In the early 1970s, military planners in the United States concluded that the next world war would most likely begin with the chaos of a shooting war between mortal enemies Pakistan and India over the disputed Karakoram region, to which they both laid claim. Communist China, another claimant, saw the distraction of its neighbors and thrust southward toward the oil fields of Eastern Europe and the Persian Gulf. Studies concluded that slightly more than a million Chinese soldiers could pour southward through the mountain passes along the aFriendship Highwaya before western forces could detect them. At the urging of the National Security Council, the President of the United States authorized an operation, under the guise of a mountaineering expedition, to install an early warning seismic monitoring device in the area. It was from that point that deception, on a number of levels, became apparent. The task of installing those monitoring devices was handed to two investigators from the National Science Foundation. This is the saga of their ill-fated expedition.