Mission Survival 8

by Bear Grylls

  He pushed the button firmly.

  Chapter 46

  ‘All OK?’ James sounded doubtful. Beck barely heard him. Nothing was happening!

  Then, just as he was about to take his thumb away, the engine coughed. A cloud of smoke blew out of the exhausts. With a rising whine that turned into a roar, the propeller began to spin.

  James had only now spotted the missing link in Beck’s flying lessons. ‘Hang on . . . Did he let you land as well?’

  ‘Uh – no.’

  ‘Uh – isn’t that kind of important . . .?’

  The plane wasn’t moving. Beck found the lever marked BRAKES and let it go. The plane twitched, but that was all. The throttle! It was pulled right back, so the engine was on minimum revs. He wrapped his fingers around it and pushed it slowly forward. The engine roared twice as loud. The plane shuddered, and began to move.

  Heading straight for the jet.

  James shrieked in Beck’s ears as Beck kicked down hard on the rudder pedal. The plane swerved round, violently enough to tilt up on one of its wheels. Beck kicked on the other pedal to straighten up and pulled back on the throttle to slow down again.

  Now they were facing down the runway. This was it. Beck glanced over to one side. They were in view of the guards now, and the men were all looking their way. Maybe they didn’t know who was in the plane, but they could surely tell that it wasn’t an expert at the controls. It was time to go.

  The plane started to trundle forward in a straight line. Beck pushed the throttle hard forward. The engine roared again and the plane began to speed up.

  But it was still only trundling along at a fast walking pace. Beck knew it was nowhere near take-off speed, even though the whole frame shook with the power of the engine. He ran his mind back to that one lesson. What was it? Think, think . . .

  ‘Um, they’re coming . . .’ James shouted.

  Some of the men had left the guard post and were running purposefully towards them.

  Beck’s eyes fell on a lever marked PITCH. Of course! Pitch controlled the angle of the propeller blades as they cut through the air. And that changed the amount of thrust you got out of them. For driving around on the ground you only wanted a little thrust, just enough to keep the plane moving. For taking off, you wanted lots and lots.

  Beck moved the lever to its fullest setting. The plane roared and the acceleration pushed him back into his seat. James whooped in his ears as the plane hurled itself forward.

  Now, how fast did this thing have to be going to take off? There was a notch on the speed dial at the sixty mark. Beck hoped and trusted that this was the one. The needle seemed to crawl up towards it.

  The tail wheel had left the ground and the plane was running horizontally on its two wing wheels. The needle reached sixty and Beck pulled back on the stick.

  The ground fell away. They were airborne.

  ‘Yeah, baby!’ James shouted happily. And then: ‘Uh, Beck. I think they’re, uh, shooting at us . . .’

  Beck’s head whipped round. Far below, the guards were kneeling down, their guns raised to their shoulders. All he could see was little flashes of light flickering at the end of the barrels.

  Suddenly a line of small holes appeared in the left wing tip, like it had just been run over by a giant sewing machine. The plane lurched to the right. Beck instinctively flinched and pushed the stick over the other way. The plane swerved like it was falling out of the sky. Beck’s stomach seemed to have been left behind somewhere. He pulled the stick back again to straighten out.

  ‘They can’t shoot me! I’m their boss’s grandson!’ James yelped.

  ‘They don’t know that,’ Beck muttered. ‘They just know the plane’s been stolen . . .’

  The throttle was still at full power. They should be going as fast as they could but the plane was shuddering like a car in the wrong gear. He remembered that changing pitch again, once they were up, would help the airspeed. He pushed the pitch lever halfway back to its old position. The shuddering died down and he felt the plane pick up speed once more.

  But the guards were still shooting. And then, suddenly, there was a clattering in front of him as if someone was smashing up a load of machinery. The engine belched and shuddered and a cloud of black smoke suddenly blew back over the cockpit.

  They had been hit. The engine was losing power and the plane began to fall out of the sky.

