banned from carrying loads through the Icefall, but he still spent a lot of his spare time with his newfound Sherpa friends. Pasang was even introducing him to the language. In return, Dominic was trying to teach him the words to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” the only English recording in Pasang’s tiny home village.

  The young man found the vocabulary very difficult. “What it means — fiddly-eye-oh?”

  Dominic’s Sherpa connections also provided him with every single piece of gossip in Base Camp. The Sherpas had the lowdown on everybody. Dominic knew who had the best summit chances (This Way Up) and the worst (the Guamanian brothers). Adventure Consultants had the best food, the Israelis had the best computer games, and the Canadians were the most polite. The strongest climber on the mountain that year was Babu Pemba, who turned out to be a kind of local hero. They also had a lot of respect for Cap Cicero and Ethan Zaph.

  Sammi Moon turned out to be quite famous among the Sherpas because she was involved in every softball game, every Frisbee catch, and every arm-wrestling match at Base Camp. By contrast, no one had noticed Perry at all. If the reluctant climber hadn’t had such striking red hair, he might have been totally invisible.

  Tilt, however, had a reputation all his own. He had discovered that the yak drivers were so poor that they would do practically anything to earn a few extra rupees — mere pennies in U.S. money. So he kept a staff of personal servants to perform such tasks as rewinding his videotapes, tying his bootlaces, and recharging his laptop computer. The climbing Sherpas hated him for it.

  “Sherpas poor, yes,” said Pasang angrily, “but no slaves.”

  For his own part, Dominic was disgusted and embarrassed to be part of the same team as Tilt Crowley.

  “Why can’t he rewind his own videotapes?” he muttered to Pasang. “He spends all day cooped up in that tent. What else does he have to do?”

  E-mail Message

  TO: bv@national-daily.com

  SUBJECT: Dominic’s return

  Cap has brought that poor sick kid back to Base Camp. They don’t care about Dominic. They just want the glory of putting a thirteen-year-old on the summit.

  That lousy Dominic! Every time Tilt thought about it, he wanted to break something. Dominic couldn’t stay sick like everybody else with HAPE. He had to come roaring back, carrying loads up the Icefall with the baboons.

  And Cicero thinks the sun shines out of his little shrimp butt!

  The thought made Tilt smolder. If I went into the Icefall without permission, I’d be on a plane home tomorrow.

  It wasn’t fair. Dominic got HAPE, and it actually helped him acclimatize. He was dancing around the Cwm while the rest of them were hammered by the altitude.

  Not that the little runt was going to summit. But his chances had to be improved because he could breathe the thin air.

  There must be some way to turn this around!

  The really crazy part is that the Sherpas are taking advantage of Dominic, forcing him to haul heavy loads up through the Icefall. And Cap is doing nothing to stop it. Back in the States, you could go to jail for something like that, couldn’t you? But in this dump, nobody cares.

  There, he thought with a grim smile. That ought to keep the pot boiling. By this time, Tilt had learned to anticipate the chain of events: The story comes out in the National Daily; outraged people complain to Summit; Summit chews out Cap Cicero.

  And, he reflected with satisfaction, Cicero blames the whole thing on Ethan Zaph.

  * * *

  If Ethan was not too popular around the Summit-Quest campsite, his teammate, Nestor Ali, was becoming a great favorite. Young, and even younger at heart, Nestor was easygoing, friendly, and always good for a laugh. The yeti incident at ABC had only cemented his reputation as Everest clown. He was welcome in every tent and could often be found sitting around the flat stone slab that served as SummitQuest’s dinner table.

  “I don’t think Ethan could be doing what you think he’s doing,” Nestor was saying one day over an omelet lunch. “Sure, he has the media contacts — he’s a famous guy. But he doesn’t care about records and being a big shot. He’s a tunnel-vision climber. When he’s taking aim at the summit, he forgets the rest of us are even here.”

  “Don’t you think we’re all like that?” Dominic asked thoughtfully. “I know I’m totally focused on getting my brother’s sand to the top.”

  Nestor looked bewildered. “You’re going to put sand on the summit? Why? To make sure nobody slips off?”

  Dominic laughed. “Chris has sand from the Dead Sea,” he explained, flipping up the leather string so the vial showed above his collar. “You know — from the bottom of the world to the top. Like that. If I get to the summit, I’ll leave it up there for Chris. He should really be here, not me.”

