The Second Step, Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—28,133 feet
May 26, 2009
5:07 p.m.
The realization of what was missing paralyzed Quinn. He lay there, able only to visualize Nelson Tate Junior’s young body being struck by the rockfall, seeing it sweep the boy off the ledge to cartwheel down the sheer face below like a rag doll, the rucksack releasing, the oxygen system spinning away, the yellow down suit ripping and bursting in explosions of blood and feathers at every contact with the razor-sharp edges of the mountain …
Stop!
Breaking his mind from the image, Quinn told himself to put his ski goggles back on. But, as he wrenched them back around to his eyes, he found that the hard plastic lens was split cleanly in two. They were useless. Pulling them up over his head, he tossed them away. When his gloved hand returned, he saw that it was covered in blood from his bleeding forehead. He pushed it back, applying pressure to the wound to try and staunch the flow, involuntarily imagining the boy’s fall all over again until a new sequence of thoughts finally intruded:
You need to move.
You can make it through this.
You’ve got to try.
With his other hand, Quinn reached for a frayed and faded length of red rope that was projecting from some hard ice at the foot of the rock wall.
He tugged on it.
It held.
He waited a little and then pulled on it with all the remaining strength he could muster.
Slowly, Quinn brought himself up onto his knees, then his feet.
His head spun like a gyroscope as he straightened himself. Winded from the exertion of getting up, it was all he could do to lean into the rock to stop the spinning.
Breathe.
His dry mouth pooled with saliva. He was going to vomit.
Instinct made him push his oxygen mask out of the way. He needn’t have bothered. Nothing came out as he dry-heaved painfully. It was a long time since Quinn had eaten anything.
The vomiting only winded him more.
Still continuing to retch, he pushed his mask back up onto his mouth as the rock in front of his face replayed Nelson Tate Junior’s body rolling to a rest, far below, smashed to a bloody pulp.
Quinn screamed at himself to stop thinking of the boy’s fall, to start thinking about saving himself instead.
FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DO SOMETHING!
He began to pull in the purple rope that had linked him to the boy. When he arrived at the finality of its tufted end, Quinn felt disgusted with himself.
Untying the remnant from his waist harness, he let the severed rope fall to his feet.
Immobile, he stared down at the hopeless coils until an inner voice said he wasn’t going to find the boy’s body there.
LOOK FOR IT!
Grasping the end of the rope with which he had righted himself, tugging on it once more to be sure that it really was hard frozen into the side of the mountain, he gradually inched himself toward the edge of the snowy ledge. There he stopped, tentatively leaning out, craning his head to look down into the cavernous black and white drop below.
Almost immediately, Quinn made out the forms of two dead bodies, one clad in blue, another in green, partially snow-covered and folded into the rocks directly below the step, but of the yellow-suited boy, there was no trace. As he searched further, an understanding of the boy’s unhindered drop down the sheer side of the mountain reawakened a forgotten—or was it just heavily suppressed?—sensation from long ago.
Jump! a crystal-clear voice suddenly seemed to command.
His legs started to tremble, his eyes fogging.
JUMP! JUMP! JUMP! it repeated.
Quinn’s insides spiraled into nausea once more.
To beat the vertigo that was threatening to overpower him, he forced himself to step away from the drop and back into the mountainside.
Turning, he saw a dark shape flick out from the rocks to his right until a cloud pushed up the face, obscuring the area.
Quinn kept his eyes fixed on the spot until the cloud thinned and he saw the darting shape again.
The small black form leapt out, tumbling and twisting madly on the buffeting wind until it could break free with a flick of wings and disappear back into the rocks.
It was a gorak, a mountain crow.
Quinn’s first reaction was to consider its presence as inevitable.
Years of expeditions with the Sherpas had ingrained his subconscious to automatically offer up their superstitions, whether he believed them or not.
The Sherpas said gorak came to collect the souls of lost climbers …
The bird was slow to reappear a third time.
While Quinn waited, a baser, more sickening realization of what it was really doing there ousted the mystical. Unlike humans, gorak are not interested in achieving incredible feats of survival at high altitude. They are motivated to break avian records for one reason and one reason alone: food. Even though a rock buttress blocked Quinn’s view beyond the end of the snow ledge, he grimly understood what must have attracted the crow.
Continuing to look across the length of the narrow ledge, he noticed some new marks in the snow, tight into the rock face.
His heart jolted.
The kid went that way!
The thought offered a moment of alternative, but not of sustained relief. The route down from the Second Step ran in the opposite direction. Quinn already knew the direction in which he was looking was a dead end in every sense, a projection of crags and buttresses that offered no prospect of safe descent.
The bird appeared again, as did the thought of what it might be feeding on.
No. You can’t permit that.
Cursing the absence of his ice axe to give him some support, Quinn cautiously began to make his way along the exposed traverse toward the bird.
In the beginning, it did indeed seem to lead nowhere. Only as he finally reached its visible end, the point where the rock buttress jutted out, did he understand that there was something beyond.
Gripping the buttress for support, he saw that the ledge narrowed to a width of just a few inches but actually continued around the small promontory. Hugging the rock, his oxygen mask blocking any downward view of his feet, he blindly forced the sharp points of his crampons into every groove he could feel and edged his way around, constantly fighting the magnetic pull of the massive void he knew was below.