Читать книгу Edge of the Map. The Mountain Life of Christine Boskoff онлайн

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This time, no plan had been left to track their whereabouts. No permits had been requested to help aid the massive hunt. In short, nobody knew where the hell they were. Christine, dammit woman, Callahan thought, please tell me you’ve left something in here to give us a clue where you’ve gone. “Can we get a bolt cutter in here?” he asked. The nearest PSB officer paused for a moment, stymied by Callahan’s Mandarin accent. He tripped over a colleague’s foot as he pushed out the door, heading for the police toolbox.

In the week since Callahan had arrived in China, he’d been mostly holed up in Chengdu, Chris and Charlie’s last confirmed location, following leads. It took a sizable reward to tease out the information needed to land him in this police station in the city of Litang, three days west of Chengdu on the Tibetan Plateau. The air was thin in this part of the country, altitude 12,900 feet.

The caravan leaving Chengdu a few days ago had included a CNN crew. Chris and Charlie’s disappearance had started to grab headlines in the United States. A trio of climbers on Oregon’s Mount Hood had vanished just weeks earlier, feeding the nightly news reports for several days. The Pacific Northwest drew climbers from around the United States, as there was no finer place in the country to prepare for attempting any of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. As the drama from the slopes in Oregon turned from a rescue of live climbers to a recovery of their bodies, the story unfolding in China stirred the public’s desire for a happy ending. A Christmas miracle. It was December 23, 2006.