No Way Down_ Life And Death On K2 Part 17

He told her he would call her again when he reached the camp.

He rounded the corner, and he saw some fixed ropes snaking lower. He had stumbled onto a route, though he didn't know whether it was the Cesen route. A long way below were what looked like two yellow North Face tents.

Van Rooijen realized now that two figures were climbing across toward him, between him and the tents. They appeared to speed up. When he saw them, he was overjoyed. Climbers meant a stove, and that meant melting snow for water. It would be an end to his thirst. Van Rooijen walked on slowly, pausing every few steps and bending down on one knee to lean on his ice axe, catching his breath.

The two men were still about three hundred feet away from Van Rooijen when they came into focus. The one at the rear was wearing a dark blue suit. The one leading was dressed like Van Rooijen in orange. s.h.i.+t! It's Cas! s.h.i.+t! It's Cas!

When Van Rooijen reached Cas van de Gevel, he embraced his friend and Van de Gevel hugged him back. Chest to chest, they screamed their joy into the other's face. Both men cried, so desperately happy to have found each other and cheated death.

"I didn't think we were ever going to meet again!" Van de Gevel said.

He looked into Van Rooijen's gaunt, sunburned face. Van Rooijen's lips were sore and blistered, and his eyes were bloodshot. The wind and the cold had marked his cheeks with red blood vessels.

Van de Gevel helped Van Rooijen down the Cesen and they crammed into one of the Dutch tents. He was in shock and they helped him get himself together. Gyalje had already melted two liters of water from snow in a pan and Van Rooijen gulped it down. He also breathed some oxygen from the tank Gyalje had carried lower, and forced a Sultana biscuit into his mouth.

Van de Gevel took out his video camera and filmed Van Rooijen speaking into the lens under the low roof of the tent, his silver hair sticking up crazily. Even after his adventure he was well enough to give an interview for posterity. But when they explained he was only at Camp Three, he was disbelieving and then angry.

"What do you mean?" he said. He was convinced he had been climbing so long that he must have bypa.s.sed the top three camps. "Not funny."

After all his hard work there was still about 7,000 feet between him and Base Camp.

"It's true!"

Van de Gevel told him about the deaths on the mountain. They had rescued Marco Confortola. But Hugues d'Aubarede was dead. They also thought that Gerard McDonnell was gone. Van de Gevel and Gyalje didn't go into greater detail because they didn't know more. Chris Klinke had the list at Base Camp.

Van Rooijen was devastated and shook his head ruefully, only half comprehending. He said he thought he had been the only one caught in this nightmare.

He said he could not feel his feet and asked Van de Gevel and Gyalje to take a look. They peeled off the outer part of his boots, then his inner boots. It looked bad. His toes, swollen and hard, had turned gray and light blue. They had severe frostbite.

They radioed Base Camp to report the news that the lost climber had been found. It was a terrific, joyful moment. After all the bad news, there was immense relief. The voices on the radio were full of congratulation.

Van Rooijen thanked them all. "Now you have to focus on finding Gerard and getting Marco down," he said. The Italian, still above them at Camp Four at 26,000 feet, was in a bad way.

They discussed the state of Van Rooijen's injuries. Eric Meyer's gravelly voice came on the line, and he told them they had to lose height as rapidly as possible if they were going to save Van Rooijen's toes. Some of the teams at Base Camp had made a rescue plan and offered to climb up carrying ropes and oxygen tanks to help lift Van Rooijen down. But Gyalje demurred, saying they would manage on their own; the mountain was dangerous and there had been too many deaths already.

Van Rooijen insisted he could walk, and with the oxygen tank on his back the three men descended toward Camp Two. If anything, Cas van de Gevel was more exhausted than Van Rooijen. As they climbed, his colleague pa.s.sed him the bottle of oxygen, and breathing the extra gas gave him some new energy, though the bottle was empty after a few minutes.

At Camp Two, Gyalje melted more snow for water and Van de Gevel was so tired that he crashed into a deep sleep outside the tent. When he woke up, he told the others he wanted to stay at the camp for the night. It looked like he had some frostbite on his hands; his fingers were turning rigid and painful. "You must get up," said Gyalje, insisting. The other two men forced him to his feet and they began climbing down the route again.

