Edyta told Crocker that one of the German climbers was coughing up blood. Crocker suspected high-altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE), which could be fatal. He’d had it twice, once in the Andes and once in the Himalayas. As with all cases of altitude sickness, the best method of treatment was to descend. But there was nothing they could do now except wait out the storm.
As the wind pounded his tent, Crocker rolled over in his sleeping bag, thinking about his mother, who had died recently at the age of seventy-five.
He’d watched her change from a thin young mother with shiny brown hair to a stooped, gray-haired grandmother. But the sweetness in her blue eyes never changed. He saw them looking up at him, pleading, as he held her frail hand.
“What, Mom?”
She was trying to say something, but couldn’t speak because she was so weak from the cancer that had started in her lungs and spread throughout her body.
As Crocker held her, she mouthed the words: “Please don’t leave me.”
The next time he saw her, two days later, she was a gray corpse on an aluminum table in the local morgue.
All he could do was kiss her on the head, say “I love you.” Then he crumpled to the ground and wept like a little boy.
He thought about her now as he sat in the tent next to Davis, who was trying to sleep beside him. His parents had been good, brave, loving people who had worked hard for their children. Tried to pass on everything they’d learned.
Where were they now?
A blast of wind ripped at the side of the nylon tent.
Interesting how nature reduced things to fundamentals. Life and death. Disease and destruction, then the smell of wildflowers and a gentle breeze.
The storm outside was violent now. If nature wanted to take him—to bury him and the others in snow, blow them off the mountain, and freeze them to death—it would.
Whispering a prayer to his mother and father, his brother, sisters, and their kids, his daughter, his stepson, and his wife, Holly, he closed his eyes.
At noon the next day, the snow was still falling. Crocker estimated that another three feet had accumulated. And the winds had picked up to sixty knots, with gusts up to ninety.
The Germans in the lime green tent felt better, and they were all getting antsy, to either climb or turn back once the storm subsided. Edyta, in particular, wanted to push on. She pointed out that they had only another five thousand feet and approximately sixteen to eighteen hours of climbing before reaching the top. Crocker thought she might be suffering from summit fever.
“Not under these conditions,” he responded. This was just a training climb for his men. He’d planned to take them another thousand feet at most.
“Then I’ll go by myself!” she shouted.
“That would be suicidal,” Crocker told her. He and Davis ventured out to take a look.
A few steps from the tent—wearing glacier glasses, fully baffled parkas, and windproof, water-resistant down pants—they were blinded as the wind kicked up a swirl of snow. Crocker tried looking behind him, but the blast from the west was so frigid and powerful that it started to freeze the little bit of exposed skin on his neck.
Using a trekking pole, he gestured to the blond-haired, blue-eyed SEAL as if to say, You wait here.
Davis waved him back. “Don’t go!”
Taking a step in the fresh snow, Crocker’s right leg sunk up to his thigh and his foot didn’t touch bottom. Still, he ventured out a few yards and tried to dig some of their supplies out of the snow.
They had camped approximately six thousand feet above the base camp. To move in any direction was perilous, because the slopes were primed for an avalanche.
And conditions were likely to get a whole lot worse before they got better. Since the snow that had been falling was so cold, the crystals hadn’t yet bonded. An avalanche that happened now would be soft, not the heavier, denser slabs that they could expect once the sun and wind compressed the crystals into giant chunks of snow.
Armed with his trekking pole and ice axe, Crocker tried to inch up a traverse to the next ridge to get a better look. But when he stepped on the clear, hard ice, he lost his footing and fell back.
He picked himself up and tried again, with the same result. No go.
Back in the Germans’ tent, Edyta reported that base camp had received a message from Switzerland that there would be a small break before more bad weather moved in.
She shouted above the roar of the wind outside: “I’m leaving at dawn. Who’s coming with me?”
Crocker thought: A chick with a pick, and stubborn as a mule.
Being a responsible team leader, he explained to Davis and Akil that it was better to play it safe and come back to climb another day than try to prevail against conditions that were out of their control.