The Climb Read online

*A few months after his rescue on K2, Gary Ball died on Dhaulagiri from an ailment similar to the one he had suffered on K2.

  CHAPTER 3

  DOING THE DEALS

  For Scott’s invitation to join his Everest expedition, I was grateful, and I was very eager to develop a close working relationship with him. I thought about my friends, mountaineers like me, who would never have such an opportunity. Their dreams smashed by the financial realities that came with the breakup of the Soviet Union, many of them would never go to the mountains again. I thought of the climbers who had died in their attempts to advance Soviet mountaineering, attempts that in the history of high-altitude climbing had become legendary. It was an insult, I thought, that what many of them had died for was now suffering its own slow death.

  In early November, Boukreev and the members of the Kazakh team continued their preparations for the Manaslu climb. Still tired, both psychologically and physically, from his ascent on Dhaulagiri little more than a month earlier, Boukreev was committed to the Kazakh effort and focused on the challenge. Like all high-altitude attempts, this one would have its risks, and to them could be added that it was a winter ascent and that some of the team’s members were young and relatively inexperienced. In combination—the vagaries of winter weather and untested talent—these elements didn’t improve the odds, but Boukreev, encouraged by the strength of the more senior climbers, some of whom had summited Kanchenjunga (8,586 m) with him in 1989, was not overly concerned. Later, he would say, “The end of every road is only the beginning of a new one, even longer and more difficult.” The road to Manaslu almost proved fatal.

  Fischer, who had flown to Denmark after hiring Boukreev, was at the beginning of his own road, building the team he would take to Everest. He had gone to Copenhagen to spend some time with Lene Gammelgaard, thirty-four, a lawyer-therapist-adventurer whom he’d met in the Himalaya in 1991 and with whom he’d been conducting a personal correspondence since then. In their exchanges they had been open and revealing, Fischer about career and personal issues, Gammelgaard about life, ambition, and her interests in climbing, both of them about their futures.

  Gammelgaard recalled, “When we met in 1991, we kept on writing, thinking maybe we could meet up and climb something in Europe, or I could go to Alaska and we could climb something. Then, finally in 1995, everything sort of got together.”

  Fischer had encouraged Gammelgaard to join his 1995 expedition to Broad Peak, to climb her first 8,000er, but in the years that had intervened since their first meeting, Gammelgaard had made a decision. She wasn’t going to climb the big ones. She had new priorities, and she took them to Pakistan to personally discuss them with Fischer.

  “I went knowing I was going to leave mountaineering behind,” she said. “I wanted a family; I wanted kids; I wanted to settle down, sort of keep my drive, but I didn’t want to be out there climbing mountains.”

  With the expedition team, Fischer and Gammelgaard hiked the trekking trail to the Broad Peak Base Camp, and Gammelgaard clearly laid out her decision to Fischer. “It was kind of a turnaround point for me, where I decided, ‘Okay … I’m going to be satisfied with the trek and see if I feel happy about that.’ So that was a very conscious decision. ‘Okay, I’m grown up now. I’m making the wise decision.’ ”

  Gammelgaard was resolute, firm, decided. “Then Scott asked me if I wanted to go to Everest in spring 1996.” Without hesitation, without a moment of reflection, Gammelgaard immediately answered, “Yes!” No Scandinavian woman had ever summited Everest; she had held it as a dream for years. She had one more mountain to climb.

  “I went back to Denmark [thinking], ‘I’m going to take it easy and see if this guy survives Broad Peak, because if he doesn’t, there’s not going to be an Everest expedition.’ So I sort of hold the horses for a while, until I got the message that he was safe down. Then I started working to get sponsors together.”

  Fischer wanted Gammelgaard on the expedition and had offered to assist in her fund-raising efforts. Gammelgaard remembered, “[It was] hard work, eight, ten hours a day, continuously calling, writing, promoting, using the press to create some public image and attract sponsors. So that was sort of a strategically planned, media-using job, to get money together.”

  Fischer had raised his share of money in the past and was helpful to Gammelgaard, but he was not his usual self. “He was going on a huge expedition to Kilimanjaro in January 1996,” she recalled. “He had a very, very tough schedule from January until he was going to Everest… . I was shocked about how exhausted he was. He was totally exhausted. And he kept on being exhausted. He kept on being sick… . Here’s a friend, and … so I tried whatever you can do to a grown-up man [suggesting] … you have to rest, you have to really, really rest, maybe you have to rest for half a year, maybe you have to rest for a whole year. Because his whole life he has been pushing himself, and so far being able to cope with it, because he was a very, very strong physical personality.”

