Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day

by Zuckerman, Peter

  He reluctantly inhaled lungful after lungful of the gas. As he breathed, his vision sharpened and his mind rebelled. He realized that an oxygen mask was on his face. The wrist pressing it on him belonged to the Sherpa on the Dutch team, Pemba Gyalje. The hiss came from the regulator attached to the bottle. “Marco,” said Pemba’s soothing voice. “Marco. Marco. Marco. I’m trying to help you.”

  But Marco didn’t want this kind of help. He had suffered plenty to avoid the bottle. Now, with each breath, he was ruining his record of climbing without supplemental oxygen. Why now, so close to high camp, should he surrender? To satisfy the recordkeepers, he’d have to climb the Savage Mountain all over again. Meanwhile, the Italian media might dig up an old taunt from 2004 when he had climbed Everest on the bottle: They’d call him il bombolaro, the bottle guy. Marco tore off the gas mask. Using it was exactly what he hadn’t wanted. Pemba extended an arm and Marco, infuriated, grabbed it, pulling himself to his feet.

  They had barely begun descending when something—Marco thought it was an oxygen cylinder, Pemba thought it was a rock—bounced down the incline and bludgeoned Marco in the nape, knocking him to his knees. Blood trickled from the puncture on his neck, and a dying avalanche, which had propelled the missile, flowed hard against him, threatening to whisk him away. Within seconds, Marco felt as though he were levitating.

  Pemba grabbed him by the scruff, “like a lioness protecting her cub,” and towed him to the side, out of the slow-moving flow. The avalanche slid past, blasting powder into the air and carrying the entangled bodies of Big Pasang and Jumik. Sickened, Marco shut his eyes, and Pemba, with the equanimity of a coroner, snapped photos.

  To their far left, the man who had eaten Marco’s chocolate bar came to rest. Ropes bound Big Pasang’s corpse to Jumik; the Bhote cousins were aligned head-to-toe. Marco sucked in and looked away, contemplating something far worse than his tarnished record as Pemba photographed the streaks of gore in the snow.

  Clouds moved in, “as if trying to hide the disaster,” Marco recalled. He got moving, climbing side by side with Pemba, heading down the 50-degree slope toward the Shoulder. The nightmare was too real to talk about, so they made their way back to Camp 4 in silence.

  Locating Wilco the next day became a collaboration that stretched around the globe and into space.

  As he wandered down the mountain, lost, GPS satellites installed by the U.S. military were orbiting 12,000 miles overhead, spitting signals to Earth. Wilco’s phone grabbed several GPS signals. Using an algorithm based on the time the signals were sent and the satellites’ positions, his phone calculated its latitude and longitude.

  Every time Wilco called his wife, his 7.5-ounce phone quietly tossed its GPS coordinates to a Thuraya communications satellite floating 22,000 miles above equatorial Africa. This satellite then volleyed the data to Thuraya’s computer server in Dubai.

  The data sat there for a day, idling on the server. Thuraya’s United Arab Emirates office refused to release any information about Wilco’s location. Company policy promises its customers uncompromising confidentiality. The U.S. military uses Thuraya phones; so do spies, pimps, and politicians. Thuraya’s policy protects its clientele from assassins who could use GPS coordinates to hone in on targets. Disclosing Wilco’s location, the company feared, could put him in danger. Thuraya needed permission from the man himself.

  Unfortunately, the subscriber was rather hard to reach. Tom Sjogren, Wilco’s expedition tech provider, tried to reason with Thuraya and assure the company that he was telling the truth. “We had to convince them that a customer lost at 26,000 feet on K2 had other concerns than being ransomed by terrorists.” It took several hours of verification, but Sjogren eventually prevailed. On the afternoon of August 2, he secured the data from Thuraya and plotted Wilco’s rough location on a three-dimensional map of K2, e-mailing the information to Maarten van Eck, Wilco’s expedition manager.

  Aboard the Archimedes canal boat in Utrecht, Maarten further manipulated the data, factoring in his knowledge of Wilco’s last-known location, photos of the mountain, and details about the routes. What he found surprised him. Everyone had thought Wilco would be somewhere above Camp 4, and climbers had spent hours scanning those slopes with binoculars. Maarten discovered that they were looking in the wrong place. Wilco was below Camp 4, at about 24,000 feet, south of the Cesen route. Maarten relayed this information to K2 Base Camp.

