Apartment E, 57 Sukhra Path, Kathmandu, Nepal
May 31, 2009
3:05 p.m. (Nepal Time)
On the other side of the mountains, Henrietta was not the least bit surprised by Sarron’s reaction to her call. The honest and the intelligent had always seen her as the undisputed historian, the guardian even, of Himalayan mountaineering. They actively sought her confirmation of their successful summits as a necessary endorsement of what they had achieved. The braggarts, the frauds, and the crooks, on the other hand, saw her only as a potential threat. There were many reasons for Henrietta Richards to dislike Jean-Philippe Sarron, and the fact that he had always refused to give her the time of day was confirmation of them all.
In the beginning Henrietta had come across Sarron, as she did most people, because of his climbing achievements, but in the latter years of her time at the embassy, it was more due to his other activities. There were many myths and legends about Sarron but even when she found that the truth was different, it was, ultimately, no less tawdry or dangerous. It was said, for example, that Sarron had been in the French Foreign Legion—he sometimes said so himself—but Henrietta knew from her investigations that he had actually served in the 1er Bataillon de Chasseurs Alpins, the French Army mountain troops. He had only been seconded to the FFL when the intense fighting that took place between Chad and Libya in the mideighties moved into the Tibesti hills. What was undoubtedly true though, was that using accumulated periods of long leave, he did undertake some of the toughest climbs of that time. For a short period, Henrietta was even developing an admiration for his abilities, but when he showed absolutely no interest in respecting hers, she placed him under a more critical eye.
After one of those climbs, Sarron had somehow acquired a hotel in Kathmandu with a small trekking business. In the bars of Thamel, it was said that he bought them for when he was going to leave the army, but Henrietta knew they were actually given over under some duress in lieu of a nonexistent payment for a wayward shipment of French military oxygen. When Sarron did finish with the army in 1988, he moved to Nepal to take up the ownerships. The hotel was quickly sold as the man clearly had little aptitude for hospitality. However, trading on his climbing reputation and his ruthless streak, Sarron built up the guiding business, assisted in this by two brothers.
Oleg and Dmitri Vishnevsky were wild Russians from the mountainous Caucasus, who, as teenage conscripts to the OKSVA in Afghanistan, deserted by escaping over one of the highest passes into Pakistan during the winter. With no prospect of a welcome home from Mother Russia, they spent the next few years traveling onward, stealing and cheating their way along the tourist trails of the Indian subcontinent until caught one night breaking into Sarron’s equipment store in Kathmandu. The pair told Sarron, during their subsequent beating, of how they had crossed the Dorah in January in little more than army fatigues, that they were Russian and nothing he could do would break them. Sarron, tempted by the challenge but suspecting they might be right, decided instead that they should work for him. He paid them very little, told them to drag his clients to the summit if necessary, and regularly tapped their psychotic streak if anyone crossed him.
By the midnineties, No Horizons, his unruly yet effective expedition company, had become increasingly successful at getting people up the highest peaks, even Everest if they paid enough. His heavy French brogue and constant cursing were ever-present features of those base camps where the majority of the occupants were paying handsomely for the often questionable pleasures of being there. As the number of climbers to the eight-thousand-meter peaks increased exponentially, so did the demand for bottled oxygen. By renewing some old military contacts and, quite literally, breaking some new local ones, Sarron started to feed off this market as well.
For a time, he appeared to be living well off it all. Too well to make sense, a few even said, despite the obvious facts that he paid his two head guides next to nothing, suffered no mark-up on his own oxygen, and was clearly one of the principal ringmasters of what was fast becoming a high-paying Everest circus. More recently however, everyone was in agreement that things seemed to have been turning against the Frenchman. A demand for higher standards and quality was making both the expedition and oxygen businesses more professional and competitive—a competition that increased still further when the global recession significantly reduced the number of punters able to pay the $65,000 Everest admission ticket. Sarron’s problems were further compounded when his two guides, the “Vicious Twins” as they had become known, vanished after their sideline of importing crystal meth and MDMA from Thailand turned sour when a bad batch killed three backpackers in a Thamel dance club. Since Sarron had then been compelled to pay market rates to the more respected guides, he needed to try and win back the business he was losing.
That was enough of an explanation for most, but Henrietta knew the true extent of Sarron’s other activities—and losses. Diplomatic circles had long suspected that No Horizons was also a “front” for profiteering from the Maoist insurgency in Nepal, primarily through the sale of stolen French army weapons to the rebels and general thuggery for hire in Kathmandu. The fact that the Nepalese Maoists had come in from the hills to political respectability in 2006 had also killed that side of Sarron’s dealings, leaving only the Naxalite rebels in India as customers. From what Henrietta had heard, the Indian Intelligence Bureau were also now onto that. A failed, somewhat bizarre attempt in late 2008 to sell two containers of Chinese counterfeit climbing clothes through the port of Naples had even traced back to Sarron to show how desperate he had become.
Yes, it was hardly surprising that Sarron was not going to speak to her about such a disaster for his operation on Everest.
Calling over to Sanjeev Gupta, she asked, “Sanjeev, can you find out what hotel the No Horizons team uses in Kathmandu? It’s probably the Peak or the Khumbu, most climbers tend to stay at one of those two. When you do, please give them a call and find out when the No Horizons team will be arriving back from Tibet. I want to organize one of my post-climb chats with Neil Quinn as soon as possible.”
Feeling strangely irritated that Quinn should have gotten himself mixed up with someone like Sarron, Henrietta stood and readied herself to leave.
“I’m off now, Sanjeev. I think it might be useful to have one of my little lunches with Pashi the barber to hear what the gossip is on the No Horizons expedition. Can you warn him I’m coming? Back later.”