Kangri Sar

Chapter One: The Desk in Chamonix

The phone rang at ten past six on a Tuesday evening, and Sophie Crossan looked at it the way you look at a dog you don't know.

The office of Aiguille Outfitting occupied the top floor of a narrow building on the Rue Whymper, three rooms of maps and radios and stacked plastic crates. Outside the window the Aiguille du Midi stood in the last of the light, a grey tooth against a peach sky, the cable car strung beneath it like a thread of spider silk. Sophie had a spreadsheet open. Twenty-two clients, four guides, three permits, one helicopter contract that needed renewing before the end of the month. It was the kind of work she had once thought of as the boring part of climbing. Now it was all of it.

The phone kept ringing. The screen said a number with a Japanese country code, and beneath it, because she had never had the courage to delete him, a name.

RIKU.

She let it ring four more times. Then she picked it up.

"Sophie." His voice hadn't changed. Flat, careful, a little amused at the edges even when nothing was funny. "Don't hang up."

"I wasn't going to hang up."

"You were deciding."

"I was deciding," she admitted.

There was a pause with wind in it. He was outside somewhere, somewhere cold. She heard a generator and, faintly, a language she thought was Urdu.

"Where are you?" she asked.

"Islamabad. The roof of a very bad hotel. Sophie, I need to tell you something and then I need to ask you something, and I want you to hear all of it before you answer."

She stood up. She always stood up for bad news; some animal part of her wanted to be on her feet. Her left ankle sent up its usual small complaint, a hot wire from heel to shin, and she shifted her weight off it without thinking. Three years of not thinking about it.

"Go on," she said.

"I've been supporting a glaciology team. Six people. Four scientists, two porters. They're drilling ice cores on Kangri Sar II, in the Shimshal."

"I know where Kangri Sar is."

"I know you do. That's why I'm calling." He breathed out. "Nine days ago they finished carrying the drill to Camp Three, at six thousand four hundred. Two nights later a serac band collapsed above the lower icefall. It took out the entire route below them. Not damaged, Sophie. Erased. Two thousand metres of fixed line, the ladders, the whole approach. It's a debris field a kilometre wide now."

Sophie sat down on the edge of the desk. Outside, the cable car crawled up its wire.

"Comms?" she said.

"Their satellite phone was in the equipment cache at the base of the icefall. Gone. They've got a handheld VHF with a dying battery. We got one transmission on day three. Nothing since."

"Food?"

"Eight days of rations for six, and that was nine days ago."

"Helicopters."

"The army has flown three sorties. They can get to five thousand nine hundred on a good morning and Camp Three is five hundred metres above that, on a shelf under a rock buttress with no clean approach. Their Lamas will not go there. I've asked. I've begged. There's a colonel in Gilgit who has stopped taking my calls." A pause. "There's a ground rescue or there's nothing."

Sophie looked at the map on the wall opposite. Not the Shimshal — the Mont Blanc massif, all its ridges printed in orange contour lines she could have drawn from memory now. But her eye went past it, through it, to another map, an older one, the one folded in the bottom of a box she hadn't opened in three years.

"Riku," she said. "I don't do this anymore."

"I know."

"I mean I really don't. I book flights. I chase insurance certificates. I have a very good relationship with a man in Geneva who sells oxygen regulators."

"Sophie."

"My ankle has eleven screws in it. Eleven. I can walk. I can't run and I can't do a full weight-bearing front point on my left foot for more than about ninety seconds, and if you think I'm going to—"

"There is a way in," he said.

She stopped.

"There's a couloir," Riku said, "between the two hanging glaciers on the southwest flank. It doesn't appear on the Japanese survey. It doesn't appear on the Polish sketch map. It appears in exactly one place, which is a report you filed in the spring of the year before Broad Peak, when you spent nine days reconnoitring the southwest side of Kangri Sar II with a Slovenian team and then abandoned the attempt because your permit was wrong."

Sophie said nothing.

"You climbed to six thousand seven hundred on that trip," Riku said. "You are the only person currently alive who has stood on the upper mountain and looked down at where those people are sitting. Everyone else who was on that expedition is either dead or retired to a vineyard in Slovenia. I checked. I have spent forty hours checking."

"You could take the photographs. You could take my notes—"

"Photographs don't tell you where the ice is rotten in October."

She pressed her thumb hard into the corner of her eye. Down in the street a group of young climbers came out of a bar laughing, ropes still coiled on their packs, and the sound rose up through the window like something from another country.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm sorry, Riku. Find someone else. Find one of the Poles. Find—"

"Mingma Dorje is on that mountain."

The room went very quiet. Somewhere in the building a door closed.

"Say that again," Sophie said.

