Over the Edge: The True Story of the Kidnap and Escape of Four Climbers in Central Asia

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Description

*CLICK HERE to download sample chapters from Over the Edge *

* A different sort of true climbing adventure―this one with terrorists, kidnappings, and AK47s

* New afterword by the author

* First time in paperback

Before dawn on August 12, 2000, four of The united states’s best young rock climbers―Tommy Caldwell, Beth Rodden, Jason “Singer” Smith, and John Dickey―were asleep in their portaledges high on the Yellow Wall in the Pamir-Alai mountain range of Kyrgyzstan. At daybreak, they would be kidnapped at gunpoint by fanatical militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which operates out of secret bases in Tajikistan and Afghanistan and is linked to Al Qaeda. The kidnappers, themselves barely out of their teens, intended to use their hostages as human shields and for ransom money as they moved across Kyrgyzstan. They hid the climbers by day and marched them by night through freezing, treacherous mountain terrain, with little food, no clean water, and the constant threat of execution.

The four climbers — the oldest of them only 25 — would see a fellow hostage, a Kyrgyz soldier, executed before their eyes. And in a remarkable life-and-death crucible over six terrifying days, they would be forced to choose from saving their own lives and committing an act none of them thought they ever could.

In Over the Edge, the climbers reveal the complete story of their nightmarish ordeal to journalist and climber Greg Child. With riveting details, Child re-creates all the hour-by-hour drama, from the first ricocheting bullets to the climatic decision that gains them their freedom. Set in a region rife with narcotics and terrorism, it is a compelling story about loyalty and the will to live on. What continues to make it relevant today, 15 years after the events took place, is the geopolitical context — the incident happened, eerily, on the eve of 9–/11; the truth that at least two of the four climbers continue to be prominent in the sport; and the main points incorporated into the story around the media hype and controversy regarding the climbers and their story.
A year before The united states woke to the madness of Islamic terrorism, four young American rock climbers were pulled directly into its line of fire on a rock climbing expedition 80 miles from Afghanistan. Oblivious to the volatile mix of ethnic strife, drug smuggling, and militant Islam brewing there, the four had been seeking extreme adventure in the “Yosemite Valley” of Central Asia. Greg Child gives a riveting chronicle of their capture by militants of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (linked to al Qaeda), who dragged them through six harrowing days of gun battles before the four made their dramatic escape. As a veteran climber of the area and a seasoned creator, Child used to be uniquely qualified to write “the story that refused to stop unfolding,” scrupulously tracking the moments that led to the ultimate decision–whether to kill to live–and the firestorm of controversy and skepticism that surrounded the four on their return to a still-ignorant The united states. To be informed the truth, Child even traveled to Kyrgyzstan with two of the climbers to face one of their captors. Over the Edge is a charged and unforgettable look into the many faces of international terrorism and human nature itself. –Lesley Reed

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