Twenty-five meters later, the fog diminished slightly and they could make out a wide, sloping shelf of ice ten meters below. Harvath unleashed himself from Jillian and gently increased his speed. By the time she made it the rest of the way down, Harvath’s crampons were already firmly planted on the shelf.

“Did we make some sort of mistake?” said Jillian as she stood up and looked around, disappointed. “There’s nothing here.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” said Harvath as he removed one of the satellite images from inside his parka and studied it. “It’s been over a year. When it comes to snow and ice, a lot can happen in that time.”

Jillian watched as Harvath withdrew two more coils of rope from his pack and established another set of anchor points by hammering pitons into the rock face behind them. He secured the ropes they had used to climb down from the pass so they wouldn’t blow away and then got back to work, readying for the next stage of their descent.

After first securing Jillian’s rope and harness, followed by his own, Harvath looked at the shelf they were standing on. It sloped upward, away from the mountain, and the number one question on Harvath’s mind was Where did it lead? Removing what looked like a collapsible ski pole from his pack, he extended the telescoping avalanche probe to its full length and leaned it against the cliff face.

“What are you doing?” asked Jillian.

“You see how the ice slopes up like that?” he said as he pointed at the shelf in front of them.

“Yes.”

“That ramplike or wave formation can happen when there’s a lot of freeze-thaw, freeze-thaw kind of weather. It builds up very quickly and can be extremely fragile.”

“So what are you going to do, walk out there and test it?”

Harvath nodded his head.

“I was kidding,” she said. “What if it gives way?”

Harvath tripled-wrapped his own rope around her waist and tied it with a double knot. Once he had rechecked the security of her anchor points, he said, “Then I’ll be glad I’ve got you hanging on to me.”

After showing her how to properly feed out the rope, Harvath picked up his probe and started out away from the cliff face along the top of the shelf.

As he walked, large sheets of crisp, ice-laden snow cracked and broke away beneath his crampons. The pop, as every footfall punched its way through the crusty snow, sounded like gunfire and could be heard well above the roar of the wind. Harvath looked back more than once, just to make sure Jillian was keeping a tight grip on his safety line.

Using the avalanche probe to test the stability of the shelf in front of him, he took his steps one painfully slow foot at a time. It was like climbing up the side of a slick, steeply pitched, snow-covered roof. With the sharp teeth of his crampons aiding his climb, Harvath was more concerned about the entire shelf dropping away beneath him than he was about losing his footing. As he continued to move forward, he tried not to think about it.

He developed a steady rhythm as he planted his avalanche pole, then took a step, then planted his avalanche pole and took a step. It was almost hypnotic, and Harvath literally had to shake his head to keep his mind focused on what he was doing. When he finally reached the shelf’s peak, he stopped and looked around as best he could through the increasing snow. Mount Viso towered high above while the other side of the shelf appeared to run steeply downhill into a large ice field far below.

Harvath had explained to Jillian that when and if he signaled, it was okay for her to follow him out onto the shelf; she should untie the loops of rope from around her waist and follow exactly in his footsteps. Giving her the signal, he watched as she removed the rope and coiled the extra loops on the ground where they wouldn’t get tangled with her own. Then, like a tightrope walker, she carefully began placing one foot in front of the other and made her way toward him.

She was doing great and was about halfway across the shelf when Harvath heard a series of rumbling noises that sounded like three mortars being loosed. Jillian heard it too and immediately stopped, frozen in Harvath’s tracks. For a moment, he thought it might have been thunder, but he knew it wasn’t. Thunder came from over your head, not below your feet. For the moment, there was nothing but silence. Even the wind and snow seemed to have died away.

Harvath stood completely still for several seconds, as his ears strained to pick up any further sound, but there was nothing other than his own shallow breathing. After several seconds more, he signaled for Jillian to start moving forward again, slowly.

One step. Two steps. So far so good. But three steps later, the shelf began to tremble and made a terrible groaning noise. Pieces of it splintered as if a giant hand was pushing down on it from above. Harvath yelled for her to lie spread-eagle and distribute her weight evenly across the snow, but Jillian couldn’t hear him above the noise. Suddenly, the shelf cracked apart and collapsed inward, completely disappearing from sight and taking Jillian Alcott along with it.

FORTY-FIVE

As the ice shelf caved in, there was nothing Harvath could do to save her. Jillian was too far away. It was like watching someone fall through a frozen lake. As her screams echoed off the side of the mountain, Harvath was tempted to look back, but his instincts had taken over and he was totally focused on saving himself.

Flattening his body against the upper peak of the shelf, Harvath slid his ice axes out from their holsters and swung them, along with his crampons, into the ice as hard as he could. Behind him, he could hear the sickening sound of the shelf as it wrenched the rest of the way away and collapsed into the chasm below. At least twenty feet out from the face of the mountain, Harvath said a silent prayer that the receding hunks of ice and snow wouldn’t drag his safety line, and him, down into the frozen void.

He lay there waiting to be yanked off at any moment, but the moment never came. As the thunderous roar of the collapsing shelf subsided, Harvath began to entertain the guilty thought that for the umpteenth time in his life, he had cheated death.

With his hands beginning to ache from the death grip he had on his axes, he knew he needed to come up with some sort of a plan, the crux of which had to be getting to Jillian to see if she was still alive.

Looking down, Harvath saw that only about two and a half feet of shelf still remained below him. From the edge of it to the face of Mount Viso, where they had rappelled down with their first set of ropes, was about eighteen feet. The shelf which Harvath had crossed, and which had swallowed up Jillian, had been nothing more than a fragile bridge of ice and snow that covered over the entrance to a deep cavern of blue-green ice. Even though his anchor was firmly established on the far mountain wall, using his rope to swing out over the open expanse, Tarzan-style, was not the best of ideas. Eighteen feet might not seem like much, but it was plenty of distance in which to pick up a full head of steam and slam into the other side. He immediately struck it from his list of possible options.

Ice chasms in general were like a big V, wide at the top and progressively narrower as you got toward the bottom. If one were to imagine a huge triangle with its point downward, it would form a pretty good picture of what things had looked like before the shelf had collapsed. Harvath now stood at the top of the chasm looking across to where his rope was anchored on the other side. Since swinging across was out of the question, the only way he could go was down. The problem, though, was that if he established another set of anchor points on this side, when he wanted to climb back up he’d still be on the wrong side of the cavern with no way to get across. There was no telling what condition Jillian was in. He needed to figure something out quickly. Finally, Harvath had an idea.