Mission Raptor

by Bear Grylls

  “So, we go.”

  They set off across the snow field, past the gully where they had spent the night, trudging urgently to make some ground up before the car returned down the track.

  As soon as they were out of sight of the van and the track, Beck stopped and looked up the snow face to his left. The way Storkittel bulged, he couldn’t see all the way up to the peak. What he could see was smooth fields of snow, spread like thick icing sugar over the slopes above them.

  “What's up, Beck?”

  “What angle would you say that slope is?”

  “Angle?” Jonas asked, baffled. He tilted his head. “I don’t know. Thirty degrees? Thirty-five?”

  “Exactly,” Beck said grimly, “and between thirty and forty degrees is one of the worst angles for avalanches.”

  “Ah.” Jonas looked quickly up at the snow above them, as if it might choose any moment to leap off the mountainside and come hurtling down at them. Then he looked up the track, torn between the risk of avalanche country and the woman who would be hunting them.

  But he was right to be cautious. Beck had never been in an avalanche, but he had watched one from a distance and he had seen the aftermath. A hundred thousand tons of snow, swooping downhill at over two hundred kilometres per hour. And contrary to what the movies said, it wasn’t just loud noises that set them off. It could be as simple as the sun melting a key patch of snow.

  Beck and Jonas were standing in a relatively thick drift of angled snow slope. Beck knelt down to scoop out a small pair of parallel trenches in the snow. Then he did the same again, at a different angle so that the tops and bottoms of the two trenches were joined. He had effectively dug out a square trench with a raised centre section.

  “What is that?” Jonas asked with fascination.

  “Avalanche trench.” Beck rested his forearms in the first two trenches and bent his wrists at right angles so that his fingers could intertwine in front of the centre section. Then he pulled back, as hard as he could. The centre section stayed where it was. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  “I learnt this when I stayed with a Sami tribe,” he said. “If this was avalanche territory, the snow would be loose and I’d have been able to pull the middle bit away. But it isn’t, so it’s probably safe — for now. But if that woman is smart she’s going to find our tracks in this deep snow.” He stood up and looked behind them at their footprints in the snow.

  “You think she could track us?” Jonas asked nervously.

  “Yes,” Beck said simply, “always assume the worst when it comes to survival — but hope for the best,” he added with a smile.

  Within the last year, he had had to track someone across Australia’s Kimberley desert — and if he, an amateur, could do that in a desert then he was sure an expert could do it here in the snow.

  He turned to go, and flinched by instinct as a shadow flitted rapidly across the snow towards him. But a second later the high pitched peal of a raptor came down out of the air above them. They both looked up.

  “Eagle? Buzzard?” Beck asked. Jonas squinted thoughtfully.

  “This high — probably an eagle. We’ll get other types when we get down to lower ground.”

  “Mm.” Beck thought.

  This was the raptors’ home territory, the place they belonged to by right — the clear air for them to soar in and the hundreds of square kilometres of ground below.

  But, what had Jonas said the day before? The harsh environment drove the prey animals out to look for food, and it was then that the raptors came hunting …

  They had to remember that this wasn’t just about them. Somehow Dr Winslow had to be told that his organisation had been infiltrated, and Jonas’s family had to be warned that professional hitmen were on their trail, and the authorities had to be informed.

  The people after them would do all they could to prevent that from happening. Right now, Jonas’s words pretty well described their own situation. They were the prey and the hunters were out for blood.

  Chapter Nineteen

  For a long time the only sound was their feet crunching in the snow. Their tracks were like marking a large arrow in the snow labelled ‘here they are’, pointed directly at their heads, Beck thought.

  Every step broke through a tiny crust of ice on the ground. The sound was dry and lifeless, like the air that blew in their faces. All the moisture in it had frozen out, and what was left would slowly freeze-dry them as they walked. Already Beck’s lips were tingling and they tasted of dry leather when he ran his tongue over them. How long since either of them had last drunk something? Too long.

  Beck shrugged the pack off his back and swung it round to his front without breaking step, so that he could pull the water flask out. They took turns to drain it, and Beck thought it was a sign of how dehydrated they already were that a litre of water disappeared into each of them with barely a pause.

  “Refill,” he said. Now he did stop, only briefly, to kneel and scoop the empty flask full of snow, before screwing the topper back on and stuffing it inside his coat, and setting off again. “Before long, it’ll have melted into lovely clean water all over again. We’re going to need at least two litres a day, and we should make extra sure we don’t dehydrate up here. But there’ll be plenty of water down below.”

  “This is Sweden,” Jonas agreed. His face was set and determined but he let out a smidgen of pride. “Ten percent of it is lakes.” He cast an eye around them. “Or we could just eat the snow? It’s only water in a different form.”

  “Yeah, frozen water,” Beck explained. “We could eat it but the reality is that it will just give us cold burns on our lips and mouth, like the worst ulcer ever. No, we’ll have to wait. But meanwhile — breakfast!”

  Jonas’s face lit up as Beck pulled out the sandwich and the apples from the pack. They divided the food between them, still on the move. Jonas’s portion disappeared entirely, and in seconds. Beck kept steadily working his way through his half of the sandwich, chewing every mouthful, hoping to get as much energy out of it as he could.

