I nodded. The small settlement was the closest human habitation to Base Camp and the location the girls would have headed for if they had escaped.
We couldn’t assume that anyone was still there, of course, they might have evacuated along with everyone else once Viking and her team of thugs had attacked Base Camp. But surely there might be a caretaker or two? Someone had to be looking after the lodges.
We threaded our harnesses on and roped up together. The ground was heavily crevassed and there were no fixed lines heading in the direction we wanted to go.
It was virgin terrain and doubly dangerous as a result. Snow bridges had collected over the top of even the biggest crevasses, unstable platforms that could collapse without warning.
‘Keep the rope tight,’ Kami warned. We took turns to lead, probing the surface with a ski pole to try and check what was beneath our feet.
Finally we found ourselves on a natural pathway between two absolutely monster crevasses. On either side of us the ice fell away into inky blue-black voids.
‘These are the biggest slots I’ve ever seen,’ I told Kami. They had to be 100 metres deep.
An hour of careful traversing took us round the shoulder of Nuptse, far enough that the vantage point changed and the whole of the Khumbu Glacier was stretched out in all its glory.
The many hundreds of tents at Base Camp were also visible, looking deceptively calm and peaceful.
We looked for signs of Viking and her team but the tiny figures moving around were too far away to identify.
I unpacked the radio from my small rucksack and switched it on.
From this vantage point we had an uninterrupted line of vision down to Gorak Shep some twelve miles away. The collection of lodges was just visible to the naked eye, dark dots against the snow. If there was any chance of making contact with the outside world, this was it.
‘This is Camp 1 on Everest calling Gorak Shep. Camp 1 on Everest, do you read me?’
We stared at the handset, willing it to crackle into life.
Kami took over. He persisted for twenty minutes with no result, then gave up. Sitting side by side, we shared a couple of chocolate bars.
‘I see smoke,’ Kami said. He stood uncertainly, shielding his eyes with a hand.
‘What?’
‘I see smoke at Gorak Shep,’ he repeated.
Away in the distance, I saw it too: black fumes were rising from the small hamlet.
‘Maybe Viking’s men have burned the lodges,’ he muttered.
It seemed horribly plausible, I thought. If any military intended to try and wipe out the terror group, Gorak Shep would be the logical place to base an attempt; its destruction meant rescue was unlikely.
My chest went tight. ‘She’s thought of everything,’ I said.
The retreat back to Camp 1 took place in silence. We had been quietly confident our new idea would work but it had utterly failed.
We were out of contact with the world. Locked in a trap of our own making.
As we approached Camp 1, an avalanche peeled off the slope above. The mass of powdered ice raced down the cliff in seconds, billowing out into a substantial cloud. Our tent was blown about a bit but not buried like some of the others.
I rubbed at the icy grit in my eyes, coughing hard.
It was a reminder of the risks. A reminder of the reality of Everest. The clock was ticking and we had to find a way out.
We spent the afternoon in a kind of stupor. The sky was cloudless, allowing the sun to beat down mercilessly on the tent. The Western Cwm is a natural heat trap when no wind is blowing, high-altitude rays radiating off the valley bottom and side walls.
We lit the cooker to boil up some water. It would create more heat but we had no choice. As we waited, we heard the faint hiss of the radio.
‘Base Camp calling Camp 1,’ came the call. A woman’s voice. ‘Base Camp calling Camp 1.’
My guts twisted.
‘Viking,’ Kami said.
I turned up the volume. Her voice came loud and clear.
‘I know you’re there,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard your radio chat.’
Kami and I exchanged a glance. We had wondered if our calls might be intercepted. She continued to repeat the message.
Then Kami had a thought.
‘We might discover something about the girls,’ he said.
The temptation to try and get some news about Tashi and Shreeya was too much. Kami picked up the radio.
‘This is Camp 1,’ he said. ‘What do you want?’
‘Information. Anatoly Kuzkin and his daughter are up there, yes?’
