The Everest Files (14 page)

Kami was gutted as he watched the rescue team move into the icefall. Every fibre of his being told him that he
should
be with Jamling all the way down. After all, what if Jamling woke up and asked for him?

For a crazy moment Kami wanted to run after them, to ignore Brennan's order and follow his heart.

But Brennan had overruled him and he was the boss.

Later he was taken to a tent and fed with lentils and rice. He drank cup after cup of hot chocolate and was loaned a sleeping bag by one of the other teams.

As he slipped into sleep his last thought was this; Nima gone. Jamling gone. What's going to happen next?

George was already filming in the mess tent as Kami woke the next morning.

‘You did a great job yesterday,' he told him, swinging the camera to get a close up of Kami. ‘Maybe you even saved Jamling's life.'

‘No problem,' Kami replied with a half smile. He still felt awkward and self-conscious when the lens was directed at him.

After breakfast Brennan outlined the plan for the day.

‘We leave at eight,' he said, ‘Non-stop up to Camp Three.'

George didn't look too impressed with this. ‘Don't you think we should give everyone a rest day? Let the Sherpas come up through the icefall early tomorrow and then we all leave together?'

Kami silently applauded the plan. It made perfect sense. It would give his fellow porters a chance to recover down at Base Camp and he could use the day off himself.

‘No,' Brennan was adamant. ‘We lost a day yesterday bringing that old guy down. Now we need to make that time back.'

He followed this up with a terse radio call down to Base Camp, ordering the support team to leave right away. The response from Tenzing was less than enthusiastic – the Sherpas were still asleep at that moment.

‘Wake them up,' Brennan replied. ‘I need you to get those guys moving now.'

‘Roger. Over and out.'

Brennan led the way that morning, breaking a trail through quite punishing soft snow. The Cwm was utterly silent save for the occasional clatter of rocks tumbling from the Nuptse Face.

Kami felt tired and listless as they got into the trek. Lunchtime came and went, celebrated with a brief stop for a muesli bar or two and a swig of Gatorade.

‘Where are those guys?' Brennan kept repeating.

He was keeping a look out for the Sherpa support team which by now should have been cresting over the upper lip of the icefall.

He tried to raise Base Camp on the walkie talkie but, as was commonly the case in the Western Cwm, there was no direct line of sight and thus no signal.

One hour before Camp Two, the terrain started to rise up a ramp of rocky moraine. George slowed down dramatically, pausing often as coughing fits overcame him. Kami's skull began to pound with a forceful headache.

Brennan went ahead, going strongly and, if anything, putting on speed.

‘He's a machine,' Sasha commented. ‘How does he do it?'

Step by step they forged ahead, arriving at Camp Two by mid-afternoon to find Brennan waiting for them impatiently.

‘I'm not feeling so great,' George told the boss, ‘I'll never make it to Camp Three today. Why don't we do the sensible thing and hang on here for the night?'

‘I second that,' Sasha agreed. ‘We're all feeling it.'

‘Kami could make it up there with me,' Brennan observed in a waspish tone. ‘I could even train him how to operate the camera.'

The three of them stared up at the Lhotse Face, where Camp Three could clearly be seen some seven hundred metres above their position.

‘What do you think, Kami?'

The young Sherpa wondered how to respond. He didn't want to say the wrong thing and offend the boss.

‘I think it's better to rest here,' he ventured. ‘Tomorrow we will be stronger.'

At that point George clutched at his guts, running behind a large boulder to answer an urgent call of nature.

‘He's getting sicker,' Brennan said bitterly, ‘he's shot hardly any footage today.'

There were a handful of Sherpas also at the camp, mostly working for a huge Japanese team. They received Kami warmly and invited him to their mess tent. He sipped a mug of yak butter tea but couldn't face the lentil stew they offered to go with it.

One of the Sherpas had a more powerful radio than the one that Brennan carried and Kami borrowed it to report back to Base.

