Next to the tram, a sandy-haired woman in her twenties sat with her back to the rail, sobbing. A wiry olive-skinned man crouched next to her, staring off into space. Beside them, turned away from us, stood a taller, darker man who was looking over the railing. All three wore climbing gear.
Ignoring the few other people on the dock, we went straight to them and quickly learned what had happened. Alexandra Patrick was an American from Boulder, Colorado. Her older sister, Tamara, was the woman on the rope.
The young man beside Alexandra was Tamara’s boyfriend, René Leroux, a French expatriate living in Denver. The three of them had been traveling around Brazil seeing various games in the World Cup tournament. All were experienced climbers.
So was the tall Brazilian, Flavio Gomes, who worked for Victor Barros, the comatose man on the rope. Barros’s company had been guiding advanced climbers up the face of Sugarloaf the past eight years. Nothing even close to this had ever happened.
“We set every anchor,” Gomes said. “We check them every time. It all looked solid. And then it wasn’t.”
Gomes, Leroux, and Alexandra had been on a different, easier route than Tamara and Barros. Tamara was a far better climber than her sister or boyfriend and had asked to go up a more difficult way. Gomes’s group had gone first and was one hundred and fifty vertical feet above the other two when, apparently, an anchor bolt gave way, and then another. Only Alexandra saw the entire event.
“They fell at least fifty feet,” she whimpered. “And then they just kind of smashed into each other, whipsawed, and crashed into the wall. I could hear Tamara screaming for help, saying that she couldn’t feel her legs. There was nothing we could do from our position.”
Gomes nodded, chagrined. “I’m a solid climber, but I only just started guiding, and I’ve never been on a rescue like this. It’s out of my league.”
Leroux hung his head, said, “She’s gonna be paralyzed.”
I ignored him, went to the rail, and saw an anchored nylon rope going over a pad on the belly of the cliff and disappearing into the void.
“Were they on this line?” I asked.
“No, that line runs parallel to their rope, offset about eight inches,” Gomes said. “Another one of our normal safety measures.”
Thinking about the position of the injured climbers, thinking about what I was going to have to do to get them off the cliff, I decided against going down the secondary rope.
I looked at da Silva and said, “I need you to make a few things happen very fast, Colonel. Two lives depend on it.”
Chapter 4
THIRTY-EIGHT MINUTES later, I was on my belly on the floor of the tramcar. The doors were open. I was looking over the side, straight down more than a thousand feet, and fighting vertigo.
The second I spotted Tamara Patrick on the cliff, I said, “Stop.”
Colonel da Silva repeated the order into a radio. The tram halted and swung on the cable about twenty-five feet out from the summit station.
“How far down are they?” da Silva asked.
“I’m calling it three hundred feet,” I said, getting up to look at two Brazilian soldiers who’d come from an army base located less than a mile from the bottom tram station. They were almost finished attaching a truck winch to the steel floor of the cable car.
“One hundred meters,” I said to the soldiers. “Does it get me there?”
Tavia translated my words into Brazilian Portuguese, and they answered her.
She said, “With the extra rope, they think so.”
Gomes was checking the knots and carabiners that connected a climbing rope to the winch’s quarter-inch steel cable. I checked the space that separated the winch drum from the floor. Three, maybe four inches of clearance. With that much rope going onto the drum, it would be a tight fit.
We threaded the other, looped end of the climbing rope through a large carabiner we’d attached to a steel hook above the door frame. A closed D ring connected the rope to the harness I wore.
“Radio?” da Silva said.
I reached up and double-clicked the mike clipped to my chest.
The other people in the car—da Silva, Tavia, Gomes, the two soldiers, and the off-duty sergeant—nodded. They got in a line and grabbed hold of the rope with gloved hands.
I went to the edge of the open door, willed myself not to look down. Just before I stepped out, I said, “No slipping, now.”
Then my weight came into the harness and my legs were in space, and I was pushing off the bottom of the tram. Free of the car and dropping, I went into a slow twirl that got me dizzy and forced me to close my eyes to the jungle treetops so far below.
Sometimes I think I’m crazy. This was one of those times.
It took them a full minute to lower me the entire length of the climbing rope.
“You’re on winch now.” Da Silva’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Got it,” I said, feeling the descent go smoother and faster.
A minute later, I was almost to Tamara Patrick, eight, maybe nine feet above her and four feet out from the wall.
“Stop,” I said into the mike, and the winch halted.
“Help me!” Tamara called out weakly.