Lost Girls

by George D. Shuman

  “You’ve done this before?” Sherry joked.

  The craft began to make an arc. She could feel the tail coming around on its axis.

  “Once or twice,” the pilot said dryly.

  Sherry hoped he was smiling, too.

  “How many people climb Denali?” she asked, trying to keep her mind off the descent.

  “About twelve hundred a year,” the pilot said.

  “Most make it to the top?”

  “About half.”

  “Am I distracting you?”

  “Not in the least.”

  “Any die?”

  “Five or six a year. Fifty or sixty too broken to come back and try it again.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Fifteen to twenty days on average, but Denali can be a cakewalk or it can be hell. No one walks into a storm on purpose.”

  “It’s impressive,” she said, “that people can do such things.”

  “You know there have been blind climbers on the summit?”

  “I’ve heard,” she said.

  And she had. Ever since reading about Erik Weihenmayer’s summit of Everest in 2001 she’d become interested in the sport. Weihenmayer had gone on to become both a world-class climber and an athlete after losing his sight at age thirteen. He had told his interviewers after Everest that summiting was far more than a spiritual quest. Erik liked the feel of hard rock under his hands. He liked the technical challenges. He liked, he told reporters, to surround himself with competent people, the kind of people who would make him a better human being.

  You didn’t have to think long on that. To be blind was not a choice. How to live and the kind of people you determined to follow was.

  There was some excited radio traffic over a cockpit speaker about an airlift off the Muldrow Glacier. Something was wrong with the lift arm of a rescue sling.

  “Down there?” the pilot said.

  Sherry felt Metcalf lean forward. She imagined him looking out a window in the door.

  “You can work with that?” Metcalf asked.

  “I can get you down,” the pilot allowed.

  Suddenly the vibrations in the floorboard smoothed out and the Pave Hawk began to move laterally, approaching the top of the ridge.

  “I never saw anything like it,” the pilot said.

  “The ice?” Metcalf asked.

  “I’ve been flying this mountain for fifteen years and it’s never looked like this.”

  “Tell me,” Sherry insisted.

  “Everything’s glazed over. Like ocean waves frozen mid-break.”

  She saw the surf breaking in her mind’s eye, a memory from her childhood in Wildwood, New Jersey, before the incident that took her sight at age five. Bluish white and elegantly curved, they would be dangerous for the rescuers to cross, she knew. This was not a place for amateurs, not a place for mistakes, and she thought once more that she was a potential liability to this man who was relying on her to save his sister. Once again she felt the obligation to qualify herself. She didn’t want to endanger anyone who was trying to get her down the side of a mountain unless he was very clear about her limitations. In spite of Brigham’s confidence in her ability, there were real-life issues to consider, the least being common sense and logic. What were the real possibilities that a man hanging upside down in a whiteout below the ridge would be lucid in the last few seconds of his life?

  She pulled away the microphone from her face. “Captain Metcalf, I don’t know what Admiral Brigham told you about me, but there are things I cannot do. I’m not a mind reader. I can only see what people were thinking about a few seconds before they died. I’m not always able to see anything relevant.”

  “I know what you do,” Metcalf said evenly, “and what I need when we get down there is for you to tell me what you see. I don’t care if you think it’s trivial, I don’t care if it makes sense to you or not. Don’t filter it. Tell me everything he was thinking about.”

  Sherry nodded, but she clearly didn’t understand. How could this navy captain be so certain this would work?

  “How long do we have?” Metcalf asked the pilot.

  “Eight hours, maybe a little more.” The pilot tapped his watch. “I’ll get a refuel and wait to hear from you at basin camp.

  “You and your men will have until twenty-one thirty, but then we’ve got to fly,” the pilot continued. “That’s when the window starts to come down.”

  Sherry flipped open the hinged face of her watch. It was just after one P.M.

  “Copy that, twenty-one thirty hours,” Metcalf said to his men.

  Sherry could hear a change in the engine’s pitch.

  “Suit up,” Metcalf told her. “We’ll be out in a minute.”

