2

While his father contemplated whether his old friend Barney Guttman could make a currency play for him on any payment to the Russian space tourism program, Nelson Tate Junior was actually little more than an unconscious mound of yellow fabric and goose down fifteen feet directly below the highest point on earth. The boy’s heavily masked, freckled face was pitched forward into the thick cap of snow, blind to the blue-black dome of unlimited sky above, to the incredible views of the mighty mountains all around him.

Released from reality and reason, his mind had fled. Denying the bitter, tooth-cracking cold; the racing, freezing wind; the rattle of the snow crystals it carried, his addled brain was telling him instead that he was in the beautiful garden of his parents’ house. Convinced of soft grass under his feet and a bright sun warming his face, Nelson Tate Junior was, at that very moment, intent only on throwing an old baseball for his bulldog, Buddy …

Two thick mittens hovered for a moment above Junior’s prone body before slapping themselves together and reaching down to turn the skinny kid over in a single, brisk movement.

One hand then gripped the hood of the boy’s down suit, the other a shoulder strap of his rucksack, and, with a second hard pull, forcefully wrenched him up into a sitting position.

Nelson Tate Junior came to with a start, hit by successive waves of panic, nausea, and confusion.

What is this alien being, peering down with mirrored eyes, making odd, rubbery noises at me?

If he could have heard the sounds properly, the boy would have understood that Neil Quinn, No Horizons’ head guide for their 2009 Everest North Expedition, was shouting, “You’ve done it, kid. You’ve done it. No time to sleep. You’re on the summit of Mount Everest.”

But he couldn’t, and as Quinn stopped talking, Junior’s head lolled to the side once more.

Quinn gave the kid a shake but to no avail.

He was out cold.

“Fuck!”

The English guide’s mind pushed through its own fatigue to start issuing warnings. This was more than someone resting after the final push to the top. This was serious. Reminding himself that he had never lost a client in fifteen years of guiding, Quinn told himself to act fast if he wasn’t going to now.

Quickly hunching his six-foot-four frame down from the violent gusts of wind racing over the summit pyramid, the Englishman pulled the fluorescent lime-green oxygen cylinder from the top of the kid’s rucksack. He immediately tried to click out the supply wheel on the regulator valve to increase the flow. It didn’t move, already screwed out to the maximum. Quinn swore again.

Shaking a gloved hand from within its heavy mitten, he used an index finger to scratch the ice from the face of the regulator’s gauge. Pulling his eyes tight into the dial, he saw that it was reading no pressure. Tapping the gauge, its needle started oscillating wildly.

Is it broken or is the cylinder empty? Is there a blockage? Where?

Searching for answers, Quinn saw a heavy ice buildup, translucent and grey, hanging from the bottom of the boy’s rubber facemask and encrusting the front of his down suit. The ice continued along the thin, red oxygen supply line and down the thicker corrugated tube that led to the system’s clear plastic reservoir bottle. Quickly but carefully he broke away as much of it as he could and then massaged the supply tube hoping that was the problem. After that he followed the red tube back to the regulator to see if it was blocked or split further back, but he could see nothing obviously wrong.

Perhaps the bottle just slipped down within the otherwise empty rucksack and kinked the supply tube?

It was known to happen. One way or another, the boy’s precious flow of supplementary oxygen must have been interrupted. Quinn had to restore it.

Pushing the kid’s ski goggles up off the bridge of his nose and unhooking the straps of his oxygen mask, he pulled it away. The edges ripped from the teenager’s beardless cheeks, taking ice and a little skin with them. The shock of pain, followed by the sudden cold of the freezing air on his wet mouth and teeth, instantly brought the boy back to consciousness. Nelson Tate Junior began to sob and dry-heave alternately. A blister on his lower lip split. A trickle of blood oozed out.

