by Bear Grylls
‘Hot work?’ Samora asked.
Beck just smiled and lay down on his front next to the gap. He wrapped the shirt around the top of the chair leg and carefully inserted it into the gap between the boards so that the wrapped end was below the board he wanted to prise up.
Then he took hold of the leg firmly in both hands and jabbed it sharply upwards against the bottom of the board. It hit the wood with a muffled thud. The cloth of the shirt absorbed the sound in case anyone was listening outside the hut.
‘It shifted,’ Samora reported.
Beck grunted and repeated the action. Then again, then a fourth time. The board finally popped up by a centimetre.
It was all that Samora and Beck needed to get their fingers underneath and lift it up. The wood creaked and groaned again. Beck felt sure they must be able to hear it back in Johannesburg. Still no angry shouts from outside, though. They pulled the board away, and now they had a space just wide enough for them to edge into, one at a time.
Beck put his shirt back on and poked the chair leg into the gap, back and forth. The hut was raised off the ground so that things like snakes would go under rather than into it. The problem with that was there might actually be a snake under it now.
But he couldn’t feel anything with the end of the stick. Beck reached down and rapped the dry earth with it a couple of times, just to make his point.
‘Snakes will generally get out of the way if they know you’re coming,’ he explained to Samora – then suddenly realized that he’d forgotten for a moment which of the two of them had actually been born in Africa and grown up in a wildlife park.
‘Except for mambas.’ Her teeth flashed white in the dark. ‘They’ll go out of their way to attack you. And they’re deadly.’
Beck had just been about to lower his feet into the gap. He paused, then decided, What the heck. He slid down until his feet touched the ground. The floorboards were now at waist level. He lowered himself further and further, holding his breath because the gap was very narrow.
Soon Samora was behind him, and the pair started to crawl towards the edge of the hut, their hearts thumping in their chests . . .
Chapter 22
The space beneath the hut smelled of cool, dry earth and wood. Beck peered ahead, towards the compound. Through the steps he could see the truck that had brought them, parked to one side, and the other buildings. Some had lights on, some were dark. He couldn’t see anyone about, though he could hear voices, and somewhere a radio was playing music.
He twisted round to look in the other direction. He could see the edge of the building, a couple of metres from where he was. Beyond it there was enough moonlight to show dry grass and bushes a short distance away, but there was open ground in between. They could run for the cover of the bushes, but if – if – anyone happened to look, then they would be spotted.
It was a risk they had to take.
‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Mind the mambas.’
They both started to crawl through the shadows, over to where the open ground began. Beck was still waving the chair leg ahead of him. He couldn’t see the ground clearly and he didn’t want to put his bare hands on anything that might sting, bite or slow down their escape if they broke free. One bite from a snake and they would be in big trouble, out in the bush, with no medical help.
Emerging from under the hut, Samora stopped close behind him, and they looked over towards the bushes. They would be out in the open for about ten seconds.
‘Ready?’ Beck asked. He jammed the chair leg into his belt. It was sturdy and a handy length – it could be a useful tool; better than having to pick up random sticks along the way. ‘OK, let’s—’
A gunshot cracked through the darkness and made him jerk his head round. Then another. The second sounded slightly different, which meant that someone was firing back. Then a whole succession of shots tore the night apart. This wasn’t just people letting off a few rounds for kicks. This was a gunfight.
Beck and Samora stared at each other, wideeyed, in the moonlight.
‘Think your dad’s people have found us?’ Beck asked.
She shrugged, as baffled as him. ‘Or the police, or the army . . . Poachers have a lot of enemies. Including other poachers.’
The pair knew that it might not be wise to show themselves straight away.
‘Let’s stay hidden and see how this plays out,’ Beck whispered. ‘If it’s the good guys, great – but if it isn’t, then we need to be ready to run.’
They poked their heads round the edge of the hut. The poachers had spilled out of their building and were cautiously circling the compound, eyes straining to see in the gloom. Every now and then one of them spotted something, and raised his gun to fire off a volley into the night. Yellow flame spouted like a dagger from the end of the barrel.
Sometimes there was returning fire, always from a different direction. It looked like the compound was surrounded. Beck glanced behind him again, back the way they had been planning to run. It didn’t look like anyone was attacking from that direction.
‘Hey, that must be their car,’ Samora said suddenly. She tugged at his arm to show where she was looking.
It was way over to one side, and Beck hadn’t noticed it before. It was dark metal against a dark background, so it was well hidden. He could only see it now because moonlight shone off the few reflecting bits – a glimpse of bonnet, a flash of bumper. Suddenly, like looking at a magic picture, his brain pieced it all together – and his heart sank.
It was the black Jeep that he had last seen in Johannesburg – which meant that it was James or, more likely, the large man with him, the one who looked like a Silverback, who was now attacking the poachers.
Either way, it meant that Lumos had caught up with him.
Again.
Chapter 23
‘What is it?’ Samora asked.
Beck realized he had muttered something under his breath. ‘Long story, but we haven’t been rescued.’
How the heck had the Silverback caught up with them?