  Fischer, Gammelgaard knew, was struggling with his personal limits. After his 1995 Broad Peak expedition and its challenges, he had written to Gammelgaard and said that he “had to get humble; I [have] to learn to be humble, because I don’t want to die in the mountains.”

  One of the problems, as Gammelgaard saw it, was the image that people had of him, one he felt he had to maintain. “It was really shocking to see in Pakistan that the people who were on the support trek, the only thing they could see was their image of a hero. They just couldn’t see the human being. They just absolutely were totally blind to the reality. They had that picture of what a hero should be, and they addressed him like that, but they couldn’t see him, and I thought, ‘Is that an American symptom? How can they be so blind?’ And I think maybe the people in Mountain Madness … the business partners … they might also have been … not dragging him back, saying now you have to … settle down and find the ground. They needed him for creating the money, and he was playing the game, too, so he’s to blame; there’s nobody else to blame; he’s a grown-up man.”

  By December 6, the Kazakhs and I, ten of us altogether, had advanced to 6,800 meters on Manaslu, where we spent an incredibly cold night. The outside temperature got as low as minus forty degrees centigrade. The next day we advanced to 7,400 meters and, on a platform of hard-packed snow, set up what would be our highest-altitude camp, Camp IV, the place from which we would make our bid for the summit. Into each of our two four-person tents we crammed five climbers, and we weathered the night where winds blew at close to sixty miles an hour. Looking at a temperature gauge periodically, I noted that the temperature hardly ever got above minus twenty degrees centigrade.

  The next morning at 4:00 A.M., hoping to leave at the same hour, the ten climbers began their preparations for the final assault, but in the crowded tents it was impossible for everyone to ready themselves at the same time, and the decision was made to stagger the departures. At 6:00 A.M. the first climbers began their ascent along the gradual slope of hard snow and ice that lead to the corniced ridge of the summit. Between 10:00 and 11:30 A.M., eight of the ten climbers summited. Two others, Michael Mikhaelov and Demetri Grekov, who had tired early in the climb, had turned back before making the summit.

  By 2:00 P.M. all the eight climbers who had summited made it back to Camp IV, where Michael Mikhaelov and Demetri Grekov, who had previously descended, were waiting. We took a brief moment to warm ourselves and then began our descent. While descending toward Camp III, I noticed that many of the climbers were moving slowly and having a difficult time because of their prolonged exposure to the cold and altitude. By 6:00 P.M., in the darkness, eight of us had made it to Camp III, but somewhere above something had happened to Mikhaelov and Grekov. At Camp IV they had appeared fine, prepared to descend with us, but now they were missing. A radio message from Base Camp gave us some information, but no answers.

  From the base camp the two missing climbers had been seen through binoculars and telephoto lenses not long after we started our de
scent sitting in the snow on a steep face just below Camp IV. I could only imagine that they had misjudged their strength and had spent all their power.

  With the message about the missing two, Shafkat Gataullin, a young Kazakh climber, and myself, without having had an opportunity to warm ourselves or to take a hot drink, started back up the mountain. Our ascent was hampered by the night, and because we were afraid that the batteries in our headlamps would fail at a critical moment we turned our lamps on and off as we needed them. Finally, after three hours, we found the climbers, down on the ice. One of them had somehow come out of his crampons* and didn’t have the strength to fasten them again to his boots. Getting the climbers to their feet, I tethered them to my climbing harness, and with Gataullin’s assistance we descended through a night fog and temperatures that were almost as cold as the night before our summit bid.

  Just above Camp III a couple of the Kazakh team members, having seen the descending climbers’ headlamps, climbed up to meet Boukreev and the others and to give them hot tea. Mikhaelov and Grekov relaxed at the sight of the illuminated tents below them and began to eagerly drink down the hot tea. Distracted by the tea and relieved by the proximity of the warm tents, one of the climbers lost his balance and slipped on the ice. Tumbling as he fell, he pulled the other climber and Boukreev behind him over a fifteen-meter ice wall and onto the face of Manaslu.

