Hell Is Above Us: The Epic Race to the Top of Fumu, the World's Tallest Mountain (14 page)

The boulder made a loud echoing crack as it hit limestone twenty feet down. It then broke into two massive halves, both rolling in different directions. Unfortunately, one of the halves advanced toward the group waiting at the camp, a giant coin rolling on its thin side, beginning to wobble as it lost speed. The boulder finally came to rest on Huggins’ left foot.

The resulting cry echoed up and down the Western Cwm. It was high-pitched; more of a scream than a yell. And it persisted. Huggins kept screaming and screaming, spit flying from his mouth. The yell stopped only occasionally so he could produce curse words and pleas for someone to remove the boulder from his hobbled foot. It took no less than four men to life the boulder up an inch so Huggins could pull his foot out from under. The simple act of moving his foot must have set off a new wave of pain because Huggins increased his scream to eardrum-damaging levels.

And still the Lhotse Face remained silent. Junk decided the Western Ridge was their only chance. Huggins was to stay back with all of the Sherpa, with the exception of Ang Kikuli. The remainder of the expedition would ascend to the Western Ridge. They would place their final camp at the shoulder of the ridge, down-climb to continue the acclimatization process, and then return. From there, Junk, Oldhusband, Twist, and Ang Kikuli would make for the summit. They were getting closer to the prize, and the excitement was setting in, muffling the pain wracking their depleted bodies.

After a night of fitful sleep, Hoyt’s team was now tackling the Northern Ridge at 10 a.m. on September 1st. The weather had cleared and the summit was now in view. It was only hundreds of feet away now instead of thousands. They moved as quickly as they could. But all of this time, of course, the air was getting thinner. It is along the Northern Ridge that the climber enters the “death zone” – the altitude at which the human body begins to deteriorate rapidly. No one can take up permanent residence there. The acclimatization process of moving up and down the mountain stops, and speed becomes of the essence.

Hoyt looked at the route laying ahead of them. Three large steps stood between them and the summit. The climbing would be quite technical and would require the team to exert more effort. Hoyt was becoming fearful they may run out of oxygen tanks. If they were willing to venture off the ridge slightly, they could perhaps avoid the steps and instead follow the massive couloir scarring the Northern Face. But the “Great Couloir” as it would come to be known was a mystery near the top. It may present a challenge dwarfing the steps of the Northern Ridge. In the end, with input from the sardar and Zeigler, Hoyt decided to try the Great Couloir. There was a 100% chance of difficulty if they stayed on course and a 50% chance if they tried their hand at the Northern Face.

By all accounts – Hoyt’s, Junk’s, and the British military’s - the group walked off the ridge and onto the Northern Face at 11:05 a.m. According to Hoyt’s notes, they had not hiked twenty feet when they saw a massive fireball rise up from the Western Ridge on the far side of the North Face, followed a few seconds later by its accompanying, deafening explosion…

It was 11 a.m. on the Western Ridge. “The world is now in view” Twist wrote from their final camp. “Before, we could only see a small slice of the surrounding mountains. Now we can see over Lhotse into Tibet, we can see the entirety of the Northern Face, and behind us we can see the familiar landscape of Nepal. Of most interest to me is that Fumu. It seems to be smoking more than it was when we passed it on the approach. We see small explosions and flecks of bright orange amid the grey smoke. Active bugger. It looks mean and enormous. I would not be surprised if someday someone judged it taller than the mountain we are now on.”

The wind on the ridge was impossible. It felt strong enough to send the men airborne, hurtling them toward the Northern Face. They were making very slow progress. As planned, the Sherpa and Huggins, nursing his broken foot, had stayed behind at the camp on the Western Cwm. The remainder of Junk’s team had ascended to the Western Ridge, camped out on the shoulder marking the start of the ridge, only about one hundred feet back, and now, Junk, McSorley, Twist, Oldhusband, and
Ang Kikuli
were hiking along its razor edge, averaging only about four steps per minute. Junk walked far in front. McSorley, Oldhusband, and Twist walked in a group about fifty feet back, all attached to a rope. Ang Kikuli took up the rear, feeling an obligation to keep an eye on the foreigners. They were known to push themselves far beyond their capabilities and “hit a wall” quite suddenly. And at 11:05, that is what happened. In an interview about the events on the Western Ridge many years later, Ang Kikuli wrote the following.

