by Bear Grylls
“There were. I had a twin sister, Dian—”
Beck stopped abruptly, because he thought that if he went on to say ‘but she died’, that could sound like a criticism, and it wasn’t meant to be.
But Winslow had cocked his head thoughtfully. Then he shook it.
“I’m sorry I don’t remember the name Granger. And looking at you, if she was your twin then it was obviously a long time ago. Perhaps if I met your parents — are they here?”
“Uh — no.” Beck didn’t want to say why they couldn’t be here too. It felt weird to be saying they had died — as well as his baby sister. “No, I’m interning here for Green Force on my own.”
“Well.” Winslow flashed a brief smile, and the way he held the tablet showed that he very clearly wanted to get back to whatever he was doing. “Please pass on my regards.”
“Yeah…” Beck was trapped now. It was now too late in the conversation to own up that they were dead.
“And I’m afraid I do need to get back to this, it’s rather urgent…” He trailed off, before turning his attention back one hundred percent back to the tablet. Beck didn’t really know how to disentangle himself, or what he had expected from this meeting. He felt foolish stood like this. He realised he’d been longing for another little link back to Dian. But, he reminded himself, Winslow’s career meant he had helped a lot of babies — he wasn’t going to remember just one from years back. And he was a busy guy — a hero. All the babies who had come in with the refugees today would be much more important to him than Dian, and that was how it should be. Doctors who worked for charities didn’t get rich, and they wouldn’t be there if they weren’t extremely dedicated. Beck shouldn’t be disturbing him.
He shuffled his feet, and the other man at the table gave him a flat look. Beck gave a gesture that was kind of like a wave, and turned and headed back to his own table. Jonas had got them each a helping of dessert, and had finished off his, and it looked like Beck’s portion only had seconds to live unless Beck got to it first…
But something wrangled Beck, in the back of his mind.
And why had the doctor been so off-hand?
Chapter Seven
State in your own words the importance of taking direct environmental action.
Beck glared at the title on the laptop screen. Part of his internship was to write an essay using the experiences he had gained. He had already spent several evenings after work, here in the twin room he shared with Jonas, staring at the screen and trying to get the words in his head into the right order on screen.
And tonight he had the added distraction of Dr Winslow in his brain. He hadn’t realised it would hit him so hard. Every time he closed his eyes to relieve them from the screen, his thoughts slipped sideways into another world, where Winslow had been successful, Dian had lived, and he had grown up with a sister.
If that had happened, what would she be like now? And how would having a sister have affected him? How would having two kids instead of one have changed his parents’ actions in the first place? Would they have not got so involved with chasing the Lumos organisation, determined to expose it? And if so, would they still be alive now?
Shift one pebble and you change the course of a rockfall. Would Dr Winslow be where he was, too? What course of events had taken him from a comfortably paid paediatrics job in a London hospital to doing charity work? Was he over-compensating for losing a baby by doing extra good? Or was he the kind of selfless guy that Beck would always admire, someone who would always have ended up in that kind of work anyway?
But, it hadn’t happened. They had followed their different courses and fate just happened to have brought them briefly together again — a doctor caring for children driven by tyranny from their homes, a boy struggling with an essay on a laptop. That was how it was. Beck didn’t like thinking of pointless maybes. It was how you survived.
The sound of the door opening and closing behind him was a welcome interruption. Beck knew it would be Jonas.
“Before you say anything, I know, I’m still working on it…” Beck narrowed his eyes at the screen, as if he could somehow squeeze the opening sentence out of the pixels there. A faint shadow moved across it as the figure came up behind him. “So how’s yours—”
The shadow moved, fast. Something was wrong.
Beck moved faster, by pure instinct, even before his conscious mind kicked in. He had been in too many survival situations to do anything different. He hit the floor in a roll and sprang to his feet while the grip of the pistol in the man’s hand smashed into the laptop’s keyboard.
Man?
Pistol?
The man hadn’t expected Beck to react so quickly. They stared at each other in equal astonishment.
“Who the—” Beck began, and he saw the man begin to raise the gun.
Beck had been held at gunpoint before and he knew that once that small, round hole was pointing directly at you, it became much harder to move fast enough to avoid whatever came out of it. So the only solution was to get in there first. ‘Always strike first.’ Beck knew that one by heart.
He charged with his head down into the guy’s midriff. The man’s breath whooshed out of him and he staggered back. He was bigger and stronger than Beck and Beck had no illusions that he could do anything much against him, so he was already pelting for the door. Get out into the corridor, hit the fire alarm, get lots of witnesses — that was the only plan he had.
But now another man stood in the door. Beck was already too close to try the head-butting thing again. He swerved and the man quickly moved to grab him. Beck tried to duck down under and past him—
Crack.
It was like an explosion inside his skull. Beck’s consciousness seemed to go dim and he vaguely saw the floor coming slowly towards him through the waves of pain in his head. It felt like he bounced when he hit it. Part of his mind a long way away was telling him that the second man had cracked him on the head, and he was soon going to be in a lot of pain.
