by Bear Grylls
“Because they meant for us to disappear completely,” he said. “If we’d just vanished but our stuff was still there, then people would know we’d been taken. If we’d disappeared with our outdoor stuff, they’d assume we had gone somewhere deliberately — sneaking off for some adventure. Our disappearance would be a tragic accident, but no one would suspect anyone else had been involved.”
It was one more reminder that this hadn’t all been a misunderstanding. Someone, for some reason, really had wished them dead.
In a couple of minutes, they were properly dressed for a night on a Swedish mountain and Beck felt a lot better about what he was planning. They were still in for a freezing cold night, and a cold day after as they made their way to Riksliden, but he had an extra layer of warmth and protection that he wouldn’t have had otherwise and that was what counted.
There was one more thing they needed, which Beck had spotted when they checked the spare wheel compartment. The compartment was sealed off with a metal lid — a flat square metal plate that was light and strong, and just what Beck needed. He unscrewed it and they trudged with it through the snow to the gully.
Now the van’s lights were out, their eyes could adjust to the moonlight and there was enough of it to see what they were doing. The gully was about ten metres long and three deep. The last time Beck had done this had been high in the mountains of Alaska, with his friend Tikaani, and there had been plenty of snow to dig into. They had been able to excavate a proper cave for themselves, well protected from the elements and from the storm raging a few centimetres above them.
The snow here wasn’t deep enough for that — but on one side of the gully it had piled up thick, and that was all they needed to dig out a sideways trench that would keep them alive for one night. Beck pushed the edge of the lid into the snow and started to scrape.
Chapter Fifteen
It didn’t take more than a quarter of an hour for the trench to be ready. Beck took great care not to work so hard that they would start sweating. In these temperatures sweat would swiftly turn to ice against his skin and suck all the warmth out of his body.
Jonas piled the snow that he dug out into a small wall that re-sealed off most of the trench from the outside. They left a space at one end that they could crawl into. The wall gave a small measure of added protection against the elements.
The trench only needed to be a little bit longer and higher than they were when they lay down. Air had to be able to circulate, but not so freely that it lost all the warmth it had acquired from their bodies. And snow contracted, so by the morning the trench would be a little smaller than it was now.
Beck crawled in to give it the finishing touches, smoothing down the ceiling so that there were no rough edges. The problem with a nice, warm snow shelter was that warm snow melts … and drops would collect on any ridges or points and drip down onto them.
“Well, what do you think?” he said when he was done. The boys looked unenthusiastically at the hole in the snow they had created. They were abandoning their warm, sheltered van for a hole in the side of a snow-covered mountain — and it was actually the safer option.
“Well, I know some Japanese hotels just rent out sleeping pods,” Jonas replied. “I guess it’s the same principle here — just less Wi-Fi. Ah. But one other problem.” Jonas craned his neck to peer out of the gully and back at the van, about twenty metres away. “They’ll just see where we’ve been.”
Beck followed his gaze, and groaned to himself. Their footprints in the show were foot-shaped pools of dark shadow, in a neat line between the gully and the van.
Duh! he told himself. He wasn’t used to having to throw off human pursuers. Normally in survival you want to be spotted. But Beck reminded himself that sometimes to survive, the rules change, and you need to stay hidden. This was such a time. It was called covert survival.
“Well…” He tramped out of the gully and scraped the lid experimentally over the nearest set of prints, then stepped back to study what he had done. He had managed to blur their outline in the snow, but he could see it wasn’t going to work. It would still be obvious that something had passed that way.
“Okay. So we don’t try to hide. We distract and divert instead! Come on, help me.”
Together the boys walked side by side, away from the trench making two sets of footprints in the snow.
“We will keep walking for 100 metres in a loop back towards the road, and it will look like we tried to go cross country but gave up and returned to the road and followed that that instead.”
The boys completed the dummy track and returned to the road, then carefully walked back in their same exact footprints to where their shelter was. They carefully smoothed over any extra footprints around the trench so that any pursuer would just see one trail leading off into the snow, with no sign of their hidden trench along the way.
At least that was the theory.
What Beck really hoped for was for it to start snowing again to cover their tracks completely.
Beck laid out one of the rugs on the floor of the trench, folding it over for double insulation. Then, one by one they crawled into the hole, and Beck pulled the compartment lid over the opening to seal them in properly.
The lid wasn’t airtight, but it wasn’t meant to be — they still had to be able to breathe. They lay side by side in the dark, under the second rug, and shivered. Beck knew they were warmer than they would be outside though, where it would easily get to minus twenty. ‘Warm’ was a relative term, he figured.
“Beck.” Jonas said it as something between a whisper and sob.
“Uh-huh?”
“I’m frightened. For us. For my family. I’ve never had someone try to kill me before.”
Beck could feel his friend shivering; he didn’t know if it was the cold, or delayed shock. Even Jonas’s easy-going temperament had been tested to the max by what he had gone through.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Beck said quietly. “Whoever they are, whatever they wanted… we beat them. We’re still here, they don’t know it and we’re going to stay ahead of them. Once we get to Riksliden tomorrow, we go straight to the police, and then a simple phone call to your family makes sure everyone’s warned. Right?”
