Buried in the Sky: The Extraordinary Story of the Sherpa Climbers on K2's Deadliest Day (23 page)

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.

Another hour passed. Those who saw her waiting wouldn’t make eye contact, and Parveen began to understand. Finally, Didar Ali, a farmer, came to the stoop and told her the truth: Karim had never returned to high camp.

Parveen’s first instinct was to reach her children, Umbreen, Abrar, and Rahmin. She ran to their elementary school. When she walked into the classroom, Parveen didn’t have to ask whether her children had been told the news by classmates. Their faces said it all.

At the Fearless Five base, Marco was lifted from Masood’s chopper into the backseat of a military van. The Italian nodded off, unsure of his surroundings, until he woke in front of a dusty playground with swings and a canary-yellow seesaw. Squat buildings on the periphery resembled concession stands at a fairground. Painted in candy-apple red, the sign on one building read MORTUARY. Another cautioned: OPERATING THEATRE. NO ENTRY. VISITORS NOT ALLOWED. This was the Combined Military Hospital in Skardu.

Nurses helped Marco out, lowered him into a wheelchair, and pushed him into the operating theatre. The bright room smelled rancid, a mixture of renal failure and nail-polish remover. Following faded instructions taped to the wall, the nurses lowered Marco’s feet into tubs of lukewarm salt water and told him the pain would get worse.

Within an hour, reporters from the local stations, now working as correspondents for international media, had pushed past the NO VISITORS sign on the swinging door. They fended off doctors ordering them to leave and mobbed Marco’s cot, shoving microphones under his chin. The reporters tossed Marco questions, snapped photos of his feet, and videotaped his grimaces. Marco, communicating in rudimentary English, was so exhausted he could barely make sense. But he was photogenic enough for the Associated Press, and his sentence fragments, strung together by reporters, managed to offend and enthrall. “I was surprised by his interview,” South Korean climber Go Mi-sun later wrote in an e-mail to Ger’s family. “Marco had a mental breakdown.”

Media outlets around the world picked up the story. Many romanticized the horror and misrepresented important details. It was widely reported, for instance, that Pasang’s cousin Jumik had learned of his son’s birth during a satellite phone call from the summit. That is fiction, according to Jumik’s wife. In the
New York Times
, a front-page article about the disaster displayed a photo of Gasherbrum IV—the wrong mountain.
ExplorersWeb
, the insiders’ website for mountaineering news, ran a column titled “K2’s Double Tragedy,” castigating Base Camp bloggers for releasing premature casualty lists that traumatized some victims’ families.

The disaster captured the attention of viewers around the world. In London, Jerry del Missier, the president of Barclays Capital, was engineering the “Deal of the Century,” the acquisition of Lehman Brothers, involving $47.4 billion in securities and $45.5 billion in trading liabilities. He took a break to send worried e-mails to Kathmandu. Jumik Bhote was his friend and had climbed with him. In Dublin, President Mary McAleese, a fan of Ger’s, released a statement consoling his family: “Following so closely on their righteous pride, and that of the country, at Gerard becoming the first Irish person to scale K2, it is truly heartbreaking that they must now contemplate the loss of a beloved son and brother.” She dispatched a diplomat from Tehran to meet Ger’s family in Pakistan. In Islamabad, Vincenzo Prati, Italy’s ambassador to Pakistan, prepared a note for Marco: “Hoping you’ve unwound from your tremendous efforts on K2.” The note included an invoice for $10,614, the cost of Marco’s airlift.

The press, meanwhile, vied for the chance to interview Wilco. Inside the lobby of Islamabad’s Regency Hotel, the Dutchman hunkered below a crystal chandelier and rested his bandaged feet on a Louis Quatorze chair. He tried to be polite as reporters swarmed over him, but his mind was still on the mountain. What do these people know about fighting for your life? he thought, while the cameras flashed. He held up his bandaged hands, as requested. “I guess it’s showtime,” he said.

15

The Next Life

A
s the survivors returned to Islamabad, Pakistan’s Ministry of Tourism invited them to the Committee Room of the Green Trust Tower. A press release stated that government officials were hosting a “tea party” on August 8 to “pay tribute to the heroes who took part in this noble rescue that saved human lives.”

At 4 p.m., sixteen guests crammed around a rectangular conference table on the twelfth floor. Fans sliced the air as condensation pooled in the window frames. A bureaucrat passed around crackers and bottled water, and, despite the swelter, poured steaming tea. He gave the climbers gifts: lapel pins enameled with Pakistan’s flag and picture books of alpine flora.

The room hushed as Dr. Shahzad Qaiser, secretary of the Ministry of Tourism, slid behind a makeshift podium. Sweating in a suit and tie, Qaiser read from prepared remarks. He commended the rescuers for their courage, thanked the people of Pakistan for their hospitality, and apologized as though K2’s seracs had fallen in violation of ministry protocol. He and everyone else around the table had a patchy understanding of the events and limited insight from the Pakistani mountaineers, who were not present to explain what they had done. Of the lead team, only Pasang Lama and Pemba Gyalje attended the tea party.