“
Oldhusband went down on two knees. The rope went taut, so the others stopped. Junk also turned and watched from further up the ridge. Oldhusband turned to look down the ridge at me. I was more than willing to help him. ‘Are you okay?’ I yelled over the wind. But I did not expect his response. ‘Carry me!’ he yelled back between gasps. ‘Carry me! On your back!’ Like most Sherpa, I am a man of patience. But this white-eyes had passed my limit. ‘No’ was all I could say. He said he must get to the top. That England must get to the top. That if he did not continue, his Queen was that much less likely to get her prize. Not only was I to carry him, but I needed to beat Junk to the top. No one planned on having the American take the lead, and it was an egg in the face of England. ‘Carry me!’ he exclaimed once more. ‘For England.’ I apologized and refused. It was right about then we heard the noise.”

There is no disagreement among the various parties about what happened next. A buzzing noise was heard from the south. Everyone looked up. They saw something spinning toward them through space. It spun on a vertical plane, like a circular saw but much, much larger. As it spun, smoke escaped from a single point on its perimeter, leaving a spiraling black trail through the air, originating all the way back to Fumu.

It was an airplane. Some sort of single-man fighter. The left wing was clearly damaged. The men had little time to run, nor did they have many places to run, nor did they have the energy to move quickly. The plane passed above the Hillary Step, and within moments, it made contact with the Western Ridge. As if planned by some cruel, unknowable force, the plane met the ridge at an angle practically parallel to the ridge, like a train gradually meeting up with a new track. It then proceeded to tumble like an acrobat down the ridge, not leaving it at all. Junk, who was the first in its path, had moved off the ridge just enough to avoid contact, and to avoid falling to his death, but he was close enough to receive a piece of flying shrapnel to the chest.

Oldhusband rose from his knees and tried to jump off the north side of the ridge, but his rope-mate McSorley tried jumping in the opposite direction, with Twist pulled down right in the middle. Oldhusband and McSorley were pulled right back on top of Twist. All three men were hit by the plane and killed instantaneously.

Ang Kikuli watched as the plane, coming right for him, hit an upturn in the ridge (between where he and Oldhusband had had their awkward moment) and sail up into the air directly over him. It came to land on their camp, full of supplies including oxygen tanks. When it made contact with the tents, it exploded. Ang Kikuli, and even Junk further up the ridge, could feel the heat. The sound deafened Ang Kikuli for days. He later wrote, “I saw but could not hear the Lhotse Face collapse in a massive avalanche. It was a cruel taunt.”

Junk lay on his back, looking up at black brush strokes of smoke on a deep blue sky canvas. He must have felt unbearable pain in his chest. He would later find out the shrapnel had punctured his right lung, so breathing difficulties brought on by high altitude were now doubled.

He must have wondered how his long shot had gone so wrong. Years later, while discussing the risk involved in a business investment with the press, Junk said, “I am confident, but cautiously so. I am older now, and I’ve learned you can calculate the angles to death, measuring the marigolds until you are exhausted, but there’s always the unknowable.” It is hard to imagine he wasn’t thinking of planes randomly falling out of the sky.

William Hoyt saw people through the binoculars. They were strewn across the Western Ridge. Some were not moving, but others were. Up until that point, he had had no idea other people were on the mountain. He saw no flags flying over their devastated camp. They could be from anywhere. For all he knew, they could be pesky Nazis climbing in enemy territory. The States were not at war with Germany, but best to leave them alone. If this was some sort of strange military operation, and the exploding plane increased the likelihood of that, then more violence could ensue.

Nonetheless, Hoyt did not hesitate. He told the rest of his team the plans had changed. They were giving up their bid for the summit and instead crossing the Northern Face in order to aid those who were still alive and possibly stranded. Taylor and Zeigler urged him to reconsider, but Hoyt was convinced it was God’s will they forego glory and practice kindness. Even if the rescue meant they would have to abandon their other team members below and risk returning home through forbidden Nepal, they were going to do it. Those at lower camps would ultimately leave Hoyt and the others for dead and go home. They would even have a pleasant surprise when they returned to civilization and found out their team leaders were indeed alive. It would all work out. It had to.