  With a jerk, I was torn from my ice ax, which I had used in belaying* the pair. Sliding down the mountain and falling more than twenty meters, we were stopped by a rope that I had fixed to an anchor† just a moment after we had stopped for tea. No one was seriously injured, but somehow I lost my gloves in the fall. In the fifteen minutes it took to get to our tents at Camp III, my hands were frostbitten, but fortunately, my exposure was for a short time and I did not suffer any lasting damage.

  Boukreev would later say, “There is not enough luck in the world. That night I got somebody’s share.”

  Returning to Kathmandu with the Kazakh team, his fellow climbers safe and without frostbite, Boukreev checked into the offices of P. B. Thapa of HimTreks, Fischer’s agent. In the several weeks that Boukreev had been on Manaslu, a number of faxes had arrived for him from the offices of Mountain Madness. Fischer wanted Boukreev, as soon as he could, to begin negotiations with Poisk in St. Petersburg for the purchase of the expedition’s oxygen supply and to arrange with the tent makers in the Urals to manufacture the tent he’d talked to Boukreev about in Kathmandu.

  Depleted from his back-to-back climbs of two 8,000-meter peaks and eager to see his mother, who had been widowed the year before, Boukreev returned to Kazakhstan for a brief rest; then, after a New Year’s celebration with friends, he headed to Russia to do his deals.

  Traveling to St. Petersburg on a gray, freezing day to visit the Poisk oxygen factory, Boukreev considered how fortunate he was to have signed on with Fischer. He knew the “joke” that during the winter it was the Kazakhs, Georgians, Ukrainians, and other “outsiders” who stood on the street corners to peddle shish kebabs while the Russians got the jobs next to the furnaces in the foundries. While he is a native of Russia, Boukreev strongly identifies with the Kazakhs of his adopted country, and being a high-altitude mountaineer he laughingly jokes that he qualifies for his own minority status. He was glad not to be standing on the street, stoking a brazier.

  Boukreev worked diligently, but by January 29, there was still not an oxygen deal. There had been complications. Boukreev’s negotiations with Poisk had hit a wall. In his conversations with factory representatives he was told that Henry Todd of Himalayan Guides, with whom Boukreev had gone to Everest in 1995, had cornered the market on oxygen, that he had made an advance purchase agreement on the condition that he be the sole supplier for Everest, effectively making him the exclusive distributor of Poisk. Boukreev, who had introduced Todd to factory personnel at Poisk the year before, was nonplussed.

  Boukreev and Karen Dickinson, who was handling Mountain Madness business while Fischer was in Africa leading an expedition on Kilimanjaro, had a problem. In late March the clients who were signing on for Everest were to depart for Kathmandu, and by as early as the first week in May they could be making their bid for the summit. They needed oxygen to climb; Mountain Madness didn’t have any.

  Miffed by Todd’s attempt to corner the Poisk oxygen supply, Boukreev suggested to Dickinson that Mountain Madness consider another supplier, Zvesda in Moscow, where he knew he could get a better price than what Todd was charging.

  In his Edinburgh apartment office Henry Todd got a phone call from Poisk. “Henry, what’s going on here? We’ve been threatened by Anatoli that if he doesn’t get a deal through us he’s going to Zvesda.” Todd, like the winter coal fire that burned in his living room, began to smolder: “I’m very bad with people trying to get an upper hand. I like to have the drop. I’m not going to shoot, but I like to have the drop.”

  Boukreev opened discussions with Zvesda but continued to pursue his conversations with Poisk. If Poisk relented and did a deal with him, he could save Mountain Madness almost a third of the price Todd was asking and perhaps even make a small commission for himself. In West Seattle, Dickinson scurried around to get her passport renewed, because if Mountain Madness was going to get the Poisk deal, Boukreev told her, they were going to want cash up front, on the table. She had to be ready to fly with a suitcase full of dollars.

  Fischer had been clear in his preference. He wanted to keep the carry weight of the oxygen canisters low. At high altitude, weight matters, and he wanted to maximize his clients’ shot at the summit, so Mountain Madness came up with a compromise plan. They would purchase their Poisk canisters from Todd, just enough to supply their clients for the summit push. The balance of the oxygen, what they calculated the clients would need at lower elevations and what the Sherpas would need in their climbing efforts, they would order from Zvesda. Zvesda’s canisters, while they carried four liters as opposed to Poisk’s three liters, were proportionally heavier.