Quinn leaned closely into the small face. It was as white as a sheet, smeared with ice, saliva, and mucus, the only color being the crimson on his lip. The boy’s eyes were glazed, lifeless. The guide snapped soundless, gloved fingers in front of them to no reaction. He couldn’t understand the kid’s decline. He had been going fine, slow undoubtedly, but still making good progress only forty-five minutes before. It had been the Scot on their team, Ross MacGregor, who had been struggling from the moment they left the High Camp until he turned back at Mushroom Rock.

Quinn looked around for Pemba, the Sherpa whose sole task was to accompany the boy.

Where the fuck is he?

He soon saw that Pemba too was down on the snow of the summit, sitting forward with his head between his knees. Dawa, his older brother and the expedition’s sirdar, was tending to him. Above them, Quinn could see the other No Horizons client, the Swiss Yves Durand, and his Sherpa, Lhakpa, taking photos on the very summit. They seemed to be fine.

Moving his face back into the kid’s, Quinn shouted at the top of his voice, “Talk to me!” The effort winded him.

The kid heaved some more. Then, looking up at Quinn, he said faintly, almost a whisper amidst more shuddering sobs, “Don’t let me die.”

Upon hearing it, something low in Quinn’s stomach squirmed. He recognized it for what it was.

Despair.

The Englishman caught it, releasing an increasing anger to deprive it of room to grow.

“Shit! Shit! Shit! It’s okay … it’s okay. I’ve got you.”

Quinn pulled the kid into his chest and, for a moment, just hugged him close. Struggling to catch his breath from the shouting, he ordered himself to get control as he looked back again at Dawa and Pemba, asking himself once more what could have gone so wrong. Many of his clients had made that final, seemingly never-ending push up the summit ridge with little left in their tanks other than willpower, but this was crazy.

Why didn’t Pemba see this coming? And what the hell is wrong with him?

Pemba was the strongest young Sherpa they had, a quadruple summiteer before his twenty-fifth birthday. He had already saved three lives on Everest.

That’s why he had been assigned to the damn kid, for God’s sake!

Quinn began to curse himself. He should have stuck closer to the boy even if he did have other clients up there. He should have done it, not for the money, that bloody $100,000 summit bonus that Jean-Philippe Sarron, the French owner of New Horizons Expeditions, kept harping on about, but because Nelson Tate Junior was exactly what they all called him—a kid.

For a second, Quinn wished he were anywhere in the world but there. Immediately acknowledging the futility of such a thought, he laid Nelson back down and went to work.

Stabbing the shaft of his axe deep into the hard, icy snow, he pulled off his own rucksack and hooked it over the axe’s head to prevent it from sliding off the mountain. Kneeling between the rucksack and the kid, the guide then extracted his own oxygen cylinder, checked the pressure, and quickly dialed it up to a flow rate of four liters a minute. He pulled off his mask, bracing himself for the effects of giving up his oxygen supply, and put it over the kid’s mouth as he warned himself to not be without it for too long.

Holding his mask tightly over the boy’s face, he saw Dawa now moving across to him, leaving Pemba alone on the snow but sitting up unaided. At least that was a hopeful sign. Quinn watched him slowly approach, wondering what he would tell him about the young Sherpa, until his attention was pulled back to Tate Junior who was beginning to writhe and moan.

That too was a good sign.

The oxygen was reaching into the kid, bringing him back.

The boy began to mumble something.

Quinn struggled to recognize the words, but when he pulled the oxygen mask back for an instant, he understood.

“My hands. My hands. My hands,” the boy repeated.

“What about your hands?”

“I can’t feel them …”

With Dawa kneeling down beside him, Quinn pointed urgently to the kid’s hands.

Together they pulled off the boy’s black nylon insulated mittens to reveal only the thinnest of silk under-gloves beneath.

Quinn and the veteran Sherpa immediately looked at each other in shared horror as they both understood that the boy wasn’t wearing at least another pair of fleece gloves, if not two.

Quinn seized a hand and felt it.

It was rigid.

