Hostage

by Chris Ryan

  Alex frowned, thinking hard. Then his face cleared as an idea came to him. He stripped the thin, inner glove from his left hand, then plunged his hand down through the snow until he reached the frozen ground of the trail. His fingers began to ache, then hurt, and then grow numb as he scrabbled around under the snow. Finally, he found what he was looking for. He pulled his hand out of the snow with a small stone clutched in his blue fingers.

  Alex blew on his hand to warm it, then pulled his inner glove on again. Opening the survival tin for a second time, he removed a small amount of the kindling material and wrapped it around the stone. Finally, he struck a third match and held it to the kindling until it was burning so well, he was in danger of setting fire to his glove.

  'Here goes,' whispered Alex.

  He took aim and threw the stone. It landed right in the middle of the fuel-soaked area around the snowmobile. For a second, nothing happened. Then the ground burst into flames with an explosive whump.

  Cyclops flinched away from the flames, then, instead of running, he turned back and reared up on to his hind legs with a roar.

  'It's not working!' hissed Amber, but Alex was watching a twisting snake of flame wriggle towards the snowmobile's fuel tank. An instant later, a second, much bigger explosion sent bellowing gouts of flame up as high as the tree tops. Alpha Force flattened themselves into the snow as a blast of scorching air spread outwards from the centre of the explosion.

  Cyclops roared again, but this time it was more of a scream. Alpha Force raised their heads, shielding their faces against the heat of the flames. The bear was down on all fours, swatting at its scorched nose. All down one side, its fur was blackened and smoking. The bear flinched sideways as a second explosion came from the burning snowmobile, then the huge beast turned tail and ran. Alpha Force sat up and listened to the bear crashing away through the forest as fast as it could go.

  'Missing you already,' muttered Hex, staggering to his feet. He hurried over to the dead man and began going through the pockets of the tattered jacket, trying not to look too closely at what the bear had done to the body.

  Amber looked around with a dazed expression, as though she could not quite believe she was still alive. She began to shake and the shaking grew stronger and stronger, until her teeth were chattering uncontrollably. Li shuffled over and put her arms around her friend.

  'Amber?' said Alex. 'Are you ready to move out?'

  'Give her a minute, can't you?' demanded Li.

  'We don't have a minute,' said Alex quietly.

  'But the bear – it will not return,' said Paulo.

  'It's not the bear I'm worried about.' Alex nodded over at the body. 'There might be more like him.'

  Amber, Li and Paulo looked up at him in shocked understanding. There could be more than one killer out there. The man could have a partner, or even a whole team working for him.

  'OK. I'm OK,' said Amber, climbing to her feet and bracing her knees to stop her legs from shaking.

  'Where do we go?' asked Paulo, as Hex returned to the group, stuffing something into an inside pocket of his jacket.

  'Away from here,' said Alex, glancing up at the column of thick, black smoke rising above the tree tops. 'If there are more killers in the area, this smoke is going to bring them running. We'll head inland. Hudson Bay is not a good place to be right now.'

  After an hour of travelling, Alex began to look out for a good, sheltered stopping place. The smoke from the burning snowmobile was far enough behind them now and he was worried about the way his own machine was performing. It had taken several tries to start it and the engine note was rough and uneven. The wind had dropped as they made their way inland through the darkening day, but so had the temperature. According to the digital thermometer display on his dashboard, it was now twenty-five below zero, and even with their layers of arctic gear they were all beginning to feel the cold. At first Alex had been sweating behind his goggles, but now the sweat that had collected in his eyebrows had formed a crackling layer of frost and his nostrils were becoming blocked with plugs of ice.

  He spotted a particularly thick stand of spruce trees and motioned the others to a halt. They waited with their engines idling while he studied the spot. The outer trees on one side of the stand were flagged. This meant that the branches only grew on one side of the trunk, giving the tree the appearance of a flag on a pole. The flagged trees were a good indication of the direction of the prevailing wind and this was important in choosing a good spot to camp. It would not be a good idea to set up a shelter on a calm evening, only to find a howling gale blowing through the entrance the next morning.