Kami looked at me in surprise.
‘You’re wrong,’ Kami told her. ‘We haven’t seen them.’
‘We intercepted a radio message last night,’ Viking said. ‘Anatoly trying to get in touch with his military backup.’
Kami’s eyes widened.
‘The Russian voice,’ he whispered to me. ‘Just before we went to sleep.’
‘Tell Anatoly to come down and give himself up,’ Viking said. ‘And the rest of you with him. None of you can last much longer at that altitude so why not put yourselves out of your misery?’
‘Thanks for your offer,’ Kami replied calmly. ‘But getting shot by a terrorist isn’t on my bucket list.’
There was a long pause at the Base Camp end. It seemed likely that Viking was discussing this response with her men. Then the radio hissed into life again.
‘So be it,’ Viking said. ‘We’re coming up.’
The line went dead.
I muttered a curse beneath my breath.
Kami slumped back on to his sleeping bag.
‘That’s the last thing we need,’ he said. ‘Her and her thugs rebuilding the ladders across the crevasses.’
‘We’ll have to keep watch from now on,’ I agreed.
‘Do you really think that was Kuzkin on the radio last night?’
‘I don’t know.’
I went out of the tent and looked around the camp. There were no signs of life and we had not noticed any footsteps other than our own.
There were plenty of tents we hadn’t looked in but to search every one of them was too time consuming to contemplate.
The afternoon wore on. Depression overtook us, corrosive and unsettling. The thought that Viking and her team were setting out to rebuild the route through the Icefall was seriously troubling. I kept wondering how long it would take them.
Could we hide somehow? Could we climb higher to Camp 2? How could we defend ourselves?
The dome of our little tent became a small incubator, a dome-shaped Dacron oven; the two of us baking inside like a couple of Christmas turkeys.
‘Open up the back,’ Kami gasped. We unzipped the ventilation flaps at the rear of the tent, hoping to create some sort of through-draught.
Not much changed. It was still sweltering, without the smallest wind to cut us a break. We stripped off to T-shirts and shorts and lay on top of the sleeping bags.
‘You know, Alex had a premonition he would die if he ever went back to Everest,’ Kami said.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. When we were in the USA for my treatment he started having terrible dreams. Nightmares in which he was buried in an avalanche. Nightmares where he was lost in a storm, stumbling blindly through a white-out. He described it to me in graphic detail. It really messed him up.’
‘He wasn’t kidding when he said that Everest was his nemesis.’
‘He never would have guessed it would be a bullet that …’ Kami couldn’t finish the sentence.
‘No.’
We were quiet for a while.
Later I told Kami all about Tashi’s family and their misfortunes in Tibet at the hands of the Chinese. He asked a hundred questions about the Everest climb Tashi and I had done the previous year to rescue her younger brother.
‘That boy Kharma has courage,’ Kami smiled. ‘I hope I’ll meet him one day.’
At 5 p.m. the moment we h
ad been waiting for arrived: the sun dipped behind the ridge. The temperature inside the tent fell by twenty degrees in as many minutes, the chilled air a total delight after the punishing sun.
The cooler temperatures seemed to wake up my mind.
I turned the radio over and over in my hand, wondering if there was any way we could boost the signal.
The stubby antenna got my attention. Suddenly I had a brainwave.
‘How about we try and increase the size of the antenna?’ I said.
Kami raised himself up, his eyes suddenly aflame.
‘Great idea!’ he said, nodding. ‘But how?’
‘Strip copper cable out of the other radios. Try and find some head torches to plunder.’
We took one of the useless radios and prised the casing open. We were soon disappointed. A quick inspection of the interior revealed hardly any copper cable. The workings were printed circuit boards.
‘It’s hopeless,’ Kami sighed. ‘Nice idea but it’s not going to work.’
The second night at Camp 1 passed without any meaningful sleep, wraithlike bursts of wind ripping down the valley and slapping the wall of the tent as the fabric flexed and crackled.
