by Bear Grylls
‘Uh-huh.’ Beck could certainly agree that there was nothing like almost dying to make you realize just how great and valuable life was.
‘I mean, look at what you do,’ James went on. ‘All the things you’ve seen. The world’s so . . . so amazing. Even somewhere like here – this stupid dumpsville island that’s crawling with giant poisonous centipedes. Humans could just vanish and the world would carry on, because it’s made that way – all the ecosystems just work together . . . who would want to spoil all that?’
Beck raised an eyebrow. He didn’t quite follow James’s little speech. James had started by talking about money, then somehow he had got on to life, and what a beautiful world it was, and protecting the environment. Beck agreed with him on both counts, but he wasn’t quite sure how it all linked together in James’s head.
But it was none of his business, and right now there were more important things to worry about.
‘I’ll look after the ring for you, shall I? I’ve got a pocket with a zip.’ James nodded mutely and so Beck slipped it into his pocket. ‘Let’s get back to the camp.’
They took a slightly different route back, to widen their search. But there was still no sign of water. The effort of walking around the island, pushing through the thick foliage, had made Beck thirsty. Their water supply was going to be a real issue.
James seemed to be reading his thoughts. ‘There was this website that you gave an interview to . . . you talked about solar stills. We could use the boat cover to make one of them . . .’
‘Good idea,’ Beck agreed. James was obviously one of those people who was able to turn all his knowledge into something that was useful in the real world.
They could dig a pit and lay the cover over it, weighing it down with rocks. Dampness from the ground would collect on the underside of the cover. If they put the tin box underneath the middle of the cover and weighted the this point down with a rock, that would make a slope. Droplets of water would run down it and drip into the box.
‘I remember that website,’ Beck said. They had come to the edge of the trees and emerged onto the beach. They were some way from the camp, so they turned right and walked along the edge of the sand. ‘They left out a detail – they said it was too much for their young readers . . .’
‘Yeah?’ James’s eyes were wide and Beck grinned.
‘You can increase the amount of water that evaporates by putting damp stuff into the hole. You know, vegetation . . . or just peeing into it.’
‘Oh, gross.’ Then James laughed. ‘So – whenever we want to go, we go in the hole?’
‘Well, yeah. All the impurities would be left behind when it evaporated.’
James shook as he tried to subdue his mirth. ‘Including . . . including my mum?’
The thought of the high-and-mighty, elegant Abby doing that was enough to make Beck start laughing too. They were still laughing together when they reached the camp.
The first thing Beck noticed was that Abby had not marked out the SOS in the sand. There were some scuff marks that might have been the top half of the first ‘S’, but that was all.
The second was the captain and Abby, standing side by side and looking gravely at them. Beck felt his good mood disappear like a burst bubble.
‘What?’ he asked.
Abby came forward and pulled him into a hug that he was too surprised to resist. ‘Oh, Beck, I’m so sorry.’
She stepped back and Farrell came forward. For a moment Beck thought the captain was going to hug him too.
‘Beck, I’m very sorry – I’m afraid Steven has died from his injuries.’
CHAPTER 27
Steven lay peacefully where Beck had left him. He was in the shade of a tree, still with a lifejacket under his head. At first glance he almost looked like he could be asleep – but not if you looked closer.
Nothing looks more dead than a dead person.
A faint groan came from James. He had gone green, his eyes fixed on the body – he looked like he was about to throw up. Beck had seen dead people before; James hadn’t. Beck quickly grabbed him by the shoulders and marched him over to Abby.
‘James got bit on the finger,’ he said sharply. ‘It needs to be washed and bandaged.’
Abby immediately became one hundred per cent mum. ‘Here, let me see . . .’
While they were both distracted, Beck looked at Farrell for an explanation.
The captain shook his head. ‘It was very sudden. I was checking the water still while Abby was looking after him . . . She called me over, said he was going . . . He was gone by the time I got there. Beck, I don’t think any of us could have helped. That bang on the head – he needed help. It wasn’t our fault.’
‘It was the fault of whoever sank the ship,’ Beck said darkly. ‘They murdered him.’ He was surprised to feel tears pricking his eyes. It wasn’t like he and Steven had been close friends. They had got along OK, but they hadn’t known each other that long.
But Steven was the first person Beck had lost in a survival situation. Yes, he had seen people killed by the emergency that created the situation in the first place. A crashing plane, an exploding volcano. That had always been before he became responsible for them. But this? No one had ever gone and died on him like this.
‘We’ll have to bury him, Beck, and quick.’
Beck knew what the captain meant. In this heat a dead body could go off very quickly. And the gulls and crabs would smell him and come for him . . . They had to get Steven out of the way. But digging a grave would be tiring and energy consuming, and make them thirstier than ever.
Abby had come back to join them. ‘I was just thinking – we all pooled what we had when we got here, but no one went through Steven’s pockets, did they?’
Beck and Farrell both stared at her.
She shrugged. ‘I’m sorry, but we can’t afford to be sentimental, can we? Before we bury him we should find out what he has.’
She was absolutely right, but Beck wished she could have found a better time to have this bright idea. Like, before Steven died.