Peeling off the useless under-glove, he saw that the fingers were soapy white, each one an icicle.

Dawa pulled off the other.

It was the same.

They each began to squeeze a hand, desperate to get some movement, some warmth back into the fingers.

They remained locked solid.

Motioning to Dawa to pull the kid forward, Quinn unzipped the front of his own down suit and forced the kid’s hands up and under the fleece layers inside, pushing them up as far as he could get them. He shivered as he felt the bitter cold of the frozen fingers touch his warm skin. Ignoring it, he clamped his elbows inward, squeezing the fingers into his armpits, trying to force every degree of his body heat into them.

Huddled around the boy, Quinn felt the inside of his head suddenly wallow, reality rippling. He recognized it as a warning that the dull floating sensation he was already feeling was becoming a deeper hypoxia. Without his additional oxygen supply, he was entering the gelatinous world of true high altitude where urgency fades, the body slows, and the mind drifts off into the ether.

You need your Os back, Major Tom …

After asking Dawa to look at the kid’s oxygen system while he continued to warm the boy’s hands, Quinn said, “Dawa, Pemba not okay?”

“Pemba sick, I not know, Mr. Neil,” the veteran Sherpa replied, momentarily lowering his head as if shamed by his brother’s infirmity. “He try for summit without using his Os for big track record, but he sick in stomach so big problem instead. Sorry, Mr. Neil. Pemba better with Os. Good now. You must worry only about boy.”

A sharp hiss stopped any further discussion as Dawa broke the seal on a new cylinder by screwing it into the kid’s regulator and then concentrated on checking all the parts of the supply system once again.

After several more minutes working on it, the Sherpa indicated to Quinn that it seemed to be functioning. He passed the kid’s mask back. Quinn, with one hand, hooked it over his head and pulled it onto his own mouth while Dawa wedged the kid’s old cylinder deep into the broken snow above Quinn’s ice axe to stop it sliding away down the slope. Taking a series of long, deep breaths from the mask, Quinn felt his head lift and clear slightly. Whatever Dawa had done, it had worked.

“What was the problem?”

“Don’t know, Mr. Neil. Maybe ice, maybe bad cylinder …”

“Okay, Dawa. Well done, anyway. Now let’s do his hands.”

Dawa pulled a white pair of knitted wool gloves from his bag and took some chemical hot packs from the cargo pocket of his bulky, insulated trousers. Tearing them open, he vigorously shook each one to bring it to life while Quinn released the boy’s arms from the inside of his suit. Together they both massaged the small hands some more before working the silk under-gloves and Dawa’s woolen gloves back over the stiff fingers.

Quinn took off his own heavier, thicker mittens and passed them to Dawa to drop the hot packs inside. As Quinn took the kid’s thinner mittens in exchange, Dawa put the Englishman’s onto the boy’s damaged hands. They both knew well that there was not enough oxygen up there to fully activate the heat pads. There would be even less within the confined space of the mittens, but maybe a little heat and the thicker insulation of Quinn’s gloves would reduce the severity of what was well on its way to being severe frostbite.

Tate Junior started mumbling again, more urgently. As Quinn replaced the kid’s now-functioning oxygen mask and took back his own, the boy continued to try and force a word through his cracked and blistered lips.

“Pht … pht … pht …”

“Feet?” Quinn questioned.

“No. Pht …”

“What then?”

The word finally emerged.

“Photo.”

Quinn’s heart sank.

“Really? Just breathe the fucking Os, for Christ’s sake.” Quinn pushed the kid’s mask hard onto his nose and mouth, pulling the elastic straps as tight as possible to secure it, hoping that it might also have the effect of shutting him up.

As Dawa turned away to return to Pemba, Quinn shouted after him, “Dawa, get Mr. Yves and Lhakpa going down now. They got here a good time before us—too long on summit now. Down. Then you give more help to Pemba. Okay?”

The veteran Sherpa nodded as he slowly moved away.