  Alex pointed to the lee side of the stand of trees and they set off again, driving slowly along until he spotted what he wanted. Three spruce trees were growing shoulder to shoulder in a line, so close together that their lower branches merged together under their covering of snow. He brought his spluttering snowmobile to a halt in front of the three spruce trees and turned off the engine. The others parked up beside him one by one and turned off their engines too. The deep silence of the interior settled around them as they eased off their goggles and clambered stiffly from their machines.

  'Fingers? Toes?' asked Alex. His face was so stiff with cold, the words came out slurred, but the others knew what he meant. They each checked for any sign of pins and needles or numbness that could be the start of frostbite. Next, Alex peered into each face in turn, checking noses and cheekbones. They all looked fine, just pinched with cold and tiredness.

  Amber raised her frosted eyebrows, which looked very white next to her dark skin. 'Do we pass inspection?' she asked.

  Alex grinned, pleased to see that she was back to her old, sarcastic self. 'Yes. You pass. And here's your reward.'

  He reached inside his outer jacket and removed a small cloth bag which was hanging from his neck by a cord. He opened the drawstring and produced five bars of chocolate.

  'Oh! I love you!' yelled Amber, tearing off her outer gloves and grabbing one of the chocolate bars. She ripped off the packaging and crammed the chocolate into her mouth. "Sgood,' she mumbled.

  Everyone else grabbed a bar and began to eat as though they had not seen food for days. In such low temperatures their bodies used up huge amounts of energy just to stay warm, and since they had arrived in northern Canada they had all discovered a craving for fat in any shape or form. Here, even Amber could safely eat chocolate without worrying about blood sugar levels because she would burn it all up again within a couple of hours.

  'Now, that is what I call survival expertise,' said Paulo, grinning at Alex with chocolate-coated teeth. Paulo knew that all the food in the trailers would be frozen solid and he had not been looking forward to the long, drawn-out process of lighting a fire and thawing everything out before they could start cooking. 'It is a good trick,' he added. 'Wearing your food. I shall have to remember that.'

  Paulo looked down at Li, expecting her to meet his gaze with laughter sparkling in her uptilted eyes. Instead, she stood next to him, silent and pale, gazing back the way they had come. There was an awkward silence as the rest of Alpha Force remembered that Li had lost a dear friend that day.

  'Right,' said Alex, breaking the silence. 'We've had our energy boost. Now let's make camp.'

  EIGHT

  Alex had chosen the three spruce trees because of their spreading, interlinking lower branches. Snow had built up on the top side of the branches, weighing them down so that they bent to the ground. More snow had piled up around the outside of the bent branches, effectively anchoring them in place. Underneath the tent-like branches, where the snow could no longer reach, a natural hollow had formed.

  Once they had unloaded the snow shovels from the trailers, Alex showed Amber and Hex how to dig down carefully into the snow beneath the trees to enlarge the existing hollow without disturbing the outer branches. Li and Paulo set off into the trees to collect as much dead wood as they could find. They were going to need huge amounts of fuel to keep them warm t
hrough a night of sub-zero temperatures. Alex concentrated on getting a fire going. First, he dug out a fire pit in front of their shelter trees. Using the snow he had dug out and the snow that Amber and Hex were clearing from under the trees, he built a snow bank behind the fire pit to create extra shelter and reflect the heat from the fire back into the hollows under the trees.

  Starting with a pyramid of small, dry twigs and another piece of his precious kindling, Alex used his flint to create a spark. Soon the kindling and twigs were burning well and he began building up the fire by adding branches from Li and Paulo's first load of dead wood. Once he had a good blaze going, he filled two billycans with snow and set them on the edges of the fire to melt, then he strapped on his snowshoes and set off towards a willow thicket he had noted on the way in. Rabbits and snowshoe hares were common in this region and they loved to eat willow bark. Alpha Force were carrying a limited supply of food but Alex wanted to supplement it in case they had to stay hidden for a while.