A pause.
“Right,” Jonas said unhappily. “Right…” A pause. “What about your friend the doctor?”
“Him too,” Beck said at once. He frowned in thought. He had a definite sense of making this up as he went along. There were too many unknowns to be sure of anything. All he could do was work with what he had and never give up.
“If they came up here to get you, I can’t believe he’s in danger — not if he doesn’t find out what they were planning. But he still needs to know the kind of people who are misusing the organisation.”
It was another variation on the thought of how life might have been different if Dian had lived. Maybe Dr Winslow wouldn’t be here now. Maybe Jonas wouldn’t be here to warn him.
“Anyway, that’s all for tomorrow. For now, let’s rest." No answer came. Somehow, Jonas had beaten Beck to it, and was fast asleep. Beck tried to do the same but sleep didn’t seem to come.
The cold still bit into his bones and he already knew this would be one of the most unpleasant nights of his life. Freezing cold, and knowing someone wanted him dead. Worrying that they hadn’t done enough to throw any pursuers off — and, above all, not knowing why he had been targeted.
And on that note, he finally nodded off.
Chapter Sixteen
It was the translucent glow of sun shining through a wall of snow that woke Beck, not the ceaseless cold. Finally, the dawn had arrived.
Jonas still slumbered next to him, so he gave his friend a nudge, then worked his way out into the morning air to give himself a chance to wake up properly.
He screwed up his eyes as he emerged from the trench and bright sunlight reflected straight into them off a million ice crystals. The sky above was clear blue and the snow field was spark
ling white. He could badly do with a pair of tinted snow goggles. Just one more reason to get off this mountain, as soon as possible. Mountains deserved the utmost respect, but they gave none at all to anyone daring to walk across them. They were harsh, merciless things. Getting down below the snowline had to be the first priority.
After a moment, Jonas crawled out and stood next to him. He stretched and flexed his back, and looked around him in wonderment.
“We did it. We actually did it. We slept in a hole in the snow.”
“Yeah. Your pillaging ancestors would be proud. Look, there’s no point hanging around — we’ll see what else there is in the van, and get ourselves off to—”
He stopped. The sound of a vehicle — engine noise and wheels crunching gravel — rumbled through the clear air. From the bottom of the gully they couldn’t see the track.
“Someone is coming to find us!” Jonas’s face lit up for a second, which made his look of realisation all the more tragic. “It might not be a good thing, hey?” he said with quiet, determined courage.
“Whoever it is, they’ll stop to look at the van,” Beck said. “Let’s take it carefully.”
They lay down on their fronts and crawled up the side of the gully to peer over the edge.
It was a black SUV, bouncing up the track towards them. They had left the van jammed sideways across the track — the newcomer couldn’t not stop. The driver was a woman, on her own. Her eyes were fixed on the van, but Beck quickly pulled his head back as she suddenly looked around, before opening the door and climbing out. In that quick glimpse he was sure he had seen her before …
He risked another peek as she got out and stood with her back to the two boys, phone pressed to her ear. She was tall, with short, fair hair, and dressed in serious-looking outdoor gear. While she was waiting for the phone to be answered, she pulled the van door open and peered inside. When she came out she was holding Kolberg’s gun, which she slipped into a pocket.
She began to speak rapidly in Swedish, and to turn slowly, gazing all around her. Beck quickly pulled back again before she had turned far enough to see him. His second glance had confirmed what he thought. She was the woman he had seen in Reception at the lodge the day before, sitting with a friend while Dr Winslow and the others checked in.
He closed his eyes and shook his head. And he had thought the two of them were hikers? They had looked like they meant business, but he couldn’t have guessed what kind of business it was.
Jonas was straining his ears to follow the conversation that they could hear but not see. Beck followed his changing expression to know whether or not the woman was good news for the two of them, and it didn’t look hopeful. He distinctly heard their names — ‘Kolberg’, ‘Eriksson’, ‘Granger’. Jonas gave a soft groan.
She spoke for a little longer, with pauses as she listened to the voice at the other end. She seemed to be the one doing most of the talking. Then they heard the sound of a door close and the SUV’s engine gunned. Tyres crackled on gravel again as it pulled past the van and headed on up the track. Beck waited until it was out of sight and ear-shot, before they carefully stood up and dusted snow from their fronts, knocking the chill of the ground away.
“Well?” he asked nervously.
“She said, Kolberg is here, no sign of the boys,” Jonas said dully, his voice just balanced on the edge of panic. “She couldn’t tell if he had killed us and dumped us, so she’s going further up the track to see if there are any clues. She knows there’s a spot where the track comes close to the edge — that must be where Kolberg took us — so that’s where she’s going to look.”
There was only one track up and down Storkittel, Beck thought.
It meant that, in a few minutes, the woman would be coming back this way.
Chapter Seventeen
“Didn’t she ask how he ended up in the back of the van?” he said.
