Summit: A Novel Read online

  SUMMIT

  A NOVEL

  HARRY FARTHING

  SUMMIT

  A NOVEL

  HARRY FARTHING

  Copyright © 2013 by Harry Farthing

  Published in 2016 by Blackstone Publishing

  Jacket design by Kathryn Galloway English

  Interior maps and illustrations by Kathryn Galloway English

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher,

  except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition: 2016

  ISBN 978-1-5047-1021-3

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  CIP data for this book is available

  from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

  31 Mistletoe Rd.

  Ashland, OR 97520

  www.downpour.com

  “Berg heil!”

  —Traditional German salute to the mountains

  Prologue

  A filtered crimson light illuminated the windowless room with a visceral glow. The smell of chemicals was toxic, instantly overpowering everyone except the white-coated man already working inside. After a lifetime spent in such environments, the Leica technician no longer even noticed it. Finishing another sequence of adjustments to the skeleton of an archaic negative enlarger, he flicked his head from side to side in silent appeal for more elbow room, mumbling something only to himself. He clearly preferred to work alone.

  The man made one further minute calibration then paused, arms dropping to his sides, eyes closing as he mentally counted down some required delay known only to his experience. The instant it was over, he quickly reached for the eight-by-ten-inch rectangle of photographic paper set within the base of the metal frame. Taking a corner of the white card in the long jaws of a pair of tongs, he then deliberately slowed himself to gently slide it into the first of four stainless steel trays of developing fluids he had so fastidiously prepared. He began to bathe the blank paper, lightly agitating it within the clear chemical bath, his soft, rhythmic movements setting the fluids lapping.

  A dark smudge dirtied the white rectangle’s center. Lines and shadows started to define themselves, growing in twists and turns like an aggressive black vine. The technician, completely and utterly absorbed in his task, carefully tweezered the sharpening image through the next three trays. With each transfer he leaned a little further forward, deliberately hiding it, still, at heart, the small, clever boy at the prestigious Karlsruhe Academy who would shield his impeccable schoolwork from the prying eyes of bigger, slower classmates.

  The observers in the room tried to arch around him in response, each desperate for their own first look, but the diminutive man expertly blocked their every move. He didn’t care who they were; he had a job to do. Only when he was completely satisfied with what he saw did the technician finally push back to lift the fully developed photograph from the last tray. Reaching up, he clipped it, with two small clothes pegs, onto the makeshift drying line strung in anticipation of that very moment.

  The still-wet photograph hung above them all, soft like lychee flesh, swaying a little on the sickly air. No one in the darkroom said a word. They just stared up at it rigidly, as if brought to attention in unison.

  The image was black and white, yet to its small audience it shone down through the blood-red haze with all the colors of the rainbow. It showed a mountaineer standing just a couple of steps below the pointed white apex of a mountaintop. The cloudless sky behind was almost black, yet the figure at the center seemed to faintly glow, as if surrounded by an evanescence of a whiter, brighter light.

  The baggy hood of the climber’s white canvas wind-jacket was thrown back. A pair of round-framed snow goggles were pushed up onto the ice-encrusted front of a fabric-peaked cap. Beneath, a woolen scarf wrapped the climber’s head, but it had been pulled down from the mouth to deliberately expose an exhausted yet triumphant face.

  The figure’s right arm was projecting forward and upward into the sky, its mittened hand gripping the bottom of a long, wood-shafted ice axe in a straight-armed salute. The T-shaped head of the axe was high above, hooking onto the very edge of the atmosphere. Below the axe’s long pick was a small flag. At the very moment the photographer released the camera’s shutter, the wind must have gusted. In that fortuitous millisecond, the flag was perfectly unfurled, snapped back by the wind, its design unmistakable.

  They all recognized it immediately.

  Part I

  A DIFFICULT DESCENT

  EIN SCHWIERIGER ABSTIEG

  1

  Mount Everest Summit Pyramid—29,015 feet

  May 26, 2009

  2:04 p.m. (Chinese Standard Time)

  Nelson Tate Junior’s satellite position tracker was working perfectly. The sixteen-year-old’s body was not.

  The tracker, a small block of orange plastic no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, was attached, as usual, on the left shoulder strap of the boy’s lightweight backpack. Despite being thrust against the hard frozen snow, the unit was still silently and resolutely going about its task of communicating with invisible space hardware orbiting hundreds of miles above. Lacking either the sensors or the programming for humane distractions, it could only ignore the young heart beating as if about to burst, just a few inches behind it.

  The tracker signaled relentlessly.

  N 27°59’17”, E 86°55’31”

  The heart pulsated violently.

  196 BPM …

  Elsewhere, that latest set of electronic coordinates was being transferred onto a topographical mountain map as a kite-shaped marker. Automatically, the image began popping up onto a number of computer screens around the world, its arrival completing a dotted red line that followed a graceful, linear progression up the Northeast Ridge of Mount Everest to its summit, the highest point on earth. There was still no mention of the frantically beating heart.

