In the 1930s, sporting climbers from all over the world began flocking to Switzerland as word of the impossible face spread. They came in droves, determined to conquer the needlelike summit. Topping out at 25,430 feet, Der Nadel ranked with Everest and K2 as one of the deadliest mountains in the world. In a storm like this, it was the deadliest. Since the first climbers had attempted to conquer the north face in 1933, over seventy-five men had died up there. Countless had been severely injured. And almost everyone lucky enough to survive had never gone anywhere near Der Nadel again.
By the time Lieutenant Hartz had climbed one thousand feet, insecurity had given way to the first hints of panic.
Hartz paused to hammer in another titanium tube into the coat of ice. He missed the target and his hammer careened off the rock. He felt himself starting to shake. The hardened steel trap that was the young soldier’s mind was beginning to crack under the strain. Cracks just wide enough to admit slivers of fear.
Determined to fulfill his mission, Hartz kept climbing, his fingers searching for purchase as new layers of thin ice coating made it ever more difficult. He swung his ice ax again and again, looking for another pick. His normally icy nerves continued to unravel with each swing of the ax.
He realized he was now sweating profusely despite the subzero temperatures at that altitude, something he’d never done before. His bowels were dangerously close to the boiling point. He knew why. It was because he was now passing by certain early but prominent landmarks of Der Nadel. Crumbling outcroppings, ragged formations, rotten ice, all had given him nightmares as a young boy thumbing through his alpine picture books, dreaming of climbing and the Swiss Army.
Crabbing gingerly across the broad slab of ice, he found that the wall steepened, the snow cover thinned, and his ice ax ricocheted off solid rock a few inches beneath the crust. With the advent of rotten ice at the higher elevations, Christian now felt a nauseous anxiety that shook him to the core.
He felt the only thing preventing him cartwheeling off into space was a pair of two thin titanium bolts sunk half an inch into rotten ice. Ice that looked like the inside of his freezer when it badly needed defrosting. Then came the first truly stupid mistake of the day.
Lieutenant Hartz looked down.
He saw the ground spinning more than nine thousand feet below. And suddenly felt woozy, even dizzy, as if he was about to faint. He wrestled mightily for control of his once stalwart mind and took a dozen deep breaths before he could resume climbing. Normally, his steely confidence made short work of encroaching panic, crowding it out. It had been his greatest strength. Now he wondered if it would soon become his downfall.
This time, to his mounting horror, everything was different.
It had taken him six tortured hours to climb a mere forty-eight hundred feet up the face. Hartz figured he had maybe three more hours of reasonable daylight to reach the roughly calculated area he’d been assigned to scout for a survivor.
The weather was deteriorating so rapidly that he was at the point where it looked as if he might soon be needing that rescue door himself.
He paused to check his altimeter, and a new kind of fear crept into his reeling mind on silent tiptoes. Based on his current rate of ascent, he knew that only two scenarios were now even possible. One, best case, he’d actually find the door, and the climber behind it would be alive. He’d take shelter inside the mountain with her for the night. Ride out the storm and get her down next morning. But it was a night that promised nothing good. It was already shaping up to be wretched from any perspective.
Foehnsturms, heavy snowfall, and high winds were increasing the chance of avalanches and thundering rock slides by a factor of ten. Worst case? He might never even reach the altitude where he might find that door, much less rescue anybody.
If worst did prove to be the case, it meant he’d have to stop climbing and soon. He’d need somewhere, anywhere, to spend the night; perched on some craggy overhang, some random narrow ledge where he could huddle against the rock, totally unprotected from the raging elements.
An even worse scenario? There would be no ledge at all. He would be forced to hang suspended from two anchors embedded perhaps one-quarter of an inch into crumbly rock and ice. Hanging in space and twisting in a violent, icy wind. An entire night of darkness, dangling at ten thousand feet in the middle of a Category 4 hurricane.
He shook his head and tried to clear his trembling mind.
He had little choice but to continue moving up the face. Duty dictated that decision. But the longer he climbed, and the wearier and more unsure he grew, the more he began to question the wisdom of his decision to keep on going. He was moving at a snail’s pace, doing a long end run around yet another wide ledge protruding from the rock just above him.
He felt dizzy, like he might faint. He had to take a few minutes’ rest before he could resume climbing. When he resumed, he tried to regain his focus by thinking of something else, anything else, as he moved upward across the face. After half an hour, he came within sight of a familiar landmark above.
His platoon called that imposing strip awning of rock “der Flughafen.” In English, that meant “the airport.” The departure lounge to the Eternal Kingdom. God’s waiting room. If it was a joke, as some people said, he didn’t get it. There was nothing remotely amusing about getting under that damn overhang before you even had a shot at climbing on top of it!
The crumbling rock wall here was coated with two inches of ice. Thin though the layer was, it was still enough to hold his ice ax in place if he swung it slowly. He kept moving, praying for any change in his luck. He was certainly due one. And that’s when he saw an old, frayed rope someone had left behind. A line that emerged intermittently from the glazing and continued upward across the face.
Some long-ago climber he’d never know had left him a lifeline.
Nearly paralyzed with fear and desperate for anything at all that might subdue his mounting panic, Christian was shamelessly, and very dangerously, grabbing at bits of old rope whenever they were visible. Any slip now would send him plummeting to the bottom of the wall, eight thousand feet of free fall with no chute and no God to save him.
He went higher, foolishly holding his breath to calm a deepening anxiety he’d never known before. Now he started thinking that his much-vaunted confidence had put him up here. And now that that same cocksure attitude that had been his lifelong cornerstone was going to send him to his death, he could almost feel his confidence seeping out through his pores.
Still, he climbed higher toward his objective, looking for each new shred of frayed rope, literally grasping at straws as he scaled the Murder Wall.