“Sure. That was one of the things she wondered. Did he get a hit on the head when the van crashed, and climb into the back, and collapse? Or was it us? She said there’s a lot of disturbance in the snow, but there was nothing fresh in the last few hours, so we might have escaped last night and frozen to death. She will come as soon as she’s checked the glacier. And she asked whoever it was she was speaking to, to send a clean-up crew to avoid this going public.”
If Beck had had any doubt at all, those last words killed it. The woman was not an ally. Hikers did not ask for clean-up crews to conceal corpses. After Kolberg, the next thing she would want to clean up… was him and Jonas.
“Okay.” He did the calculations in his head quickly. “It took us, what, ten minutes to drive down this far? And she’s a better driver. Up and down will take her five minutes either way — so, ten minutes total. Maybe a couple of extra minutes to work out our bodies aren’t lying in the glacier but not much more. So we basically need to get away now.”
“Where to?” Jonas asked hopelessly.
“We’re sticking to plan A. We’ll head for Riksliden and go to the police.”
“But we have no transport,” Jonas pointed out.
“Yeah.” Beck bit his lip, and gazed down the mountain at the forested ground far below. “We’ll have to go cross-country.”
“Va?” Jonas exclaimed. “But… but that is…”
“Fifty kilometres by road, you said, so probably less on foot,” Beck said simply. He pictured the map in his mind’s eye. He remembered that the road ran east, but it also curved towards the South and then back North. Going cross-country, they could head in a near straight line, cutting across the curve. “I’d guess thirty, forty max. And there won’t be another phone anywhere nearer, so we have to get going. Before she comes back.”
Jonas unhappily followed Beck’s gaze at the country below them. His shoulders slumped as he accepted Beck’s reasoning.
“You think we can do this?” he said quietly. Beck looked him in the eye and spoke with quiet assurance.
“I know that together we can.”
“In one day?”
Beck narrowed his eyes in thought. Possibly, they could walk forty kilometres in one day — over level, unchallenging terrain. Getting off the mountain, getting through the forest, navigating who knew what obstacles… That would take longer.
“Probably not. We should plan on spending another night outside.”
Jonas sighed, but Beck was pleased to see he was showing more resolve than before.
“We should get going, then.”
“We’ll check the van out first.” They hurried over to the stranded vehicle. “I’ll take the back, you check the front,” Beck said briskly. “Anything we can use — anything at all.”
They got to work quickly, always with the sense of a ticking clock at the back of their heads. The woman getting to the point up the track, looking round, turning round, coming back…
In the back, Beck retrieved the pack he had found the previous night. In the daylight he could see it was a proper survival pack, put together by someone who knew what it would be like to be stranded far from civilisation in a Swedish winter. One more example of Swedish foresight and clear thinking.
A two-litre flask, full of water. A coil of rope, striped red and white. Some metal cylinders in garish red and yellow that he identified as emergency flares — handheld ones that would make a lot of light and smoke where you stood, rather than ones that were designed to be fired into the air. A tin box of long-life biscuits. A knife with a pointed blade, sharp on one side and serrated on the other, kept in a plastic sheath.
He could also give the spare wheel compartment a final once-over. The wheel was secured to the floor of the van with a bolt through the hub, which he unscrewed so that he could lift the tyre away. Underneath it in foam recesses were the vehicle jack and a crowbar, one end a flat wedge and the other a shaped socket to fit over the wheel nuts. He left the jack but the crowbar went into the pack.
And there was a toolkit, which Beck hesitated over. In principle a survivor might be abl
e to use anything. In practice there was no point in weighing yourself down with heavy, mostly metal, items. Eventually he left most of it, but he slipped a spool of plastic-wrapped wire into the pack as well.
And then there were the two rugs they had used in the shelter last night. Warm, insulated, waterproof — far too important to leave them behind, even if they were going to be bulky. Back outside, he laid them one on top of the other, folded them, and rolled them as tight as they would go. After that they just about fitted into the pack along with everything else.
Finally he stuck his arms through the straps and hoisted it onto his back.
Ready to go. And it had taken him only seven minutes.
Chapter Eighteen
Jonas came back from the front of the van with a crumpled paper bag.
“I found a sandwich and a couple of apples in the glove compartment.”
“Great. Stick them in the sidepockets, then we need to get going — and soon.”
He half-turned to make it easier for Jonas to get at the pack.
“Which way do we go?” Jonas asked as he zipped the flaps up.
“We want to head east…”
Beck looked up at the sun. It would have risen in the East, then gradually moved round to the south as it progressed. It was now a little after seven a.m. so it hadn’t been up long. That gave him a rough estimate for which way was east, and he could check it with his watch. He angled his wrist and the watch face so that the hour hand pointed at the sun, and then drew a line in his mind’s eye between the hour hand and the twelve o’clock mark. That way was south, so he could turn ninety degrees to his left and see that he had estimated pretty well exactly.
“That way,” he said. It was right across the snow field. Jonas squinted in that direction and shrugged.