Van de Gevel fell behind. Walking down alone, he forced himself onward. Later, he would think about what K2 had done to him and to his friend; Van Rooijen had lost twenty-two pounds. Van de Gevel had lost thirty. They had both nearly died. He would think how dreadful it would be to face Gerard McDonnell's family. He had met the Irishman for the first time on this expedition. They had gotten to know each other on the trek in from Askole. Now McDonnell was gone. Ger's mother, his sisters, his brother would hate them all for having allowed this to happen.

The tragedy would no doubt stop some people from coming back. But it would not keep Van de Gevel from returning to the mountains. If he gave up climbing, he knew, he wouldn't be the same person. When he was climbing, he felt at ease, the most comfortable he ever was.

He couldn't stop thinking about the moment on the summit when the guys-d'Aubarede, McDonnell, and Van Rooijen-had embraced under the dome of the perfect blue evening sky.

That is what it was all about. Even this disaster could not rob him of that.

Ahead of Cas, Van Rooijen, for his part, reflected that he had finished with K2. After three attempts, he had conquered its summit. K2 was a mountain you climbed only once in your lifetime. To try again would be stupid. As he hobbled lower, he knew he was not coming back.

Marco Confortola had woken up alone on Sunday morning at Camp Four with only his two Balti HAPs for help. The last of the large South Korean contingent had cleared out without waiting to a.s.sist him down.

The sun was high in the sky. Confortola felt dizzy. After his hours outside unprotected on the mountain, and his fall down the Bottleneck, he ached, and pains burned in his left hand and in his feet, but he climbed over the misty ridge onto the rocks of the Abruzzi. He was familiar with it, whereas the Cesen was strange to him.

The two HAPs followed him down, but they stayed a few hundred feet behind him, as though Confortola were bad luck or too much work. He cursed them. He knew he couldn't rely on them.

The Abruzzi was deserted. He followed the ropes alone. When he climbed down onto the cut-up snows at Camp Three, he found n.o.body. No one to wave or run to him or bring him in.

The climbers who had waited to help the Norwegians had abandoned the camp, but he found a Sprite in one of the tents and drank it, and found two energy bars in another tent and ate them. He found a battery for his phone and called Luigi at his bank in Valfurva.

"This is Marco!" he said, pressing the phone eagerly to his mouth.

But Confortola's luck wasn't getting any better. Luigi wasn't there. His brother was out.

Confortola nodded. "Okay."

He hung up, and then slept.

As Wilco van Rooijen, Cas van de Gevel, and Pemba Gyalje dropped onto the steep paths near the bottom of the mountain, they were met by climbers from Base Camp. There had been no ropes on the lower thousand feet of the Cesen so the rescue party had fixed new lines to help the injured climbers get down.

Roeland van Oss and others from the Dutch team, including the Base Camp manager, Sajjad Shah, gathered around the men. They had brought water, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Snickers and Kit Kat bars.

One of Sajjad's jobs in Base Camp had been to keep Van Rooijen in supplies of cookies and peanut b.u.t.ter. It was one of his favorite foods, so much so that halfway through the season Shah had had to send down for another dozen jars from Skardu. Now, when Van Rooijen saw the Pakistani, he bellowed out: "Sajjad!" Then added with a smile: "Where are my peanut b.u.t.ter and cookies!" Shah could see that the ebullient Dutch leader had emerged from his trials with his spirits undiminished.

As they gathered around, Van Rooijen, Van de Gevel, and Pemba Gyalje asked the climbers from Base Camp whether there had been a sighting of Gerard McDonnell. It became clear as they talked that if there had been any chance that the Irishman was alive, it was now finally gone.

Roeland van Oss got on the radio and satellite phone to report that the rescue party had reached the stricken climbers. "Wilco, Cas, and Pemba are safe," he said somberly. "But we are now fairly sure that Gerard died in the Bottleneck."

In Utrecht, Maarten van Eck had called Heleen as soon as Van Rooijen reached Camp Three. He posted the news of the successful rescue on the Dutch team's website: WILCO IS ALIVE EXHAUSTED BUT HE SOUNDS GOOD. ONLY PROBLEMS WITH FEET. WE HOPE TO UPDATE SOON!.

