The young man beside Alexandra was Tamara’s boyfriend, René Leroux, a French expatriate living in Denver. The three of them had been traveling around Brazil seeing various games in the World Cup tournament. All were experienced climbers.
So was the tall Brazilian, Flavio Gomes, who worked for Victor Barros, the comatose man on the rope. Barros’s company had been guiding advanced climbers up the face of Sugarloaf the past eight years. Nothing even close to this had ever happened.
“We set every anchor,” Gomes said. “We check them every time. It all looked solid. And then it wasn’t.”
Gomes, Leroux, and Alexandra had been on a different, easier route than Tamara and Barros. Tamara was a far better climber than her sister or boyfriend and had asked to go up a more difficult way. Gomes’s group had gone first and was one hundred and fifty vertical feet above the other two when, apparently, an anchor bolt gave way, and then another. Only Alexandra saw the entire event.
“They fell at least fifty feet,” she whimpered. “And then they just kind of smashed into each other, whipsawed, and crashed into the wall. I could hear Tamara screaming for help, saying that she couldn’t feel her legs. There was nothing we could do from our position.”
Gomes nodded, chagrined. “I’m a solid climber, but I only just started guiding, and I’ve never been on a rescue like this. It’s out of my league.”
Leroux hung his head, said, “She’s gonna be paralyzed.”
I ignored him, went to the rail, and saw an anchored nylon rope going over a pad on the belly of the cliff and disappearing into the void.
“Were they on this line?” I asked.
“No, that line runs parallel to their rope, offset about eight inches,” Gomes said. “Another one of our normal safety measures.”
Thinking about the position of the injured climbers, thinking about what I was going to have to do to get them off the cliff, I decided against going down the secondary rope.
I looked at da Silva and said, “I need you to make a few things happen very fast, Colonel. Two lives depend on it.”
Chapter 4
Thirty-eight minutes later, I was on my belly on the floor of the tramcar. The doors were open. I was looking over the side, straight down more than a thousand feet, and fighting vertigo.
The second I spotted Tamara Patrick on the cliff, I said, “Stop.”
Colonel da Silva repeated the order into a radio. The tram halted and swung on the cable about twenty-five feet out from the summit station.
“How far down are they?” da Silva asked.
“I’m calling it three hundred feet,” I said, getting up to look at two Brazilian soldiers who’d come from an army base located less than a mile from the bottom tram station. They were almost finished attaching a truck winch to the steel floor of the cable car.
“One hundred meters,” I said to the soldiers. “Does it get me there?”
Tavia translated my words into Brazilian Portuguese, and they answered her.
She said, “With the extra rope, they think so.”
Gomes was checking the knots and carabiners that connected a climbing rope to the winch’s quarter-inch steel cable. I checked the space that separated the winch drum from the floor. Three, maybe four inches of clearance. With that much rope going onto the drum, it would be a tight fit.
We threaded the other, looped end of the climbing rope through a large carabiner we’d attached to a steel hook above the door frame. A closed D ring connected the rope to the harness I wore.
“Radio?” da Silva said.
I reached up and double-clicked the mike clipped to my chest.
The other people in the car — da Silva, Tavia, Gomes, the two soldiers, and the off-duty sergeant — nodded. They got in a line and grabbed hold of the rope with gloved hands.
I went to the edge of the open door, willed myself not to look down. Just before I stepped out, I said, “No slipping, now.”
Then my weight came into the harness and my legs were in space, and I was pushing off the bottom of the tram. Free of the car and dropping, I went into a slow twirl that got me dizzy and forced me to close my eyes to the jungle treetops so far below.
Sometimes I think I’m crazy. This was one of those times.
It took them a full minute to lower me the entire length of the climbing rope.
“You’re on winch now.” Da Silva’s voice crackled over the radio.
“Got it,” I said, feeling the descent go smoother and faster.
A minute later, I was almost to Tamara Patrick, eight, maybe nine feet above her and four feet out from the wall.
“Stop,” I said into the mike, and the winch halted.
“Help me!” Tamara called out weakly.
“That’s what I’m here for,” I said. “My name is Jack, and we’re going to get you out of here.”
“I can’t feel anything from the waist down,” she said, starting to cry.
“But you can feel your arms?”
“A little,” she said. “Yes.”
“Both hands?”
“The left more than the right,” Tamara said, getting herself under control.
“That’s good, that’s a start,” I said, looking down twenty-five feet to the guide hanging there limply.
“Has your guide said anything since the fall?” I asked as I started to kick and pump like a kid on a swing.
“No,” Tamara said. “How are you going to get me off here?”
“With a little imagination,” I said, swinging closer to the wall and then farther away.
On the third swing I caught that secondary rope coming down from the top. I rigged my harness to it and called into the mike, “Give me eight feet of slack, then bring the litter down.”
“Got it,” Tavia said.
I waited until a loop of rope hung almost to the injured climber before I started down. When I reached Tamara’s side, she rolled her head over to look at me, another good sign.
“I’m scared,” she said.
“Me too,” I said. “I hate this kind of shit.”
She smiled feebly. “And I love this kind of shit.”
“Your sister told me that.”
“Am I gonna be paralyzed, Jack?”
There was so much pain and fear in her voice and face that I felt tears well up in my eyes. I looked away and said, “I’m no doctor.”
She said nothing. I glanced at her. She was staring up.
I craned my head back and saw the stiff backboard twisting lazily on a second rope dropping from the tramcar.
“Jack?” Tamara said. “Could you hold my hand until it gets here?”
“I’d be honored,” I said, reaching out and taking her left hand. It felt cold and clammy, and I realized she was probably almost in shock.
“Did you see René up there?” she asked.
“I’m wearing his harness.”
Tamara nodded, her lower lip trembling. “He can’t deal with stuff like this.”
“Like what?”
“A paralyzed girlfriend,” she said, tears dripping down her cheeks.
“What is he? An imbecile of titanic proportions?”
Tamara laughed through her tears. “Sometimes.”
I kept up the light chat with her until the backboard reached us. It took quite a bit of finagling on both our parts to get Tamara strapped to the board, and the winch cable rope attached to the four lines supporting it. But we did it.
“Have a nice ride,” I said after I’d separated her from the rope that had saved her. “Very few people have ever done anything like this.”
“Thank you, Jack,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said, giving her hand one last squeeze. “And whatever happens, you’re going to be fine in the long run. Okay?”
“You think?”
“Only an imbecile of titanic proportions wouldn’t.”
She smiled and closed her eyes.
“Take her up,” I said into the mike, and I watched her rise for a few moments before starting toward Victor Barros.
By the time I’d climbed down to the guide’s side, Tamara had disappeared inside the tram, and the cable car was moving to the summit station.
“We’ll be right back, Jack,” Tavia called into the radio.
My fingers were on Barros’s neck by then. His skin was still warm to the touch, but there was no pulse that I could feel.
“Take your time,” I called sadly into the mike. “He’s gone.”
I hung there on the side of the cliff with the dead guide until the tram came back and lowered the winch rope. Then I clipped it directly to his harness and released him from the rope that had snapped his back and killed him.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled me into the tram. I sat against the wall opposite the corpse, feeling wrung out, and the cable car began to drop toward the mid-station.
“You okay, Jack?” Colonel da Silva asked.
“Honestly? I feel like I could sleep for a week.”
Tavia looked at her watch and grimaced. “I’m afraid you can’t, boss. We’re already running way late.”
I glanced at my own watch, closed my eyes, and groaned.