  One screen, in particular, had been burning for hours in anticipation of that very moment. On the other side of young Nelson Tate’s daytime, five and a half vertical miles lower and many thousands to the west, it was set on a fine English mahogany desk within the warm, softly lit study of his parents’ palatial home.

  Upon arrival of the latest marker, the pair, clad in silk pajamas and matching monogrammed cashmere robes, began calling out to the family members and guests specifically assembled to share this fantastic moment of unparalled achievement.

  Nelson Tate Junior’s mother, Amelia, was beside herself with worry. Even if her face had now received a little too much work to fully reveal her emotions, her voice could still betray her. It did so, cracking slightly when she shouted as loudly as she dared, “Quickly, everyone. We think he’s on the summit. We’re here in the study. He may call. It could be any time now. Please hurry.”

  The boy’s father, her husband, Nelson Tate Senior, was more abrupt. “Come down! Now! Everyone! It’s on!” he bellowed. It was enough to wake the deepest sleeper.

  The Tates’ family and friends began to obediently shuffle into the varnished world of Senior’s wood-paneled study. Ignoring the walls filled with framed photos of their host meeting statesmen and celebrities and the shelves crammed with row after row of glittering trophies recording a career of multimillion-dollar real estate deals and corporate investments, they focused only on the computer screen at its center. Drowsily positioning themselves around the room, they stared at the slowly revolving three-dimensional image of Mount Everest it displayed. In silence the asse
mbled group contemplated the bright red trail that now led to the summit, plundering inadequate memories of ski holidays past, trying to imagine what it must be like to be up there.

  How high? How cold? How windy?

  None of them could have known that they would have been closer to the answers sitting on the wing of Senior’s G5 as it flew them into Long Island.

  Mima, the Tates’ aging Puerto Rican housemaid, brought in a vintage bottle of Dom Perignon champagne perched in a silver bucket of ice. An unknowing disciple of the “butterfly effect,” she gently set it on a side table, seemingly convinced that any disturbance might cause dire consequences on the top of the world. When finished, she loitered just beyond the door with an expression of deep concern, her lips reciting a silent prayer to a god with whom she was familiar.

  Excitement, and thoughts warmed by the prospect of vintage champagne, began to enliven the room, generating a buzzing spiral of superlatives.

  “Junior’s done it!”

  “He is standing on the summit of Mount Everest! Just think of that!”

  “The youngest person to climb the Seven Summits!”

  “The highest peak on each of the seven continents conquered! Can you believe it?”

  “A new world record!”

  “At sixteen!”

  “No one can beat it!”

  “Outstanding!”

  “Congratulations, Senior.”

  By summiting his seventh actual mountain, Nelson Tate Junior was indeed ensuring that once again the Tate name would be in the news. The press release was already prepared, Tate Senior’s publicists primed, awaiting only his signal to feed it, in a pre agreed hierarchy of exclusivity, to the media. Sitting there in the middle of the assembled group, Tate Senior began to imagine his study walls newly embellished with the framed summit photo in place of honor, flanked by others of Senior and Junior on the covers of magazines or with Letterman, Leno, even the President.

  While he visualized the images, Senior’s agile commercial mind was simultaneously running the financial mathematics of getting Junior up into space next. Now that was really going to cost. It would make the $500,000 summit bonus he had pledged to No Horizons, Junior’s Everest expedition organizer, seem like the chump change it was—for him.

  Nelson Tate Senior was looking forward to his only son’s “eighth summit”—the one that no one else could possibly afford.

  2

  While his father contemplated whether his old friend Barney Guttman could make a currency play for him on any payment to the Russian space tourism program, Nelson Tate Junior was actually little more than an unconscious mound of yellow fabric and goose down fifteen feet directly below the highest point on earth. The boy’s heavily masked, freckled face was pitched forward into the thick cap of snow, blind to the blue-black dome of unlimited sky above, to the incredible views of the mighty mountains all around him.

  Released from reality and reason, his mind had fled. Denying the bitter, tooth-cracking cold; the racing, freezing wind; the rattle of the snow crystals it carried, his addled brain was telling him instead that he was in the beautiful garden of his parents’ house. Convinced of soft grass under his feet and a bright sun warming his face, Nelson Tate Junior was, at that very moment, intent only on throwing an old baseball for his bulldog, Buddy …

  Two thick mittens hovered for a moment above Junior’s prone body before slapping themselves together and reaching down to turn the skinny kid over in a single, brisk movement.

  One hand then gripped the hood of the boy’s down suit, the other a shoulder strap of his rucksack, and, with a second hard pull, forcefully wrenched him up into a sitting position.

  Nelson Tate Junior came to with a start, hit by successive waves of panic, nausea, and confusion.

  What is this alien being, peering down with mirrored eyes, making odd, rubbery noises at me?

  If he could have heard the sounds properly, the boy would have understood that Neil Quinn, No Horizons’ head guide for their 2009 Everest North Expedition, was shouting, “You’ve done it, kid. You’ve done it. No time to sleep. You’re on the summit of Mount Everest.”

  But he couldn’t, and as Quinn stopped talking, Junior’s head lolled to the side once more.

  Quinn gave the kid a shake but to no avail.