  Sherry zipped her jacket to her neck and Velcroed the collar, slipped on her two pairs of glove liners, then allowed Metcalf to push on the heavy snow gloves. Her ice boots were already biting into her shins.

  The helicopter thumped on hard-packed snow, lifted several inches, and spun a ninety-degree arc with skids scraping ice.

  The pilot hovered the craft there, keeping its full weight off the snow. The door opened and the machine rocked as a blast of cold filled the cabin. Howling winds forced them to yell to be heard.

  Metcalf took her hand and tugged before they jumped into the snow.

  “Brace yourself between steps,” he yelled. “Imagine that you are walking in water, feet wide apart, and do not let go of the rope.”

  She took a wide stance. Feet apart and awkwardly testing the snow, she moved one foot then the other, crampons slicing noisily through the crust of ice.

  “It’s going to be hard going until we reach the edge of the ridge.”

  She nodded and he slipped a harness around her back and snapped it off at her waist. “Don’t want you sliding off the edge of the mountain on your back.”

  Sherry, who couldn’t have agreed more, said nothing.

  The going would be twice as slow because of her. An experienced climber would have made the descent in half the time. But getting to the body was only part of the ordeal. The minute they were finished with the body, they needed to contact the search team above and get back up to the ledge. Metcalf would be bearing much of her body weight on the ascent. She couldn’t imagine the complexities of what it took to do that, but her job was to maintain balance and concentrate on what she came to do. He would take care of the rest.

  “Sandstorm, this is North Sickle One,” he said, making a radio check to his men. “Do you copy?”

  Sherry heard a voice come over the air. “North Sickle, you are loud and clear, over.”

  Metcalf tapped Sherry’s arm gently as they began to approach the ledge. “We’re going to clip to cleats and rappel off the ridge. One of my men will keep safety lines on us until we’re over the wall, then we’ll fasten onto the fixed line. Use the toes of your boots. You’ll get used to them quick.”

  Sherry nodded, wondering what she’d let herself in for this time. It would have been an understatement to allow that she had spirit—she did—and she’d been in some pretty unusual places before, like belly down on the front line of an equatorial civil war or compressed into a metal cage and lowered into a coal mine. But Sherry did not consider herself to be reckless or an adrenaline junkie. She might have overcome the fear of not being able to see, but she respected life and feared whatever a prudent person might fear. She had no death wish.

  Step by step, they lowered themselves. Crampon by crampon, their boots dug into the mountainside, negotiating toeholds that were beaded with ice, rounded corners of slick granite smooth as glass, the wind bumping them on the lines as they were carefully lowered, but at last they were under the ridge and Metcalf clipped them to the wall. Then they began the slow descent down the face of granite. It took almost an hour to reach the body and when they did, Metcalf went silently to work, chipping away at the heavy cast of ice around the dead climber’s arm.

  The experience had been like nothing Sherry had ever k
nown. It was both terrifying and exhilarating at the same time, the physical challenges of identifying foot-and handholds on a brittle wall of ice, the nearly intoxicating rewards of personal achievement. This was nature and self-awareness at the extreme.

  Metcalf’s immediate concern was clearing the corpse’s hand of ice and getting Sherry situated next to the body, making sure she was comfortable enough on her lines so she could forget about her physical situation and focus on what she came to do. Metcalf kept chipping away with the butt of his survival knife at the man’s glove, which was hanging below his body. Once it was clear, he used a chemical pack to thaw and remove it. It took fifteen minutes before he was guiding Sherry into position alongside the inverted corpse.

  Removing her own glove was tedious, but at last it was off, and she gently exercised her stiff fingers. Once more she thought about how the climber’s end must have come. He would have tried to upright himself several times before the effort became too much. Then he would have relaxed into his fate, remembering, thinking, ruminating about loved ones. Perhaps, if Metcalf was right, he would also have been thinking about the people he set out to save. She hoped he would have considered them one last time before he drifted into eternal sleep, hoped that bringing her here was not time wasted. Still, she could not imagine what the dead man might have been thinking that would lead the climbers to a cave buried under a literal mountain of snow.