The longing for peaceful rest became almost too powerful to bear.
‘Demons are rising tonight,’ Kami said.
He clutched the shrine bell close all through that blustery night, but – like me – totalled just a couple of hours of uneasy sleep.
Next morning we were up just after dawn, searching more of the tents for a decent radio. Camp 1 was a vast area and there were dozens we hadn’t yet checked.
Just after 9 a.m. I heard Kami giving out a jubilant whoop.
‘Look at this!’ he exclaimed.
In his hands was exactly what we needed: a powerful radio with serious range.
We packed the radio and its battery in Kami’s bag.
‘This is going to change everything,’ he said. ‘We have to try it right now. Let’s get back to that same viewpoint.’
We crossed the crevasse and traversed back across the top end of the Icefall, following the route of the previous day.
A couple of ravens fluttered above us, cawing aggressively.
‘They’ve come up for breakfast,’ Kami said wryly.
‘I’m not on the menu,’ I told him. I compacted some snow in my hands and threw it at one of them.
The birds banked away with an indignant squawk.
We reached the vantage point with the big valley view and unloaded the gear. A glow of hope began to burn inside me.
‘Let’s connect the battery,’ Kami said.
We fumbled with the connector for a few moments, then worked out how it clicked together.
‘Try it!’ Kami said.
I switched the radio on and started to broadcast.
‘This is Camp 1 on Everest. Camp 1 on Everest. Anybody receiving us?’
We listened in, detecting a change straight away. The static was different now, filled with voices, faint enough that they sounded like they were coming from the moon.
It was encouraging.
Then a voice that wasn’t the least bit faint. It was coming in loud and clear. I almost dropped the handset.
‘Ryan? This is Tashi and Shreeya. Do you hear me? Ryan, come in!’
‘It’s the girls!’ Kami yelled. We embraced with the joy of the moment. I pressed the button.
‘Tashi! It’s me! Are you both safe?’
A squeal of delight came from the other end.
‘We made it out. We’re down in the valley, safe and sound!’
Kami and I beamed at each other. It was the news we had been longing for.
‘How about you?’ Tashi’s voice trembled. ‘We heard a lot of shooting after the explosion. Is everyone OK?’
The air seemed to chill. I paused, searching for words that would not come. Kami reached out and gently took the handset.
‘Alex was killed,’ he told Tashi. ‘Shot. There was nothing we could do to save him.’
‘Oh no!’
The line went quiet for a while, then I asked:
‘Have you seen Dawa? He saved our lives back there.’
‘Yes. He got here yesterday, dehydrated and exhausted but alive.’
‘How about Zhanna?’
‘A mystery. She hasn’t been seen.’
I passed the handset to Kami and he spoke with Shreeya for a while. The conversation was in Nepali but I could sense the tenderness in his words.
When he finished, I got back on the line with Tashi.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘We’re going down to Kathmandu,’ she replied. ‘Spread the news about Viking and what she’s doing. The more information gets out, the better the chance of international action.’
There was a long pause.
‘She can’t get to you, can she?’
Kami and I shared a look.
‘Hopefully not,’ I replied.
I didn’t have the heart to tell the girls that Viking was on the way up.
‘OK,’ Tashi said. ‘Do you think we’ll be able to talk again tomorrow?’
‘Sure,’ I told her. ‘Let’s try at 7 p.m. Yes?’
The signal was cut. We stood in silence, savouring the words we had shared with the girls.
‘The gods have cared for them,’ Kami said.
‘They’re out of Viking’s clutches,’ I said. ‘That’s all that counts right now.’
We packed the radio away and trekked back to Camp 1 where we began to search the tents for more cooking gas and food.
The final tent we wanted to check was the furthest from our own, a yellow North Face dome, positioned underneath a rock wall about fifty metres away. It was set back from the main group. There were no fixed ropes in this part of the camp so we probed the ground ahead of us, searching for crevasses or other hazards.
We arrived at the tent and I unzipped the front flap. Poking my head in, I got the shock of my life.