In Ireland, the hopes of Gerard's family that he was the lone surviving climber were finally extinguished. On Sunday morning, the McDonnells called a news conference at the local school, just a few hundred yards from the farmhouse. It was a gray day. His brother-in-law stood in the parking lot to announce that they accepted he was dead. A few days later the family issued a statement to the press: We are extremely proud of the many heroic and brave achievements of Gerard, whose death has left a major void in our lives. He brought honour not only to us his family, but the whole country when he became the first Irish man to summit K2.

On K2, the decisive realization that McDonnell was dead seemed to have the most powerful effect on Pemba Gyalje. From that moment, he hung his head and fell silent, the other climbers noticed.

He was convinced now that the climber in the red and black suit that Big Pasang had reported seeing being hit by ice and falling from the Traverse was indeed McDonnell. That meant the Irishman had not abandoned Jumik Bhote and the two injured Korean climbers on the slopes at the end of the Traverse. He had stayed behind after Marco Confortola had left and had helped them to descend, before he had been swept off the Traverse to his death.

Another Sherpa, Little Pasang Lama, had received a radio call in Camp Four from Big Pasang Bhote before the final avalanche; Big Pasang said again that he had reached the Koreans and Jumik Bhote near the Traverse. Jumik had even come on the radio to say his limbs were frozen and the injured Koreans were suffering from snow blindness but he could walk, and when he reached Base Camp he hoped he could be flown by helicopter to Islamabad and home.

Then Big Pasang and Jumik and the Koreans had died when the serac collapsed.

But it was already becoming complicated. Another Sherpa, Chhiring Dorje in the American team, believed that Gerard McDonnell had probably been the lone figure witnessed at 10 a.m. on Sat.u.r.day, trapped above the serac and walking up and down on the snowfields. He had either fallen over the serac, Dorje felt, or climbed down onto the Traverse where he was. .h.i.t by the avalanche and had little to do with the rescue of Jumik and the Koreans.

On the Cesen, it took the three injured climbers and their retinue another few hours to reach Base Camp. It was dark, approaching 9 p.m., when Pemba Gyalje walked in first, a.s.sisted by one member of the rescue team. It was a while before the other two men followed across the dark rocks of the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier, hobbling away from the maw of K2 and into the blessed safety of Base Camp.

A lot of effort was now directed toward saving the men's frostbitten toes and fingers. The Americans had converted the big Dutch mess tent into a medical emergency room to receive the injured climbers. It soon became a busy crowded scene inside. The cooks boiled water and put down blue basins for the men's feet. The Norwegians' heater blasted some warmth from the corner. Eric Meyer and Chris Klinke had their headlamps strapped on their foreheads. Their lights illuminated the p.r.o.ne figures of the two stricken Dutch climbers who were laid on bed mats, their backs propped up against the inflatable Ikea sofa that Rolf Bae had originally carried from Norway for Cecilie and that the Norwegians had also donated to the rescue effort.

In their orange North Face fleeces, both Dutch climbers looked years older. Cas van de Gevel, in particular, seemed shrunken and gray, his skin lined and hanging from his cheeks. Klinke and Chhiring Dorje handed out Pepsi in tin cups and with Lars Nessa they scrubbed and warmed Van Rooijen's and Van de Gevel's hands and feet, while Meyer prepared to apply what medicines he had. Roeland van Oss was relieved to let Meyer take charge, to see now whether the descent had been rapid enough to save the climbers' fingers and toes.

Meyer inserted plastic tubes into veins on the back of their hands and injected a c.o.c.ktail of medicines. First, morphine and Valium to ease the painful thawing of their flesh. He also possessed two bottles of a new drug, tPA, or tissue plasminogen activator. Normally used to treat heart attacks, it had shown in university trials that it could help frostbite, though it had never before been tested at alt.i.tude and it had side effects such as internal bleeding. Meyer was worried about what dosage to try, so he called a specialist at the medical school in Denver, who advised against using it. The drug also had to be injected within twenty-four hours of the initial exposure. This applied only to Van de Gevel, but Meyer was growing so concerned about their condition that he injected it into both men. He followed it with another drug, heparin, to stop the blood clotting in the tiny vessels of their fingers and toes.

