Green Boots Cave, Northeast Ridge, Mount Everest—27,890 feet
May 16, 2010
4:53 p.m.
A mask over my mouth?
Oxygen?
Where am I?
Slowly twisting his head from side to side, Quinn understood he was propped against the rock wall of Green Boots Cave, a climber to each side of him. The shelter of the overhang was giving a temporary respite from the driving wind and snow.
An oxygen mask being held over his mouth was indeed bringing him back to life, but it wasn’t Quinn’s. It belonged to the climber to his left. His own mask, useless since he had run out of oxygen, was pushed down around his neck.
His goggles also removed, Quinn struggled to recognize his rescuers through frosty, blurred eyes. The only thing he could make out for sure was that they were too big to be Sherpas.
Drawing down hard on the oxygen, he told himself that he must have blacked out from a lack of it. He wondered if the two climbers spoke English. He began to say, “Thank you,” as a third climber moved in front of him.
Pulling up his own goggles and unclipping his oxygen mask, Sarron revealed his face, saying, “Ça suffit. He is conscious now.”
The oxygen mask over Quinn’s mouth was abruptly pulled away by the other climber, who immediately pushed it back onto his own face.
“Save your English manners for those who might appreciate them, Quinn,” the Frenchman said. “The only thing that you are going to be truly thankful for this day is when it ends. You will be envying the quiet fate of Green Boots here, much like your antiques-dealer friend.”
At the mention of Graf, Quinn started to struggle.
Instantly, the two other climbers gripped him firmly, locking his body hard against the uneven rock.
Sarron lifted the old ice axe and, after holding it close to Quinn’s eyes so that he could see exactly what it was, rested the sharpened metal end spike on the Englishman’s cheek. “Stop. Moving. Stay. Still,” he shouted over the wind, stressing each word with a push.
Quinn flinched each time the point pierced into his cheek.
Pulling the axe away, Sarron leaned in close to Quinn’s bleeding face. “I heard that you like sticking ice screws into people’s eyes. Not so much fun being on the receiving end, is it, fucker?”
Quinn could only stare back in silence.
“Huh, I thought so!” Sarron shouted. “I bet you never imagined I would hit you so high on the mountain. Beautiful, for so many reasons. First, it permits me to take what I need with no witnesses. Second, it allows me to push you off the Kangshung face and give you a very long time to remember me as you fall. And, third, that putain Henrietta Richards can put it in her fucking record books as the highest ambush in history.”
Sarron took a long Tibetan knife from inside his climb suit. He unsheathed it and slipped the narrow blade under Quinn’s oxygen mask, which was hanging on his chest. Hooking it out and up on the end of the long blade, Sarron tensioned the razor-sharp edge to easily slice through the elastic straps. The mask fell loose.
The Frenchman lifted it up, slicing its red oxygen supply tube as he did so. For a moment he just held the severed mask in his hand, looking at it as if it was a surgically removed heart. “Remind you of Munich, Oleg?” Sarron asked before tossing it back over his shoulder.
“You won’t be needing that anymore. I control your oxygen now,” he said looking back at Quinn. He motioned to the person on Quinn’s left. “Dmitri, give him some more of yours. I need him lucid for the next part.”
The silent climber put his own mask back over Quinn’s mouth.
Quinn was able to suck in five deep breaths before Sarron gestured for the mask to be pulled away once more.
“To be honest, it is very difficult to resist cutting your miserable throat right now, you English bastard. However, I need you to tell me some things first.” He paused before asking, “Find what you were looking for up there on the Second Step?”
“No,” Quinn replied.
“Sure?”
“Yes. Fuck you.”
Sarron pushed the blade of the knife back up toward Quinn’s face.
“No, Neil Quinn, it is I who will be fucking you with this knife if you don’t answer me.”
The blade stroked Quinn’s face, his skin twitching at its touch.
“Now I ask again: What did you find? Did you find a camera up there?”
Quinn said nothing before a push of the blade produced an involuntary, “Yes.”
“I knew it. Where is it?”
“I don’t have it.”
“Of course you don’t. Oleg, search his pack.”
