Part 3 (1/2)

”Let's go down,” Meyer said. His voice was tired and resigned.

But he first had a duty as a doctor, and he examined each of the Serbs in turn, peering into their eyes as he asked questions about how they felt. They had been through a lot and he wanted to make sure they were not showing signs of cerebral edema. They nodded. They were barely coherent. He rifled through his backpack and handed everyone a vitamin energy bar, then he lined them up and gave each of the Serbs a four-milligram tablet of dexamethasone, a quick-acting, anti-inflammatory steroid. It would reduce any swelling in the brain and be enough to to get them down.

The Pakistani porter, Hussein, walked out toward the edge of the slope to collect the gloves, rucksack, and other equipment that Baig had dropped. It was dangerous, and if he had slipped he would have disappeared over the edge before the others could have stopped him, but Hussein wanted to collect his friend's belongings and the others let him go.

There seemed no question now that they would leave Mandic's body where it was. Strang tied the rope attached to Mandic's harness to an axe and stabbed the axe securely into the ice. Mandic would stay there forever at 26,000 feet, or until the storms swept him away.

Meyer got on the radio to Base Camp and announced somberly that Baig had died. Then they followed each other in a line down toward Camp Four. The Americans wanted to tie a rope between themselves and the two Serbs but the latter said they could manage on their own. Hussein, however, was uncertain on his feet and so for a while Strang strung a rope between his own harness and that of the HAP.

They reached the tents near the bottom of the Shoulder at about 4 p.m. A number of people were milling around. The South Korean B team and their two Sherpas had climbed up the Abruzzi and were waiting for evening and their chance to leave for the summit after midnight. There was the Australian climber from the Dutch team and Paul Walters, the Australian from Meyer and Strang's expedition. They wanted to hear what had happened.

Strang was overcome. He threw his rucksack on the ice, knelt in the snow, and cried.

”It's meaningless!” he said.

But then he saw the Serbs sitting down just a few feet away, silent and stony-faced, and he felt ashamed. They had more reason than he did to be upset. When one of the HAPs brought him a cup of warm tea, he waved him away guiltily.

The Serbs trooped off to their tent to make calls on their satellite phone and radio, to talk to Erdeljan in Base Camp; he would telephone Mandic's girlfriend in Subotica. Strang and Meyer debriefed the other teams.

It was still a warm afternoon, warm enough that they could stand outside in their Windbreakers. Up on the mountain, the line of climbers still heading for the summit had moved on and was stretched across the Traverse and up into the diagonal ascent to the summit snowfields. The mountaineers were a line of black dots against the white snow.

Even after the deaths, Strang and Meyer felt a pang of envy and wondered whether they had done the right thing by turning back after all.

Their teammate, Walters, pointed to the distant line of climbers and remarked on what good time they had made.

Meyer shook his head. ”They are still going up,” he said.

Walters couldn't believe it. He was surprised and disappointed. After fourteen hours of climbing, they were still hours from the top.

In their tent, the two Serbs, Pedja Zagorac and Iso Planic, sat alone. They couldn't rest, couldn't help staring at Zagorac's jacket, stained with Mandic's blood. Their friend was dead. Never again, Zagorac resolved, would he go on such a long expedition, so far from home.

CHAPTER FOUR.

At dusk on July 19, 1939, Fritz Wiessner, a thirty-nine-year-old German-born American and a superstar climber of his era, put one hobnailed boot in front of the other to reach 27,500 feet, within three or four hours of K2's summit.

Wiessner was seemingly close to the end of a single-minded quest to become the first mountaineer to conquer the world's second-highest peak and the first to scale any mountain above 26,000 feet.

It would have been a stupefying feat for an American, and a German-American at that, just as most of the world spiraled toward war. It was not to be-it would take another sixteen years before Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli climbed to the summit. Instead, Wiessner's benighted expedition would come to ill.u.s.trate the folly of relying too heavily on complicated logistics, including teams of unsupervised porters and Sherpas. It would have echoes in the 2008 expedition, in which, among other things, too many climbers relied on a seemingly foolproof cooperation agreement only to see it fail. Wiessner's expedition ended with four deaths, the first known casualties on K2.

