Rage of the Rhino Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Character Profiles

  Map

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Epilogue

  Bear’s Survival Tips

  About the Author

  Also by Bear Grylls

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It’s eat or be eaten.

  You are lost on one of the largest game reserves in Africa.

  You know your priorities: find water, find food, find your way back to civilization.

  And most of all, stay away from the many, many animals that want to eat you . . .

  Beck has survived in some of the most dangerous environments imaginable, but can he survive the hungriest place on Earth?

  To young Scouts all over the world.

  Go for it in your lives and grab all those adventures.

  And always live by the Scouting code, which will

  help empower you to your full potential.

  With admiration to you all,

  Bear Grylls (Chief Scout)

  CHARACTER PROFILES

  Beck Granger

  At just thirteen years old, Beck Granger knows more about the art of survival than most military experts learn in a lifetime. When he was young he travelled with his parents to some of the most remote places in the world, from Antarctica to the African Bush, and he picked up many vital survival skills from the remote tribes he met along the way.

  Uncle Al

  Professor Sir Alan Granger is one of the world’s most respected anthropologists. His stint as a judge on a reality television show made him a household name in the UK, but to Beck he will always be plain old Uncle Al – more comfortable in his lab with a microscope than hob-nobbing with the rich and famous. He believes that patience is a virtue and has a ‘never-say-die’ attitude to life. For the past few years he has been acting as guardian to Beck, who has come to think of him as a second father.

  David & Melanie Granger

  Beck’s mum and dad were Special Operations Directors for the environmental direct action group, Green Force. Together with Beck, they spent time with remote tribes in some of the world’s most extreme places. Several years ago their light plane crashed in the jungle, and wreckage was spread for miles around. To this day their bodies have never been found, and the cause of the accident remains unexplained . . .

  Samora Peterson

  Having grown up in South Africa with a father who works as a ranger in Kruger National Park, Samora was always destined to be pretty knowledgeable about wild animals. When she’s not at school, she can usually be found with her dad studying migration patterns of elephants or helping to save rhinos and other endangered animals.

  Chapter 1

  The first thing Beck Granger saw as he stepped into the kitchen was the caterpillar. And it was huge.

  He stopped in his tracks, then bent down to inspect it more closely. It didn’t move.

  He had come in from school, chucked down his bags, made his way into the kitchen – and there it was. The caterpillar took up half the table. It was as long as Beck’s forearm, its skin thick and green, and studded with spines.

  At one end was a smiley face made of marzipan.

  Beck looked up at his uncle. ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘I thought it would be right up your street, Beck!’

  Uncle Al – Professor Sir Alan Granger, to anyone outside the family – applied a match to the caterpillar’s spines, which were the candles. Fourteen of them. ‘It’s in honour of all the insects you’ve managed to eat in fourteen years of life.’

  ‘Mmm. Thanks for the reminder.’

  Al extinguished the match with a flick of his wrist and put an arm around Beck’s shoulders. Beck accepted the hug.

  ‘Happy birthday! I have to say, there were times when I was afraid neither of us would be seeing this day.’

  He said it lightly, but Beck heard the stress that lurked behind his words. Beck had never given much thought to birthdays – they just happened naturally, one after the other. But yes, there had been times during those fourteen years when he hadn’t been sure he would live to see the next one.

  Just recently, he had learned that there were people in the world determined to make sure he didn’t even make it through to the next sunrise. So maybe he had more reason than most teenagers to celebrate.

  He had a proper birthday party planned for the weekend, with friends his own age. Today it was just the two of them.

  The candles were all lit.

  ‘Make a wish?’ Al suggested.

  Beck thought for a moment, then bent down close to the cake and blew. The candles went out in one puff, and the wish was made.

  Please make Al’s friends get a move on!

  The last three months had been an agony of routine and trying to be normal.

  He had returned from an eventful cruise in the Caribbean. It had involved shipwrecks, exploding drilling rigs and murder. For the first time Beck had been able to put a name and a face to the organization that had killed his parents and blighted his life: Lumos.