‘Look, Beck, I can—’ Farrell began, but Beck shook his head.
‘It’s OK. I’ll do it.’ Beck wouldn’t want a complete stranger going through his things.
Steven was still dressed in the day clothes he had been wearing when the ship went down: trainers, trousers, leather jacket. Beck tried the trouser pockets first. ‘Hanky . . . keys . . .’ There was nothing in the outside pockets of Steven’s jacket. Beck unzipped it and felt inside. ‘Wallet.’
The wallet contained Steven’s cards, driving licence, a few soaked dollar bills, and a photograph of a small girl.
Beck looked at this for a moment. No one ever died in isolation. Every person’s death affected someone. He remembered Steven mentioning a daughter. Six years old.
People liked to think they would somehow magically ‘know’ when a loved one died. Beck knew from bitter experience that this wasn’t true. Somewhere, this little girl – or another child, or Steven’s own parents – were happily going about their business right now, not knowing that their lives had just been torn apart.
He shut the wallet and tried the inside pocket on the other side. His fingers closed around a piece of folded paper. It was a single A4 sheet, soggy but drying slowly. ‘And this.’
‘Can we use anything?’ Abby asked.
Beck idly flicked the page out so that it unfolded. Its survival value was almost zero. ‘Not really. Though it might have been handy when we were starting the fire—’
He stopped, looked more closely. It was as if something on the paper had snagged his eye. Like hearing your name mentioned in a crowded room – there are things that just catch your attention. This was one of them.
The laser-printed text had blurred in the water but it was still legible. No, he hadn’t been mistaken. There it was in black and white.
Lumos.
Beck’s heart began to pound as he studied the page more closely. There was a logo – pla
net Earth, ablaze with light, and the words LUMOS INC. There was an office address for a street in Miami.
The very first line said, COMPANY CONFIDENTIAL: NOT TO BE READ BY GRADES BELOW EXECUTIVE LEVEL.
‘Beck?’ Farrell asked. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Beck held up the paper. ‘It’s Lumos . . .’
The captain shrugged. ‘The energy company?’
In theory, Beck knew that Lumos was just that – an energy company. It was also a company he had run into more than once, and the experience had never been good. They were greedy, they were corrupt, and they didn’t care about the damage they did as long as it made money.
He also knew something about Lumos that he had never said out loud in any of his interviews. Al had told him very firmly not to. Lumos had powerful lawyers and Beck couldn’t prove anything.
But he said it now.
‘Lumos killed my parents.’
CHAPTER 28
‘Can you prove that, Beck?’ Abby asked. ‘Because if you can’t, that’s a very dangerous thing to claim in public . . . I’m just saying.’
Beck looked her in the eye. ‘Sue me.’
This piece of paper just didn’t make sense, he told himself. Was Steven working for Lumos? Steven, whom Al had known and trusted for years? Would Al have trusted him to look after Beck if there had been the tiniest atom of doubt in his mind?
How the heck could Steven have anything to do with them?
But here was the paper, in his pocket. A very important bit of paper, apparently: confidential, only to be read by very senior people.
Something wasn’t right.
‘So what else does the paper say?’ Abby asked. Beck glared at her for a moment. He didn’t care what else the paper said. The whole point of this had been to see if Steven had anything on him they could use for survival. Instead they had found this. It meant that everything just got a whole lot more complicated – and yet again Lumos had wormed its way into his life. The corporation was like those parasitic wasps that laid eggs in other insects. When the eggs hatched, the grubs ate their host from within. Beck felt that Lumos must have laid its eggs in him long ago, and now yet another one was hatching.
The next line read: Fuel for the Future – a Strategy for Exploitable Energy Resources in the Caribbean Basin. There was a map on the reverse. He looked at the front again, and another phrase caught his eye in the opening paragraphs. Methane hydrates.
‘Hey, James, weren’t you talking about these?’ He pointed at the line.
James peered at the text. ‘Uh, yeah. Ship disappearances, and, uh, that . . . Yeah.’
‘So why would Lumos be interested in ship disappearances?’ Farrell asked.
Beck shrugged. He doubted whether Lumos wanted ships to disappear. Lumos would want as many ships as possible to be up and about, running their dirty, inefficient engines so that Lumos could supply them with more fuel and make more profits.
‘Methane hydrate could be a really good fuel source,’ James said. ‘It’s formed by natural gas freezing under pressure, deep down under the ground – but it’s much better than natural gas, if it’s handled properly.’
‘What happens if it’s not handled properly?’ Farrell asked.
‘It’s better than natural gas, but it’s also even more explosive. One small mistake, and – boom!’ James mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Remember that oil rig that caught fire?’
‘Deepwater Horizon?’ Beck said. He remembered Al’s interest in the case. Green Force’s lawyers had been busy ever since. Deepwater Horizon had been an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded in 2010. Several of the crew had been killed. The rig had blazed away until it sank two days later. The well it had been drilling had gushed oil straight into the ocean for the next three months. It was an ecological disaster.
‘That was an oil well,’ the captain said. ‘They weren’t drilling for methane hydrate.’
