Death in High Places

Death in High Places - By Jo Bannister



PROLOGUE





THE FIRST THING YOU NEED TO KNOW about mountains is that they don’t care. They’re not out to get you, nor have they any interest in keeping you alive. They are supremely indifferent to the presence of tiny humans among their crags and pinnacles. Every time you go to the mountains, you have to remember that they don’t care whether you come back.

People who spend a lot of time at sea say that sometimes—not always, not reliably, but sometimes—the sea seems to enjoy having you there. Provides for your comfort, tries to keep you safe. No one feels that way about mountains. They’re cold. And not just those jutting their heads into the region of perennial snows known as the Death Zone. There are desert mountains whose red rocks become too hot to touch under the unblinking sun, but at the heart of them even they are cold.

On the bright side, they’re not actually trying to kill you. But their very nature is hugely inimical to human survival. They don’t have to do anything to get you killed. Just being a mountain is often enough.

Which is precisely why young men climb. They embrace the challenge. They want to test themselves, test their manhood, in one of the few environments where the Health & Safety Inspectorate doesn’t get a look-in. The first time they approach a real killer mountain they’re like any other virgin, innocent, unprepared. Whatever they may tell their friends, they may be afraid every minute they’re up there. But even fear can be addictive. If you genuinely think you’re going to die, and then you don’t, the flood of euphoria is better than anything you can buy on a Friday night from men in hoodies. That’s what keeps you going back. You tell people you’re hooked on climbing. Actually, you’re hooked on coming back down.

The second thing you need to know about mountains is that a significant proportion of those who get to the top—who stand in triumph on the highest point of their chosen peak while their companions take bad photographs with chilled hands clumsy in big gloves—never see base camp again.

* * *

Consider these two. They’re in their early twenties, as fit and strong as it’s possible for human beings to be. They have all the right gear. One of them, the taller, has brand-new high-tech clothing and kit in this year’s fashion color, which happens to be lime green. The other is wearing last year’s outfit and carrying a combination of sound old gear and newer stuff bought secondhand from climbers who care what color’s in fashion. None of it matches. All of it is good quality and well maintained.

People who saw them setting out, days ago and many miles away across the trackless foothills, assumed that he was the guide and the taller man in the Day-Glo green was the client. In fact they were mistaken about that. They’re both amateurs, in the truest sense of the word, young men who’ve crossed first an ocean and then a continent to reach their chosen mountain, to pit themselves against an untried peak in one of the few parts of the world where you can still find such a thing—Alaska. The only reason for the difference in their appearance is that one has more money than the other.

Right now they’re running on anticipation. Their bodies are tired—they’ve carried their kit a long way over broken terrain, and they’ll carry it a good deal farther before they can finally start the climb proper—but their minds are buzzing with excitement. An expedition like this doesn’t come together in a bar on a Saturday night. They’ve been planning it for two years. They’ve done plenty of climbs together in that time, at home in Britain, in the European Alps, in the High Atlas of North Africa. But Alaska has always been the goal, and almost since they started their research this mountain has been the one they wanted. Mostly because there’s no record of its having been climbed before. It’s not as high as Mount McKinley. It’s probably not the hardest climb in the state. But it’s a chance to set their boots on slopes that may never have felt them before, and the romance of that captivates them. They’ll deny it to their dying day, but all climbers are romantics.

They’ve seen pictures. Aerial photographs of the summit, and pictures taken by earlier expeditions of the approaches and also the main obstacle to success, an exposed ridge two-thirds of the way up where the wind has honed the rock to a knife-edge under a coating of green ice. The mountain has a name, though it’s not a very impressive one—it’s called Little Horse, and the river winding round its feet is the Little Horse River. Oddly enough, the ridge is more famous. It’s the highest point known to have been reached by earlier climbers, none of whom found a way across. Some of those who attempted it turned back, some died. Those who turned back named the ridge, and the name they gave it tells you all you need to know about the conditions they found there. They called it Anarchy Ridge.

Our two young men are still a long way short of Anarchy Ridge. They haven’t even crossed the Little Horse River yet, and after that they have to climb up onto the glacier that inches down the shoulder of the mountain, grinding its unseen rocks to gravel. They won’t set up base camp until late tomorrow. It’s as well that the thrill of anticipation is keeping them going. There isn’t much else here to enjoy.

Except one another’s company. Once the climb starts in earnest, there won’t be time to talk—just a terse trading of advice, warnings and swear words until either they succeed or are beaten back. There’ll be time in the tent at night, but by then they won’t have any energy left for conversation. Only if the weather keeps them pinned down will they have both the time and the inclination to socialize.

But now, with all the danger and excitement and challenge still ahead of them, whatever breath the broken ground doesn’t demand of them can be spared for talking. Being young men, their conversation isn’t particularly profound. It revolves around women, and work, and how many pints you can sink before you get that funny tunnel-vision effect, and soccer, and fast cars. The tall one can afford a fast car. The short one can afford a car. Because they’re friends, the short one mocks the tall one for being rich; the tall one does not mock the short one for being comparatively poor. Both are absolutely comfortable with this and show it by the easy nature of their insults.

