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

Khan was like the celebration of the vanquishing of some mythic beast.
    Then the leaders of each expedition team had convened the cooperation meetings, held in the Serbians’ and Koreans’ mess tents, to discuss logistics. The climbers knew they were too many to ascend in an uncoordinated rush. Around a large green table, they worked out who would bring the ropes, even who would supply what precise number of ice screws or bamboo sticks or lengths of fish line.
    â€œWe are working like one team,” said Pemba Gyalje, a Nepalese Sherpa in the Dutch team who attended the meeting. They had turned the crowd to their advantage, it seemed. It was quite an achievement among so many competing languages and egos.
    Gyalje banged his fist for emphasis.
    â€œOne team,” he said. Not many .
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    On the way up the mountain during the final summit push to Camp Four, the teams had climbed up the ropes and rickety aluminum wire ladders suspended in House’s Chimney, a 150-feet-high crack in ahuge red-rock cliff below Camp Two. It was named after an American, Bill House, who had climbed it in 1938. And they had scaled the notorious Black Pyramid, a large promontory of broken rock and shingles below Camp Three.
    Around this time, unforecast winds had swept in. In the night the gusts had nearly lifted the flapping tents off the ground. The climbers had clung to their sleeping bags, convinced they were going to die. The winds had ripped open one of the tents to toss a backpack full of equipment belonging to another independent Serbian mountaineer into the chasms.
    It was the Serbian team’s lead guide, a man called Shaheen Baig, who had vomited blood in their little tent on the narrow ledge at Camp Two. While some of the teams, such as the South Koreans, had flown in Sherpas from Nepal, the Serbs had hired three local HAPs—the HAPs were generally drawn from nearby northern areas such as Shimshal. During the storm, the Serbians listened, above the roar of the wind, to Baig’s hacking cough. Baig possessed the valuable experience of having summitted K2 four years earlier. But there had been no other option; he had had to climb back down.
    The rest of the Serbian team pushed on but the next morning the Serbians’ two other porters, Mohammed Khan and Mohammed Hussein, slyly admitted that during the storm they had forgotten to pack everyone’s food, so then there were no sausages or biscuits for Mandic and his colleagues, though they found candies and soups in a rucksack and borrowed a bowl of pasta from Alberto Zerain. At that altitude, though, they discovered they were not really hungry after all.
    Then, on the steep mountainside at Camp Three, Khan complained of a headache. They gave him ibuprofen and he reached Camp Four; and he had set off with the Serbs this morning. He was to carry two bottles of oxygen for them to the top of the Bottleneck and then turn around. The Serbs were using supplementary oxygen—the breathing apparatus was a Russian-made system—and each climber had twofive-kiloliter bottles. But Khan had stopped about 150 feet before the top of the Bottleneck and refused to go on, complaining he could not breathe. Planic insisted he had to continue, but Mandic and Zagorac took the two oxygen bottles the HAP was carrying and divided his backpack between them so he could descend. The Serbs were two HAPs down. That left just Hussein.
    Mandic felt the extra weight he was carrying now as he shifted on the rope at the top of the Bottleneck. He and Zagorac had agreed they would change over to the full oxygen bottles somewhere at the top of the gully. If Zagorac ever made it up there. Mandic’s friend was stuck below in the line in the Bottleneck.
    Why was everything going so slowly? These were not hard slopes. Steep, yes. Fifty, sixty degrees. But no more difficult, really, than the ones the Serbs had scaled on Broad Peak.
    It was the altitude that made the climbing tough. This was