41

BELOW

Camp Four — 25,600 feet,

Mountain of Makalu, Province No. 1, Khumbu, Nepal

October 23, 2014

Quinn left his battered tent later than he would have liked, dismissing, with movement, the alternative of sitting out the day in the hope of better weather. There were no guarantees it would come and the physical debilitation of a stationary twenty-four hours at 25,600 feet was a certainty. It was then or never and he knew it.

He pushed himself out into the steep darkness, relentlessly forcing himself upward, once again imprisoned within that freezing bubble of high-altitude slow-motion. The beam of his lamplight showed little beyond a lattice of streaking snowflakes. The howl of the wind drowned out all other sounds, leaving only the internal metronome of his heavy breathing to count him onward and upward.

The dense cloud was lightening by the time Quinn reached the entrance of the French Couloir. The deep snow gully was acting like a flue from the high ridge above, spindrift, ice, and small rocks scouring it constantly. Quinn weathered the bombardment to move up and across the opening—so small in the photographs but seemingly never-ending in reality—to follow a slightly more sheltered line at the bottom of the rock face. The relentless grind continued.

It took the arrival of daylight to finally reveal what he was seeking—a projection in the base of the rock form where it rose into that distinctive shoulder, still mostly hidden in cloud above. Quinn began to climb up, hooking and spiking himself into the rock. Every inch of the way, he fought against the subzero cold, the wind, and the growing exposure conspiring to block his every move.

Finally making it around to a deep trough in the rock, he stopped to try to recover his battered senses and search for the slightest trace of something, anything. He squeezed his eyes to focus through the haze but there was nothing, no sign that any climber had ever been there before, just more black rock, white ice, and gray cloud. Quinn could feel that day’s energy had already faded in him, sapped by the struggle to just get this far without his body freezing. The nerves in his fingers and toes had long ago receded into a blunt numbness, but now he could feel his limbs beginning to slow and stiffen at the behest of essential organs desperate for the little warmth that remained in his body. He was running out of time.

Crouched in the lee of the rock wall, Quinn laid his head back against the mountain and closed his eyes. A wave of intense fatigue released an unnatural warmth in the center of his chest. Quinn found himself wondering if the ghost of Fuji was there again, seated next to him, stripped to his tattooed skin and destroying the cold with his strange magic. But it was an older ghost, one with a German accent. “You know better than this, Mr. Quinn,” it commanded. “To sleep here is to die. Move!”

Quinn jerked awake. He told himself he must do as instructed, forcing the slow command to rise into his reluctant legs just as a heavy fall of snow and grit plummeted down from above. Instinctively he turned his body into the mountain, pressing his masked face tight into the rock while the spindrift rattled on his back like an icy waterfall. Holding and waiting, his frosted eyes traveled a line scratched into the rock before him. The incision turned and looped, slowly cutting its trace into Quinn’s hypoxic mind.

The symbol killed his lethargy.

Quinn immediately began to look around, pushing snow and ice from the surrounding rock with his mittened hands to find something more.

Slightly lower down he soon glimpsed a color, purple, so alien in the monochrome. It was the frayed end of a fabric sling. Using the pick of his axe, he began to hack away at the mound of snow and ice from which it projected. The tattered nylon band ran back to an old carabiner hooked onto a metal piton. Cleaning around the anchor Quinn saw something else, still mostly hidden, hanging below that same metal loop.

With a feeling of dread, he dug deeper, but revealed only a blue backpack, which he broke free from its frozen tomb. Quinn pried the stiff fabric open wondering if he was going to find the kapala but, inside, the well-preserved contents were the usual; a coil of rope, some more pitons and climbing hardware, a few personal effects, even a few bars of chocolate.

Quinn tested the strength of the old anchor from which the pack and the tattered sling hung and found it still completely solid, so he tethered himself to it just as Anderson must have done all those years before. Secure to work, he began to search elsewhere using his axe to probe the cracks in the rock, hooking and scraping them clear of snow and ice.

The first few revealed nothing, but then one began to open up the more he dug. Letting his axe fall on its lanyard, Quinn reached in, his arms pushing into the deep shelf in the rock. At the back, a round object met his hands.

Quinn swung off his rucksack, took out his own coil of rope to create space, then reached into the rock again. With a hard pull, the gabardine-covered package was released from its icy glue. After pulling it free, Quinn turned his back to the mountainside and, exhausted, slid down the ice and rock to just sit with the bundle in his lap. He eventually began, in vain, to try to undo the red cord that bound it, but the knots were too tight, his fingers too numb to make any impression on them.

He dug into his outer breast pocket for the Swiss Army knife he had stashed, surprised to find the small toy horse he thought that he had given to Beth. Confused to see it again, even a little worried, as he thought Beth was the one that needed it, he put it back and dug deeper into the pocket for the heavier knife. When he got it out however his fingers were so deadened they couldn’t open even the biggest blade.

Taking up his ice axe instead, he drove the pick into the green material then tore a small opening. From the slit a single empty eye socket looked out at him just as the wind lashed the rock face once more.

I have it.

Pushing the kapala down into his own rucksack, Quinn ordered himself to get out of there while he still could. Reaching for the old carabiner and piton, he grasped and pulled himself back up onto his feet. The repeated thought that the anchor was still rock solid gave Quinn an idea. He pulled the other coil of rope from the old rucksack then rummaged around to assemble whatever else he could take from it to bolster his own equipment.

Threading the head of his rope through a new carabiner clipped onto the old piton, he then knotted Anderson’s rope to it, and cast both lengths down the face. Attaching his descender to the double line, Quinn shouldered his own rucksack, trusted his life to Anderson’s forty-year-old anchor, and began to rappel straight down. He lost height like an elevator, one instruction from Pertemba driving him on: “If you can get back to the La at Camp Three, it’s possible but only if the weather permits. Camp Two is best. Remember to wrap yourself in everything you have. I don’t want you to freeze any more than you will have already.”

Quinn continued to descend until the ropes got stuck on the rocks above. He fought to free them but to no avail. Reluctantly Quinn abandoned his lifelines and downclimbed until he could let the snow slope take him, sliding, rolling, and plunging back to his tiny tent at Camp Four. He arrived just as the weather worsened. Dragging himself inside, he collapsed, utterly spent. His first thought was of the satellite phone, but its battery was dead. He tried the spare, but the cold had killed that also. His next thought was a prayer that he and his small tent wouldn’t blow away in the night. His last was that if it did, he wouldn’t be awake to experience it anyway.

Out, cold.