As Qaiser spoke, Nazir Sabir—the Hunza mountaineer and president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan—sat at the opposite end of the room, wishing the tourism secretary would make it fast. Nazir had a headache from arguing with Alpha Insurance agents about
Jehan Baig’s policy
. His printer had run out of ink, so he couldn’t produce the summit certificates that the climbers wanted to frame. Everyone knew our party was a farce, he recalled. The ministry couldn’t smooth over the loss of eleven lives by serving tea and cookies. When Dr. Qaiser finished speaking and sat down, nobody clapped.

When it was Wilco’s turn to speak, he didn’t try to stand on his frostbitten feet. His cheeks, crusted over from exposure, had sunk inward, and his fingertips were starting to swell into purple grapes. He waved a bandaged hand at Nazir. “You need to train your high-altitude porters,” he snapped.

Wilco was among several survivors who felt that the Pakistanis had failed him. Some blamed Shaheen Baig, accusing him of feigning his illness. As more facts surfaced, Wilco came to a better understanding, but his perspective at that moment reflected a widespread stereotype. “Pakistani high-altitude porters are not
the right kind of climbers
for K2,” he said. “They are just too lazy to do the work.”

Nazir tried to keep the tone civil: “Some of our high-altitude porters aren’t as trained as Sherpas, but we are not ashamed of them,” he said. “They are not expected to do everything, and you cannot blame them for every problem.” No one had debriefed the Pakistanis yet, he reminded his guests, and speculation was fueling a blame game.

Sitting to the right of Nazir, Brigadier M. Bashir Baz, the head of Askari Aviation, chimed in. “Pakistan treated you well,” he shouted at the Europeans. “Some of you did not pay for evacuations, but we picked you all up. Your mistakes cost Pakistan a great deal of money.”

Disgusted, Nazir forgot Wilco and turned on Baz. How could Askari Aviation lecture his distraught guests about the bill? Nazir got in his face, and the two men shouted at each other in Urdu. Someone restrained Nazir, yanking him away from the brigadier. Sixty-five-year-old Ashraf Aman, the first Pakistani to summit K2, then sprang out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box. He shouldered his way toward the brigadier. “This is a tea party,” he pleaded.

Someone threw a punch, and Ashraf tackled the brigadier. Ministry bureaucrats dove between the two and pried them apart. Unexpectedly, Mr. Kim kicked back his chair and lunged at Wilco. You maligned me to the Korean media, he charged. Wilco had done no such thing. Ministry bureaucrats pulled Kim off the bewildered Dutchman.

By then, Nazir had seen enough. He stormed into the hallway. Mr. Kim followed and jumped in front of him, blocking his way and stuttering something in Korean. You don’t understand what we’re going through, Kim’s expression seemed to say.

Nazir said nothing. His brother had been buried by an avalanche on Mount Diran, a peak he could see every morning from his driveway. I’ve lost fifty-eight close friends and a brother to the mountains
,
Nazir thought to himself. He shoved past Kim and stomped down twelve flights of stairs. The tea party was over.

Chhiring avoided the receptions. After trekking back from K2, he picked up his summit certificate and boarded an empty flight to Kathmandu. Loneliness pressed in on him. To distract himself, he stared out the window of the plane. In the valley below, the smoke from the brick factories undulated in the air currents like strands of seaweed. When the plane jolted to a stop on the runway, Chhiring grabbed his pack and stepped out into a sheet of rain.

He had not spoken with his wife since leaving for K2, and he prayed Dawa would be waiting inside the terminal. He scanned the corridors of Tribhuvan International, trying to spot her—or anyone he knew. Stray cats swatted dung beetles across the pink marble floors. Bug-eyed TV monitors flickered with snow and cryptic numerals, informing travelers that they had missed the last flight.

Chhiring switched on his cell phone, but the network was overloaded as usual. Taking a bus to Boudhanath, he trudged home through leech-infested mud, rehearsing what he’d tell his wife. K2 had never been worth it, he planned to tell Dawa. I’ve always loved you more than any mountain.

When he unlocked the front gate of his house, his white spaniel, Dolkar, whipped his tail so fast it nearly tipped him off-balance. Chhiring gave the dog a pat and, climbing up the stairwell, found his brother, Ngawang, in the rooftop prayer room. But his little brother and the dog were not the ones Chhiring wanted to see most. He wandered down the hallway, through the kitchen, and into the bedroom. His wife was gone.

