Mission Raptor

by Bear Grylls

  “Oh, yes. Very kind,” Jonas agreed, rolling his eyes, but he helped Beck gather together a good handful that they could carry in the pack’s side pouches, and Beck noticed him stuffing a couple more roots into his coat pocket for later use.

  Beck kept one that he chewed on quietly as they picked their way down the slope, away from the dead reindeer and through the path of the avalanche.

  It was easier once they were back into the proper forest, where they could walk between trees and not have to negotiate fallen branches.

  “Hey, mushrooms!” Jonas said hopefully. A cluster of orange discs clung to the trunk of a tree that they passed.

  “Only if you know for a fact they’re okay,” Beck told him. “Something like eighty percent are poisonous — so best not to risk. We’ve got enough for the time being.”

  More light showed through the trees up ahead, which suggested that the forest ended there. And sure enough it did — as did the ground. The shoulder of Storkittel that they had been walking on came to an abrupt drop. Jonas peered over the edge, down a hundred metres of sheer rock.

  “We climb?” he asked, and his tone made it clear that he dreaded what the answer might be. For a moment, Beck was actually tempted. It might be the quicker option.

  “Let’s see if it gets easier later on,” he suggested, and Jonas breathed a silent sigh of relief. There was no point in risking their necks if it turned out they could just walk down further along.

  They turned left, because that was the direction that kept them more on their course of due east, and walked.

  And soon found that maybe they should have turned right…

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The fast flowing stream had gouged a gully several metres deep through the rock, right across their way, before running out over the edge in a waterfall almost 40 metres high.

  “Walk across?” Jonas said — very, very doubtfully. Beck shook his head. They weren’t even going to try. The gully was a slippery tube of rock, water, snow, ice and moss — they would be swept to their deaths as sure as eggs were eggs.

  And besides, in the corner of his eye he had seen what Jonas hadn’t. Straight lines, which when it comes to nature is very uncommon. To Beck that meant something man-made...

  “Hopefully no need,” he said, and walked a few metres back up the length of the gully.

  “Oh no…” Jonas groaned when he saw what had attracted Beck’s attention.

  It was the faint remains of an old rope bridge — or rather, what looked like one. Once it had been a pair of ropes strung from one side to the other, with planks of wood hung between to tread on.

  Now the planks were gone and it was just a pair of ropes covered in mould and moss. Beck took hold of one and tugged on it experimentally. It was old, but it felt secure. Kind of.

  “We could just go a little further up, cross there?” Jonas said hopefully. But his eyes answered his own question. Further upstream, the land grew steeper and the gully was maybe thirty metres or more deep. And no obvious way across.

  “Or back…?” He trailed off and answered his own question again. “No. Not with…” Beck could finish it in his head. Not with her potentially on their tail. That thought was the constant pressure driving them, always pushing them on, even more so than the need to reach the authorities and warn their friends.

  “Plus we could just end up bouncing back and forth along the ridge, trying to find the best way down,” he added. “We’ve got to keep going. And if this bridge is here, that means someone before us decided this was the best way. I’ll go first.”

  It needed planning. The ropes were wet and slippery after who knew how long in the harsh arctic elements, so Beck gave them several sharp jerks, tugging them in every direction he could. Eventually he was confident they should hold his weight — but they would still be impossible to keep a grip on. First though he cut a short length from his rope, and tied it round his waist in a bowline with short tail hanging down in front of him. Then he carefully undid one of his shoe-laces from his boots.

  Jonas looked at him quizzically.

  “Please tell me you aren’t going to do some ninja magic with that shoelace!” he asked.

  “You said it.” Beck replied.

  Beck then tied the two ends of the lace together and then wrapped the loop round and round the old handling rope.

  “This is called a prusik,” Beck explained. “As I move across the bridge I can slide the lace along the rope, but if the thick rope breaks and I fall, the lace will then bite into the rope as it suddenly gets pulled tight under tension. Clever?”

  “Precarious if you ask me,” Jonas replied.

  “I’ve used it many times climbing,” Beck replied, “just never with a shoe lace. Normally you use a thin bit of rope for this. But it will still work, I reckon.”

  Beck then threaded the tail of rope in front of him and tied it to the loops in the improvised prusik that wrapped around the handling.

  Beck now knew if the rope snapped then at least the prusik should save him. It would be undignified and uncomfortable, but it wouldn’t be a non-stop, lethal drop straight into the fast flowing stream.

  Beck hoisted himself up onto one of the bridge ropes, face first, lying flat along it. The rope ran under his chest and between his legs, and he had one knee bent so that one foot was also hooked over it. The other leg would work as his counter-balance on the line. It was as steady a position as he could take without just dropping down and hanging under it. He steadied himself, then he began to pull himself forward.

  It was ok at first, because the ground was only a metre below him. But then it abruptly fell away and he was staring straight down at the raging water.

  It concentrated the mind. One hundred per cent. He reached out ahead, always keeping his fingers wrapped around the rope, and pulled himself forward. Every second of the way, he had to readjust himself, sensing his balance, stabilising his body, pushing with his leg to ease himself along the rope. He tried not to let all his weight go onto his chest as that restricted his breathing and he needed to be calm and strong if he was going to make this.