  Chapter 47

  Beck ignored James’s yells. All his attention was on coordinating the throttle and the pitch lever and the control stick and the rudder pedals. The plane was still falling, but somehow he found a magic combination that made the engine cough back into life.

  It only had a fraction of its old power, but they were high enough that they could afford to descend a little. They had left the high valley of the monastery, and were now out of shooting range.

  Beck looked out at the peaks that soared around them. ‘I’m going to try and go round that mountain ahead,’ he shouted. ‘If we put it between them and us, it’ll buy us some time.’

  ‘Right,’ came the nervous response. ‘In the unlikely event that we survive . . .’

  Heart pounding, Beck pulled back on the stick. The nose of the plane tilted up but the engine sound grew even more laboured. He felt his ears pop and glanced at the altimeter. They were pointing upwards, but they were falling.

  He pushed the throttle forward to feed more power to the engine. It continued to cough and splutter, but the propeller seemed more effective now. The altimeter showed that they were going up again, little by little.

  Unfortunately, the fuel gauge was visibly dropping. The guards must have holed the tank. Beck was just glad that the whole plane hadn’t blown up on the spot.

  ‘Uh, Beck?’ said the voice in his ears. ‘We seem to be going up. Don’t we want to go down?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll go down,’ Beck said confidently. That was the one part he could absolutely guarantee. The plane was shaking all around him. The fuel needle had dropped down into the red; smoke was still billowing out of the engine casing.

  The mountain loomed ahead, and he nudged on the stick to take them round it. The ground dropped away even further on the other side; below them he saw thick cloud. The sides of a deep valley rose out of it, laced with snow. There was lots more space for the plane, and them, to fall out of. Yes! Beck thought.

  ‘Oh, blimey!’ James had seen the same thing. ‘It’s miles down! You’ve got to take us down now!’

  ‘I’m not taking us down. We’re jumping.’

  ‘Eh?’

  Beck made himself sound calm, though his heart was thumping in his chest. ‘I don’t know how to land – we’re going to crash anyway – and if we don’t, then the plane will probably just blow up first. We need to get out. It’s easy. We’ve got parachutes.’

  ‘I hate you, Beck Granger!’ James shrieked.

  ‘Consider it payback for kicking me!’

  The engine was spluttering, at its last gasp. Beck issued the instructions quickly and urgently: ‘There’s a handle on your parachute harness – on the left, by your waist.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘The moment you’re out of the plane, pull on it. Once your chute opens, there’ll be handles on straps by your shoulders. Pull on them to go left or right. You’ll have plenty of time to practise. When you come in to land, pull on both of them together. That’ll slow you down and you’ll touch down gently. Hopefully.’ Beck paused. ‘Now, open the canopy ’cos I can’t take my hands off the controls.’

  Another pause, and then the canopy slid back. Freezing wind laced with oily smoke blasted into the cockpit.

  ‘Undo your seat belt,’ Beck shouted. He fumbled with his buckle to release his own.

  ‘Done. Do I climb out now?’

  ‘No need.’ Beck pushed the stick hard over to one side. The plane flipped over onto its back and they both simply dropped out like bombs into the clear air.

  Chapter 48

  Beck’s body fell, totally
out of control, through the whiteout of the clouds. Hurricane-force winds pummelled him from every side. This wasn’t the careful, planned skydiving he had done before. It wasn’t even like the time he’d had to bail out of a smugglers’ plane flying over the Sahara. He felt like a doll in a freezing tumble drier. And he wasn’t wearing goggles, so his eyes immediately teared up in the airflow and he couldn’t see a thing.

  Beck scrabbled at the handle on his harness and tugged. With a sound like the sky splitting open, his chute was ripped out of its pack.

  He swung like a pendulum beneath the canopy, round and round. Out in the clouds, everything was still white. He was still half-blinded by tears, but finally he felt his insides settling down and opened his eyes. Far below, a plume of smoke had to be the plane, still heading down towards the ground. Through the clouds, James’s chute was a splash of colour, apparently falling smoothly and under control. Great! Beck decided he would steer over towards his friend so that they could stay close together. But first he would have to lose some height.