  “There were biscuits too…” Jonas pointed out.

  “Later,” Beck said firmly. “There’ll be plenty to eat down in the forest, but until we’re off the mountain we’ll conserve supplies.” He had to laugh at Jonas’s unhappy look. “Green Force is all about conservation, anyway!”

  “Conservation also means staying alive, Beck!” Jonas replied dryly.

  After that they concentrated on walking. It wasn’t just the snow that made it tiring on the legs. They were heading downhill, so every step came down a little lower than the last one, and it sent an extra little shock up the leg. Beck was doubly glad their kidnappers had thought to include their outdoor gear, even if it had only been so they could literally get away with murder. Making this trip in his indoor shoes, melted snow soaking into his feet with every step, did not bear thinking about. He focused on the knowledge that every step took them further down Storkittel and closer to the forest below, and once they were off the snow, there would be less of a trail for anyone to follow.

  They angled around the steeper parts of the slope, Beck always trying to find the compromise between the easiest ground to walk on and the route they needed to take, sticking to eastwards as much as possible. But then they came to a section that they simply couldn’t avoid.

  A sheer slope of snow and ice cut across their path, dropping fifty metres to a pile of jumbled boulders. It was like a gash in the mountainside. On the other side, only about ten metres away, Storkittel’s gentle incline resumed — but for those few key metres, the angle had to be something like forty degrees or more. One wrong step and they would skid straight down into those boulders, unable to brake their fall.

  They stood on the edge, looked down, looked up. The slope ended another fifty metres above them, in a sheer wall of rock. Up above them, the wind had carved a cornice — something like a wave of overhanging snow, a smooth, curved half-tunnel which could be lethal if it decided to collapse ont
o them.

  He peered down, and then back the way they had come, and ahead. Retracing their steps until they could find another way around would just cost them valuable time and run the risk of bumping slap bang into those pursuing them, if the woman had picked up their footprints.

  “We just have to do this quickly,” he said. He pulled the rope from his pack and swiftly tied a large bowline loop in either end. One loop went under his arms, the other under Jonas’s.

  “Sit down,” he told his friend. “Dig your heels in and face forward. And then—”

  “And then, if you fall, I catch you. Got it.”

  Jonas set his face — the look he got when he was going to do something he wasn’t looking forward to — and plonked himself down in the snow. He kicked his heels in, one at a time, and took a firm hold of the rope. “Okay, go.”

  And so Beck leaned onto the first part of the slope, resting his hands against the snow and kicking his right foot hard into the compacted snow. It sank in as far as his instep, creating a foothold. He stepped out, right foot supported and left foot hanging over the drop until he kicked that one in as well. Now he was a good two metres away from Jonas, and if the snow gave way then Jonas holding him was his only hope to save him from the rocks fifty metres below.

  So, he told himself, try not to fall…

  Chapter Twenty

  And so he sidled slowly down — kicking out with first his right foot, then bringing his left foot next to it, kick out with right foot again — kick by kick, with the rope paying out slowly behind him. Half way across his legs were aching — but with the angle of the slope, he could just bend his knees and rest his lower legs from knee to ankle flat against the slope. Then he carried on, and five minutes later he was safely across the steep ice slope.

  “Now you,” he called. “Step where I stepped, that way you know the snow is still strong under you. With your two feet and two hands, make sure three of them are always still and you only move one of them at a time.”

  He sat down and braced himself as Jonas had done. Jonas hesitated, then visibly gathered his courage up and set out.

  Jonas took a lot longer to do it. He moved slower than Beck, and he didn’t quite have the confidence to move his right leg as far out each time so that he had to kick a fresh toe hold every second step. Every time he did, he flashed a proud smile that seemed to say, ‘wow, look what I did!’

  Beck waited patiently, legs braced and ready to take the weight should Jonas fall. He could feel the cold seeping into his backside even through his waterproof, insulated snow trousers. There was no point trying to make Jonas hurry. The other boy had never done this before, and trying to force anything was the best way to invite disaster.

  But eventually Jonas was standing safely beside him, breathing more heavily than before, but Beck could now stand up again. He started to coil the rope up so that he could put it back into the pack.

  “Is it possible to book natural obstacles in advance?” Jonas asked. “If so, I’d like to cancel any more things like that.”

  “Sorry, customer service requires five days’ notice.”

  Beck gave the water flask a check and found that most of the snow had melted. He gave the flask a good shake and by the time the contents had settled it only held clear water. They drank and ate a couple more biscuits, before Beck filled the flask up with more snow and they could set off again.

  “It’s getting warmer,” Jonas commented. He opened the zip of his coat a little to make the point — a wise move, Beck thought, to let sweat ventilate naturally rather than freeze on him.

  “It should,” he said. “About three degrees for every three hundred metres we descend, if I remember right.”

  Jonas looked down the slope towards the rolling, snow-free land below them.

  “It should be much better going also down there, then. I’ll look forward to getting off this mountain.”

  “Off the snow,” Beck agreed. It couldn’t happen soon enough.