  The sun was starting to set as he tramped through the snow towards the willow thicket and everything had an edging of gold. Alex smiled as he looked around. He felt at home in northern Canada. It reminded him of some of the remoter forests and moors back home in Northumberland. His sharp eyes noted a group of ptarmigan under a spruce tree. The birds were pure white and almost perfectly camouflaged against the snow, but they were scratching for food under the trees and the movement of their large, densely feathered feet had caught his eye.

  Alex stopped, debating whether to try to catch one, but then he saw that another hunter was already stalking the birds. An arctic fox was stepping slowly through the snow, weaving along the edge of the tree line. The fox already had its white winter coat, which was perfectly adapted for cold-climate survival. Each hair of the coat was hollow inside and full of air. This worked like the layer of air in a double-glazing unit, trapping the fox's body warmth and enabling it to tolerate temperatures as low as forty below zero.

  As Alex watched, the fox reached the tree next to the ptarmigan and flattened itself into the snow, preparing to pounce. An instant later, it launched itself at the birds. They rose up into the air and flew off in a flurry of feathers and squawks.

  Alex thought they had all managed to escape, but when he looked again at the fox, it was trotting off with a bird hanging limply from its jaws. He smiled in admiration for a hunter that could catch its prey without the use of snares or traps. He also made a note to check his snares before morning. If he did not retrieve his catch pretty quickly, the fox would eat it right out of the snare.

  When he reached the thicket, Alex was pleased to see that there were several trails through the snow made by rabbits or hares. Pulling off his outer mittens, he took the snare wire from his survival tin and set to work. He fashioned a slipknot noose out of the brass snare wire and then rubbed the metal with rabbit droppings to dull the shine and hide any human smell. Next, he hung the snare from a willow branch overhanging one of the trails. Finally, he blocked the sides of the trail with a fence of small sticks. This would funnel the rabbit into middle of the trail and it would run straight into his snare. The noose would instantly tighten around the rabbit's neck, cutting off its air supply and killing it quickly.

  Alex set a dozen traps in the willow thicket, reckoning that he would catch three or four rabbits if he was lucky. By the time he got back to the camp site, Amber and Hex had finished the shelters. Each hollow had a sleeping platform made of snow, which Amber and Hex had tramped down with their snowshoes and then covered with spruce boughs to create an insulating mattress for their sleeping bags. Paulo and Li had collected a huge pile of dead wood, including two sections of tree trunk which they had set in front of the fire to serve as seats. Paulo had made a hot drink for everyone by adding stock cubes to the first batch of melted snow and now two more billycans were strung over the fire, heating up five boil-in-the-bag meals. Paulo had also placed a large, flat stone on the edge of the fire where he was slow-baking flat, savoury biscuits made from oatmeal and melted snow. A large pat of butter was thawing next to the stone, ready to spread on the biscuits when they were done.

  Alex sat down and accepted his share of the stock-cube drink. For a moment, everything was quiet as Alpha Force sat staring into the fire, lost in their private thoughts. Then Alex straightened and looked around the circle.

  'Time to talk,' he said. 'Who wants to start?'

  'Me,' said Hex, and everyone looked at him in surprise. Usually, when they had a problem to solve, Hex preferred to sit back and listen to them flounder for a while, before coming in with a devastatingly neat and logical solution.

  Hex smiled wryly at their surprised expressions, then he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out the object he had taken from their pursuer's body. It was a mobile phone.

  'His?' asked Amber, jerking her thumb back the way they had come.

  'Yes. This is what gave him away, remember?'

  They nodded, remembering how the man's phone had started ringing as they stood in a shocked circle around Papaluk's frozen body. 'I took it because I wanted to know who was calling him,' continued Hex. He stripped off his gloves, switched on the phone and studied the display. 'Text message,' he muttered, accessing the menu.

  They were silent, listening to the beeps as Hex negotiated his way around the phone, stopping every now and then to read the information on the display. 'OK,' he said finally. 'Here's what we have. Just after he killed Papaluk, he sent a text message to some guy called "D". The message he sent reads, "Original leak sealed. Poss. 5 more. Total containment?"'