  He had known about Lumos for a long time. In his mind he had lumped it together with all the other corporations that were happy to see the Earth ruined, so long as they made money. But he hadn’t realized just how bad Lumos was – rotten to the very core.

  He had found that out when Lumos had put its most senior operative onto the job of killing him. She had failed; he and Al had returned to England . . . and done nothing.

  At least, that was what it felt like. They knew about Lumos, but they couldn’t prove anything. They needed hard evidence that would stand up in court. The only evidence they had was in their own heads.

  Al had friends, and plenty of them, in the Green Force environmental action group. They believed the story. Al had been able to give them pointers to where to start looking for evidence of wrongdoing. But it all took time – so much time. And Green Force had other projects to be getting on with – like doing what it was meant to do, which was raise environmental awareness and fight ecological criminals all around the world.

  Green Force couldn’t afford to throw everything it had at Lumos if it meant taking resources away from other jobs.

  The result had been three long months of waiting, not knowing if Lumos would strike again.

  For a while Al had checked under his car for bombs eve
ry day before heading off to work. Beck had been kept out of school on the pretext of being ill.

  Eventually they had decided that Lumos wouldn’t be quite so obvious. The company had their own reasons for lying low and not attracting attention – it wouldn’t help their image if Beck suddenly turned up dead so soon after their previous encounter.

  The last time they tried to kill Beck, they had lured him out of the country. As long as he and Al stayed at home, they should be safe.

  So Beck went back to school again and tried to act like a normal schoolboy. But ‘normal’ was Beck’s kind of living hell.

  Chapter 2

  ‘Looks like you got a lot of cards this year!’

  Al’s cheerful tone jolted Beck back to the present. His uncle passed him a sheaf of stiff envelopes. Beck leafed through them, looking at the postmarks and stamps to guess who they were from.

  A stamp with a kangaroo and a Western Australia postmark – that was easy. That would be Brihony, though the kangaroo seemed out of place. Her speciality was saltwater crocodiles. Those had been just one of the dangers they’d encountered as they yomped across the Outback in search of the old man who could help them fight Lumos.

  A stamp from Alaska, showing a pod of orcas diving below the surface of a smooth, cold sea, was from Tikaani, with whom he had hiked across frozen mountains to get help for a badly injured Al. That was the first time Beck had bumped into Lumos.

  A kind of jungle scene from Colombia – that would be Christina and Marco, the twins who had survived a shipwreck and then a jungle trek with him on the trail of a drug lord.

  And one with no stamp at all; just a hand-drawn picture of an orang-utan saying ‘Hi, Beck!’ That one had been hand delivered by Peter, his best friend, who only lived a few streets away.

  Peter had not only been stranded with him in the Sahara, escaping from murderous diamond smugglers; he had also ended up dodging tigers and volcanoes in the Indonesian rainforest. After that, Peter’s parents had been less enthusiastic about their son going on holiday with Beck. Even though Peter was always up for more.

  Beck smiled. He had made a few enemies in fourteen years, but he made many more friends in the course of his adventures. Friends he would always treasure.

  The smile dimmed a little. There was one boy he didn’t expect to get a card from. He didn’t even know if James Blake was still alive. When Beck last saw him, he had been sobbing as he tried to free his mother from the tangled wreckage on a collapsing drilling rig.

  And why were they on the rig in the first place? Beck’s smile dimmed further still. Lumos. Lumos, Lumos, Lumos – always Lumos, everywhere he looked. This time, they had been experimenting with a new fuel source on the sea bed. It could make them very rich, and at the same time it would cause devastation. Lumos only cared about the first bit. Beck had been there because James’s mother was Lumos’s assassin, acting under orders from James’s grandfather, the head of Lumos, Edwin Blake. She had lured him onto the rig to kill him.