The second figure pushed Quinn forward and pulled off his rucksack. Digging into the top, he pulled out the empty oxygen bottle on its severed tube and threw it down the slope of the hill. The Russian rifled deeper, discarding the other survival items inside before concluding there was nothing else.
“It must be inside his suit,” Sarron said.
Quinn deliberately started to struggle.
“Hold him, both of you.”
As the Vishnevskys forced Quinn hard back against the rock wall, Sarron moved the point of the knife down under Quinn’s chin to his throat, pushing it into the skin to stop him from moving. With his other hand, he ripped open the wind flap to the front of the Englishman’s suit and pulled down the zip inside. Lowering the blade of the knife, he pushed open the right side of the suit. It moved back easily. When he tried the left side, it was heavy against the knife. Sarron quickly pushed his hand onto Quinn’s chest and felt the camera in the mesh pocket within.
“This is it, isn’t it?” he said as he looked back up into Quinn’s face.
Not waiting for any reply, Sarron reached into the suit and seized the old Leica. Once it was free, he nodded to himself, holding the camera up in his left hand.
“So you don’t have the camera, huh? You shit!” he shouted at Quinn, pulling back his right hand and punching the hilt of the knife within his clenched fist into the side of Quinn’s face. Quinn’s head smacked back against the stone. He slumped forward, senseless from the blow.
Sarron put the camera inside his own suit, saying, “Get him up.”
The two Russians each put a shoulder under Quinn’s arms and pulled him to his feet.
Sarron, pointing beyond the overhang, shouted, “Up onto the ridge.”
Quinn, head still reeling from the punch, blood flowing from his nose, was unable to stand.
Forced to use all their considerable strength, the brothers held him up and turned him back out into the blast of the weather. Sarron, his words now lost in the wind, followed, constantly gesturing for them to be faster, with the knife in one hand, the old ice axe in the other.
Quinn tried to collect himself as they moved, but the blow to his head and the renewed oxygen starvation made it impossible to think clearly. He had to do something, or he was going over the edge. In a vain attempt to slow the Russians, he raised his feet, dropping his full weight onto them.
It caused them to falter for a moment, but with another hard pull, they moved on toward the top of the ridge where a ramp of snow launched a grey maelstrom of cloud out over the abyss.
Just before the lip of the snow cornice, they stopped.
Sarron shouted something more, but those words too were lost.
Quinn tried to push back from the edge, only for Sarron to begin jabbing at the small of his back with the axe, determined to use it to send the Englishman over the edge.
In one last desperate effort, Quinn raised his right boot and brought it down as hard as he could. The sharp steel crampon ripped through Oleg Vishnevsky’s down suit, stabbing through muscle and flesh to lodge into bone.
The Russian bowed from the pain as Quinn twisted around with the other brother. Both of them toppled forward over Sarron, beginning to fall down the mountainside. They left Oleg Vishnevsky behind them, collapsed onto his knees. He instinctively tried to stand up but his broken lower leg buckled and he fell, the snow cornice under him collapsing. The man vanished, the wind masking his screams, the swirling cloud consuming his plummeting fall.
Quinn and the second Russian continued to roll down the face, gathering speed until both were stopped by a black projection of rock. Dmitri Vishnevsky quickly forced himself on top. Clenching Quinn’s head between his hands, the Russian struck it back against the rock. The impact spiked into Quinn’s skull with a white flash that left colored spots dancing before his eyes.
One of the spots remained, a point of bright red light that hovered on his attacker’s chest. Quinn fixated on the firefly, questioning its brilliance, its persistence. Just as his addled, oxygen-depleted brain understood what it really was, the red light burst over him in a wet explosion of blood and feathers.
The Russian, killed in that instant, fell onto Quinn, cracking his head back once more onto the rock, knocking him senseless again.
Half opening his eyes, Quinn thought he saw Stevens approach and lean down to check that the Russian was dead.
He tried to say something to him, to warn him, but no words came.
Stevens looked at Quinn, reaching for him.
Sarron lunged from out of the cloud.
The long Tibetan knife disappeared into the side of Stevens’ neck.
It was the last thing Quinn saw.