Two people were in there.
And the sharp end of an ice axe was pointed right at my face.
Zhanna reached out to pull the ice axe back.
‘Put the axe down, Papa,’ Zhanna said. ‘I know him. It’s the English boy, Ryan.’
– CHAPTER 9 –
Kami and I jammed into that little tent to fill the Russians in on all that had happened. Zhanna smiled broadly as she made us tea. Her father looked haggard, his eyes rimmed with red, a far cry from the suave businessman I had seen pictured in the gossip pages.
‘How come you’re here?’ Kami asked.
‘I flew in by helicopter with a bodyguard,’ Anatoly said. ‘We touched down about three miles from Base Camp and trekked in from there. Zhanna’s beacon guided us.’
Kami and I exchanged a look. That explained the mysterious helicopter noise we had heard two nights earlier.
‘Best moment of my life,’ Zhanna said. ‘Hearing Papa’s voice whispering to me in that tent.’
She put her arms around her father and gave him a hug. It seemed the two of them had put their differences aside.
‘Our plan was to take Zhanna out in the helicopter,’ Anatoly explained. ‘But an explosion lit up the area we were in and we had to double back.’
‘That was us!’ Kami said. ‘We set the tent on fire as a diversion.’
‘The terrorists were swarming everywhere. We had one option,’ Anatoly said. ‘Heading into the Icefall was our only chance.’
‘Where’s the bodyguard?’ I asked.
‘He was fatally wounded. We had no choice but to leave him,’ Anatoly said. ‘Zhanna and I had to keep going – we could see head torches following.’
Kami and I filled the two Russians in on our story. Zhanna’s face crumpled when she heard that Alex had been killed.
‘That’s two deaths down to Viking,’ Anatoly said grimly. He didn’t expand on the comment but I saw the fixed expression on his face and, in that moment, recognised another side to his character.
>
Anatoly Kuzkin was not a man to forgive.
We ate together, jammed into that small tent. The food was basic but filling: pre-packed foil sachets of sausage and beans that we boiled up.
It felt good to be with Zhanna and her father. Four people felt an awful lot safer than two, even if one of us was only twelve.
‘How much do you know about this woman – Viking?’ Anatoly asked.
‘We know she hates you,’ Kami replied.
‘That’s an understatement,’ Anatoly spat. ‘Her organisation has hounded me for years.’
‘She’s evil,’ Zhanna said.
‘She’s a thorn in my side,’ Anatoly continued. ‘She’s twice attacked my businesses, once in Uzbekistan, once in Siberia. And now this!’
‘She made a big announcement about your Indian Ocean mining operation,’ I said. ‘Is it true that it might have diverted the monsoon?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anatoly replied. He looked away, clearly uncomfortable with the question.
‘She’s accusing your company of putting the lives of millions of people at risk,’ Kami told him. ‘She’s broadcasting that to the world. Why don’t you make a statement to deny it?’
Anatoly went quiet. Zhanna studied her nails. I sensed he was unsure.
‘I am a businessman,’ Anatoly said. ‘I pay my taxes. I employ tens of thousands of people all over the world. If my operations are legal and above board why should I have to justify them to anyone?’
‘So her information is wrong?’ Kami asked.
‘The methane thing could be partly correct,’ Anatoly said grudgingly.
Kami seemed about to say something, but he bit his tongue and kept silent. Zhanna went red in the face but also said nothing.
‘Global warming is happening everywhere anyway,’ Anatoly continued. ‘So it’s hard to believe that my business is making such a terrible impact.’
The conversation died away. The theme had soured the mood. It was obvious that Anatoly was in a state of denial. But it was also obvious that Viking’s tactics were evil and vicious.
‘Maybe you should change things, Papa?’ Zhanna suddenly said. ‘Perhaps the mining really is damaging the world? Maybe you can invest in something better for the environment?
‘Of course,’ Anatoly replied without conviction. ‘I will think about it.’
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