  He was out cold.

  “Fuck!”

  The English guide’s mind pushed through its own fatigue to start issuing warnings. This was more than someone resting after the final push to the top. This was serious. Reminding himself that he had never lost a client in fifteen years of guiding, Quinn told himself to act fast if he wasn’t going to now.

  Quickly hunching his six-foot-four frame down from the violent gusts of wind racing over the summit pyramid, the Englishman pulled the fluorescent lime-green oxygen cylinder from the top of the kid’s rucksack. He immediately tried to click out the supply wheel on the regulator valve to increase the flow. It didn’t move, already screwed out to the maximum. Quinn swore again.

  Shaking a gloved hand from within its heavy mitten, he used an index finger to scratch the ice from the face of the regulator’s gauge. Pulling his eyes tight into the dial, he saw that it was reading no pressure. Tapping the gauge, its needle started oscillating wildly.

  Is it broken or is the cylinder empty? Is there a blockage? Where?

  Searching for answers, Quinn saw a heavy ice buildup, translucent and grey, hanging from the bottom of the boy’s rubber facemask and encrusting the front of his down suit. The ice continued along the thin, red oxygen supply line and down the thicker corrugated tube that led to the system’s clear plastic reservoir bottle. Quickly but carefully he broke away as much of it as he could and then massaged the supply tube hoping that was the problem. After that he followed the red tube back to the regulator to see if it was blocked or split further back, but he could see nothing obviously wrong.

  Perhaps the bottle just slipped down within the otherwise empty rucksack and kinked the supply tube?

  It was known to happen. One way or another, the boy’s precious flow of supplementary oxygen must have been interrupted. Quinn had to restore it.

  Pushing the kid’s ski goggles up off the bridge of his nose and unhooking the straps of his oxygen mask, he pulled it away. The edges ripped from the teenager’s beardless cheeks, taking ice and a little skin with them. The shock of pain, followed by the sudden cold of the freezing air on his wet mouth and teeth, instantly brought the boy back to consciousness. Nelson Tate Junior began to sob and dry-heave alternately. A blister on his lower lip split. A trickle of blood oozed out.

  Quinn leaned closely into the small face. It was as white as a sheet, smeared with ice, saliva, and mucus, the only color being the crimson on his lip. The boy’s eyes were glazed, lifeless. The guide snapped soundless, gloved fingers in front of them to no reaction. He couldn’t understand the kid’s decline. He had been going fine, slow undoubtedly, but still making good progress only forty-five minutes before. It had been the Scot on their team, Ross MacGregor, who had been struggling from the moment they left the High Camp until he turned back at Mushroom Rock.

  Quinn looked around for Pemba, the Sherpa whose sole task was to accompany the boy.

  Where the fuck is he?

  He soon saw that Pemba too was down on the snow of the summit, sitting forward with his head between his knees. Dawa, his older brother and the expedition’s sirdar, was tending to him. Above them, Quinn could see the other No Horizons client, the Swiss Yves Durand, and his Sherpa, Lhakpa, taking photos on the very summit. They seemed to be fine.

  Moving his face back into the kid’s, Quinn shouted at the top of his voice, “Talk to me!” The effort winded him.

  The kid heaved some more. Then, looking up at Quinn, he said faintly, almost a whisper amidst more shuddering sobs, “Don’t let me die.”

  Upon hearing it, something low i
n Quinn’s stomach squirmed. He recognized it for what it was.

  Despair.

  The Englishman caught it, releasing an increasing anger to deprive it of room to grow.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit! It’s okay … it’s okay. I’ve got you.”

  Quinn pulled the kid into his chest and, for a moment, just hugged him close. Struggling to catch his breath from the shouting, he ordered himself to get control as he looked back again at Dawa and Pemba, asking himself once more what could have gone so wrong. Many of his clients had made that final, seemingly never-ending push up the summit ridge with little left in their tanks other than willpower, but this was crazy.

  Why didn’t Pemba see this coming? And what the hell is wrong with him?

  Pemba was the strongest young Sherpa they had, a quadruple summiteer before his twenty-fifth birthday. He had already saved three lives on Everest.

  That’s why he had been assigned to the damn kid, for God’s sake!

  Quinn began to curse himself. He should have stuck closer to the boy even if he did have other clients up there. He should have done it, not for the money, that bloody $100,000 summit bonus that Jean-Philippe Sarron, the French owner of New Horizons Expeditions, kept harping on about, but because Nelson Tate Junior was exactly what they all called him—a kid.

  For a second, Quinn wished he were anywhere in the world but there. Immediately acknowledging the futility of such a thought, he laid Nelson back down and went to work.

  Stabbing the shaft of his axe deep into the hard, icy snow, he pulled off his own rucksack and hooked it over the axe’s head to prevent it from sliding off the mountain. Kneeling between the rucksack and the kid, the guide then extracted his own oxygen cylinder, checked the pressure, and quickly dialed it up to a flow rate of four liters a minute. He pulled off his mask, bracing himself for the effects of giving up his oxygen supply, and put it over the kid’s mouth as he warned himself to not be without it for too long.