‘Tenzing? This is Kami. We made it to Camp Two.'

‘Give me that thing.' Brennan had walked up behind him. Now he snatched the walkie talkie out of Kami's hands.

‘What the hell's going on with the load carry?' Brennan demanded, ‘I thought those Sherpas were coming back up through the icefall today!'

‘They were out for fifteen hours yesterday,' Tenzing replied, an air of indignation entering his voice, ‘carrying the stretcher down through the icefall has wiped them out.'

Brennan was gripping the walkie talkie so tightly his knuckles were white.

‘What are you trying to tell me Tenzing? We
need
that oxygen.'

‘They're completely exhausted, sir,' Tenzing insisted. ‘You'll have to wait another twenty-four hours if you want those bottles.'

‘I'll offer them a bonus. Fifty bucks apiece if they'll leave Base Camp right now.'

‘Sir. It is not a question of bonus or no bonus. They don't have the strength to move out of their tents.'

Brennan terminated the radio call and tossed the walkie talkie into the corner of the tent.

‘What's wrong with these people?' he raged, ‘where I come from you get paid for a job you do the job.'

‘This is Everest,' Sasha reminded him gently.

‘Sure. And those guys are Sherpas. This is where they belong.'

Kami wanted to intervene, to correct Brennan. Nobody
belongs
on Everest, he wanted to tell him. Not even the Sherpas.

At that moment the wind decided to come out and play, sending Kami running for the tent with the others. They ate an uninspiring meal, then, just before 9 p.m., they heard crampon spikes coming across the rocky moraine.

It was Norgay. The sole Sherpa to come up with more oxygen as Brennan had demanded. He had raced up through the icefall to Camp Two in just six hours, a phenomenal effort.

‘I bring four bottles of O
2
!' he exclaimed, collapsing exhausted into the tent and accepting a big mug of sweet tea.

‘Nice work, Norgay,' Brennan congratulated him. ‘You'll get your bonus for sure.'

Kami was delighted to have a fellow Sherpa with him. It took off some of the pressure and gave the two Westerners a big boost, even if the oxygen that had arrived was a fraction of what should have come up.

Norgay and Kami went to one of the other tents where they talked late into the night.

‘It feels like the plan is going a bit wrong,' Kami observed thoughtfully. ‘I thought the whole thing would be more … certain.'

Norgay laughed cynically. ‘Certain? That's a good one. The only certain thing about this business is that there's no certainty at all. It's always a mess. Every time. There's too many things to go wrong.'

‘How about Jamling?' Kami asked, ‘is there any news?'

‘They got him to hospital,' Norgay told him, ‘it's a good one in Kathmandu. If they can save him they will.'

Kami was happy to hear that Jamling was getting good care. He quietly said some prayers for him before he fell asleep.

The next morning was unusually calm; the mid-Asian jet stream had wandered off towards Mongolia for the day leaving Everest untroubled by even the faintest puff of wind. It was a rare moment and they all noticed it as soon as they quit the tent.

‘This should be our summit day,' Brennan said with an air of regret. ‘Not a breath of wind up there.'

‘You think it'll stay like this for the next few days?' Sasha asked hopefully.

Norgay snorted derisively. ‘No chance,' he said, ‘tomorrow will be business as usual. More wind. More storm.'

For the first hour of the morning, Kami enjoyed the peaceful sensation of climbing without the nagging wind. The mountain really was a different place without it and he settled into a steady rhythm, following Brennan up the fixed ropes.

Midway on the face they heard a clatter above.

Kami felt an adrenaline jolt as he saw black shapes tumbling down. For a terrible moment he thought they were bodies falling.

‘Rocks!' Brennan cried out. ‘Look out below!'

They dived for the ice, burying their heads in their arms as the boulders zipped past in a blur of speed and sound. Kami looked up, deftly rolling out of the firing line as he saw one the size of a basketball heading right for him.

It happened in an instant. Then it was over.

Just a few tens of kilos of smaller stones and grit pebble-dashing down the slope then an odd silence.