Fredrik Strang came into the tent and turned on his camera. Wilco van Rooijen looked disoriented as the Americans filled him in on the full extent of the disaster.

"How many victims are there?" he said.

"Eleven," said Meyer. "Eleven people."

"Missing?"

"No, dead. Rolf, Gerard."

Blowing out his cheeks, Van Rooijen gazed emptily around the tent.

They told him Marco Confortola had left Camp Four and that another rescue party was climbing up to meet him on the Abruzzi. Down at Base Camp, Roberto Manni, Confortola's Italian colleague, had been desperate for volunteers to help Confortola and had offered money to any Sherpa who was willing to go up to find him and bring him down. Eventually, after a day's delay caused by the need to get equipment together, another American climber, George Dijmarescu, had set off up the Abruzzi with the two Sherpas in his expedition.

Lying beside Van Rooijen, Van de Gevel sank lower against the mattress. Initially Meyer was most concerned about Van Rooijen's frostbite. He had slept two nights in the open, the first night at about 27,000 feet, the second at somewhere around 25,000 feet. But Van de Gevel's hands looked bad, too. He told Meyer about waking up with his gloves off. The Dutchman was a carpenter, Meyer knew, and his fingers were important to him. But the fingers on his left hand were limp blocks of gray, with purple streaks across the mid portions. Meyer could see hemorrhagic blisters, which meant serious frostbite damage.

They dunked his hands in a tin basin of warm water and soaked his feet in a bowl but repeatedly he dozed off, trying to stretch out, and pulling his hands and feet out of the water. Chris Klinke had to keep lifting them back in.

Looking in a concerned fas.h.i.+on at both men, Meyer said, "I hope they will keep their digits."

After a few hours, the only thing left that Meyer could do was bandage the two men up and prepare them for their departure. It was about 3:30 a.m. There was talk of helicopters flying up from Skardu to airlift them out.

CHAPTER TWENTY.

Monday, August 4, 8 a.m.

Helicopter transportation for injured climbers is being organized for tomorrow morning," Maarten van Eck wrote in an update on his website late on Sunday night.

At K2 on Monday morning, Roeland van Oss thought the helicopters would not arrive until late, but at eight o'clock one of the military liaison officers at Base Camp rushed to his tent with the news that they were only forty minutes away. The Pakistani military had established a private company precisely with the aim of plucking injured mountaineers out of the Karakoram, and it had choppers stationed at the military airport at Skardu. Van Oss had spoken by satellite phone with the owner of Jasmine Tours, the Dutch expedition's organizer, and he had made the arrangements.

Suddenly Van Oss had much to do. He scurried to collect Van Rooijen's and Van de Gevel's bags. The Dutch climbing leader sat upright in the mess tent shooting instructions at Van Oss about all the jobs he had to do after Van Rooijen was gone, such as paying the porters and dealing with the remaining food barrels.

Away from the tents, about three-quarters of a mile down the glacier toward the southeastern shanks of the mountain, the Serbian team's liaison officer and a team of helpers s.h.i.+fted rocks to build a landing pad for the helicopters. They marked it with flags and a windsock.

At nine o'clock, two former Pakistani military Eurocopter Ecureuils, or Squirrel helicopters, flew in from the south, casting shadows against the mountainside. They came noiselessly at first but then thudded above the glacier near the tents.

Almost everyone left in Base Camp took turns in the scrum helping to lug Wilco van Rooijen over the rocks on a red stretcher. After they set him down, Chris Klinke s.h.i.+elded the Dutchman's head with his arms as the chopper blades billowed gusts of wind over the rocks. Then they lifted Van Rooijen through the helicopter door and the chopper hovered into the air and flew away.

Roberto Manni persuaded the pilot of the second Squirrel to take a detour up the Abruzzi ridge to attempt a long-line cable and harness rescue of Marco Confortola. The arrangement was that Confortola would climb down onto a flat s.p.a.ce below House's Chimney, but when the helicopter got up to 19,000 feet the pilot could not see him. Confortola hadn't managed to descend to that point yet. The weather forced the chopper to wheel away without waiting.