‘We should get over to those bushes and keep going,’ he added quickly.
Samora didn’t ask why. There was no time for discussion, anyway.
‘Come on – follow me,’ Beck whispered, and they quickly ran across the open ground, away from the compound and the black Jeep.
Beck scanned the shadows as they ran, keeping an eye open for any accomplices that James might have brought with him.
Then they were amongst the bushes and had to slow down, picking their way through carefully to avoid detection.
The gunshots and shouts faded away behind them. They paused for a moment, ears straining. Suddenly a car door slammed and a powerful engine revved. It came from the direction of the black Jeep – it was closer than Beck had realized. They heard the crash of gears as it reversed and turned round. The driver didn’t bother with headlights, which would have provided a handy target for any gun-toting poachers still around. The Jeep roared off into the night, smashing its way through any shrubs and bushes in its way.
Then, finally, there was only the silence of the night. The usual insect song poured into their ears until their brains tuned it out into the background.
‘OK,’ Samora said. ‘I think I’m due an explanation.’
‘I think so too,’ Beck agreed. ‘But first we should get going. We crossed the border, didn’t we?’
‘Yes. We’re about, um, ten miles inside Mozambique . . . Not more than that. But we’re still in the Kruger National Park. Any rangers should be able to help us.’
‘Yeah, but finding a ranger station would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Plus we don’t have passports and we’re in another country,’ Beck pointed out. ‘Even the friendliest ranger will automatically radio our presence to the authorities.’
Samora’s eyebrows went up. ‘And that’s a bad thing?’
‘Yes,’ he said firmly.
Beck knew from bitter experience that Lumos had tentacl
es everywhere. He wouldn’t feel safe until he was back with Al and Bongani and Athena.
‘Well, there are checkpoints on all the roads,’ she said, ‘but no fence or barriers so that the animals can move around freely. If we head across country, we should be OK.’
‘Cool. We’ll do that.’ That definitely suited Beck. Staying away from the roads also meant that there was less chance of the Silverback cruising by and picking them up.
‘But, Beck, if we’re not going straight to the authorities – how long will it take us to get back to where we want to be?’
He thought out loud: ‘It was a three-hour journey, but it was all pretty rough. They didn’t use proper roads so they couldn’t have travelled fast. Thirty miles an hour?’
‘Or forty, maximum. Not more, in a rusty old truck like that.’
‘So we came between ninety and a hundred and twenty miles. Now, say we walk at three miles an hour for ten hours a day – with breaks . . .’
Samora swallowed, but she didn’t complain. ‘Thirty miles a day,’ she said.
‘So, three days to walk ninety miles. Four to walk a hundred and twenty.’
They both paused to consider the implications of a four-day trek through the Kruger National Park.
‘We’d better get moving,’ Beck said.
Samora didn’t argue. She just asked: ‘Which way?’
Chapter 24
Beck looked up at the sky. He hadn’t yet had a chance to admire the stars. It was a sight you never got back home in London, where streetlights washed the starlight out of the sky with their bland shade of orange. Here they were a hundred miles from the nearest streetlight and the stars were clearer that he’d ever seen them – millions of them, in all directions, shining down upon the Earth like jewels.
Beck sometimes thought it was the most beautiful sight in the world.
A thick band of light ran across the sky. At first glance it looked a bit like a long cloud, until you examined it more closely and saw that it wasn’t just millions but billions of stars. It was the Milky Way, the galaxy that Earth’s sun was part of, seen side-on.
Back home, or anywhere in the northern hemisphere, Beck would have been looking for the Plough. Find that and you can find the North Star, which doesn’t move across the sky but always stays in the north. Once you know where that is, you can navigate in any direction.
But you can’t see it from the southern hemisphere. The Earth gets in the way. Instead, Beck ran his eye along the Milky Way until he came to the Coalsack. It was a dark patch, like a hole in the field of stars. It wasn’t really a hole – Al had told Beck that it was a vast cloud of interstellar dust, 600 light years away from Earth, blotting out the light of the stars behind it. That was a whole lot cooler than a hole, Beck thought.
Once he had located the Coalsack, he could find the Southern Cross. This was a collection of four stars nearby. They always reminded Beck of a small dagger, with a short handle and a long blade pointing upwards. The stars at the tip of the blade and the right-hand end of the hilt were the two brightest in the sky.
The Southern Cross was tilted over by a couple of degrees. Beck squinted and held his hand up vertically to measure. He drew a line in his head across the sky that extended the line of the hilt, heading down towards the horizon. When his mental line was about five times longer than the hilt, he stopped. Then he noted the bit of the horizon that was right below it.
That bit was the south.
He turned ninety degrees to his right.
‘We go west,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a couple of hours of darkness left. We’ll get as far away as we can while they can’t see us . . .’ He trailed off.
‘Yes?’ Samora prompted.
Beck bit his lip. ‘I know how to survive pretty well in—’
‘I know you do.’