Though night was falling, Wiessner wanted to continue to the summit. He believed he could get to the top, wait for dawn, and return in the morning light. But his climbing partner, a Sherpa called Pasang Lama, was already tense and warned Wiessner that going on at such a late hour risked waking the fury of the mountain G.o.ds that he believed inhabited the summit snows.

When Wiessner began a traverse that would have taken him up onto the summit snowfields, the Sherpa refused to play out his rope.

”No, sahib,” he said. ”Tomorrow.”

Reluctantly, Wiessner climbed back down to their tent, which was pitched on the top of a rock pillar at 26,050 feet. He was confident he could make a second try the following morning or at some point over the next few days. Over the course of the previous month and a half, he had established a series of nine well-stocked camps below him. The camps were tended by a team of nine Sherpas and stretched the entire way to Base Camp. This elaborate network, he believed, would ensure he would continue to be well supplied and sheltered. He took the next day off, and as he rested in the suns.h.i.+ne, naked on his sleeping bag in the open tent, he expected a porter to appear at any hour carrying fresh food and supplies.

That did not happen.

Wiessner, a chemist, was born in Dresden and left for the United States in 1929. He was an inspirational climber but also domineering, autocratic, and single-minded-traits common to many of the world's most successful climbers and perhaps especially mountaineers who have been attracted to K2.

His difficult character was one reason why he struggled to gather the best of America's climbing talent, though he was also trying to put together an expedition during years when America was suffering the economic effects of the Depression and few mountaineers were willing to invest money to join. In the end, his indifferent K2 team was selected mainly for having the private wealth to finance the adventure. It included two twenty-year-old Dartmouth undergraduates, along with an independently wealthy, middle-aged New Yorker named Tony Cromwell, and, most curiously, a large, clumsy, but rich playboy called Dudley Wolfe. At the last minute, the American Alpine Club also added Jack Durrance, a twenty-seven-year-old Dartmouth medical student, who was also a powerful and competent climber.

Wolfe was a man who frequently required the help of guides to push or pull him up easy ascents. But despite his apparent lack of ability he was determined and strong and devoted to Wiessner, and he had doggedly managed to follow his leader and Pasang Lama near to the top of K2, until he was stopped by the deep snows covering a bergschrund, or creva.s.se, at around 25,300 feet. He waited at Camp Eight, below the Shoulder, while the two other men had gone on to Camp Nine for the summit attempt. (The early K2 expeditions had as many as eight or nine camps, but modern attempts have tended to employ an established system of four camps up the main routes as knowledge of the mountain has grown.) Although Wiessner did not know it, his expedition had begun to fragment and communications between the lower and upper mountain had more or less broken down. Even while Wiessner, Pasang Lama, and Wolfe were waiting up near the summit, some of their disaffected colleagues in Base Camp were preparing to depart for the United States (and the fall semester at Dartmouth). Cromwell, the second in command, was giving orders for the lowest three camps to be dismantled. Ostensibly this was so that the climbers up above would have less to carry when they descended, but the prevailing sense was that they wanted no more part of Wiessner's personal summit quest. They were already thinking of home.

Although the lower camps were being put out of action, the Sherpas were still manning the higher tents. As the days dragged by, however, they heard nothing from Wiessner. When a Sherpa ventured up a few hundred feet past Camp Seven, he called out but received no reply, even though Dudley Wolfe lay asleep inside one of the tents at the camp above him. Seeing no trace of footprints in the storm-blasted snow, the Sherpa concluded that Wiessner, Wolfe, and Pasang Lama had been lost under an avalanche. He retreated down the mountain with the remaining Sherpas, and they gathered up everything they could carry-mattresses and sleeping bags, food, anything worth salvaging-or threw equipment away in order to avoid carrying it down. The elaborate supply chain Wiessner believed stretched below him was in fact a tenuous line of abandoned or broken tents blowing emptily in the wind.