As August wore on and the monsoon moved northward, Big Pasang’s widow felt as though she were sinking. On September 6, when a doorman led her into the Hotel de l’Annapurna, Lahmu considered turning around. Inside the hotel’s opulent lobby, she felt tense, perched on the edge of a leather couch in front of a man who was blaming himself for the death of her husband.

Mr. Kim was in Kathmandu, preparing to leave for Manaslu, another 8,000-meter peak. He looked weary. His eyes teared as he provided life-insurance paperwork and helped Lahmu fill it out. Kim, speaking through the interpreter, told Lahmu about the perils of climbing. He told her that he was the president of a mattress company and could not offer much money or ask his sponsor, Kolon Sport, for further support. He handed her a thick envelope with Big Pasang’s earnings and a donation from the survivors of the Flying Jump, a sum of about $5,000.

After Lahmu accepted the envelope, Kim appeared to relax. He ordered tea. The interpreter ordered a soda. Kim offered to take Lahmu to a restaurant where the entrées cost more than her month’s rent. But Lahmu doubted that her young daughter would accept the breast of the woman caring for her while she was away. Kim shook her hand and left. Lahmu didn’t expect to hear from him again.

She didn’t hear much from Pasang Lama, either. He had become a pariah in the Bhote family. When Pasang returned from K2, Jumik’s older brother, Pemba Jeba, was unsparing. You abandoned my brother to save yourself, he told Pasang. Jumik and Big Pasang are dead, and you’re alive. How could you have let this happen?

Pasang avoided his relatives, but he asked himself Pemba Jeba’s question, again and again. How could I have let this happen?

“I hate climbing,” he told anyone who would listen. He found himself in a bar drinking
chang
so cheap it didn’t have a name. It tasted like lye, and he liked it that way; that’s what he thought he deserved. A greasy wad of rupees was all he had left over from the climb, and he spent the money as fast as he could, draining jug after jug until he passed out. He woke up in a gutter one morning, filthy and lost, not knowing where he was or where to go. Pasang was convinced he never wanted to see another mountain again.

Two weeks later, he took a job with the Flying Jump and left for Manaslu, the world’s eighth-highest peak.

Pushing a cart of duffels through Los Angeles International Airport, Nick Rice was just bones wrapped in cellophane. One blogger dubbed him “Freddy Krueger’s cousin.” Nick’s life had been saved by a soggy pair of socks. Now he wanted to gulp down a life-affirming Starbucks Frappuccino, lock his bedroom door, and hide. Hobbling on a bandaged right foot, he plowed through a wall of video cameras and microphones. “Twenty-seven interviews so far,” he said in response to a question from TMZ, adding that he intended to return to K2 whenever he could find a sponsor.

Many climbers faced a similar spectacle—so much so that, in Holland, Cas van de Gevel had to plan an escape. “Wilco, good luck with all this media shit,” he told his friend before flying south to meet his girlfriend in Málaga. “I hope they never find me.”

Cecilie, devastated by the death of her husband, had difficulty getting out of bed. When she could, she paced the beach near Stavanger, Norway, and watched waves beat the shore. “The pain was physical, too,” she explained. “Every part of me hurt, every muscle.” Gradually, she started to run on the sand, “so I didn’t have to think.” Each day, she ran farther and faster. Eighteen months later, she had completed the first
unsupported, unassisted
crossing of Antarctica.

Marco adapted to fame better than the others. As Italian journalists reported his amputations—“my little pedicure,” as he put it—his cell phone twitched with texts and his inbox filled with fan mail. He moved out of his mother’s place and purchased a hot tub with rotating jets and a bed with a mirror on the canopy. The media attention turned him into a toeless sex symbol. His story was covered in newspaper articles, television specials, talk-show appearances, two book deals, and a five-page spread in
Vanity Fair
, which featured Marco performing planche push-ups over a lead pipe. The Italian Olympic athletes association awarded him a medal for heroism. Dolce & Gabbana inquired whether he would model underwear; Italian housewives nearly swooned in anticipation.

But Marco had alienated Pemba Gyalje, the Sherpa who had saved his life. In Marco’s memoir, he characterized Pemba as a porter, not an equal, and misidentified him as “
Pemba Girgi
.” Scrutiny intensified when Pemba complained to Shaheen Baig’s climbing partner, Simone Moro, in a searing four-hour interview. Moro, in turn, dissected Marco’s errors on K2 for the newspaper
Corriere della Sera.

Pemba’s interview with Simone “made my mama cry,” Marco recalled. He considered himself “persecuted like Bonatti,” the Italian martyr of K2—until he flew to Kathmandu to visit
Jumik Bhote’s mother
. Gamu Bhoteni met him beside a frog pond at the Hotel Mala. With her was Jen Jen, her grandson. Marco was moved. “Holding Jumik’s baby was one of the great privileges of my life,” he said. “I told Jen Jen, ‘I wish I’d been strong enough to bring your papa home.’ ”