by Bear Grylls
He moved, and deliberately stumbled as though he had slipped again.
“Woah!”
He shouted theatrically and fell into Jonas’s arms, and for a moment the two of them teetered on the point of going down. Beck just had time to mutter it into Jonas’s ear: “Fall over.” He pushed Jonas away, all in the same movement.
“You should be more careful, Beck,” Jonas said loudly. “Woah!”
He threw his arms in the air and seemed to do a little jig before toppling to the ground.
And in that one moment, while the man was looking at him, and the gun was pointing at him too, Beck charged. He flung his rug at the man, and simultaneously hurled himself forward and to one side. The man couldn’t see him with the rug in the way, and if he fired in that direction he would miss, hitting only fabric.
Beck slammed into him and went straight and fast for the man’s gun hand.
Chapter Eleven
The man bellowed and punched Beck hard in the ribs. The shock and the pain ran through him like an electric jolt and his eyes streamed, but he kept his grip.
And then Jonas was with him, slamming in with all his body weight. The three of them lurched together like some weird dance and Beck almost pulled them all over on top of himself as his feet slipped again on ice.
And suddenly they were the ones falling on top of the man. Both the guy’s feet shot away and he tumbled backwards, pulling Jonas and Beck down with him. He landed with a sound like an egg breaking open and went immediately still.
“Oh wow!” Jonas pushed himself up. “Is he dead or unconscious?”
“I don’t know yet, but good acting back there, Jonas,” Beck muttered. That had not been a healthy sound — it must have been the man’s head hitting the ground. Beck knew that the most dangerous part of any real life fight was the very real prospect of falling backwards and smacking your head on the ground. The whiplash effect of your whole body and head hitting rock or concrete can cause severe brain damage or even death. And that sound had been a bad one, for sure. But if it had to happen to any of them, at least it was this way. Him not them.
He felt for the man’s pulse in his neck, the same way he had felt for Jonas’s — and got nothing. He forced himself to breathe in and out, slowly, calmly.
He felt again. Still nothing.
Beck knelt by the man’s head and pushed it gently. It moved without any resistance, and Beck could see the dark patch of blood against his pale hair. It was black in the moonlight.
Beck stood up slowly, feeling every beat of his heart as it thudded inside him. Now he regretted his flippant comment. They had done exactly what the guy was going to do to them.
“He’s — uh — dead.”
“Dead?” Jonas scrambled to his feet and stared down at the still form. His chest heaved and his voice began to rise into panic. “He — we — he’s dead — we — we did…”
“He was going to shoot us,” Beck said harshly. “Over there.” He nodded at the edge of the road, and let Jonas work it out for himself. When Jonas’s eyes went even wider, he knew the penny had finally dropped. “He was about to kill us and we defended ourselves. Ugly, but true. Now come on, we need to get moving.”
Beck looked down at the body and swallowed. No one’s death was a good thing. Yes, Beck had seen people die before, and often they had been people who would have killed him. But it still made him feel sick inside.
He recognised that same feeling and tried to escape it by getting busy.
“I’m sorry he’s dead,” Beck finished, his voice shaking, “but I’m not sorry we’re still alive.” He cocked an eye at Jonas. “And what did you mean, you got me into this?”
“Well…” Jonas tore his shocked gaze away from the man’s body and looked up. He shrugged. “I guess of the two of us, they’re more likely to be after me.”
“Why?” Beck asked, baffled.
“Uh — because — look, Gothenburg is a busy port, lots of traffic coming in and out — and it’s not all legal.”
Beck’s eyes narrowed.
“Drugs?”
“Drugs…” Jonas said with a new intensity in his gaze. “Illegal imports, illegal exports, illegal immigrants, illegal… anything. And my father is senior in Tullverket — that’s our Customs agency. Very senior. And he’s had a lot of success cleaning up lately. And that means a lot of enemies — some of who no doubt will try to get at him through me. They thought you were me, until I turned up.” He shivered. “Beck, we’ve got to tell my dad what’s happening.” His voice went up a little. “They might be coming for the rest of the family too. I have a brother and a sister.”
“Wow.” Beck thought. Jonas had only ever said his dad had an office job — maybe the habit of secrecy ran deep in their family. Which was fair enough. And it did make more sense that they would bump into an enemy of the Eriksson family rather than the Granger family, here in Sweden.
Jonas was still shivering — he was not just cold, Beck realised suddenly, but in shock too. He quickly picked up his friend’s dropped rug and handed it over.
“Okay. Look. I’ve — uh — I’ve made enemies in my time too. I know what it’s like. But there’s no one so big they can bring us two down,” he said with a reassuring smile.
It was time to make a plan. Beck pulled his own rug over his shoulders and knelt by his body again.
“What are you doing?” Jonas asked.
“Finding out who he is, if I can…”
It wasn’t pleasant, but Beck unzipped the guy’s coat and felt around inside. In one breast pocket he found a mobile phone. In one of the trouser pockets he found a wallet, and when he opened it up, the first thing he saw was an EU driving licence. He held it so that the moon shone on the writing.