  In Base Camp, a crowd of mourners lifted their binoculars and scoured the area Maarten had described. Even Hoselito Bite, the Serb whom Wilco had evicted during a windstorm, pitched in to help. “I’d have even climbed up to help that asshole,” Hoselito recalled. “This was no time to nurse resentment.” But no one spotted Wilco, even with clues to his location. Fog obscured Camps 3 and 4, and the prevailing opinion was that Wilco was tough but K2 was tougher.

  Nadir, the cook for the Serbs, disagreed. “Wilco wasn’t the type of man to give up,” he said. After rescuing Shaheen from Camp 2, Nadir was back in the kitchen, wishing he could do more than prepare lunch. He didn’t really expect to find Wilco, but he figured that if nobody had spotted him yet, he should leave the grill. “Everyone had lost their appetite anyway,” he recalled. Long after others had quit, Nadir continued to scan the slope in a grid pattern, even when all he could see were clouds.

  Around 3 p.m., the fog lifted, and Nadir spotted a dot south of the Cesen, above Camp 3, just where the GPS geometry had predicted. At first, the dot appeared to be a rock, but, after studying it, Nadir decided that the object was unquestionably orange—and moving. “This had to be Wilco,” who had been wearing a mango-colored North Face downsuit. But a moment later, fog rolled in and others couldn’t see the spot.

  Three and a half hours later, the fog burned off, and Chris Klinke, an American, sighted the orange dot. It was definitely a survivor. Chris became ecstatic and alerted others. Base Camp radioed Wilco’s teammate, Cas van de Gevel, near Camp 4.

  Guided by bearings radioed from Base Camp, Cas descended toward the dot. As the sky darkened, he switched on his headlamp, but soon it went out. Cas crouched, trying to swap dead batteries with live ones. His fingers were stiff with cold, and all the batteries dropped from his grasp and slid down the slope. Forced to stop, Cas pulled a sleeping bag from his pack, wrapped it over his head like a shroud, and waited. He spent the night less than 700 yards from Wilco. At first light on August 3, he intercepted the last survivor near Camp 3.

  Wilco could march, but his gait was robotic. His face resembled a barbecued bell pepper, and his lower lip was swollen, ready to pop. His eyes were poached. Cas had known him for twenty-five years, and when he grabbed his friend in a bear hug, both men began to cry. “I thought I’d never see you again,” Cas said. Unable to speak at first, Wilco accepted a liter of water and downed it. His throat now wet, Wilco rasped something to his friend, but it took a few tries before he could be understood. Cas was anxious to hear what he had to say.

  “I’m fine,” said Wilco. “I’m feeling good.”

  At Base Camp, the vacant tents unsettled everyone, but the dome of the first victim was the strangest. As the glacier melted around its perimeter, Dren Mandic’s red-and-blue tent appeared to rise. On a four-foot pedestal, too prominent to avoid, it resembled a stupa. “I tried not to look at it,” Pasang recalled.

  Entering his own tent was intolerable enough. Inside, his cousins’ sleeping bags were rolled in the corner. Jumik’s socks were paired on top of each other. Big Pasang’s wallet was wedged inside a shoe. The neatness of the space repulsed Pasang and made him imagine his cousins, entombed in the glacier, being ground into scrap.

  He was unsure what to do with their gear. The various equipment—down gloves, glacier glasses, parkas, sleeping bags—were valuable. The Flying Jump had provided it all, but Pasang doubted that his family would accept anything with Kolon Sport’s twin-tree logo. He left the tent and asked another cousin, the team cook, what to do.

  Take whatever you want, Ngawang Bh
ote replied. “You’re a stranger to them. A few weeks from now, Mr. Kim won’t remember your name.”

  Pasang didn’t care. He didn’t want to remember his name either.

  Pasang heaved, crying, and Ngawang gripped him by the shoulders. “I have good news,” he said. On the day before the summit bid, Ngawang had received a call from Kathmandu. Jumik’s wife, Dawa Sangmu, had given birth to a son on July 29. Ngawang had tried to radio high camp to surprise the new father, but terrain blocked reception. And then Jumik had died. Ever since, Ngawang had been burdened with good news. Now, he told Pasang everything he knew about the baby, a healthy boy named Jen Jen.