  Reach, pull, reach, pull… The slipperiness of the rope meant that the strands slid easily beneath him, but it also meant he could slip off sideways at any time, so every muscle in his body was tensed to maintain his balance.

  It was a Tyrolean traverse, a technique used by both climbers and hunters to cross a gorge with a rope — though it was always done with proper equipment, he thought grimly. Reach, pull… But someone — presumably someone in the Tyrol — must have been the first to do this, and they wouldn’t have had modern gear. They’d have had to do it like this. Respect to that man, Beck thought.

  Reach, pull…

  The stream slowly slid past below him, and then suddenly there was solid ground in front of him again and he could finally swing his legs down and rest his exhausted arms.

  “Wow. I was running out of strength at the end there. I think we are getting more tired than we realise, Jonas. Go easy on this and keep your balance!” he called as he unfastened his improvised prusik safety line.

  Beck then wrapped up the lace and the short length of rope he had used around his waist, and carefully threw it with all his might back across the narrow gorge. Jonas picked it up and tried to copy how Beck had fastened them both.

  “Take your time, Jonas. Remember, to make the bowline, make a loop, then think of the end of the rope as a rabbit: it comes out of the hole, round the tree and back down the hole. You got it. Now make it tight around you.”

  Jonas carefully repeated Beck’s words under his breath. ‘Make a loop, then the end of the rope is like a rabbit: out of the hole, round the tree and back down the hole.’

  Beck continued: “And three turns of the prusik should be enough, then tie your bit of rope to it carefully.”

  “Okay. Come on over!”

  Jonas lay on top of the rope with a lot more caution. He promptly lost balance and swung around it so that he
was hanging upside down.

  “Shoot!”

  Fortunately, there was still ground beneath him. Beck closed and opened his eyes while Jonas stood up and tried again.

  “You have to concentrate all the time,” he called. “Always be feeling where your body is, what it’s about to do…”

  But Jonas had a set look that said he was concentrating, and Beck knew that sometimes the worst thing you can do is keep bombarding someone with advice, so he shut up. He wasn’t in Jonas’s body; he didn’t know what information his friend’s senses were sending to his brain.

  At a speed that makes glaciers look fast, Jonas shuffled along the rope. A quarter of the way, halfway…

  Movement beyond him caught Beck’s eye. He glanced up instinctively, and suddenly his heart was pounding with the urgent need to flee, now.

  Coming out of the trees, unseen by Jonas, striding purposefully towards them and with a hunting rifle slung over her back, was the woman.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Um—”

  Beck bit back the word. He wanted to yell at Jonas, “Hurry!”

  But if he did that, he had no doubt Jonas would fall straight off the rope. Okay, his safety line would catch him; he wouldn’t fall to his death in a torrent that took him over the edge of the mountain. But he would be a sitting duck to someone with a rifle.

  The only thing Beck could do was will him on, silently, trying to shift his friend with the power of his mind. Casually, without making any fuss about it, he swung his pack off his back and reached into it for the knife. At the same time, he eased his body behind the tree he had been holding onto, and crouched down low.

  ‘Come on, Jonas. Just get across.’ Beck whispered to himself.

  Still, Jonas inched his way over, and the woman was approaching. And then she shouted.

  “Hey!”

  Jonas froze.

  “What was that?”

  “Oh, uh…” Beck began helplessly. Jonas’s eyes went wide.

  “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  Jonas abruptly sped up, reaching, pulling, reaching, pulling, and then the thing that Beck had dreaded happened.

  Jonas’s balance went, and with a yell, he flipped around the rope so that he was hanging off it again. But he kept his grip, and he kept his legs wrapped around it, so he could keep pulling himself along, goaded on by fear.

  Meanwhile Beck put the knife to the other rope of the bridge, the one Jonas wasn’t using, and started to saw at it.

  He hated to do this. This bridge had been put here to help people. It was meant to be useful and it wasn’t his to destroy. But in this case he didn’t have a choice, and he was sure the bridge builders would understand.

  It only took a few seconds to cut through the strands. The severed rope dropped away, falling into the gorge. And then Jonas was across, able to put his feet down and stand up. Beck immediately started cutting that rope too while Jonas undid his safety line.

  Now the woman was running towards them.

  “Hey! Stop!”

  “I’ll stop when you do…” Beck muttered. The remaining strands of rope parted. Jonas was already several metres away, bouncing impatiently on his feet, and the moment the rope was finished both boys turned and fled. The rifle on her back was foremost in Beck’s mind — bullets travelled much faster than people.

  “Get behind that rock,” he shouted as they ran, his voice jolting with every pounding step that he took. A car-sized lump of bare rock was embedded in the earth and they skidded to a halt on the ground behind it, shielded from view and bullets, chests heaving.

  The woman was still shouting on the other side of the gully but Beck closed his ears to her.

  “Well, at least she won’t get across that stream in a hurry.”