He rolled onto his back, dazed, and stared up at the second man, and into the dark circle of the gun aimed unwaveringly at his face. He tried to move his body but his groggy brain wasn’t sending the right signals to his muscles. He wanted to speak. He wanted to croak, “Who are you?”, but the words wouldn’t come. He realised, with horror and amazement and more horror, that for some reason he was about to be shot — and had absolutely no idea why.
“Nej!” The first man had got the power of speech back, gulping in the air that Beck had knocked out of him. He stumbled across the room, fumbling in one pocket. “Ställ inte till det inne!”
From his pocket he pulled a white cloth, and a sickly chemical smell filled the room.
Chloroform, Beck realised blearily. They’re going to drug me and then they’re going to kill me…
He tried to lever himself up on his elbows, and the first man forced his head back down with the cloth over his face. Beck lifted weak hands to try and claw it away. He tried to hold his breath, but he felt the fumes penetrate his brain. His hands flopped down to the ground and a roaring darkness filled his head…
“Vad är det här?”
He recognised that voice. Beck looked up to see Jonas was stood in the doorway, wide eyed, trembling and amazed, as the second man whipped his gun around to aim right between his friend’s eyes.
And then the darkness had taken Beck completely.
Chapter Eight
The rattling of metal and the pounding in Beck’s head merged together out of the darkness. He was lying and shivering in the dark on a hard, metal floor, freezing cold, shaking from side to side. He could hear the sound of an engine and the sucking, crackling noise of tyres running over gravel. The floor lurched and with every big bump his head would bounce up and crack down again hard on the metal.
Beck’s eyes focused blearily on the one thing he could see — two pale squares, hanging in mid-air and shaking along with everything else. He coughed and gagged to clear the foul taste in his mouth
, and the extra breath cleared away the last shreds of the chloroform that clogged his head like cotton wool.
He was in the back of a moving van. The squares were the rear windows looking out into the moonlit night. That was the only source of light. The driver’s cabin was a separate compartment and there was no way of seeing out of the front of the vehicle.
He pulled his legs up and groggily tried to push himself into a sitting position. Another lurch, and he was flung against a soft body lying next to him. In the dim light he could just make out—
“Jonas!”
He gave his friend a shake, and Jonas’s head flopped from side to side with the van’s motion. Beck felt for the pulse in his neck, where the carotid artery beat against the tendon. The skin was warm, the pulse was steady and strong, and Beck breathed a sigh of relief. Apart from whatever had knocked him out, Jonas was okay. He cautiously sniffed the air above Jonas’s face and got a distinct whiff of something sweet and chemical. Yes, more chloroform.
Poor Jonas. Those men obviously hadn’t expected Beck to have a roommate and they hadn’t taken any precautions against someone else wandering in. So, his friend had innocently got caught up in… In whatever was going on.
Beck groped around in the dark for something, anything that could make him and Jonas more comfortable. He made out the outline of some kind of pack hanging from the side of the van, and he got up on his knees to reach for it. He felt several hard objects inside it, which bumped together with metallic clinks and which he thought would bear further investigation. But first his fingers dug into a pair of travel rugs — waterproof tarpaulin on one side, artificial wool on the other. He pulled them both out, spread one over Jonas’s still form and tucked the other under his head.
Then Beck sat next to his friend with his knees hugged up — more comfortable than lying on the floor, and warmer — and forced himself to think. He remembered staring into that gun barrel and he had no doubt at all that the man had been about to kill him, before the other guy intervened. He had looked before into the eyes of men who intended to end his life, there and then, on the spot, and it had been the same. But no one just randomly turned up in a teenage boy’s room intending to kill him.
Beck was in no doubt — he had been targeted, by… and that's where his mind went cold.
Chapter Nine
Beck ran in his head through the last few years. Lumos? The energy giant; a corrupt organisation with a finger in every environmental pie around the world. It had been his biggest enemy, his greatest problem — but that should all have been over when Edwin Blake, its founder and chief, had been arrested. Beck and Edwin’s grandson, James, had helped bring the giant down. Edwin had died in jail — he wouldn’t be sending assassins out now.
African poachers, Indonesian illegal tree loggers, South American drug smugglers… Beck had had run-ins with all of them. But he wouldn’t expect any of them to track him down to this remote corner of Sweden, of all places.
Jonas coughed and moaned, and mumbled something in Swedish. Beck was immediately at his side, shaking him gently.
“Hey, Jonas?”
Before too long Jonas was also sitting up, also with a splitting headache. They each wrapped one of the rugs around their shoulders for warmth, and compared notes. Jonas didn’t have much more to add.
“They knocked you out with that stuff, then they did the same to me.” He shuddered and his voice broke a little. “I was so scared. I didn’t know if I would ever wake up again…”
Beck put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him.
“Yep we got done, well and truly,” he said softly. “But we must stay calm. They didn’t kill us and they could have done — there and then. There will be a way out of this. What can you remember? One of them said something…”
“Ställ inte till det inne,” Jonas said glumly. “It means, don’t make a mess in the room.”
