The Ninth Peak

Chapter 1: The Phone Call

The rain came sideways off the Kattegat, sheeting across the harbor at Gilleleje and rattling the windows of the cottage like a drunk trying every door on the street. Rasmus Gundersen sat at his kitchen table with a mug of black coffee going cold in his hands and watched the fishing boats buck against their moorings. It was quarter past six on a Tuesday morning in late September, and the world was gray from waterline to cloud ceiling, the kind of Danish autumn gray that settled into your joints and stayed there until April.

He'd been awake since four. That wasn't unusual. Sleep had become a shallow, unreliable thing in his late fifties, a series of brief descents into darkness followed by sudden resurfacings, gasping, disoriented, his chest tight with the phantom sensation of fluid where fluid shouldn't be. The doctors said the pulmonary edema had left no lasting damage. The doctors had never woken at altitude in a tent filling with the sound of their own drowning lungs.

Rasmus lifted the coffee, took a sip, grimaced. He set it down and looked at the framed photograph on the shelf above the radiator. It showed two men on a summit ridge, arms around each other, ice axes raised against a sky so blue it looked painted. The taller man was Rasmus himself, twenty years younger, his beard red-gold instead of the iron gray it had become. The shorter man beside him was Jürgen Stoll, compact and grinning, his goggles pushed up on his forehead, squinting into the light with the particular joy of a man who has just climbed something enormous.

That photograph had been taken on Broad Peak, 8,051 meters, in the summer of 2001. Three weeks later, on the same expedition's attempt on Nanga Parbat, Jürgen had died in a serac collapse at 7,200 meters. His body was never found. It remained up there somewhere, frozen into the mountain's architecture, becoming part of the geology.

Rasmus looked away from the photograph. He did this every morning—looked at it, then looked away. A ritual of remembrance and avoidance that had calcified over two decades into something automatic, like brushing his teeth.

His phone rang.

It was not the mobile phone that sat charging on the counter. It was the landline, the old wall-mounted unit with the curled cord that he kept because cell reception in Gilleleje was unreliable in storms and because he was, as his ex-wife Katrine had often observed, a man who clung to things long past their usefulness. The landline's ring was a physical sound, a bell inside a plastic housing, and it cut through the rain noise like a blade.

Rasmus stood and crossed the kitchen in three strides. He lifted the receiver.

"Rasmus Gundersen."

"Mr. Gundersen, this is Brigadier Tariq Hussain, Pakistan Army, Northern Areas Command." The voice was clipped, precise, the English accented but fluent. "I am calling regarding your son, Anders Gundersen. I regret to inform you that he has been reported missing on Nanga Parbat."

The kitchen tilted. Not literally—Rasmus's inner ear was fine, his balance excellent for a man his age—but the world shifted on some axis he couldn't name, and for a moment everything was at the wrong angle.

"Missing," Rasmus said. The word came out flat.

"Yes, sir. He was last observed above Camp Three on the Rupal Face, approximately seventy-two hundred meters, moving upward in deteriorating weather. That was thirty-six hours ago. No contact since. His permit—" A pause. "His permit was not fully in order. He was climbing alpine-style with minimal support. We have been unable to launch helicopter reconnaissance due to severe avalanche conditions."

Rasmus pressed his palm flat against the wall. The plaster was cool and slightly damp. Real. Solid.

"Who saw him last?"

"A Korean team descending from a summit attempt. They reported a single climber ascending in a whiteout near the Merkl Icefield. The description matches your son. He was alone."

"Alone," Rasmus repeated.

"Yes, sir."

"At seventy-two hundred meters. In a whiteout. Alone."

"That is correct."

Rasmus closed his eyes. Behind the darkness of his lids, he saw the Rupal Face—the largest mountain face on Earth, four and a half thousand meters of rock and ice and avalanche chutes, a wall so vast it generated its own weather. He had stood at its base twenty years ago and looked up and felt, for the first and only time in his climbing career, genuine terror.

"Mr. Gundersen? Are you there?"

"I'm here."

"We will of course continue monitoring the situation. If weather permits, we will attempt aerial reconnaissance. In the meantime, I wanted to ensure you were informed directly. The Danish embassy in Islamabad has also been notified."

"I'm coming," Rasmus said.

"Sir?"

"I'm flying to Islamabad. Today if I can. Tomorrow at the latest."

"Mr. Gundersen, I should tell you that conditions on the mountain are extremely dangerous. The avalanche risk is rated at the highest level. Even if you were to reach base camp, there is very little—"

"Brigadier Hussain. That is my son on that mountain. I am coming."

A pause. Then, quieter: "I understand. I will arrange for a liaison officer to meet you at base camp. Her name is Farah Kazmi. She is experienced and she knows the mountain."

"Thank you."

"God be with you, Mr. Gundersen."

The line went dead. Rasmus stood holding the receiver against his ear for a long time, listening to the dial tone merge with the rain.

---

He moved through the next hours with the mechanical efficiency of a man who had spent his life preparing for departures. Pack. Check. Recheck. He pulled his old expedition duffel from the closet under the stairs, the one with the faded logos of sponsors who had long since moved on to younger, more photogenic climbers. He opened it on the bedroom floor and began filling it with the gear he'd told himself he would never use again.

Base layer thermals. Mid-layer fleece. Down jacket rated to minus forty. Gore-Tex shell, pants and jacket, the seam tape cracking slightly at the shoulders. Glacier glasses. Headlamp. First aid kit. The kit was comprehensive—Rasmus had always been the medical man on expeditions, the one who taped blisters and monitored oxygen saturation and made the hard calls about who could go up and who had to go down.