  Metcalf rested on his lines, feet against the mountain wall, and wrapped his arms around her as she reached for the dead man’s hand. She felt Metcalf’s cheek brush against hers. His arms encircled her waist and pulled her body tight into his. She could feel him taking the weight off her line. Then he reached for the dead man’s hand and pulled it toward them, guiding it to her hand.

  There was a full moment when she was thinking about nothing but Metcalf’s arms around her, his warm breath on her neck as he took the weight off her harness. She had to make herself concentrate as she worked the cold fingers with her own until the hand was pliable and soft, and at last she felt the familiar transformation taking place.

  …a woman’s face, her lips were bleeding beneath patches of darkening skin. She was lying on red cloth, candlelight flickering on a brass zipper and all the white snow that surrounded her. A small electronic device was propped by her head, it looked cold and useless; now he looked up at the chin of a man and a tightly knotted necktie, olive skin and starched white shirt, gold cuff links on his wrists. His own little hand on the arm of a white wicker chair, the man was rocking him, they were on a green lawn above a crystal-blue sea; a woman now, a beautiful woman with hair pulled into a bun. She wore a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short cotton robe, turned to face a cortege of uniformed servants, one of them holding his hand; a man was sitting across from him, a black man with one white eye like a doll’s, he was drinking something amber and smoking a long cigar; a procession of black limousines, a white casket buried under flowers, men in suits wearing sunglasses; bright-colored flags snapping across a vista of low clouds, a pretty girl with long dark hair, she was wearing a snowsuit and had sunscreen on her nose; numbers floating on a small disk of black space; the girl again, she was laughing, her lips had not yet cracked, were not yet bleeding; there were arrows on the black disk, one red pointed to a letter, an N, the other to three white digits, a one, a nine, and another one; looking down from the sky through the windshield of a helicopter, it was landing in front of a massive stone castle in a dense jungle. The building had spires and buttresses and was surrounded by tall security fencing. Guards were posted at gates and next to the landing pad.

  He was inside now, there was a circle of black men wearing black uniforms, the room was large and damp and windowless, the floors were dirt except for a small round wooden platform. There was a floor-to-ceiling pole in the middle of it with leather hand restraints near the top, there were a dozen women circled around it, facing it, stripped of their clothes and kneeling. The uniformed men stood behind them with automatic weapons pointed at their heads. Others, Caucasian and Latino men, crowded forward to see. He backed away from them all, followed a dark corridor toward a pale pink light behind a partially open door. He looked inside and the walls, like the floor and ceiling, were painted blood red. There was an examination chair with stirrups in the middle of the room, a young blond woman was strapped to it, face immobilized by a clamp over her head, her left hand and foot were wrapped in bloody bandages. She was facing a large television screen that was playing a video. The video was of a woman sitting in the same chair, a naked black man with white face paint was standing between her legs, he was penetrating her, his skin broken in bleeding lesions and secreting ulcers, his eyes were dead as if he were in a trance.

  On a stainless-steel instrument table next to the woman were bolt cutters…

  He was off the side of a mountain, canister of dye aimed at the rock wall, wind spiraling him as he fumbled with the clips on his harness, he reached down, trying to undo them…then he was upside down, watching the snow fall, as if from heaven….

  “Sherry?”

  She jerked her head toward the voice.

  “Sherry?”

  “Okay,” she said shakily. “I’m okay.”

  “What did you see?”

  “Numbers.” She nodded. “I saw the arrow he was making, but there were numbers on a compass, I think.”

  “It wasn’t an arrow,” Metcalf said matter-of-factly. His arms still around Sherry’s waist, he was using his free hand to work a safety line through the dead man’s climbing harness, securing it to the fixed-line pitons anchored in the granite wall. “They’re numbers,” Metcalf said. “The canister shoots a single stream of dye. He was leaving us the team’s position in degrees. He must have been getting tossed around because they’re not pretty. The nine is lying at a forty-five-degree angle on top of the one. If you weren’t thinking about numbers, you might see an arrow with a circle on top of it.” Metcalf finished tying the safety line off and let the body go.