  The compromise proposal was transmitted to Todd, and he deliberated: “Because I knew Scott was a vacillator, I didn’t know exactly how it was going to work out.” Poisk called again, wanting to know, “Do you have a deal with Mountain Madness or don’t you have a deal?” Todd assured them, “Don’t worry: it’s all okay; the deal’s on.” Todd had seemingly been boxed into a corner. Poisk was nervous about losing the business, and Boukreev was continuing to play the Zvesda card. Todd gambled and took a hard-line position. He called Karen Dickinson and forced her hand.

  “I asked her, ‘What’s going on?’ and she says, ‘Well, we’re only looking for the …’ I said, ‘Look, I’m dealing with Poisk. I sell Poisk. They’re not going to sell to anyone else; they’re not going to deal with anyone else. The deal is with me or it’s not with me, and there’s a whole set of masks and regulators and they’re all in the deal. You either have it all or I just—I don’t need the money that badly. I’m switching the plug on this.’ “ Dickinson, doing her job, parried, “But Anatoli says he can get us a better deal.” Todd, growing increasingly impatient, but remaining characteristically cool under extreme circumstances, responded, “Look, this is the deal; take it or leave it. You sign this fax that I’m sending to you … or you forget it. I don’t care.”

  Mountain Madness capitulated. The order was written. The deal was made. Dickinson canceled her plans for flying to Russia. “Anatoli did everything he could, and he tried really hard to bring this around for us… . But, I think we … just got things started a little bit too late, and I think Henry Todd simply out-maneuvered us. You know all is fair in love and war. I mean, he won this round.”

  While maddening to those negotiating the deal, there was nothing particularly unusual about what had transpired. Expedition commerce, the behind-the-scenes dollar mechanics of putting climbers on the mountain, has no less drama than buying a used car in Trenton or Manchester or Osaka. Sharks swim in all the waters; everybody wants the best price; the invoice tells t
he ultimate story.

  In a confirmation memo to Boukreev, Karen Dickinson summarized the order: “Regarding Os—We have purchased from Henry Todd the following: 55 Poisk 3 litre bottles, 54 Zvesda 4 litre cylinders, 14 regulators, 14 masks.” Numbers on a page, numbers that would later come under close scrutiny, numbers about which endless, painful questions would later be asked.

  On February 9, Fischer, finally back in his Mountain Madness office, faxed a personal note to Boukreev. He reinforced his enthusiasm for Anatoli’s role in the expedition, telling him, “I am very excited we are guiding Everest with you. We have the potential to do amazing things. I really expect to have a smashingly successful expedition. If we do well on this one, we will be able to climb, guide many peaks. Yes?” That was his lead, gracious and solicitous, but in a few more sentences, he got to a troubling matter. “Perhaps the rumor is wrong, but I heard from friends in Denmark that you might be guiding Michael Joergensen on Lhotse. Anatoli, I am not paying you big bucks to have you moonlighting off on Lhotse. You are under contract for the duration of the Everest season. If you guide Lhotse, it will be for Mountain Madness.”

  Michael Joergensen had been a member of Henry Todd’s Himalayan Guides Everest expedition in 1995, which Boukreev had guided, and had made the summit, becoming the first Dane to make the top. He and Boukreev had talked about doing Lhotse together, but no definite plans had been made. Boukreev had no intention of committing to Joergensen until he had cleared it with Fischer, but because Fischer had been traveling, Boukreev had not had an opportunity to raise the subject with him. Knowing that Fischer was planning to climb Manaslu with Rob Hall, Ed Viesturs, and some other climbers immediately after Everest, Boukreev assumed he, too, would be on his own, but that’s not the way Fischer saw it.

  Fischer, good as he was at trying to make it work for everybody, proposed a deal to Boukreev. He thought some of the clients he was recruiting for Everest could be interested in an attempt on Lhotse following his Everest expedition. “How about this for an offer?” he faxed. “You guide Lhotse for the few clients that we have interested and we will pay for your permit costs and give you an additional $3,000.00. If Michael wants you to guide him he will have to deal directly with Mountain Madness.” Never intending to create a problem, Boukreev accepted the offer by return fax and sent Fischer the names of two climbers he might solicit for the Lhotse bid. Boukreev, fresh to capitalist waters, felt as if he were swimming upstream. When he got to the mountains, he thought, he’d be in his medium: ice and altitude. There he had a reputation for making fewer mistakes.