“Then there was the one with buck teeth,” says the short one. “I mean, what kind of a combination is that—an open-topped car and a girlfriend with buck teeth? Did you polish the flies off them before you kissed her good night?”

“Louise did not have buck teeth,” says the tall one, with dignity and the lilt of an Irish accent. “She had what my mother described as a patrician profile. Also, she had nice manners. She polished the flies off herself.”

“Patrick, your mother could find the silver lining in a week full of wet Wednesdays! Why else…?” He stops himself just in time. There are some insults that even really good friends shouldn’t trade.

Tall Patrick hears what hasn’t been said and laughs it off with a lightness that falls just short of convincing. “Would she marry my father? Because she knew what a devastatingly handsome son he’d give her, of course!”

The other one scowls into the wind, ruing his gauche attempt at humor and admiring Patrick’s deftness in deflecting it. He didn’t mean to hurt his friend but he knows he has, and also that Patrick will neither hold the grudge nor turn it back. He doesn’t envy his companion the family money that funds his share of their expeditions. He certainly doesn’t envy Patrick his family. But he does sometimes, in the privacy of his own head where no one will ever suspect, envy him his education. Not because he has a use for Latin verbs, but because he thinks a better education would have equipped him to deal more graciously with the world, the way Patrick does. He doesn’t underestimate his own strengths, as a climber and as a man—his compact, hardy physique, his endless endurance, and the mental toughness that, indistinguishable from obstinacy, keeps him going long after any reasonable person would have quit. But he wishes there was more about him to like. Everyone likes Patrick. With Patrick, there’s nothing not to like.

He steers the conversation back onto safer ground. “Then there’s the one with pigtails. You know, the one who took up climbing so the two of you would have something in common. Who’d have taken up sheep-shearing or necrophilia if she’d thought it was something you could do together.”

But Patrick doesn’t laugh, and when his friend glances back he catches a thoughtful expression on Patrick’s face. “Don’t poke fun at her. That’s a seriously nice girl, and I’m damned if I know what to do about her.”

The shorter man shrugs. “Have her, make her breakfast, and begin your next sentence with the words, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’…”

Patrick arches a disapproving eyebrow. “Nicky, I have never in my life dumped a girl like that, and I’m not starting with her. What’s more, I don’t think you would either. You’re full of it, you know that? You talk like Jack the lad, but if it came right down to it—if first of all you could find someone who wanted to be your girlfriend, and then she wanted to stick with you after you wanted to move on—I think you’d emigrate and send her a postcard from Brisbane. Wouldn’t you? I’ve seen you talking to women, remember. If they don’t know a piton from a crampon, you have no bloody idea what to say to them.”

Which is true. It’s something else Nicky rather regrets. He just thinks there’ll be time to worry about it later. After he’s climbed all the mountains he wants to. “All right then, marry her. Have kids and a Volvo estate with her.”

“I can’t do that either. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“It’s what she wants. Anyone who’s seen her looking at you knows that.”

“I know it too. Nicky, none of this is news to me. But it wouldn’t be right. I like her. I like her a lot. I don’t like her enough. And she doesn’t need to be my second choice, or anybody else’s. She deserves better than that.”

“Hold on.” Nicky stops and looks his friend squarely in the face. “Is this your way of telling me there’s someone else? Someone you do like enough?”

Even elegant, well-bred Patrick looks discomfited. “Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Well, who is she?”

But Patrick knows better than to answer. “And have it the subject of common gossip in every bothy from the Pamirs to the Rockies? I don’t think so!”

Nicky shrugs, untroubled. “So don’t tell me. But if that’s the problem, maybe you should tell”—he still can’t remember her name—“her with the pigtails.”

Patrick looks serious again. “I know. I’m just wondering how. I don’t want to hurt her.”

“You’re going to hurt her,” says Nicky, relationship expert. “And sooner is better than later.”

“I know,” says Patrick sadly.

After they’ve crossed the Little Horse River and they’re standing at the foot of the glacier, looking up, they still can’t see the summit of the mountain, only its heaving shoulders. But they can see the thin blade of the ridge, and the snow whipped off it by the rising wind making arabesques against the impossibly blue sky. They stand still for a long time, their kit at their feet, just looking.

Finally Patrick says, “And we’re going up there, are we?”

Nicky grins his youthful, overconfident grin and nods. “Oh yeah.”

“All the way?”

“You’d better believe it.”

But there’s a word for people who put their trust in mountains. You see it sometimes inscribed on memorials. Not even tombstones: you make that big a mistake, it’s unlikely they’ll find enough of you to bury.

The mountain waits. The weather closes in. The blue sky vanishes under the swirling gray cloak of a spring storm. Snow falls, and also rises as the wind tears it off the mountain’s sides. There are no observers, but if there were there would be nothing to observe. In a whiteout, you can die of exposure scant meters from the shelter that you cannot find. If there had been any observers, they would not have believed it possible that anyone could survive, let alone climb, in that.

But there is only the mountain. And when eventually the whiteout subsides and the sky turns blue again, and the expedition trudges exhaustedly down from the Death Zone and out onto the last treacherous traverse across the glacier, Little Horse doesn’t even notice that the climbing party is smaller coming down than it was when it went up.