Here, at nearly four thousand one hundred metres, the air was noticeably thinner. At anything above three thousand metres the oxygen concentration inside human lungs starts to drop. To ensure that everyone on the expedition would become properly acclimatized. Jack had insisted that they should all endure the walk up from Chomrong.
The last four hundred metres from MBC — Machhapuchhare Base Camp — had been the hardest walking of all, and some of the expeditionary team were already feeling the effects. They arrived fifty minutes behind Jack and the sirdar — the Sherpa leader — breathless and lightheaded and wondering irritably what had happened to the stone huts that were supposed to be there and which the guidebooks had described as simple lodges for tourists during the trekking season. The miscellaneous team of scientists and climbers did not think of themselves as tourists, but after walking for six days in all weathers, even the most basic tourist comfort had begun to sound attractive. The mystery of the disappearing lodges was soon solved when Jack, who had never been in any doubt where these were to be found, ordered the porters to start digging in the snow.
He had chosen to pitch camp at ABC instead of MBC, which was nearer to the forbidden mountain of Machhapuchhare where Swift wanted to concentrate their search, for several reasons: For one, the lodges at ABC were of a better standard; he hoped to get the team acclimatized to a slightly higher altitude; but most important of all, he wanted to keep the real search area of Machhapuchhare a secret from the authorities for as long as possible. The first inkling they had that the expedition was intent on violating the terms of their permit, and their liaison officer back in Khat would be forced to recall the Sherpas.
Boyd located some of the heavier supplies, including the main tent, that had been dropped near the site by an army helicopter from Pokhara. While Boyd set about erecting the tent. Jack climbed down a vertical snow shaft, several metres deep, breaking through the bamboo thatched roof of one of the buried dwellings — the Hotel Paradise Garden Lodge — and dropping into its perfectly dry interior. Another shaft was sunk in the snow, another roof was broached, and soon two horizontal tunnels connecting the front doors of both lodges were excavated and connected. Within a few hours of their arrival. Jack and the Nepalese Sherpas had located all four lodges and connected them via an icy warren of under-snow tunnels. Aluminium ladders were placed in two of the vertical shafts, to become an entrance and an exit, and a system of halogen lights was rigged so that underneath the thick duvet of snow, the lodges, which were simply furnished with bunk beds, tables, and chairs, could accommodate the eight members of the team as well as at least a dozen Sherpas and porters.
The main tent, supplied by Boyd’s company and developed for use in the Antarctic, was to serve as the expedition’s laboratory, communications centre, and main living area. Jack, who thought himself an expert in storm-proof tentage, found himself impressed by the structure — not so much a tent as an inflatable building, of a type similar to those used by the U.S. Army during the Desert Storm operation in the Gulf.
The round, twenty-metre-diameter, igloo-shaped structure that Boyd referred to as the clamshell was made of Kevlar, a material most frequently used in the manufacture of bullet-proof vests, with a frame of air-beam tubes about as thick as a beer can and inflated to about three hundred times the pressure of a standard inflatable dinghy. These tubes provided a series of rigid beams almost as strong as an aluminium beam of equivalent thickness. But as well as being strong, the clamshell, which was about three metres high at its centre, was also warm. Whereas inflatable buildings in the Gulf had been kept circulated with cool air, for the Himalayas, the air inside the clamshell was heated, creating an environment sufficiently temperate for members of the team to dispense with outer-layer clothing altogether, whatever the weather outside. There was even an airlock door to prevent spindrift snow from getting inside the clamshell. The whole structure was secured to the snow and ice of the glacier basin by ‘smart’ titanium tent pegs containing shape-memory wires designed to expand and then stiffen when subjected to pressure. Boyd said that in Antarctica the clamshell had withstood winds of up to two hundred and forty kilometres per hour.
The same helicopter that dropped in the clamshell also brought in the Semath Johnson-Mathey fuel cell. About the same size as a small car’s engine, the fuel cell was essentially a battery that could not run down, generating about five kilowatts and providing the expedition with all the energy it would need to run heat, light, and the various items of electrical equipment the porters had carried up from Chomrong — too delicate to drop from an aircraft. These included four ruggedised Toshiba Portégé laptops, a desktop PC Gel Documentation system, a Toshiba microwave oven to cook the MREs (meals, ready to eat), a portable pressurization chamber for extreme cases of altitude sickness, and a small digital weather station.
Communications in the field were to be achieved using handheld GPS units, while regular contact between ABC and the expedition office in Pokhara relied on powerful Satcom transceivers: with a broadcast power of eighteen watts, the transceivers were sufficiently powerful to serve the US-Robotics 14,400 PCMCIA fax modem cards inside each laptop computer, providing the expedition with electronic mail links to offices several time zones away.
‘This is the best equipped outfit I ever teamed with,’ Jack told Boyd.
‘You ain’t seen nothing yet,’ chuckled Boyd. ‘Just wait until you get to try one of the SCE suits. SCE. That’s Self Contained Environment. My institute had them developed by the International Latex Corporation in Delaware especially for exploration work in the Antarctic. They’re kind of similar to the EMU suits they made for the astronauts on the shuttle program.’
‘You mean like a space suit?’ Jack laughed. ‘C’mon, man, you’re shitting me.’
‘No way. It’s like you said when we met. Jack. There’s only one place gets colder than up here and that’s outer space. Absolute goddamn zero. An SCE suit? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s kind of like being in a Rolls-Royce. Once you’ve been in one you won’t want to go in anything else. Believe me. Jack, when you have to leave the clamshell in really shitty weather, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without one.’
Under Jack’s watchful eye, the team began to assemble underneath the clamshell, installing computers, checking communications, sorting gear, testing equipment, and planning reconnaissance. Meanwhile, the porters put away many of the stores in one of the newly excavated lodges.
The sirdar was Hurké Gurung, a wiry, handsome-looking man in his late forties, and an old-style Sherpa, according to Jack. Although he could neither read nor write, his face was full of the quiet confidence and experience he had gained from climbing with some of the world’s greatest mountaineers. He had been twice to the summit of Everest — once with Jack — and as part of an ill-fated Japanese expedition to climb Changabang, or K2 as it was better known in the West, on which ten people had died, he was one of the few men alive who had made it to the top of the world’s second-highest mountain via its ‘impossible’ west face. As well as being a proficient climber, Hurké Gurung was also a trained soldier. Before becoming a Sherpa, he had served with the Gurkha Rifles, reaching the rank of Naik, sergeant, and was a skilled tracker. But Gurung had one extra special qualification that made him indispensable to the expedition. Like Jack Furness, he too had seen a yeti.