'No biggie,' Gus said. 'Jorgens needs some drink. Then down. All the way to Base.
The sooner, the better.'
'What happened?' Thomas pressed.
Gus made it short and sweet. 'It was a long day. He's an old man. He won't be back
up again. It's rough as hell up there.'
Abe knew more than the others did. Jorgens had come to him a fortnight ago,
complaining about having difficulty urinating. Though it could have been any number
of things, the problem sounded like an enlarged prostate to Abe. Jorgens had been
crushed by the possibility. 'Why don't you just de-nut me while you're at it,' he'd told
Abe. Then he'd made Abe promise not to tell anyone else, as if Abe wasn't already
keeping everyone's secrets.
'How about Carlos?' Carlos had gone up, too. Now Abe remembered.
Gus pointed down, down, down. Down the Hill, away from the front, out of service.
'He gave it a go. But you know Carlos. He never belonged high in the first place.' Her
glib obituary ignored the sprained ankle hobbling Carlos. Then again, they were all
impaired to some degree. What it came down to was that Carlos had finally
acknowledged his own mortality. And that scared Gus.
'So what I'm hearing is we just lost two guys in a single day?' Thomas said.
Now Gus caught his drift. She cocked her head over. 'No problem, Tom. We still got
you, right?' She went back to feeding ice chips into the pot.
It took another hour for Carlos and Jorgens to show up. The two were in sorry
shape, gray under their blue and sunburn. Jorgens looked dazed and Carlos had no
voice left, and each moved with loose, sloppy duck steps. Daniel was shepherding
them, keeping a sharp eye on the details: what they clipped and unclipped from the
ropes and anchor, how they managed themselves, where they placed their feet. That
was good.
Jorgens and Carlos sat where Daniel sat them, hunched and bleak like famine
victims. Gus brought them the lukewarm water with Kool-Aid and extra sugar in it.
Abe took his cue and checked their pulses and eyes and asked them to count his
fingers. Carlos's helmet was tipped to one side. Jorgens had been drooling into his
beard. Both were in disarray with zippers unzipped and clothing untucked. It was
easy to tell when a person was falling to pieces in the mountains; they came apart at
the seams.
'You guys ready?' Daniel asked the two. It was kindly but stern. There was no
question that they would continue down the mountain.
Carlos gave a game thumbs-up. Jorgens set his jaw, revived enough by the sugar to
realize that he was out for the count. There was bitterness in his eyes, but it wasn't
directed at Daniel. Jorgens was coming to terms with himself.
'You want me to go down with them?' Abe asked Daniel.
Jorgens rejected him instantly. 'The day I need a babysitter...' He winced and looked
off toward the mouth of the Shoot.
'Just the same,' Thomas said. 'I'm going down. We can go together.'
The declaration stunned them. Gus paused in her pouring. J.J. scowled. Even tired
Jorgens snapped his head up in surprise. Thomas descending wasn't part of the plan.
'You're sick?' said Daniel.
'You could say so.' But the way he said it, and his level stare at Daniel, told them
what it was Thomas was sick of. Daniel had rebelled against Jorgens, now Thomas was
rebelling against Daniel. The dominoes were falling.
Abe raced to calculate the implications. Thomas was slated to carry in the Shoot
tomorrow. By dropping out – even for a day – he would deprive them of supplies up
high and bottleneck them down below. It meant that he had eaten hill rats and used
fuel and occupied a space here at Three to do nothing more than fine-tune a couple of
tent platforms. It wasn't good.
Daniel made no attempt to stop him. 'Good idea,' he told Thomas over Jorgens and
Carlos's heads. There was no sarcasm or punishment in his voice.
'The hell...' Gus protested.
Daniel hushed her. 'If the man's sick, we can't use him anyway.'
After more Kool-Aid, Thomas ushered Jorgens and Carlos down the ropes toward
Two. Even moving slowly, it would take them only a couple of hours to descend. The
weather was perfect. As they sank from sight, J.J. said. 'Bummer for Jorgens. There's
no more big mountains in him.'
'Tough,' Gus said, but her voice was empty. With Kelly's no-show and Thomas's bail,
their six-man carry to Four tomorrow was cut to four people.
Daniel said nothing. He just watched the empty depths for a minute, maybe cobbling
together a new strategy, maybe just spacing out. Then he got on with things. They
worked on the camp for another hour, ratcheting nuts, twisting wires, tightening their
grip on the mountain. Daniel prepped a rack of climbing gear, adding some super-light
titanium ice screws he'd purchased on a climbing trip to the Caucasus in the Soviet
Union.
The sun still had an hour when Daniel and Gus crawled into one of the tents and Abe
and J.J. got into the other. The tents were spacious, the floors flat and comfortable.
But when the wind came, the platforms creaked and scratched at the rock. Abe was
afraid as he drifted into sleep. He could feel the abyss under his back.
It was still dark and windy when Abe heard a yakherder's blatting call. He wasn't
dreaming – there wasn't enough oxygen to dip that low into the REM levels – and yet
for a moment he was disoriented and thought their little herder, the monk, might
have returned somehow. The yawp sounded again, and this time Abe knew it was
Daniel in the other tent, waking them all.
By headlamp, Abe and J.J. readied themselves, dressing while the stove flame
roared blue under a pot of ice. It was three o'clock. The mountain would be locked
tight at this hour, frozen to its coldest point of the night. Rockfall would be at a
minimum. Also, Daniel wanted to land at Four today. They had to ascend some eight
hundred feet of rope already fixed in the Shoot before they could finish off the last
three hundred feet of climbing. In J.J.'s thick, slurring SoCal, the day promised to be a
hump and a half. An early start meant everything.
Abe gave his straps and buckles a final tug. The super-gaiters, his helmet, the pack
flap and side pockets, his harness – everything got cinched snug.
'I'm on my way,' J.J. promised, but he was at best only half ready. He had bad
stomach cramps in the morning, and it took him longer than most to gear up. J.J. had
cavalierly diagnosed his distress as a side effect of the anabolic steroids he used. Abe
thought the problem was more likely aspirin. At these elevations the red cells – the
oxygen carriers – multiplied so thickly the blood turned to syrup. The climbers who
chewed aspirin to counter the effect usually ended up with ulcers, bad teeth and epic
constipation.
'See you there,' Abe said, wherever
unzipped the tent door. The cold lashed him across the eyes and he flinched. Then he
got a good look and said, 'God.' Outside the blackness was perforated with a million
stars. There were stars behind the start, a solid carpet of lights. He looked up and
where the carpet ended in a raggedy line, the mountain pronounced its dark domain.