  The way to do that was to spin down in a tight spiral, which made you drop more quickly. He tugged on one of the handles by his shoulder and felt his chute tip over to the right. He came round in a full half-circle – and cried out in surprise.

  He hadn’t realized that he was close to the side of the mountain. It had been lurking behind him, and now there it was, right in front. A massive wall of rock – and he was heading straight for it. He pulled hard on the strap again and began to turn. He had to get away from it, right away.

  A ledge loomed below him, and suddenly he knew he wasn’t going to make it. He just had time to grit his teeth and pull on the straps to cut his speed, and—

  BANG! He crashed into the rock. There was a wrench and a crack in his arm, and a spear of agony ran up from elbow to shoulder. Rough rock scraped against his face, and then he was falling again. His chute had collapsed and spilled out all its precious air. He was a jumbled mass of boy and silk, tumbling down the side of a rocky slope.

  Abruptly he was yanked to a standstill. The chute had caught on something. The ropes twanged around him. His arm took the opportunity to send a red-hot jab into him, and he clenched his teeth against a scream. Ahh, that hurt!

  But finally he was still, dangling in a tangled web over a very vertical precipice.

  So he could finally do something about his situation. Maybe he could pull himself up . . .

  He tried to reach the straps. Only one arm moved. The other hung uselessly at his side. He glared at it and tried to force it into action. Nothing happened. He was pretty sure his shoulder was broken.

  No, he couldn’t pull himself up. Not single-handed. Not like this.

  He gazed down. Beyond his feet was only the top of clouds. He had no way of knowing how high up he was.

  Beck closed his eyes.

  He had looked death in the eye many times – considerably more than most fourteen-year-olds. But even in the darkest times, there had always been a way out.

  He couldn’t see one now.

  If he stayed here, dangling, death was one hundred per cent certain. If he dropped . . .

  Ninety nine per cent? It all depended on how close the ground was, on the other side of those clouds. And there was only one way to find out. Beck knew he had no choice. Stay and die alone, or drop and risk it. He didn’t want to wait any longer. It would just give him more time to freak out and do nothing. He knew he had to act.

  With his good hand Beck felt for the release buckle of his chute. It was difficult to hold it and twist it like you were meant to. It was designed for two hands.

  And one day . . .

  An old man’s voice seemed to whisper in his ears, bitter and full of hate.

  . . . yes, one day, you know your luck will run out and the world will win. But what a life you’ll have lived until that day!

  The buckle opened up with a loud snap! and he tumbled into the clouds.

  Chapter 49

  Beck blinked in confusion. Somehow he knew he wasn’t really here. He should be falling, twisting in mid-air, hurtling towards the solid ground. He wasn’t ten years younger, sitting on his mother’s lap with her arms around him while they watched a video play out on a laptop.

  He struggled to turn round and look at her, but her arms held him tight. Her voice spoke in his ear. He could feel her breath tickle the side of his face.

  ‘Watch, sweetheart. Watch and learn.’

  On the screen, a mother snow leopard sat calm and impassive while three little cubs gambolled around her.

  ‘They really are like cats,’ his mother’s voice said. ‘They hunt what they can and eat what they can. They prefer small animals – their size or less. They generally steer clear of humans, if they can.’

  Another leopard lurked in the bushes, a larger male, eyes were fixed firmly on the cubs. It tensed, ready to pounce, and suddenly the mother leopard was there on top of it. The sleek, muscular bodies of the two adults wrapped around each other in a furious whirlwind of teeth and claws. The mother opened up a bloody gash across the male’s snout. He turned and fled.

  ‘They’ll defend their children with their lives. With everything they’ve got.’

  And then the scene onscreen changed again. One of the cubs had climbed a tree and had no idea how to get down again. It was giving out unhappy little squeaks. The mother jumped up and grabbed it in her mouth by the scruff of its neck. Then she carefully backed down the way she had come and dropped the cub gently back onto the ground.