  “Something happened before he could finish it, maybe the wind was banging him around and he dropped the canister or maybe the line broke or released and he got upended. We know he wasn’t finished writing because nineteen degrees points out there”—he nodded over his shoulder—“into space.”

  “The one and nine were followed by another one,” Sherry said.

  Metcalf broke another chemical pack and placed it in Sherry’s hand. “Hold this,” he said. “I’ll help you with that glove in a minute.”

  He took the mike to his handset. “North Sickle, this is Sandstorm, over.”

  There was a crackle of static. “Go ahead, Sandstorm.”

  “Bearing one, nine, one, do you copy?”

  “Copy, that’s one, nine, one degrees, Commander?”

  “Affirmative,” Metcalf answered, then helped her with her glove.

  “Are you ready?” he asked.

  She nodded, thinking the moment would have seemed anticlimactic except for what she had seen in that castle and the red room.

  “You did good, Miss Moore. You did very good.”

  “What will they do now?” she asked.

  “This fellow’s not going anywhere, I clipped on a safety line to make sure. We’ll come back for him when the storms have passed through. My men up above will use the compass coordinates to search for snowbanks. You build snow caves into the side of an existing bank, not underneath it. Every bank on the compass line, they’ll probe with avalanche sticks. Find something hollow and they’ll dig.”

  “Why are the coordinates so important?”

  “There’s twenty acres up there. A three-degree variation would put them off mark a hundred yards for each quarter mile. Walk a mile and you’re four hundred yards off target. That’s the difference between here and the moon when you’re trying to find a six-by-six-foot hole under the snow.”

  Sherry nodded.

  “You ready?” He checked the lines and then her harness.

  Sherry nodded ag
ain. “I’m fine.” And with that they began their slow ascent to 16,000 feet.

  The Pave Hawk made two lifts off the Denali mountain that evening, the first to Providence Hospital in Anchorage with three surviving members of the American climbing expedition. They had been found a mile and a half from the ridge, dug into the wall between two peaks. The climbers were near death; none were aware the storm had ended. None were physically capable of digging their way out if they had known.

  To say Metcalf was euphoric was an understatement. His energy was palpable, and it stayed with Sherry for the longest time. She felt an unmistakable sense of camaraderie. She had become a part of something much larger. She had become kindred to these men for a day.

  The inn on Parks Highway was abuzz with excitement when they arrived on the second lift, but it was soldiers who greeted them, not reporters. No one in the civilian world yet knew what had taken place during the last six hours and 2,000 feet above basin camp on Denali. No one even knew they were there.

  Thirty miles away, at the Talkeetna Ranger Station, reporters were being briefed on the progress of airlifts from basin camp. No hope was given for the teams caught above them.

  A day later a United States senator from Washington would surprise the American public with an announcement that his daughter, Allison, had been one of the three climbers rescued from a ridge on Denali and that he wanted to personally thank Alaska’s Air National Guard, Denali park rangers, and the Army High Altitude Rescue Team involved in bringing all of the survivors off the mountain. No mention was made of Navy SEALs or the pilot of the Pave Hawk. No mention was made of Sherry Moore.

  Around the base of Denali, there were still days of mourning ahead, bodies to be recovered and identified, funerals to be held, but life went on, and new teams of climbers were already forming in Talkeetna, making plans for their summit assault. The disaster had diminished to back-page news articles, part of the chronicle of the mountain’s recorded history.

  Not so for Sherry Moore. To say she had been moved by the experience of clutching the side of a mountain would be a vast understatement. The enormity of where she had been was as vivid an image in her imagination as if she had stood, looking with good eyes, upon the summit herself. And yet it was impossible to enjoy that achievement, that memory—not without also remembering those women in the bowels of a castle in a jungle.