The Squirrel flew back down to the G.o.dwin-Austen glacier for Cas van de Gevel. His hands bandaged, the Dutchman walked from the tent to the landing strip.

The trip was a stunning hour back down the Baltoro glacier, past Masherbrum and Trango Towers, to Skardu. There, Van de Gevel was reunited with Van Rooijen, and the two men were hooked up to monitors in the military hospital, a one-story complex of run-down cream-colored buildings beneath the hot, sandy hills on the outskirts of the town, where military officials strode the grounds and loudspeakers repeatedly called people to prayer.

Back at K2, more porters were arriving to carry away the teams' gear. Mules waited around on the rocks. The big South Korean team climbed down to Base Camp, and Naw.a.n.g, the cook from Nepal, prepared a special meal in the mess tent. His bibimbap bibimbap-warm rice mixed with vegetables, chili, and meat, when they had some-had become a favorite of the Flying Jump team. Now he cooked the meal even though he had lost two friends from his own region, Jumik Bhote and Big Pasang. From outside, people heard him crying.

Chhiring Bhote was preparing to return to his village near Makalu to observe two months of mourning for Jumik.

The Korean climbers drank suji, which they had brought to K2 intending to celebrate Go Mi-sun's birthday. Instead they were marking the deaths of their two Sherpas and three of their own climbers. The Koreans were not going to wait around. They were crushed by the deaths. They rolled up their flags and their gear. Then the survivors walked out of Base Camp and left the tents standing for the porters to dismantle. They walked for two hours down to Broad Peak Base Camp, which was at a lower alt.i.tude for the bigger helicopters they had ordered up. Then the sky was full of helicopters, which flew them out of the Karakoram toward Islamabad.

Before they left, Lars Nessa spoke to Go Mi-sun. She was distraught at the deaths in the Korean team and she offered her commiserations for Rolf Bae. But she was not going to give up climbing; she was leaving to move on to the next peak in her quest to reach the top of all fourteen 26,000-foot mountains. She would die a year later on Nanga Parbat, another tough mountain in northern Pakistan.

Nessa thought about what he had learned from K2. The human costs of mountaineering. Not just those costs inflicted on a climber caught up in a tragedy like this, but the pain for the families left behind.

The Serbs from Vojvodina were leaving. Without Dren Mandic. Predrag Zagorac and Iso Planic intended to sell the team's spare oxygen cylinders and give the money to Jahan Baig's family.

Cecilie Skog had left earlier on Monday, trekking out alone with a single porter to reach Askole as quickly as possible, planning to barely stop to eat. Sixteen months later she would trek across Antarctica, her love for the wilderness undimmed. Nevertheless, her burden was heavy. And, Nessa thought, was it fair on his own family, his parents, who were farmers near Stavanger, or his girlfriend? Nessa had decided he would climb again but never on a killer mountain like K2.

After Van Rooijen and Van de Gevel had gone, Roeland van Oss left a lot of what he couldn't take with him for the porters to burn. Wastepaper, his Alistair MacLean and Tom Clancy novels, all the other garbage. He would never return to K2, never again face those weeks of climbing, all that danger, just to stand on a summit. What did it mean? Most of the people who died had been victims of bad luck, he thought. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As the remaining Dutch climbers were packing up the equipment in Gerard McDonnell's tent, they discovered a bottle of beer among his belongings. That night, a group gathered in the Americans' mess tent and toasted the Irishman. They went around the table reminiscing about him.

"He was a gift to the world," said Eric Meyer in his toast. "He was a gentle, kind spirit."

A Serbian climber borrowed two tin plates from the kitchen tent and punched out the names of the dead. It took him five hours. He made a mistake with one plate and had to go back for a third.

Lars Nessa also made a plate for Rolf Bae, using a hammer and chisel.

Before they left K2, the climbers scaled the brown cliffs at the western edge of Base Camp to hang the plates on the Gilkey Memorial.

One of the oval plates was for Dren Mandic. It read:

DREN MANDIC.