  ‘So you see, a mother will do anything for her cubs. Fight for them, defend them, help them. See how she’s carrying her baby? He knows his mum’s looking out for him, and that makes him the safest baby in the world.’

  Beck marvelled that being held in a leopard’s mouth counted as ‘safe’.

  Suddenly the arms tightened in a farewell hug.

  ‘Oh, darling, I think you’ve seen enough. You can go now.’

  Little Beck began to cry. He didn’t want to go . . .

  Chapter 50

  Beck opened sore eyes and immediately squeezed them shut again. The cloud had gone and the sky was a blue canopy above him. He lay and basked in the sun’s heat.

  At the back of his mind he knew that every part of his body hurt as though he had been beaten with a baseball bat. A safety fuse in his brain was stopping him from feeling all the pain, all at once. He wiggled his toes and fingers experimentally. They moved. The rest of him . . . The rest of him felt like it could move, if it had to. But he would really rather it didn’t.

  There was something important going on. He frowned as he tried to remember what it was. He had a dim memory of being suspended in space, air rushing past him. Then a massive blow that shocked the consciousness out of him.

  There was something cold and wet at his fingertips. In fact, he was lying in it. Like the pain, the cold and wet were only an issue if you thought about them. It was much easier to lie here and feel warm and woozy.

  Warm and woozy . . . That rang a bell, and he didn’t like it. In fact, he felt annoyed that two such nice, snug words had such a bad sound to them. What was wrong with warm and woozy? He had been told about people who felt that way. It was the kind of thing you felt if . . . hang on . . . if you were . . .

  Oh yeah. Dying.

  Nope, not dying today, he resolved. With a huge mental effort, he summoned his mind back into his body. It came crashing down – along with all the pain and cold he had been trying not to feel, and a terrible, parching thirst. He opened his eyes again, cautiously.

  A vertical wall of rock rose above him. The cloud had gone and he could see all the way up to the sky. If he squinted, he could make out a patch of colour high above. The parachute, still snagged. He was lying on his back in snow. It was a brilliant, pure white that gleamed in the sun. He could only allow himself a quick glimpse before he felt the world start to spin and he had to close them again. How could just lying down and looking up make him dizzy?

  �
��Cos you’ve got concussion, brainiac, he told himself. Look how far you fell!

  He sneaked another look up at the cliff. Oh yeah. Quite a way.

  Beck tried to lift his head and look around. It made the world spin again and he had to let it fall back, but he just had time to spot something dark lying a short distance away. He kept his head pointing in that direction so he didn’t have to exert himself. He frowned. It was a tyre. A tyre, half buried in snow, halfway up a mountain. How did that get there?

  But in fact there was more to it than that. The tyre was still attached to the wheel. The wheel was attached to a metal strut . . .

  It was an aircraft wheel. He must have come down where the plane had crashed.

  No, he couldn’t have. He and James had fallen straight down. The plane had kept going. This must be another plane.

  Beck’s heart began to pound as he realized which other plane it might be. And then he froze, and stopped thinking about planes. Because right opposite him, about twenty metres away, was a snow leopard, quietly sitting on a rock. It was watching him through unblinking eyes.

  He remembered the snarling blur of teeth and claws that had attacked that bull. This was not a creature that showed mercy. The rush of blood made Beck feel woozy again.

  They really are like cats, his mother had said . . .

  Beck frowned. ‘Huh?’

  He remembered the conversation. He couldn’t recall when he’d had it. It was like seeing something that suddenly reminded you of a dream you had completely forgotten. It was fresh in his mind – but it couldn’t be, because his mum had died ten years ago.

  They hunt what they can and eat what they can. They prefer small animals, their size or less.

  His mum’s interest in leopards had taught him that cute does not equal safe. Beck knew all too well the danger he was in right now. But he couldn’t even stand up without feeling dizzy.

  His mum had said that snow leopards tried to steer clear of humans. It suddenly became very important to make this creature realize that he was a human, not just conveniently injured prey.