Mud Sweat & Tears - Bear Grylls [106]
The insurance company said that at dawn the next day they would attempt to get him out of there. Weather permitting. But at 17,450 feet we really were on the outer limits of where helicopters could fly.
True to their word, at dawn we heard the distant rotors of a helicopter, far beneath us in the valley. A tiny speck against the vast rock walls on either side.
In a matter of sixty short minutes, that thing could whisk Neil away to civilization, I thought. Hmm.
My goodness, that was a beautiful prospect.
Somehow, I had to get on that chopper with him.
I packed in thirty seconds flat, everything from the past three months. I taped a white cross on to my sleeve, and raced out to where Neil was sat waiting.
One chance.
What the heck.
Neil shook his head at me, smiling.
‘God, you push it, Bear, don’t you?’ he shouted over the noise of the rotors.
‘You’re going to need a decent medic on the flight,’ I replied, with a smile. ‘And I’m your man.’ (There was at least some element of truth in this: I was a medic and I was his buddy – and yes, he did need help. But essentially I was trying to pull a bit of a fast one.)
The pilot shouted that two people would be too heavy.
‘I have to accompany him at all times,’ I shouted back over the engine noise. ‘His feet might fall off at any moment,’ I added quietly.
The pilot looked at me, then at the white cross on my sleeve.
He agreed to drop Neil somewhere down at a lower altitude, and then come back for me.
‘Perfect. Go. I’ll be here.’ I shook his hand firmly.
Let’s just get this done before anyone thinks too much about it, I mumbled to myself.
And with that the pilot took off and disappeared from view.
Mick and Henry were laughing.
‘If you pull this one off, Bear, I will eat my socks. You just love to push it, don’t you?’ Mick said, smiling.
‘Yep, good try, but you aren’t going to see him again, I guarantee you,’ Henry added.
Thanks to the pilot’s big balls, he was wrong.
The heli returned empty, I leapt aboard, and with the rotors whirring at full power to get some grip in the thin air, the bird slowly lifted into the air.
The stall warning light kept buzzing away as we fought against gravity, but then the nose dipped and soon we were skimming over the rocks, away from base camp and down the glacier.
I was out of there – and Mick was busy taking his socks off.
As we descended, I spotted, far beneath us, this lone figure sat on a rock in the middle of a giant boulder field. Neil’s two white ‘beacons’ shining bright.
I love it. I smiled.
We picked Neil up, and in an instant we were flying together through the huge Himalayan valleys like an eagle freed.
Neil and I sat back in the helicopter, faces pressed against the glass, and watched our life for the past three months become a shimmer in the distance.
The great mountain faded into a haze, hidden from sight. I leant against Neil’s shoulder and closed my eyes.
Everest was gone.
CHAPTER 99
Once back in Kathmandu, Neil and I kind of let it all go – and it felt great. We had worked hard for this, and sometimes it is good to let your hair down. Totally.
The next morning, slightly the worse for wear, I remember wandering lazily along the rickety balcony of our small, backstreet Kathmandu hostel.
I found several members of the Russian Everest team, who had been on the north side of the mountain, sat on the corridor floor, talking in low voices. They glanced up at me wearily. To a man they looked mentally exhausted.
Then I noticed that they had been crying; big Russian, bearded men, crying.
Sergei and Francys Arsentiev were recently married. They had loved to climb. Everest had been their dream together. But it had gone horribly wrong.
Francys had been on her way down from the summit when she had collapsed. Nobody knew why: maybe cerebral oedema, or the cold – maybe just that killer Everest exhaustion. She simply had not been able to find the energy to carry on. She had died where she