“So are your chances of getting food poisoning.”
Brownish yellow dust covered everything, including the dozens of stalls that sold items that ran the gamut from trekking supplies to souvenirs. The dirt shoulder that passed for a sidewalk was crowded with a mixture of Shins, Pashtuns, Hunzakuts, and Uyghurs. Looked more like Tibet than Pakistan.
Before dinner, Crocker set out on an eight-mile run in the foothills. As his muscles worked and his lungs filled with the fresh mountain air beyond the town limits, he felt better. The starry sky and sliver of moon reminded him of his boyhood home in New England. The shadows of giant peaks looming ahead promised new adventure. The Pink Floyd song “High Hopes” echoed in his head, especially the lyric “consumed by slow decay.”
The next morning, fed and rested, the four Americans set out in two rented Land Rovers for the seven-hour drive to Askole. Zaman and the dead six-year-old girl had faded in the memories of the others, but for some reason Crocker’s mind hadn’t completely let them go.
Amends had to be made. Scores remained to be settled.
His determination to get AZ didn’t dissipate, even in the face of rugged mountainous terrain and thin air.
To call what they traversed a road was something of an exaggeration. But he’d been on worse—recently in Afghanistan, and several months ago in Bolivia, where he and his team had been sent to take out the leaders of a ring of narco-terrorists.
The members of SEAL Team Six wound their way up small hills into lushly vegetated, irrigated farming villages. Between these green oases they passed over stretches of stark desert, through river basins and canyons of sharp granite.
Crocker thought of past missions he’d been on and the casualties they’d produced—Cubans in Grenada, PDF in Panama, Saddam’s soldiers in Iraq, Salvadoran rebels, Afghan Taliban and mujahedeen, Colombian, Bolivian, and Honduran drug-war casualties. There was a fellow adventure racer who had died of heatstroke in Utah, fellow bikers he’d seen destroyed in motorcycle accidents, frozen climbers in Alaska and in the Himalayas.
He wondered about the toll they’d taken on his soul.
Not that he’d ever had a problem killing people when he thought it was necessary. At seventeen, he’d taken his first life—that of a sadistic gangbanger fresh out of prison who’d beaten up a female friend of his, a sweet lost soul with blue eyes named Patty Norris.
When a red-hot young Crocker confronted the punk, who outweighed him by at least 125 pounds, the ex-con drew a snub-nosed .38, smiled, and asked: “What the fuck do you want, kid?”
Crocker didn’t panic. Surprised the bastard with three sharp punches to the face.
As the gangbanger bent down to retrieve the pistol that he’d dropped, Crocker smashed the side of his head with a large rock. The big ex-con hit the ground, twitched a little, but never got up.
In all the many times Crocker had thought about that encounter since, he’d never felt remorse. One less evil scumbag to plague the innocent. To his mind, he’d made the world a safer place.
They had to stop where a river had washed out part of the road. The four SEALs stripped to their T-shirts and tossed boulders into the narrow, busy channel. Within an hour, they were back on their way, smiling, munching on lamb sandwiches, cracking jokes.
Akil went first. “How do you keep a blonde busy all day?”
“Beats me.”
“Put her in a round room and tell her to sit in the corner.”
Davis: “Why are tornadoes and marriage alike? They both start with a lot of blowing and sucking, but in the end you always lose your house.”
“Your turn, boss.”
“What do you call a blind deer?”
“What?”
“No eye deer.”
Groans, then Davis: “Jesus, boss, that sucks.”
Mancini blew them all out of the water. “What’s the difference between acne and a Catholic priest? Acne usually comes on a boy’s face after he turns twelve.”
“Shit, Mancini,” Davis said. “Where did that come from?”
Crocker: “I thought you were a Catholic.”
“I am.”
By nightfall, they rolled into Askole, the last village en route to the Baltoro Glacier and K2. Despite the late hour, Balti porters gathered around the vehicles to offer to schlep the men’s gear for the next ten days. For this backbreaking work, ranging in temperatures from ninety-five degrees to the teens, they were asking $7.50 a day.
Having chosen a dozen porters and one cook, the four Americans set out at six the next morning. Since there were no teahouses along the trek, all food had to be hauled in, which accounted for the fact that each man had to carry at least fifty pounds of expedition supplies and equipment. The porters tied their personal gear in tight bundles on top of their loads.