  He peered very carefully around the edge of the rock, careful not to make a target for her rifle, and squinted upstream. Earlier he had noticed that the stream cut its way out of higher ground in a deep gorge.

  The woman would now have to go upstream to find a safe place to cross, and get up onto that high ground...

  “I’d guess we’ve gained an hour, maybe.”

  “An hour! That’s nothing!”

  “Not if we get moving now. And now we know there’s only one of her.”

  That was the one ray of sunshine that came to mind. There didn’t seem to be a whole army after them — just her. But her, plus a rifle — a perfect weapon for picking off targets at a distance.

  Ahead of them, the mountainside curved down so that the horizon seemed to be only a couple of hundred metres ahead. If they pressed on for just a minute, keeping the rock between them and the woman, then they would drop down out of sight altogether.

  “Come on. Let’s get moving. We need to lose her.”

  His words rang in Beck’s ears as they hurried away. They were easy to say but he really didn’t know how to do it. With twenty-four hours’ notice, say, he could probably set up a good dummy trail, or hide their tracks altogether. With an hour’s notice, and the priority being to just hurry, it wasn’t so easy.

  Storkittel solved the problem for them.

  As they dropped down over the curving ground, putting distance between themselves and their pursuer, the rest of the world came into view. Gently undulating ground, still a few hundred metres below them — a patchwork of green trees, grey rock and blue-grey lakes. It looked like they were finally going to get off the mountain.

  But here Storkittel split. The slope grew steeper, and it forked. The ground split in two and headed off in slightly different directions, with a sheer drop between. Beck stood on the edge of the drop and looked down. Both slopes went down to the foot of the mountain, and there was a lake in between both forks of the mountain at the bottom.

  Jonas seemed to read his mind.

  “If we can go down one way, but make her think we went the other…” he said thoughtfully. Beck nodded and smiled grimly.

  “Then when we get to the bottom, there’ll be a lake between us,” he agreed. The lake stretched away for several kilometres, which just made it better.

  “So, how do we make her think that?”

  “I’m thinking,” Beck said, and watched Jonas’s face look at him in anticipation. “Well, we could start down one side, we kick up the ground, we leave plenty of trail to show we went that way, and then we…”

  He glanced down again, and swallowed. This went against every instinct he had been instilled with. Everything you did as a survivor was to get yourself out of danger. You do not put yourself in danger. But this was no ordinary survival situation.

  “And then we climb across,” he said simply. On wet, slippery rocks hundreds of metres above the ground… Beck trailed off nervously.

  Jonas finished his sentence for him.

  “You’re right, Beck. It’s risky but it’s smart. We cross covertly, then we go down the other side.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  For the dummy trail they chose the arm of Storkittel that stretched down the left-hand side of the sheer drop. They walked casually down the slope for about a hundred metres or so, stomping heavily and carelessly kicking the turf. That should do it, Beck reckoned.

  “Won’t she notice that our signs just vanished?” Jonas asked when they stopped.

  “Well, it’s not like we’re leaving footprints like on the snow.” Beck looked up the way they had come. “When you’re tracking, you don’t get a constant trail. You just get a series of clues, one by one, and sometimes with a big gap between them. She’ll have enough of a trail to set her off coming down this way and she’ll think we must have carried on.”

  I hope. He was aware this was all assuming they could trick a person who so far had proved fast, accurate and deadly. Beck was feeling less and less certain of the risk to reward ration of what they were about to do.

  But even if she didn’t fall for it completely, they would have bought themselves some more time. She would come this way, and almost certainly go further on down before
finally working out that she had been deceived. Then she would have to go back up, and around. And all the while, the two friends would be getting further and further ahead.

  “So,” he said, “let’s do it.” He walked to the edge of the drop and looked across. They were just at the point where the drop changed from incredibly steep, to sheer. If they had gone any further down then they would need proper mountaineering equipment to get across. But here, they could do it with what they had. There were ridges and bumps that should hold their feet and hands, and make it possible to get over.

  He started to pull his rope off from round his chest and shoulder.

  “I’ll go first,” Jonas said unexpectedly. Beck looked at him in surprise and he shrugged. “It will be just as difficult for both of us.”

  “You’re okay with the height?”

  “No,” Jonas said frankly. “But I’ll be staring at the rock in front of me. It can’t be that different to when we climbed across that snow slope. It’s just higher.”

  Beck could see how he had set his jaw, and he could hear the not-quite-tremble in his friend’s voice. But Jonas had a point — ultimately it didn’t make a difference which of them went first.

  “Good work, Jonas,” he said.

  He took one end of the rope around Jonas’s waist, tying it again in a tight bowline, then wrapped the other around a boulder in the ground. The boulder would take Jonas’s weight if he slipped, while Beck paid the line out.

  Jonas moved slowly to the edge, and looked down the drop. And looked some more. And more. Beck began to wonder if maybe he should go first after all…

  But then Jonas stretched a boot out onto the nearest ridge, and transferred his weight, and moved over so that there was nothing but thin air below him. Beck quickly paid out some rope so that it wouldn’t suddenly grow taut and yank his friend off the wall. He kept quiet — no distracting shouts of encouragement or advice.