‘No, but some people think they might have set a pocket of it off. Methane hydrate hasn’t been approved by any governments yet.’
‘Why not, if it’s such a great fuel source?’
‘Bureaucracy,’ Abby said with a shrug and a sniff.
James looked sideways at her. ‘Plus it’s about twenty times better at trapping heat in the atmosphere, so global warming will go through the roof if everyone starts using it.’
‘It sounds just Lumos’s sort of thing,’ Beck said harshly. ‘It’s dangerous, it hurts people, it damages the environment, and it makes a few of their top dogs very rich.’ He gave the map a quick scan. ‘Probable distribution of MH deposits . . . Blah, blah . . . Ooh, listen to this. In order to safeguard the maximization of profits, it is essential that the location of Island Alpha is not revealed as a potential fuel source . . . Typical Lumos. Don’t tell anyone because they might shut it down before we make any money.’
He crumpled the paper up and thrust it at Abby. ‘Here, read it yourself if you must.’ And he tramped down the beach to stare out at the sea.
Beck looked out at the waves for a long time. Sometimes he felt tears threatening to well up, but he faced into the wind and his eyes stayed dry. And one thought, one word, blew about inside his head, over and over.
Lumos.
How did they do it? How did they get into absolutely everything? And how was it that everything they touched turned bad?
And what was Steven’s connection? What was going on?
He didn’t know how long it had been, but suddenly James was at his side.
‘Uh, Beck? They’d like to talk to you . . .’
The boys made their way back to the adults. Beck went slowly, kicking the sand along the way.
Abby had smoothed out the map on the sand. Down one side of it was a wiggly line that Beck realized was the coast of Florida. Coloured patches showed where Lumos thought there might be deposits of methane hydrate beneath the sea bed. Dark dots were islands.
‘Beck, I’ve been talking to the captain and he’s pretty sure that we’re here. This dot is our island.’
Her finger was covering the dot in question and Beck had to move it. It was, without question, a dot.
‘I’m just using dead reckoning,’ Farrell said, ‘based on approximately how far off course we could have got at top speed over that length of time . . . but yes, I think that’s probably us.’
It might have been useful information if they’d had some way of communicating with the outside world. As it was, it didn’t do them a great deal of good. ‘OK, so we know where we are. Still miles from anywhere.’
‘Not quite.’ Abby moved the hand that had been holding the paper to reveal more markings. There was another, smaller dot, and it was labelled ISLAND ALPHA.
‘That’s the Lumos base no one’s meant to know about . . .’
‘If we patched up the lifeboat, we could probably get there.’
‘No.’ Beck shook his head firmly. ‘No way. First rule of survival is you stay put until someone comes to get you. Unless . . .’ he added, remembering all the times he hadn’t stayed put. He had crossed mountains, deserts, jungles . . . ‘Unless you’ve got a very good reason not to. Like, it’s a matter of life and death to keep moving. But say someone does come to look for us, and they find this island. How will they know where we’ve gone? We’ll have blown our chance to be rescued. If we stay here, we’ve got food and water . . .’
Although, he had to remind himself, that wasn’t entirely true. Water was low and would get lower, and it would take time to make any.
But he so totally did not want to put himself at the mercy of the open sea – with an island full of Lumos people at the other side.
‘I hear what you’re saying, Beck,’ Farrell said gently, ‘and I agree. But look at it the other way. If there’s a base on this island, then there are people there. They must be in communication with the mainland. They certainly have food and water. And whatever you say about the company, Beck, the people there will just be ordinary people like you and
me. They’ll help us.’
Beck nodded. He badly wanted to believe it was true – that the people who worked for Lumos were just decent, everyday guys. That it was only the ones at the very top who were rotten.
But he had met decent, everyday guys before who worked for Lumos – and somehow they got corrupted too. He wouldn’t trust anyone there.
On the other hand, they might be better off at Island Alpha. Especially if there was a hurricane coming. Better off than here, anyway.
He looked Farrell square in the eyes. ‘You’re the sailor. Do you think the lifeboat can get us that far? And how long would it take us?’
It wasn’t just that the lifeboat needed to float. Beck needed to be able to keep everyone alive for however long it took.
‘I think it can keep us afloat for twenty-four hours,’ Farrell said simply. ‘And I think that’s how long it will take us.’
‘Can we beat the hurricane?’
If there was any chance at all that the hurricane would strike first, they were staying put. It would be mighty rough on the island, but they wouldn’t stand a chance in a boat on the open sea.
‘We can do it. We’ll row like we did last night. Two on the oars, one on the rudder, one resting, and we rotate every hour.’
Beck put his hands on his hips and wandered down the beach to study the wrecked boat. It wasn’t badly wrecked – just that big crack. The paintwork had also suffered in the beating it had taken in the surf. It was even more flaky and peeling. Beck could just make out the shadow of old lettering on the hull, left over from the boat’s last paint job. But the paintwork wasn’t a problem. He didn’t care what it looked like, as long as it floated.
He really didn’t want to do this. Beck always reckoned up the odds before he moved on from somewhere: would it be better to stay put? Usually it had always been something like: twenty-five per cent better to stay, seventy-five per cent better to go.