  “I promised Caleb I’d take him to the top,” Sammi said sheepishly. “I’ve got a picture of the two of us skydiving last summer — free fall.”

  “My uncle gave me an old piton from his rock-climbing days,” Perry ventured. “He says it saved his life when he was twenty.”

  “Pretty lame for a billionaire,” put in Tilt. “You’d think he’d give you the Hope diamond or something.”

  “This cost almost as much,” Perry chuckled wanly. “It had to be pulled out of a cliff in the Canadian Rockies. It took a five-man team to find it and get it down.”

  “What about you, Nestor?” prompted Sammi. “Got anything for the pinnacle of the world?”

  “My Slinky,” Nestor replied readily.

  “Slinky?” Perry repeated. “Like the kids’ toy? Why would you want to leave that on the summit?”

  “The ads say those things can ‘walk’ down any sloped surface,” Nestor explained. “Well, if that’s true, I can start it going at the top and it should boing all the way down the Kangshung face eleven thousand feet into Tibet.”

  There were howls of laughter from everyone but Tilt.

  “You guys are nuts,” he snorted.

  “Well, what are you taking to the summit?” Sammi challenged.

  Tilt kicked back on the air mattress. “Myself,” he boasted. “And a camera to prove I got there.”

  www.summathletic.com/everest/lhotseface

  Above the Western Cwm looms the mile-high wall of ice known as the Lhotse Face. It is the steepest part of the southeast ridge route and grows steeper as the climber ascends.

  CLICK HERE to see the SummitQuest team front-pointing up the sixty-degree slope, watched over by the spectacular peak of Lhotse, the fourth highest mountain in the world.

  Lhotse, my butt! Perry thought to himself. He couldn’t see any peak, spectacular or otherwise, towering above them. His universe at that moment consisted of a single rope that angled nearly straight up until it disappeared into a snow squall. For all he could tell, the upper end was attached to the Goodyear blimp.

  He knew Lhotse was there only because the rocks that kept pelting down had to be coming from somewhere. It was like climbing in a shooting gallery. And if one of them ever hit him …

  He was clipped to the nylon line by means of a jumar, a device that enabled him to ascend the rope, but would lock automatically if he happened to fall.

  Slide jumar up six inches. Left foot. Right foot. Repeat fifty million times.

  The slope was too steep for conventional walking, yet not quite vertical enough for front-pointing. He found himself trying to do both
— flat steps and toe steps — an awkward, ankle-twisting combination more common on a ballet stage than in the Himalayas.

  But no ballet dancer could handle twenty-three thousand feet!

  “Doing fine, Noonan,” called Cicero from below.

  But Perry was not doing fine. The altitude was showing itself as a jackhammer against every single muscle he tried to move. The air was so thin that there was literally nothing to breathe. Every few feet he had to stop to rest, to take several more gasping sucks at the punishing atmosphere in the hope of inhaling a decent amount of oxygen so he could keep going.

  The radiant heat of the Western Cwm may as well have happened in another life. The Lhotse Face was capital-C Cold. His climber’s watch registered it as twelve below zero. But that didn’t account for the chill factor from a brutalizing wind.

  Three hours of pure agony seemed to bring him closer to nowhere. On top of all its other miseries, the Lhotse Face was endless. Sneezy had put it best at Camp Two last night: “There’s lotsa face up there!”

  At 23,700 feet, they encountered two members of the Japanese team descending after a night at Camp Three. Perry had been dreading this. Since there was only a single fixed rope, climbers could not pass each other without one of them unhooking from the line. It would only be for a second or two, but at that moment, he or she would be connected to the mountain by nothing more than crampons.

  And then the maneuver was upon him. The first man unhooked and stepped deftly around Perry. His partner seemed to be having a much harder time. He came down to Perry’s level and just hung there, waiting. He was gasping as if he’d just run a marathon; his arms hung limp at his sides. There wasn’t an ounce of extra energy in him.

  Perry really had no choice. With a silent prayer, he disconnected his jumar and moved to step around the other climber. Just as Perry was about to clip on again, the exhausted man somehow lost traction in his crampons and began to slide down the ice. His rope caught Perry just below the knees, dislodging both of the boy’s front points from the Lhotse Face.