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But the team never jelled on the mountain. Rouse divided his climbers into two foursomes, infelicitously calling them the “A Team” and the “B Team.” (He put the Burgess brothers on separate teams, even though they were used to climbing together.) And no one seemed happy with Rouse’s leadership, which was constantly vacillating and indecisive. In K2: Triumph and Tragedy, Jim Curran painted a basically sympathetic portrait of Rouse, to whom he was loyal to the end. But John Barry wrote his own book, called K2: Savage Mountain, Savage Summer, culled mainly from his own diary entries, which are scathing about Rouse:

As a leader, his is an inept performance. He admits that he wants the commercial benefits of being a leader but is unwilling to take the responsibilities that go with it—mainly the reduction of his chances of making the summit. Overheard him say that he’d prefer to go alpine style and abandon the expedition.

Barry is as gleeful a tell-all narrator as Galen Rowell and Rick Ridgeway were in their K2 books. The diary entries paint a dreary picture of constant bickering: “Big row. I tell Al-R [Rouse, to distinguish him from Al Burgess] that I think he’s a fool. Al goes off to tent in tears. Jim-C[urran] follows to comfort him. But still there is no apology or commitment to Wilkie. Wilkie pulls out.”

The biggest problem for the British expedition, however, was that despite repeated efforts, the climbers made little headway on the northwest ridge. The intricacies of the route, the misery of the snow conditions, and the danger posed by avalanche slopes and precarious seracs defeated these crack alpinists. The team reached an altitude of only 24,300 feet before giving up. The northwest ridge would finally be climbed in 1991 by a pair of dedicated French mountaineers, Pierre Béghin and Christophe Profit, but even their ascent line deviated onto the north face high on the mountain.

As early as July 7, Rouse’s party threw in the towel on the northwest ridge. In his diary, Barry laconically recorded:

We are quitting the NW Ridge. I’m disappointed. We have 3 weeks left at least.

Reasons: team too small … route too long.

Abruzzi a clear run.

By this early date, a number of Rouse’s teammates had suddenly remembered that they had job obligations back home. By ones and twos over the following weeks, they abandoned the expedition and started the long hike out. John Barry himself defected on July 28. As a result, his book is hugely anticlimactic, the long last chapter devoted to his humdrum hike back to civilization rather than to the drama that would soon unfold on the mountain.

In changing routes from the northwest ridge to the Abruzzi, Rouse was breaking all the rules, for his permit covered only the former route. As Barry wrote, “There’s great secrecy surrounding our switch to the Abruzzi. Al-R doesn’t wish to be banned from Pakistan for ten years; which he says is what the punishment would be. Phil [Burke] says that it would be a reward. I’m beyond caring.”

The Brits had sardonically nicknamed the mass base camp at the foot of the Abruzzi “the Strip.” Now, to get on the route themselves, the climbers still committed to the mountain transferred all their gear to a new base camp, as they sneaked past the Strip, hoping that the various liaison officers from other teams would not discover their transgression. The two narratives of the British expedition start to take on a comic tone at this point. The whole expedition, in fact, could have been treated as a comedy (this seems to have been John Barry’s intention from the start), had it not ended in the disaster of early August.

By the beginning of that month, among the Brits only Al Rouse was still fully committed to an attempt on K2. Jim Curran would linger on, but strictly in the role of chronicler, scarcely climbing above Camp I. And now Rouse completed his defection from his own team, as he announced that he was pairing up with a woman from the Polish team to climb the Abruzzi.