  “Walking on the flat…”

  But Storkittel had one more surprise to throw at them.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Wait!”

  Beck put up a hand to stop Jonas and the other boy looked at him in surprise.

  “Va?”

  Beck just nodded at what lay ahead. The ground dipped suddenly in front of them, and then there was a few hundred metres of flat, rumpled white ahead of them. Jonas looked at it blankly.

  “More snow. So what?”

  “It’s not snow.”

  Maybe Jonas couldn’t see the difference, but Beck could. It was distinctly different terrain — a band, in fact, that came down from above, to their right, and carried on down to their left as far as he could see.

  “It’s the glacier,” Beck said. “It looks solid, and it mostly is — but there’ll also be places where the snow is just a thin crust over a crevasse. And a crevasse here could mean a sheer drop, maybe fifty, sixty metres deep, and it’s invisible until you fall into it.”

  “Ah.”

  Jonas looked with more respect at the Storkittel glacier, the massive river of ice that blocked their path.

  “Well…” He was obviously having a struggle in his mind. On the one hand, he knew — because he had heard — about the dangers of glaciers. On the other, he could see one in front of him and… well, it looked okay. “We couldn’t just — you know — walk very carefully…?”

  “We could — but if anything went wrong we die.” Beck shrugged the pack of his back and pulled the rugs out, to get at the length of rope underneath. Jonas looked like he understood.

  “Aha! I see. Like when we climbed across that slope, we tie ourselves together…”

  “And if one of falls into a crevasse, then the second person should in principle be able to stop that fall. Well, in principle.” Beck said again.

  Beck tied a bowline around Jonas' waist and then measured out about five or six metres of rope and then tied the rope around his own waist. The rest of the line he coiled around his shoulders, like a climber.

  There were ready to go.

  “You lead the way Jonas, and then I can be your anchor if anything happens. But take your time and tread softly.”

  And so, the two boys moved cautiously out onto the glacier, testing each step carefully before putting their weight on it.

  Neither of them spoke. This wasn’t a time for chat — it was for concentrating, keeping an eye on the snow in front, scanning for the slightest clue as to what lay beneath. A dimple, an unusually smooth patch, a concave trench that was just a little lower than the snow around it…

  It was midday now so the sun was directly above them. Beck knew this wasn’t a good time of day to be crossing a glacier.

  First of all the sun would have heated up the snow by now making it weaker, but also because the sun didn’t cast any shadows across any depressions in the snow. Early in the day even gentle dips in the snow, where it sagged across crevasses, would stand out much clearer with a shadow. At midday it all just looked white and dead flat. Beck knew that was deceptive. But they had no choice. They had to keep moving.

  “Hey.” Jonas spoke suddenly, quietly. “I think this could be one. Right in front of me. What do I do?”

  Both of them had stopped. Beck peered over at the snow in front of his friend. He couldn’t see anything from where he was. Beck kicked himself for not having given Jonas the crowbar before setting out. If he had then Jonas could prod the snow to see if there was anything below the surface or not. If Beck walked over to Jonas with it, that would just miss the point of having the length of rope between them in the first place.

  “What does it look like?”

  “It’s sort of curved, downwards, a couple of centimetres.”

  “Okay, that could be one…” The crevasse would have formed as the glacier stretched and flexed beneath it, leaving the crust of snow on top. That crust would now be unsupported, and sagging. “Lie down where you’re standing — don’t move forward. Sprea
d your weight, then reach forward and hit the snow gently with your hand.”

  Beck was pretty sure that Jonas wasn’t standing directly on a crevasse, because he hadn’t fallen, so he would be safe in that position. And if there was a crevasse ahead, then hitting the crust in front of him would make it crumble, and hopefully reveal the direction the crevasse was taking. Then they would know which way to go to get around it.

  So Jonas lay down, reached out tentatively, and prodded the ground. Nothing happened. He tried again, a little harder. All that happened was his wrist sank into the snow to the depth of his fingers.

  “False alarm. Sorry.” Jonas clambered to his feet again and took a step back. “I— Yah!”

  And suddenly he wasn’t there.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Beck was ripped off his feet and flung forward a couple of metres as the weight of Jonas falling pulled him forward — and then suddenly the rope stopped, dead. At the same time Beck heard a pained “oof!” come out of the hole in the snow that had just appeared where the crust had collapsed.

  Other bits of the crust crumbled away in either direction, revealing more of the crevasse that had swallowed Jonas up.

  It ran at right angles to the path of the glacier, parallel to the route the boys had been taking. It had been lurking right beside Jonas, not in front of him at all, and he had stepped sideways into it.

  Beck fought to shift his body round into a rough sitting position where he could hold the rope better.

  Then he heard a shout. “Beck? Beck!”

  Jonas’s voice came out of the hole, rising in panic, which made Beck close his eyes in relief. It didn’t sound like the voice of a boy who had been badly hurt — just frightened.

  “It’s ok. Keep calm. I’ve got you!”

  The rope had done its job. With the weight of Jonas at one end, the rope had cut a slice into the raw ice of the glacier, running through and then up and along to where Beck strained against the weight of his friend.