“Ah. Right.” Which meant the van was taking them to somewhere they could be disposed of tidily. This didn’t bode well at all, Beck thought wryly. Not well at all.
“We have to get out of here.” Beck crawled over to the rear doors. “Let’s see if we can get these open…”
“The van’s moving,” Jonas reminded him, “and it’s freezing out there.”
Beck had already thought of the second point. He and Jonas were still dressed for indoors. He wore jeans and a light jumper over a t-shirt — it was all you needed in the lodge. Jonas was similar. Neither of them was prepared for the sub-zero temperatures outside.
“We’ve got blankets,” Beck pointed out, “and the van slows down when it takes a corner. We can jump then.”
Anything was better than the alternative of waiting for the van to stop.
They fumbled together at the door’s locking mechanism. There was a handle and they pulled down hard on it, but no matter how much they put their weight into it, it wouldn’t shift.
“It’s locked,” Jonas moaned.
A metal handle set into the floor of the van dug into Beck’s knee. It was the handle of the van’s spare wheel compartment, and he pulled it up to reveal the spare tyre, snug in its slot.
“See if there’s a crowbar in there, or anything we can use…”
At that moment the van gave one last lurch, and slowed, and stopped. The boys’ eyes met in the gloom, and then Jonas redoubled his efforts to find something in the compartment.
“There is something down there, but it’s under the wheel and the wheel is screwed down… Beck, I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
“Eh?” Beck asked in surprise. “You got me—?”
But then a door opened and closed outside, and footsteps walked down the side of the van. A key scraped in the lock of the rear door. Jonas fumbled at the locking nut of the spare wheel and Beck poised himself to pounce on whoever opened the door.
But whoever it was had thought of that. He pulled the door open and they heard him step back to a safe distance. Freezing air gushed in so that they both immediately shivered and instinctively pulled the rugs tighter around themselves.
And suddenly they were both blinking and shielding their eyes from the light of a torch which killed their night vision in a split second. They could see that it glinted off the barrel of a handgun, held in the man’s other hand and aimed right at them.
“Out,” said a man’s voice. “Now.”
Chapter Ten
“Uh — what about not making a mess?”
Words swirled in Beck’s head and they were the first ones that popped out — arguing technicalities with the guy who wanted to kill him. But anything to delay what was going to happen.
“I don’t intend to make one.” The man spoke English with a Swedish accent. “Out.”
Jonas and Beck looked at each other, but they knew they had no choice. Slowly, one after the other, they climbed out, Beck first.
He immediately knew roughly where they were — it could only be somewhere on the side of Storkittel.
There was rock on one side and a drop of about thirty metres on the other. After that, there was what looked in the moonlight like a smooth field of snow, sloping down to the land more than a kilometre below them.
Except that Beck knew it wasn’t smooth snow. He had been brought up here as part of his orientation tour at the start of his internship, and anyway he would have recognised the ripples and ridges that fell away down the slope, as if the whole mountain had started flowing and then suddenly frozen solid. It was the Storkittel glacier — millions of tons of frozen water flowing down the side of the mountain at a metre per day.
The van had pulled over in a passing space on a gravel track that looped around the side of the mountain. Up and down the track, Beck could see patches of snow on the ground. Far below, the land seemed to glow beneath a thin layer of mist, stripped of every colour except shades of silver, lit by a full moon and a million stars like frozen diamonds in the black velvet sky.
Beck and Jonas stood side by side, both starting to shiver uncontrol
lably as the cold and fear bit in, despite hugging their rugs to their bodies. There were very thin patches of ice on the rocky ground and Beck stumbled as one of his feet slipped. The man was taking no chances and still stood a safe distance away as he waggled his torch.
“Stand over there.”
He was pointing at the edge of the drop.
Beck’s heart pounded. He could only think of one reason the man wanted them over there. He would shoot them and their bodies would tumble down to the glacier. They would be swallowed by the ice and no one would ever know where they had gone — until the glacier spat them out at the bottom, in maybe a hundred years or so. Meanwhile, who would come looking? Sure, they would be missed at the lodge first thing in the morning but who would think to look for them up here?
You have gotta stop this, Beck, think fast, think smart, a voice inside him resolved. No way were their bodies ending up down there.
It was a strange feeling to be looking at the place where you were meant to die. It was only about three metres away but, feeling like he already had a lump of lead in his guts, Beck knew that if they got that far then it was all over. He had to prevent that — and still not get shot.
(And he still had no idea why? And what had Jonas meant by saying he had got Beck into this?)
Jonas obviously hadn’t twigged what Beck had. Whatever he thought about whose fault this was, Jonas just didn’t live in a world where grown men abducted and shot teenage boys. Despite all the evidence, his brain was swiftly putting two and two together. He took a reluctant, hesitant step, and like Beck, his foot slipped briefly. He quickly regained his balance.
“You too!” the man snapped at Beck. “Move!”
And Beck knew he didn’t have much choice. He could just as easily be shot where he was standing. He had no time to plan or think ahead. To obey the voice, to keep him and Jonas alive, everything just had to be done on the fly. He could see a vague way ahead, if he could just make it work…