“Gustav Kolberg,” he said. He pronounced the surname as a Brit would say it, with a hard ‘k’ and ‘g’ in ‘Kolberg’; Jonas muttered a correction as a Swede would say it, which came out more like Shol-bay. Beck rummaged a bit more. Some krona bank notes, and another plastic card with the same name and photo. It was an I.D., and Beck’s eyes went wide when he read it.
“You’ll never guess who he worked for…”
“Medics Around the World,” Jonas said at once. “Look.”
He nodded at the van, which still waited with its rear door open, lights on and engine running.
The same logo and lettering as appeared on the card was on the side of the vehicle.
“Medics Around the World hires murdering thugs?” Beck breathed. “I don’t believe it!”
“They can’t all be that,” Jonas pointed out. “I've seen them on TV helping refugees.”
“Sure, and I can personally vouch that Dr Winslow’s a real medic,” said Beck. He thought back to their very brief meeting, and Winslow’s preoccupation with his work. Beck knew from experience that some professionals were so focused on their work, they would never see something that was right under their nose. Winslow might be so zoned in on saving more children that he would never realise the kind of people he was working with until it was too late.
“But if some of the people he’s with are faking it, for some reason we don’t yet understand, and are using the organisation for something criminal…’ Beck thought out loud. ‘Winslow is going to know about this guy and his friend. Which means we’ve got to warn him — and your family. And fast!”
Chapter Twelve
“It’s PIN locked,” Jonas said glumly.
The boys sat in the van’s cabin. With the engine running and the heater turned up, it was comfortably warm. They had laid Kolberg down in the back.
Their first instinct had been to call the police on Kolberg’s phone, but when Jonas swiped the screen, it demanded a four-digit code to proceed.
“I thought you could make emergency calls on a locked phone?” Beck asked.
“Sure, but you can also disable that feature. My father did — he got tired of accidentally pocket-calling the police. And it looks like this guy did too.”
&nbs
p; In frustration they held the screen at different angles under the driver’s light. Beck knew that the finger marks on a screen will often show where the owner usually taps. They could maybe work out what the four digits were, and then work their way through the possible combinations. But they couldn’t make out enough to help, and neither of them fancied working their way through the 10,000 four-digit options available.
“We could call from the lodge — if we can get back there,” Jonas suggested.
“Yep. Only… do we want to go back to the lodge?”
Jonas stared at him.
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“Because we know…” Beck jerked his head towards the back of the van to indicate Kolberg. “…had at least two pals — the two guys in our room. So, we don’t know who’s a friend and who isn’t. Well, there’s Anna-Britt, Dr Winslow… but they could easily be outnumbered. The bad guys might see us first and we’ll just put the good ones in danger.”
Jonas’s stricken look almost made him feel guilty about introducing his friend to the harsh realities of such low life. But it had to be done, and neither of them had asked for this.
“Okay.” Jonas breathed out slowly and gazed ahead, down the road and into the darkness. “So we drive to Riksliden instead. That’s the only alternative.”
They studied the van’s instruments, wheel, gear stick… Adults always made it look so easy, Beck thought.
“Can you, uh, drive?” Beck asked.
“Um. I’ve driven my uncle’s tractor on his farm.”
“I think you just volunteered, then.” Beck drummed his fingers on the dashboard, thinking. “Do you know the way?”
“Oh, the way is easy. Only one road and fifty kilometres — we could be there in less than an hour.”
“And we go straight to the police,” Beck agreed with a gush of relief. The thought of being able to hand the problem straight over to adult authority was a nice feeling. Now they just had to get there.
“Absolut.” Jonas scooted himself to sit behind the wheel. “Put your seatbelt on…”
The first job was to turn the van around. It was still pointing up the mountain track, but Kolberg had stopped at a point where the track widened into a passing space, so Jonas just had to let the handbrake off and let the van roll back gently while the turned the wheel. He reversed safely towards the side of the mountain and away from the drop down to the glacier.
There was a crunching sound as the van rolled backwards into a million tons of rock.
“Oops.”
Jonas pressed one of the pedals down and pushed the stick into gear. The engine made a noise like a rusty concrete mixer as it revved under his foot. He bit his lip and let the brake off. The van lurched forward, straight towards the edge.
Beck might have yelled — he wasn’t sure. It was drowned in the screech of the gears. The van only went about one metre before the engine stalled and it came to an abrupt stop, throwing both boys forward so that their seatbelts tightened around them.
“That’s one idea.” Beck forced the words out of a dry mouth. “Take a good run-up to the edge and we fly to Riksliden. Much quicker.”
“Ha ha. Okay, more gently…”
This time Jonas turned the wheel hard over before he tried to make the van move, so that if it lurched again, at least it would head down the track. With the engine revving overtime he managed to coax it forwards and down the mountain.
After that, Beck didn’t feel much like talking.
Chapter Thirteen
Jonas had both hands in a death grip on the wheel and eyes fixed unblinkingly ahead. He watched the track roll forward in the headlights, stones and rocks and potholes emerging from the dark for a few seconds and then passing by out of sight at a steady ten kilometres per hour. Okay, Beck thought, maybe it would take more than an hour to get to Riksliden at this speed, but he would prefer to do it slowly and get there in one piece.