  The birth of a baby buoyed some survivors, and Ms. Go went around to the occupied tents to announce it. In the Serbian tent, Nadir, the team’s cook, listened to her and wondered what would happen to the fatherless child. He tapped a stubby metal pick with a mallet, incising letters on an aluminum dinner plate; then he took out a semipermanent Magic Marker. On the surface of the plate, he glossed over the name Karim Meherban and added HAP PAK to identify him as a high-altitude porter from Pakistan.

  Carrying several of these memorial plates, Nadir and a kitchen hand named Nisar Ali hiked to the Gilkey Memorial, the putrid burial cairn beyond Base Camp. With fishing line, Nadir strung the shiny plates around the rocks, and Nisar Ali found and buffed an old, oxidized platter engraved with the name of his father, Lashkar Khan, a high-altitude porter who died on a 1979 French expedition. In all, eleven new names were added to the memorial in 2008.

  Miraculously, neither a twelfth nor a thirteenth plate was added. Wilco and Marco limped into Base Camp, skeletal but alive. Eric Meyer turned the Dutch mess tent into a field hospital, propping the two men against the soap-suds pattern of Cecilie’s inflatable IKEA sofa. Most of the survivors he had treated needed food, water, and sleep, or blisters disinfected and dressed. Wilco and Marco, however, were living cadavers. After enduring three days in the Death Zone, Wilco had lost twenty-two pounds. Frostbite had tinted his feet violet, and much of his skin had the consistency of cheese. Marco had similarly severe frostbite, plus a concussion.

  It was hard to tell how deep the frostbite had penetrated. To treat the patients, Eric soaked their feet in warm water. He injected Wilco with the clot-busting drug alteplase and the anticoagulant heparin. As the pain intensified, he offered morphine and Valium. Chhiring worked as the physician’s assistant. He fetched supplies for Eric, monitored the IVs, maintained the temperature of the tubs, and served tea, bread, and Powerade. On breaks, he walked over to his chorten in the center of camp and prayed, thanking the goddess for his deliverance.

  Across camp, the Flying Jump survivors were arranging a deliverance of their own. Askari Aviation had quoted a price of $60,000 to dispatch the Fearless Five pilots. It was an expensive and unnecessary chopper ride, but Pasang and the Koreans were going to fly back to town. When Eric learned of this, he thought of the dead sherpas’ children in Kathmandu and Shimshal. “If the Flying Jump saved the 60 grand and trekked out like the rest of us,” he told Chhiring, “they could have set up those kids for life.”

  The Fearless Five provide a peculiar taxi service. The elite Pakistani military unit is stationed in Skardu to defend a frozen wasteland called the Siachen. The glacier, fifty miles southeast of K2, has little strategic importance, but, at an altitude of 21,000 feet, it is the world’s highest battleground, occupying disputed ice between India and Pakistan. The two countries disagree where their border should be drawn, and they’ve fought for control of the glacier since 1984. The war has cost more than four thousand lives, mostly due to cerebral and pulmonary edema. A ceasefire has held since 2002, but the Fearless Five are constantly training for a flare-up.

  During the first days of August, K2 upstaged India. Foreign nationals needed help and Pakistan’s oft-maligned military seized the opportunity to score a public relations coup. As the tragedy unfolded, the Fearless Five pilots were in the mess hall, standing around a flat-screen TV. Soft leather sofas faced the screen, but the men never considered sitting. “We were ready to move,” said Major Aamir Masood, who had been trained to suit up and get airborne within two minutes. Conversing with his colleagues in clipped British English, he felt restless. “I dislike the wait before a rescue mission,” he said, noting that the tenets of the Fearless Five—sacrifice, courage, devotion, pride, and honor—do not include patience.

  At first, Masood could only watch the reports on the Geo Television Network. Wilco and the Flying Jump had been evacuated days before, but Marco still needed an airlift on August 6. Wind gusts were stalling takeoff.

  At lower altitudes and better conditions, you have a margin of error,” said Major Suleman Al Faisal, one of the pilots. “We don’t have any margin in the Karakorum. Every mission is high risk.” Altitude makes flying a helicopter formidably complicated. The downwash generated by the main rotor blades depends on air density, and the thinner the air, the harder the rotors have to work to produce the same amount of lift. Fuel also burns less efficiently in thin air, so pilots must keep flights short or they’ll run out of gas. The Karakorum’s unpredictable winds, inconsistent visibility, and uneven terrain magnify the danger. Fortunately for the men being rescued, the Fearless Five are among the best high-altitude aviators in the world. Selected from a pool of combat pilots, they undergo years of specialized training to fly rescue missions in the Karakorum.