‘I mean, I know how to survive in most terrains pretty well . . . but I’ve not been here before and there’s going to be a ton of things I don’t know about this terrain. Like the hunting patterns of some aggressive predators. And those things you only get wrong once.’
Samora chuckled. ‘You keep us alive; I’ll handle the indigenous wildlife here. I know their habits. Deal?’
‘Deal,’ he agreed gratefully. It was, he reflected, an unusual reversal of roles, but he was very grateful for it.
And so they set off into the darkness.
Chapter 25
As they walked, Beck told Samora everything he knew about Lumos.
‘But I don’t know how they found me . . .’ he finished.
They walked a few paces in silence while Samora digested everything he had said.
‘Radio tracking.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s how we keep track of herds, or individual animals, or even birds. Like that elephant, remember? We fasten a small tracker to them. With the right equipment you can find them on the other side of the world. So you can certainly track people the same way.’
Beck’s brow creased as he thought. ‘So when would anyone have had time to plant a tracker on me?’
‘I don’t know. When was the last time you were with someone who isn’t me or Al or Athena or my father?’
‘Well . . . the lodge, I suppose. Then . . . the helicopter? The pilot? No, we didn’t go near each other . . . Anyway, the guy I mentioned found us before that, in the township . . . And the only place we had been before that was the airport.’
And there had been no time for anyone to plant a tracker on him, had there? Beck was ready to push the idea out of his head altogether . . . when he remembered.
He had been pushing the trolley through a crowd, and there had been that particularly hard bump, just once. It had made him feel like a pinball.
‘OK . . . Hang on.’
He stopped and looked down at himself. The sun was still below the horizon, but only just. Sunrise was approaching and all the world was grey, including his own body, but he could make out his shape.
He started to pat himself down. Surely he would have noticed something sticking to him . . . Or someone else would have.
It couldn’t be his pockets – he would have noticed when he put his hands in them. It couldn’t be stuck down his waistband – he would certainly have noticed someone doing that.
But . . .
There was one pocket he didn’t use. His top shirt pocket. He slid his fingers in – and they brushed against something small and plastic.
It was like a SIM card, nothing more than that. It didn’t have any flashing lights on it and it didn’t go beep. But it was clearly electronic, and Beck had never seen it before in his life. He held it up.
‘This?’ he whispered.
‘That’s the kind of thing.’ Samora’s voice was equally hushed, even though she realized that the device probably wasn’t transmitting sound. ‘They have to be small. Like I said, we fasten them to birds.’
Beck dropped it and raised his foot. ‘Just in case you’re listening,’ he said, ‘we found you.’
And he brought his foot down. It crunched very nicely.
He was surprised to find that he was breathing heavily. It had really got to him: the knowledge that he had been carrying a bit of Lumos around with him all this time made him feel dirty.
‘Eew.’ Samora was staring at him.
‘What?’ He started to pat himself down again, convinced she must have seen a second tracker.
‘That means you’re still wearing the same shirt you were wearing after a twelve-hour flight, and the whole day after that.’
Beck stopped patting. ‘Yeah, well . . .’ He fought the urge to sniff his armpits. ‘I didn’t have time to change it this morning.’
‘All boys are the same!’ Samora joked.
They turned to go.
‘And I did change my underwear,’ Beck added dryly.
‘Good!’ she replied as he ground the pieces of the tracking device a bit further into the dirt.
Chapter 26
They walked with their backs to
the sunrise so they didn’t see it come up. They were just aware of an orange light washing over the landscape around them, making the shadows of night slowly evaporate.
It should have been a beautiful sight . . . but to Beck it was bad news.
It meant that the day was going to get hotter and that they were going to get thirstier.
The poachers hadn’t given them anything to drink, so their mouths had been dry even before they set off. The excitement of escaping the gunfight had been enough to keep them going for a while. But as Beck explained about Lumos to Samora, he had been aware that his mouth was getting dryer all the time.
She must have been feeling it too, because her questions had slowly petered out. When she did talk, he heard it in her voice. Her tongue was thick with dehydration, sticking to the roof of her mouth.
Samora was the first to say it out loud.
‘I could really do with a glass of water.’ She tried to make it sound like a light, throwaway comment.
‘Uh-huh.’
They could both have done with something to eat too – they hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before – but they could go for much longer before collapsing from lack of food. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was water, and it wasn’t just a question of being thirsty. Thirst was uncomfortable, but people can live with that. There is more to lack of water than just being thirsty. There is dehydration.
‘Three weeks without food, three days without water!’ That had been something an instructor had once drummed into Beck, over and over again. ‘That’s as long as a human being can go without two of the three most important things.’ (Beck had quickly asked what the third was, and the man had grinned. ‘Three minutes without air. So don’t go getting stuck underwater, Beck!’)
So three days without water. Max. And those three days assumed you weren’t exerting yourself or using a lot of energy – certainly not walking across the veld during the heat of a southern African day.
At least they were dressed for it, though. They still wore their sensible safari outfits. But without water, those were the clothes they would die in. As they dehydrated, their organs would pack up, one by one, until eventually their legs would no longer have the strength to propel them forwards.