"Mingma Dorje. Twenty-six years old. He's the ice-core technician on the team, he did two years at Kathmandu University and a season in Svalbard, and he is Pasang Lhakpa's nephew." Riku let it sit for a moment. "Pasang raised him. His sister died when the boy was four. Pasang paid for his schooling by carrying loads for men like us."

Sophie found that she had sat down again. She did not remember doing it.

There was a particular smell she could not get rid of, in certain moments — the smell of the inside of a hood at four in the morning, breath and wet down and blood. Broad Peak, the fifteenth of July, three years and three months ago. The white wall coming off the west face at the exact moment she had told two clients, a Dutch dentist and his son, that the slope was fine, that they'd go now and be through it before the sun hit. She remembered the sound, which was not a roar but a kind of hiss, and then nothing for what the doctors later said was eleven minutes. She remembered coming back into the world upside down with her mouth full of snow and her left leg pointing in a direction that did not make sense, and she remembered a face above her, a face with ice in its eyebrows, digging with a shovel and then with his hands. Pasang Lhakpa had dug her out. Then he had gone back and dug for six hours for the Dutchman and his son, and had not found them until the second day.

He had carried her, with two others, in a sling made from a tent, for eleven hours down the Godwin-Austen glacier, in the dark, and had never once said what she knew he had every right to say.

"Sophie," said Riku. "Are you there?"

"Yes."

"I hate that I'm using this."

"You should. It's cheap." Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "It's also working."

She stood up and walked to the window. Her reflection stood in it, thin, thirty-eight, hair cut short because it was easier, a woman who had not been above four thousand metres in three years.

"How long do we have?" she said.

And she heard him let out the breath he had been holding for the entire call.

"Winter's early this year," Riku said. "The models say a big Siberian system is going to sit on the Karakoram in about eleven days and not move for a month. After that, nobody goes near that mountain until April."

"Eleven days. Which means travel, approach, and about—"

"Six days on the mountain. Maybe."

"Six days to climb two and a half thousand metres of shattered ground and bring six people down."

"Yes."

Sophie laughed. It was not a nice sound. "Who's paying for this?"

A pause exactly one second too long.

"Riku."

"There's a man," said Riku. "You won't like him."

"There's always a man."

"His name is Robin Skerratt. He runs an adventure-travel company called Summit Edge. He has put four hundred thousand dollars on the table in three days, which is what a Pakistani Army liaison, twelve porters, a charter to Gilgit and eight hundred kilos of gear actually costs when you need it by Thursday."

"And what does he want?"

"A film," said Riku.

Sophie closed her eyes.

"He's sending a cameraman."

"Of course he is."

"Sophie—"

"Book me on tomorrow's flight," she said, and hung up before he could answer, and stood in the dark office with her hands flat on the desk for a long time, until the mountain outside the window had gone from grey to blue to black.

She called her sister at eleven.

Caroline picked up on the second ring, which meant she was awake, which meant she was working. Caroline Nash had spent nineteen years in the Royal Air Force listening to things other people could not hear and had retired at forty-four into a life of consultancy and insomnia.

"You've heard," Sophie said.

"Riku called me four hours ago," said Caroline. "He wanted comms. I said yes. I said yes before he finished the sentence, actually, which I suspect is why he called me before he called you."

"He didn't tell me you were coming."

"He's not stupid. He wanted you to decide on your own." A rustle of paper. "Did you?"

"He told me about Mingma."

"Ah," said Caroline. "So no."

Sophie sat on the floor of her flat with her back against the radiator and her bad ankle straight out in front of her, and for a moment she was eleven and Caroline was seventeen and they were in the box room in Kendal with the door shut against their father's television.

"Tell me not to go," Sophie said.

"Absolutely not."

"Caro."

"I watched you for three years, Soph." Caroline's voice was gentle in the specific, unsentimental way it had always been. "I watched you make yourself very small so nothing could fall on you. I'm not going to pretend I'm not frightened. I'm going to be sitting in a tent on a glacier with a radio in my hand and I am going to be frightened for six days straight. But I'm not going to tell you not to go, because you already booked the flight, didn't you."

"Riku booked it."

"Same thing." A pause. "Bring the wrist splint. And your own crampons — don't let anyone give you rental ones."

After she hung up, Sophie went into the storage cupboard and pulled out the box she had not opened. On top were the boots. Beneath them, in a clear plastic sleeve, was a folded 1:50,000 sheet with Kangri Sar II in the top left corner and her own handwriting all over it in pencil — arrows, question marks, times, one line running up a thin gully between two blue-shaded blobs with the note *possible, but only before 10am.*

She sat on the floor with the map open on her knees for two hours, and at three in the morning she got up, packed a duffel bag, and stood in the doorway looking back at her flat as if she were being asked to remember it.