He paused over the pulse oximeter, a small clip-on device that measured blood oxygen levels. His own levels had dropped to sixty-two percent during the pulmonary edema episode on Dhaulagiri six years ago. Normal was ninety-five to one hundred. Below seventy at altitude meant you were dying. Sixty-two meant you were already in the process.

He packed the oximeter.

From the back of the closet he retrieved his high-altitude boots, double-layered plastic and foam, still fitted with crampon-compatible soles. They were stiff and cold. He flexed them, checking for cracks in the shell. They'd hold. Probably.

He did not pack supplemental oxygen. There was none in the cottage, and in any case, Nanga Parbat was climbed without it by most parties. The mountain was 8,126 meters—above the death zone threshold of eight thousand, but only just. The problem wasn't the altitude. The problem was everything else: the scale, the weather, the avalanches, the sheer vertical exposure of the Rupal Face, which dropped away beneath you for thousands of meters of ice-polished rock.

Rasmus zipped the duffel and sat on the edge of the bed. He looked at his hands. They were large, scarred, the knuckles swollen with old frostbite damage. The ring finger of his left hand was shortened by a joint—lost to frostbite on Kangchenjunga in 2005, the last expedition before the divorce.

Katrine had been right about many things. She'd been right that he loved mountains more than he loved comfort, more than he loved stability, more than he loved the slow accumulation of ordinary days that constituted a marriage. She'd been right that he'd dragged Anders into climbing too young, too hard, too fast. She'd been right that the sponsorship deals—the equipment contracts, the speaking tours, the "Gundersen and Son" branding that had paid for this cottage—had turned something pure between father and son into something transactional.

Anders had said as much, two years ago, in this very room. Standing where Rasmus sat now, his face tight with a fury that Rasmus recognized because it was his own fury, the Gundersen fury, cold and precise and devastating.

"You used me," Anders had said. "Every summit, every route, every photograph—it was all content for you. Material. Product. I wasn't your climbing partner, Dad. I was your brand extension."

Rasmus had said nothing. That was the worst part. He'd had no defense because the accusation was at least partially true, and the part that wasn't true—the part where he'd genuinely loved climbing with his son, where the shared suffering and triumph of high places had been the realest thing in his life—he couldn't articulate. The words wouldn't come. They never did, with Anders. With Anders, he was always a sentence behind, always reaching for the thing he meant to say and finding only silence.

Anders had walked out. He'd moved to Bergen, taken a job with a Norwegian outdoor education company, and stopped returning calls. Rasmus had written three letters—actual paper letters, because Anders had blocked his number—and received no response.

And now Anders was at seventy-two hundred meters on Nanga Parbat, alone in a whiteout, and Rasmus was going to get him.

He picked up the phone and called the airline.

---

The flight from Copenhagen to Islamabad routed through Istanbul, fourteen hours of recycled air and cramped seats and the particular misery of economy class for a man who stood six foot three and had knees that crackled like campfire kindling. Rasmus didn't sleep. He sat with his forehead against the window and watched the geography unscroll below—the flat farmlands of central Europe giving way to the rumpled brown hide of Anatolia, then the high plateaus of Iran, then the impossible corrugation of the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, range after range of peaks like teeth in a jaw that went on forever.

He'd flown this route a dozen times in his climbing years. Each time, the sight of those mountains from the air had filled him with a specific emotion that he'd never been able to name in Danish or English or German—a compound of desire and dread, appetite and awe, the knowledge that those white summits were the most beautiful and most indifferent things on Earth. They didn't care if you climbed them. They didn't care if you died on them. They simply were.

Now, looking down at the ranges, he felt only the dread.

Islamabad was hot and loud and choked with traffic. A driver from the Danish embassy met him at the airport and took him to a hotel near the diplomatic enclave, where a young attaché named Henrik Brandt briefed him on the situation.

"The military is cooperating, but their hands are tied by the weather," Brandt said. He was perhaps thirty, blond, wearing a linen suit that was already wilting in the heat. "There's been heavy snowfall across the northern areas. Avalanche risk is extreme. They won't fly."

"When can I get to base camp?"

"There's a charter flight to Gilgit tomorrow morning, weather permitting. From Gilgit, it's a drive to Tarshing and then a trek to base camp. Two days, maybe three, depending on conditions."

"That's too long."

"Mr. Gundersen, I understand your urgency, but—"

"My son has been missing for almost three days. Every hour matters."

Brandt nodded slowly. "I'll see what I can do about expediting the Gilgit connection. There may be a military flight."

"Do that."

Rasmus spent the night in the hotel room, lying on top of the bedspread in his clothes, staring at the ceiling fan as it turned. He tried to think about logistics—the approach, the route, the gear he'd need to borrow or buy—but his mind kept circling back to the same image: Anders, alone, moving upward into a whiteout. Climbing into nothing.

Why Nanga Parbat? Of all the mountains Anders could have chosen for a solo alpine-style attempt, why this one? It was the mountain that had killed Jürgen. It was the mountain that had broken something in Rasmus that he'd spent twenty years pretending was still whole. Anders knew all of this. He'd grown up with the story of Jürgen's death the way other children grew up with fairy tales—it was the founding myth of the Gundersen climbing legacy, the tragedy that gave everything after it its weight.

Was it deliberate? Was Anders trying to prove something? To conquer the mountain that had conquered his father's spirit? Or was it something else entirely—something Rasmus, from his distance of two years' silence, couldn't see?

He didn't know. He couldn't know. He could only go up and find out.

The ceiling fan turned. The Islamabad night pressed against the windows, warm and thick with diesel fumes and the distant sound of traffic. Rasmus closed his eyes and saw the Rupal Face, four thousand five hundred meters of vertical ice, and somewhere on it, his son.