  Hex lifted his eyes from the screen and watched the others absorb the meaning of the text message.

  'I am thinking our own Papaluk was the original leak,' said Paulo, sending Li a sympathetic glance.

  'And by "sealed" he means he killed her!' growled Amber.

  'And we must be the five more possible leaks,' said Paulo.

  'So, when he talks about total containment, he's asking D whether he should kill us too,' said Alex flatly.

  'What was D's reply?' asked Amber.

  For answer, Hex pressed a button and turned the phone so that they could all see the one word on the screen. 'Yes.'

  'That's why the guy was hiding to start with,' said Hex. 'He was waiting for instructions from his boss.'

  'And his boss told him to kill us,' said Alex.

  'Just who the hell is this D guy?' demanded Amber.

  'Let's find out,' said Hex. He checked the last number dialled and hit the redial button. The phone connected and they all gathered round to hear who picked up at the other end. They got a recorded voice.

  'Daniel Usher is busy. Leave a message.'

  'So, D stands for Daniel Usher, the head of Usher Mining Corporation,' drawled Hex, breaking the connection.

  'He is not polite,' commented Paulo.

  Hex smiled without humour. '"Not polite". That's one way of describing him. "Murderer" is another.'

  'I – you know, guys, I—' Amber came to a halt with a look of intense concentration on her face. 'I think I know that voice – I just can't place it. ..'

  Hex reached inside his jacket and brought out the soft leather pouch that held his palm-sized PC. Quickly, he slipped the little computer from the bag and lifted the lid. The palmtop had been a gift from Amber. It had come straight from the development labs and was so technologically advanced it was not yet available on the open market. There was a flat aerial in the lid which could give access to the Net via the nearest communications satellite. Within minutes, Hex was connected. His fingers danced across the little keyboard as he began his search for information on Daniel Usher. He started with the official Usher Mining Corporation site. As he had hoped, there was a glossy colour image of Daniel Usher smiling out of the screen. He was a white man in his early forties, tanned and fit looking, with blue eyes and thick, dark hair, greying at the temples. His smile was warm and wide and his eyes stared confidently from the screen.

&nb
sp; 'Does that help?' he asked, turning the screen so that Amber could see it.

  Amber gasped. 'That slimeball!' she cried. 'Sure I remember him! He's one of the richest guys in America. He has his fingers in all sorts of pies. He used to show up at some of my parents' parties, before they sold the business and got out of that whole scene.'

  'He was a family friend?' asked Paulo.

  'Nah! My parents thought he was a slimeball too.'

  'Why did they ask him to their parties, if they didn't like him?' asked Alex.

  'They weren't the sort of parties you asked your friends to,' said Amber with a sigh, remembering the long, boring hours spent in her parents' New York penthouse, talking to people she didn't know and smiling at people she didn't like.

  'What other sort of parties are there?' asked Alex, his face a picture of puzzlement in the firelight.

  'Aw, hell, you know. Schmoozing, politics, wheeler-dealing . . .' Amber faltered to a halt, at a loss as to how to explain the sort of corporate entertainment her parents had dutifully provided before they decided to turn their backs on all that. Parties where someone else wrote the guest list, prepared the food and served the drinks.

  'You know. Business parties . . .' finished Amber lamely. She and Alex stared at one another across the fire. They were less than a metre apart but there was suddenly a wide gulf between the rich American girl and the boy from a village in Northumberland.

  The silence stretched out until finally Alex shook his head.

  'What!' demanded Amber.

  'Rich people,' said Alex. 'All that money and they still can't throw a good knees-up.'

  He grinned and Amber grinned back. 'Yeah, but I can throw a good snowball,' she said, grabbing a double handful of snow and preparing to lob it at Alex. He pounced on her, knocking the snowball from her hands. Amber fell off the back of the log and, as Alex reached out a hand to help her up, she pulled him down into the snow after her.

  Paulo laughed and turned to Li, expecting her to be up on her feet and ready to join in. Li did not even raise her head and Paulo's smile disappeared like a light going out. Amber and Alex shared a look, then got to their feet and brushed the snow from their clothes.