No Way Down, Life and Death On K2 (2010) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Koreans had followed behind him. But the Koreans had gone so slowly and after half an hour they had stopped moving, causing this backlog down the Bottleneck.
    Mandic was waiting near the top of the gully. He stood on a little rock shelf on the right-hand side while he waited to cross over to the mouth of the Traverse on the opposite side. Standing stiff and impatient in a black down suit and a red coat, he waited amid a small group of climbers—four, five, six, more—who were resting, some sitting, their coats unbuttoned and their harnesses unclipped from the rope, basking in the mid-morning warmth.
    He glared up at the backs of the mountaineers lined up ahead of him in the Traverse. After the Traverse, the teams would have to climb up onto a long snowfield at about 27,500 feet, which after another three or four more tiring hours would bring them to the summit.
    Mandic turned and looked below at the longer line of climbers stretching down the Bottleneck like dominoes. The climbers wore bigjackets, clutched ice axes and ski poles, and had backpacks weighted with phones and radios. They were strangers to each other behind shaded glasses and frosted beards and eyebrows; some were wearing oxygen masks.
    Mandic noticed that the crowd was making the Sherpas uneasy. In one place, they had thrust two axes into the rocks above an ice screw and wrapped two short rope lengths around the axe handles and down to the screw to take some weight off it.
    The climbers at the bottom of the queue a few hundred yards below were still moving slowly higher. They stabbed their axe handles into the snow and moved their jumars—metal ascending devices that bit into fixed lines—up the rope. But soon the inevitable happened and they ran up against the crowd. Everyone’s frustration was boiling over. The leader of the Dutch expedition, Wilco van Rooijen, snapped.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” he yelled. A professional mountaineer, Wilco had been one of the dominant figures over the past few months at Base Camp, one of the chief organizers of the cooperation between the teams. He was dressed today in an orange down suit, a thin, broad-chested man with spiky silver hair, blue eyes, and a silver earring in his left ear. This summer represented his third attempt to climb K2. He had first tried to climb it in 1995 but had been knocked unconscious in a rock fall; he broke his shoulder and lost one and a half liters of blood. This year he had returned with an eight-strong team and a 100,000-euro sponsorship deal from a Dutch water purification company, Norit. He was an impatient man and wanted success.
    â€œHurry up!” he hollered, in his Dutch-accented lilt.
    Above them all, not fifty feet from Mandic’s head, loomed the brow of the serac, blue and sweating in the heat. It was barely the middle of the morning and the sun already blazed above them in the blue sky.
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    The thirty-one-year-old Mandic had come to the mountain with a regimented five-man Serbian team with their three Pakistani HAPs, one of the first Serbian expeditions to K2.
    There was Predrag, or Pedja, Zagorac, and Iso Planic, who was probably the most experienced among them. Zagorac was from Belgrade and Planic from Subotica. Then there was Milivoj Erdeljan, their gray-haired leader, who didn’t climb but guided his charges like a father from Base Camp. His calming voice was always on the radio. A fifth member of the team, who helped with sponsorship, had joined them in July.
    Of the three Serbian climbers, Mandic had the least experience. At home he belonged to the “Spider” Subotica mountaineering club. He had climbed Mount Ararat in Turkey, and the previous summer he had summitted Broad Peak, K2’s big neighbor, but that was his only Himalayan achievement.
    None of the Serbians was a professional climber—few people in Serbia were. Mandic worked as a carpenter in Subotica. But they had prepared well, he was convinced. They had