  Masood, whose jet-black beard matched the shade of his aviator sunglasses, waited, monitoring the weather, until finally, at 12:30 p.m., his team received clearance. Within 120 seconds, Masood’s team conducted about two hundred mechanical checks—a list they’d committed to memory—and buckled themselves inside the chopper’s slanted seats. Masood trusted his machine absolutely. The green Ecureuil B3 Mystery, with a single rotor, had a sister that touched the summit of Everest in 2005, and Masood loved its power at altitude. The rotors whirled, the skids lifted, and the Mystery was soon flying east, followed by a second, the backup helicopter that wouldn’t land unless Masood’s mission failed. The two choppers, noses angled downward, cruised over the Baltoro Glacier toward K2.

  Fifty-five minutes later, the chopper was circling Base Camp. Winds were gusting at a relatively calm 20 miles per hour, and Masood could see that the climbers had tied socks to their ice axes to signal a wind change. As the Mystery sank toward the glacier, grit shot into the air. “It’s like being in a blender,” said Masood. “You can’t see a thing.”

  As the helicopter touched the ice, Rinjing Sherpa, a mountaineer from the Makalu region, raced toward the fuselage with Marco riding piggyback. Rinjing dumped the Italian into the chopper’s open door and jogged backward, his head held low to avoid flying debris.

  The Mystery lifted off. Marco, cradling a liter of Coke, pointed to Masood’s camcorder and signaled for him to pass it over. Marco trained the lens on a freewheeling blur of glaciers below. As the camera quivered, K2 receded from sight.

  When Shaheen heard the whup-whup-whup of rotor blades beating overhead, he was strapped to a mule, plodding slowly back to town, still recovering from the illness that had nearly killed him. For days, with each passing helicopter, his mind spun. At first, he told himself that the helicopters were a sign of homesickness encouraged by a liberal insurance policy, but as more choppers crossed the Baltoro, he knew something had gone wrong. He spurred the mule.

  Reaching the village of Askole in the heat of the day, he didn’t bother to have his lungs checked at the local clinic. He only wanted the names, and they were easy to come by. News had already filtered in from Skardu, and it was even worse than Shaheen had imagined. Eleven were dead on K2, among them two Shimshalis, Karim Meherban and Jehan Baig.

  “I took it like a knife in the gut,” Shaheen recalled. He tried to think straight, but his thoughts circled, emphasizing every mistake he might have prevented if he had led the climb as planned. He never would have sanctioned the recovery of Dren’s body. He would have tried to dissuade anyone who wanted to climb
past the 2 p.m. turnaround time. So many lives—including Jehan’s and Karim’s—might have been spared if only he hadn’t fallen ill.

  Shaheen prayed that word hadn’t yet reached Shimshal. He felt that he needed to be the one to deliver it. “I loved Karim and Jehan like brothers,” he explained. “I led them to K2. I was the only man who should face their families.” So he calculated: How fast was this information moving? How fast could he move himself? If he were lucky, he could get to Shimshal within a day or two. If the village’s one satellite phone, used for natural disasters, were switched off, he might arrive in time. He hitched a ride to Skardu, and, on the main drag at College Road, found a truck bound for Hunza.

  But in Shimshal, the phone had already rung. Shaheen had been too late even before he’d heard the first rotor blades above the Baltoro. Jehan’s death had been reported to his mother, Nazib, on August 3, and, later that evening, another call had come in. By daybreak, nearly everyone in the village knew that Karim had died—everyone, it seemed, except Karim’s wife, Parveen. No one had had the stomach to tell her about the second call confirming her husband’s death, so Parveen assumed that Karim had survived. “After hearing what had happened to Jehan, I felt I had to see Karim right away,” she recalled. So Parveen had decided to leave Shimshal and meet Karim along the Karakorum Highway. “That way, I could see my husband a day sooner.”

  At 7 a.m. on August 4, she waited on the mud stoop next to her general store, desperate to catch a lift. The bus, a battered military jeep, came on time, but the driver, Merza Aman, told Parveen he wasn’t driving through the gorge until 11 a.m. “It was the lie of a good man,” Parveen recalled. “Merza wanted to save me the trip.” At 10:45 a.m., Parveen returned to the bus stop, unaware that Merza had left at 8 a.m. with his passengers.