Jonas let gravity do most of the work and didn’t gun the engine quite so much, though he was still heavy on the brake whenever he wanted to slow down. Beck breathed a little more easily when the course of the track carried them away from the sheer drop and the glacier on their right. Now there was rolling, glowing white on both sides, picked out in the moonlight. He got the feeling they were heading down a shallow shoulder of Storkittel. He was no longer seeing the glacier, just the permanent snowfield that never quite went away, even at the height of summer.
Up ahead, the track did one of its hairpin turns, and Beck was thrown forward in his seatbelt again as Jonas slowed to take it. The engine crunched as he jammed the stick into a lower gear and began to work the wheel around. The van turned into the bend.
And kept turning. Beck yelped in alarm as the track continued to slide past the windscreen.
“Hey…”
“I know! I know!” Jonas spun the wheel furiously. “We’re skidding!”
There was no feeling of the van moving — no vibration as it ran along a rough track, just a weird sense of effortless motion.
“Turn it the other way!”
“I am!”
“No, the other way…”
Now the van was moving sideways. The edge of the track was moving from left to right in front of them.
CRUNCH.
The van hit something with the sound of bending metal, and stopped abruptly, flinging the boys sideways. They looked at each other as the engine stalled into silence.
Jonas silently reached for the key and restarted the engine. It switched on with no problem, but when he tried to start moving again, nothing happened, even though the engine noise grew louder and louder as he pressed down on the pedal.
“Something is holding us…”
“Hang on,” Beck said. Jonas stopped revving, and Beck braced himself for the cold outside.
White snowfields stretched away on either side of the track, eerie and silent in the bitterly cold air that stung and numbed his face. The ground underfoot was slippery, almost one whole sheet of ice. He walked carefully around to the side of the van that had hit something.
The rear left wheel was completely smashed in, impaled on a rock at the side of the track. When the van tried to move, the wheel rim just pressed down on the rock, which held it in place.
Beck doubted they could change it, without serious lifting equipment. To put the spare wheel on, they would have to move away from the rock in the first place. Which they couldn’t do.
They were stuck.
He sighed and climbed quickly back into the van, to report. Jonas stared at him, aghast.
“We’re not moving?”
“Nope.”
The both looked out into the dark.
“We will have to stay the night here,” Jonas said, with a tinge of hope. There was still half a tank of petrol and the engine would keep running until daylight. They would be warm.
“We could do that…” Beck looked at him. “And be right here when Gustav’s friends come looking for him.”
Jonas’s jaw slowly dropped. He looked out again, then quickly cut the headlights. They sat in the dark and Beck peered forward. No other headlights were making their way up the track towards them.
Yet.
“There’s nowhere else to go,” Jonas whispered, and he was right.
But if they stayed with the van, their only source of warmth and shelter on the side of a freezing mountain, they would be sitting ducks.
Chapter Fourteen
Beck had told Jonas to put the headlights on again, and they shone out over a field of snow. Beck shivered inside his borrowed coat. He hadn’t enjoyed removing anything from a dead body, but their need for it was greater than Kolberg’s.
He walked a few steps out onto the snow, and crouched down to prod the ground. The cold immediately bit to the bone. His fingers sunk through the snow and only went in for a couple of inches before they hit solid rock. He grimaced — this wasn’t looking good. It was too thin for what he had in mind. He needed a couple of metres.
>
He looked thoughtfully across the track, which ran down the ridge of a shallow slope on the mountain. The other side of the track, behind the van, was upwind. Snow could have piled up on the lee side of the slope. He tapped on the driver’s window.
“Put it into reverse,” he said.
There was a moment while Jonas complied, and then the van’s reversing lights came on, lighting up the snow behind it. Beck walked out into the snow, and immediately sank in to his knees. This was more promising. He waded further. The ground rose and fell in shallow dips and rises, and one gully in particular caught his eye. Only the top of it was picked out in the van’s lights — the rest was dark shadow. But he could see enough to check it out, and he liked what he saw.
He hurried back to the van.
“Switch off,” he said. “We’re digging a snow cave.”
Jonas stared at him.
“Yes? What do we do when we’ve dug it?”
“We sleep in it.”
“You mean we’re going to sleep in the snow?”
“Snow is an amazing insulator, believe it or not. It’s freezing but it traps so much air it actually keeps the warmth in really well. Hey, I bet your ancestors did it all the time.”
“My ancestors used to pillage and plunder England. It doesn’t mean I want to copy them. But, hey — look what I found stuffed under the seat.”
For a moment, Beck just stared at the bundle which Jonas thrust at him. It looked like… but no, it couldn’t be…
“That’s my gear!”
He almost snatched it from Jonas’s hands. Yup — coat, trousers, hat, gloves.
“Mine is here too. And our boots.” Jonas frowned. “They kidnapped us — why would they take our things too?”
Beck was too busy shrugging off Kolberg’s too-big coat and pulling on his own things to answer for a moment. One answer did come to mind and it wasn’t a pleasant one — though it only confirmed what he already knew.
