Competitors?

Prologue

During the cold war, a nine year old innocent Afghan girl was fatally wounded by a bullet in a cross-fire between the country's security forces and guerillas in a Kabul school. 

On her death bed in the hospital, she made her widowed mother write a letter to the South-American head of a global organization requesting for a last wish to be fulfilled: That the best soldiers from the rival super powers be asked to work together on a near-impossible goal. 

The head received such letters now and then. But for some reason, this one caught his eye. He immediately delegated it to an arm of his organization. Soon, clerks were running their fingers all over their Remington typewriters to put the message across on official letterheads that were to be sent to military representatives of USA and USSR using speed post. 

Something that one could never ever imagine...was going to happen. 

Two commandos, Captain Bill Enter, an ace sharpshooter from US army Special operations sniper group and Major Vladimir Putilov, a master of close-combat martial arts from the Soviet Union's Spetsnaz had been teamed up together on an expedition. It was an order. 

Their mission? To conquer in a record time a dangerous peak in Bhutan, a remote hilly Himalayan kingdom. 

This was a peak whose first photographs were taken in 1914, when the first World war was underway, by a British army cartographer, who was then directly reporting to Lieutenant Colonel McMahon. It had since then posed an insurmountable challenge to all mountaineers. It had claimed lives. 

The old Bhutanese local name for the peak used to translate to "Sudden death", the old Tibetan local name translated to "Forbidden heaven". The then Viceroy of India, Lord Hardinge, in honor of the head of Great Britain, the British empire and the Commonwealth, named the towering peak...Mount Crown.