‘You guys still alive?' Brennan called. They looked back down the slope, seeing with relief that all three of their comrades were still standing.

‘Missed us by a whisker,' Sasha called up. Kami could hear the terror in her voice.

Kami scanned the slopes above them. The truth was that there were thousands of rocks perched up there. And many were far bigger than the handful that had just fallen.

They waited for the others to catch them up, sharing a drink and chatting nervously about the incident.

Kami felt jittery from that point on. The rockfall had been so sudden. The shock of it only really hit him about half an hour later as they continued the climb.

Any one of those falling stones could have killed them. It was pure luck that they had escaped injury.

They plugged on, reaching Camp Three in a state of paralysed exhaustion. For the next couple of hours they rested and rehydrated, then met at 8 p.m. in the dome tent to share the evening meal.

The boss was strangely silent as he picked at the pasta and sauce and Kami could tell he was building up to something.

Finally, when the plates had been cleared away he made an announcement.

‘I've been thinking about our strategy … ' he said, ‘and I've decided that Sasha should head back down.'

Sasha looked stunned.

‘Head back down? To where?' she asked.

‘Base Camp. I can't take the responsibility of you going any higher.'

Kami and Norgay caught each other's eye. They knew immediately that this surprising announcement could provoke the biggest row yet.

‘I see. And on what basis is this decision made?' Sasha queried, fixing Alex with a flinty look.

‘The rockfall made me reconsider your position,' Alex told her, ‘any one of us could have been killed in that incident. It reminded me what the stakes are here and I don't want you to get hurt.'

‘I'm responsible for myself,' Sasha told him, a tinge of desperation clear in her voice, ‘and the deal was I could go as high as I could manage.'

‘You've done brilliantly. But enough is enough.'

‘Don't patronise me! I'm all set for the summit and you know it.'

‘Sasha … I'm not patronising you, I'm just … '

‘I know what you're doing,' she retorted, ‘you're finally succumbing to your own paranoia and removing me from the summit team in case I end up making you look bad.'

‘No! That's not the … '

The argument spiralled swiftly into a shouting match, with Sasha begging to be allowed to stay. Tears began to flow but Brennan was emphatic.

‘I'm the leader of the expedition and my word is final.'

Sasha began to pull on her boots, tugging furiously at the knots. ‘You only want one account of your great summit success and that's your own. Well, all I can say is good luck to you.'

And with that she ripped open the doorway and crunched across the ice to her tent.

Kami and Norgay cleared up the supper things and bedded down for the night. They talked about the row as they played hand after hand of poker.

‘She doesn't deserve to be sent back,' Kami said, ‘it's not fair.'

‘She would have summitted,' Norgay agreed, ‘maybe he doesn't want a woman up there with him?'

In the morning the atmosphere was even worse. Sasha nursed her tea with puffy red eyes and said nothing.

Alex had the weary expression of a man who hadn't slept at all.

Norgay was given the task of finding some Sherpas to escort Sasha down and, shortly after breakfast, he turned up with a couple of the Japanese team's men who were going to Base anyway and were happy to help out.

‘Here you go guys,' Alex slipped them twenty dollars each and they nodded their thanks.

‘You're getting good value for your money at least,' Sasha told him bitterly.

Kami, Norgay and George all got a tearful hug from the journalist.

‘Good luck, guys. I know you're all going to do brilliantly up there.'

Then she started the descent, stepping carefully down the fixed line.

‘That's done,' Alex told them without emotion. ‘Now let's re-focus and keep going.'

The others packed up their things and the group of four swung out of the camp and began the tough ascent up to the col.

Kami was feeling pretty strong that day but he still felt stabbing pain in his calves and thighs. The snow from the storm had softened in the previous day's sunshine, making it difficult to walk through.

‘Good day for an avalanche,' Norgay commented with some foreboding. Kami felt for the shrine bell in his pocket and said some hurried prayers for protection.