In their first summit attempt, Wiessner and Pasang Lama had avoided the couloir-the gully that would later become known as the Bottleneck-thinking that it looked too dangerous, and had instead climbed an amazingly difficult route up the broken rocks to the left of the gully, a route that no one would dare try again. For his second attempt, Wiessner was thinking of climbing directly up the Bottleneck. But after waiting two days and with no new supplies having shown up, Wiessner and Pasang Lama descended to Camp Eight. They expected to find either porters or bountiful supplies. Instead they discovered Wolfe, still alone, and with only a few days of rations remaining.

”Those b.a.s.t.a.r.ds,” Wolfe told them. ”They never came up here.”

He had no matches to light his stove and had been forced to melt snow in the folds of his tent.

The three men roped up together and started down, but Wolfe tripped on the rope, pulling Wiessner off his feet, and the three men began sliding. They were only saved when Wiessner slammed the pick of his axe in the ice just sixty feet short of a 6,000-foot drop onto the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier. It was an amazing rescue. They had, however, lost Wolfe's sleeping bag, and Wiessner had left his at the higher camp. They spent the night beneath a single bag, thinking unkind thoughts of their teammates farther down the mountain.

The next day, Wiessner and Pasang Lama left Wolfe in a tent at Camp Seven and descended rapidly to get help. They found camp after camp deserted until a day later they finally lurched half dead into Base Camp.

A rescue mission was decided upon for Dudley Wolfe. Wiessner was too exhausted to go up himself, and the first rescue attempt involving Jack Durrance was aborted when one of the Sherpas fell sick. Five days later, three brave Sherpas-Pasang Kikuli, Pasang Kitar, and Phinsoo-reached Wolfe at Camp Seven. They found him barely sensible and lying in his own excrement. He had been above 21,500 feet for forty days. They managed to get him outside his tent and gave him tea but he refused to descend with them and they felt they could not challenge him.

The three Sherpas retreated to a lower camp, vowing to return the following day. Delayed by a storm, they climbed back but neither they nor Wolfe were ever seen again.

Fourteen years later, after the interruption of World War II and the part.i.tion of India, another American team would become the first expedition to venture up the slopes since Wiessner's fateful quest. At the site of Wiessner's camps, they discovered torn tents, three neatly rolled sleeping bags, and Ovaltine, along with a stove, fuel, and a bundle of Darjeeling tea wrapped in a blue handkerchief, some of them the poignant remains of the Sherpas' last effort to save Wolfe.

CHAPTER FIVE.

1 p.m.

The nineteen climbers in the tightly pressed line beneath the serac had spent an uneasy few minutes considering whether they should go on in the wake of Dren Mandic's fall.

Below them, the Serbs were distant specks dragging Mandic back toward the Shoulder. The Americans were climbing out from Camp Four. What more could they they be expected to do? If they descended, they were only going to get in the way of the rescue operation. be expected to do? If they descended, they were only going to get in the way of the rescue operation.

Some thought Mandic was still alive. And if he was dead-well, they were used to death. Every one of them had good friends who had been killed in the mountains.

Among them, an Italian climber named Marco Confortola was determined to continue on. The determination seemed to s.h.i.+ne in the thirty-seven-year-old professional mountain guide's sharp triangular face, in his brown eyes.

Confortola had grown up in Santa Caterina Valfurva, a ski resort town three and a half hours north of Milan in Lombardy, on the Swiss border; he came from the same valley as his hero Achille Compagnoni, and naturally Confortola had chosen to climb up on the Abruzzi route. Strong as an ox and flamboyant, he had come to K2 to burnish his professional curriculum vitae, but he also wanted to conquer the peak again for Italy. He said he wanted to ”bring it back” to his valley.

Before coming to K2, Confortola had worked at a meteorological station on Mount Everest for fifty days. He had flown back to Milan and spent a week in Valfurva before hopping on another flight to Islamabad. From Askole, he had trekked to Base Camp with a team of eighty porters and their chickens and other supplies.