Starting from the Great Couloir, Hoyt’s men traversed the Northern Face, following one of the many coloured bands of rock cutting horizontally across. The traverse was long and risky. There was little snow or ice to give their crampons purchase. Pockets of loose scree made a slip likely, and any slip from here would almost certainly be fatal. The North Face is, after all, a mostly-featureless, steep slope dropping for over ten thousand feet. There is little to catch one’s fall. Between the risk of a fall and the Death Zone atmosphere, Hoyt and the others moved at a glacial pace.

With the sun beginning to set many hours later, Hoyt approached the Western Ridge. “The scene was now quite clear,” Hoyt wrote. “Three bodies were entangled with one another, as if rolled up together by two giant fingers. There was no question they were dead. Very little blood was visible, but there was no movement, and any exposed skin was bone-white.

“
About one hundred feet higher up the ridge, I saw a man, possibly a Sherpa, standing over another man who was bleeding near his abdomen. The two figures looked desperate. They had likely gone for some time without supplemental oxygen. The standing man was hardly standing at all. He had to keep resting his hands on his bent knees. Occasionally, he would get the energy to wave us over.”

When Hoyt finally reached the two survivors, Ang Kikuli introduced himself. He said he could not get his charge down the mountain alone. He would need help. Hoyt explained they could help carry the man down the mountain, provided there was food, air, and shelter for the northern expedition on the way down the south side of the mountain. If not, they would have to back-track to the safety of their own camps on the other side of the Northern Face. Ang Kikuli said there would be no problem once they down-climbed past the ruined High Camp. Hoyt’s team could simply use the rations of the dead men. But they would need to start the down-climb immediately. The sun was setting and the nearest camp was down on the Western Cwm. Hoyt agreed and they turned to the man on the ground, calculating the best method of carrying him.

It was then the man on the ground removed his mask and goggles. “I was too tired and too shocked to become enraged,” Hoyt wrote. “I saw the wincing face. I heard the pleas for help. I even heard him apologize. My response, not conscious at all mind you, was to go down on two knees, bend over, and emit sounds somewhere between laughing and crying. I had no idea what I was doing or what I was feeling. Perhaps that is what madness feels like.” According to Ang Kikuli, Hoyt was looking down and was impossible to read. He put a gentle hand on Junk’s leg, and then rocked back and forth.

After a few minutes, Hoyt rose and walked over to Taylor. He turned Taylor around quite roughly and began rummaging through his pack. Hoyt found what he was looking for and returned to Junk’s beaten body. “Help…me….help,” Junk expelled between gasps, unvoiced, merely whispered loudly, hands clutching his chest.

Hoyt took the bottle of Jameson’s from Taylor’s pack and placed it on Junk’s belly. Then he yelled, “
Stay away from drunks! Their eyes are bloodshot and they have bruises that could have been avoided!” He paused. “You do not have the pedigree for this line of work.” Then he started to down-climb. Taylor and Zeigler did not follow. It was mutiny, but he did not care. Hoyt abandoned them all and descended to the Western Cwm. He did not stop at that camp, for he was intent on keeping ahead of the others all the way home. Junk, living or corpse must not catch up to him. He would come down Everest alone, accompanied only by his rage.

Years later, mountaineers with backgrounds in military history would climb Everest and study the remnants of the plane that lay shredded and burnt along the Western Ridge. It turned out to be a Spitfire Mark 1, a British fighter plane. It had been flying over “The Hump” on its way to delivering weapons to China, which was embroiled in the Sino-Japanese War at the time. Granted, the British did not
officially
start transporting weapons to China until 1941 when the Asian theatre of World War II rose from the Pacific. But secretly, and slowly, British leaders were planning ahead, sensing Japan’s threat early on. The route over the Himalaya was still fresh to most pilots, and apparently this one had flown too close to Fumu and damaged his wing.