  And why was the rig collapsing? Because, consumed with greed, Lumos had planted it right in the path of the biggest hurricane of the century. And, OK, Beck had helped the process by causing an underwater explosion, but that had been so he could escape. The explosion hadn’t hurt anyone, and he wouldn’t have needed to set it off if no one had been trying to kill him in the first place . . .

  His mind whirled as he recalled the details.

  Despite everything, Beck would have helped James to save his mother. He could have shown her that there was a better way than her sad, twisted, selfish view of life. But he had been prevented from doing this by someone bigger and stronger than him, who had dragged him away and thrown him into a helicopter. Soon after they’d taken off, the rig had exploded.

  James might have survived, or he might be at the bottom of the sea.

  Beck tried to put a stop to his wild thoughts and concentrated on his birthday cards.

  There was one more which obviously came from abroad, but he couldn’t place it. He couldn’t even read the stamp. It wasn’t the usual alphabet. There was something that was obviously an E, then two characters that looked like pyramids, then an A, then something like a wrong way round figure 3. He raised an eyebrow and showed it to Al.

  ‘Hellas,’ his uncle translated. ‘Or, as you and I would call it, Greece.’

  ‘Greece?’ Beck frowned and stuck a finger under the flap to open it. ‘Who do I know in Greece?’

  The envelope contained a card and a letter, handwritten in English. Beck read out the first line slowly, stumbling over the unfamiliar writing:

  ‘Dear Beck,

  Happy birthday! You won’t remember me, but we met when you were very little. My name is Athena Sapera—’

  Al’s eyes went wide. ‘Good Lord! Athena Sapera? Now, there’s a blast from the past!’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘A very old friend. Rhino lady. Read it out – and follow me.’

  And so Beck followed Al into the living room, reading the rest of the letter line by line.

  Chapter 3

  Al searched around in the cupboard where he kept their old photo albums, while Beck continued.

  ‘I worked with your parents and your uncle in Africa for many years.’

  Beck paused and glanced at his uncle, who still had his head buried in the cupboard. ‘True?’ he asked.

  ‘True.’ Al’s voice was slightly muffled. ‘Keep going.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Beck muttered. The last time he met someone who’d worked with his parents, the man had been trying to kill him – an amateur assassin rather than a professional, but it had come to the same thing. As far as Beck was concerned, being an old parental friend did not necessarily mean anything. But he supposed he had to trust his parents’ taste in friends at some point. They couldn’t all have been bad.

  ‘I have been reading all about your adventures. You clearly take after your parents! They would be so proud of you—’

  ‘Got it.’ Al dumped a heavy photo album down on the table and opened it at a page halfway through.

  The first thing Beck saw was the rhinoceros, because it took up most of the picture. It was the size of a small car, armour-plated with folds of thick, dark leathery skin. He assumed it was sedated because it was lying down with its head between its front feet, like a very big dog stretched out in front of the fire.

  On one side of the picture was his mother, just walking into the frame. Crouched down by the rhino’s head, apparently checking its eyes, was another woman. She wore shorts and a checked shirt and a sun hat. Dark curly hair spilled out from under the brim. Her face was angled towards the camera, as if she had just noticed that her picture was being taken.

  Al tapped her face with a finger and Beck understood. This was Athena. He carried on reading.

  ‘I will shortly be returning to South Africa to continue my work with the rhinos in the Kruger National Park. You have probably heard of that . . .’

  Beck had heard of it. He knew that it was a large game reserve in South Africa – large, as in the size of a small country.

  ‘I wondered if you would like to come too. I am sure you find all your new fame very boring . . .’

  Beck pulled a wry smile. She was dead right there. It had been fine, until his scrape in Australia. Then the media had finally got hold of the fact that there was this boy who kept surviving – that was how the headline had described him. Since then he had been interviewed in print and on TV and on the web. He tried to use the fame wisely – he tried to push the Green Force message and say things that ought to be said. But yes, after a while it got boring. Always the same questions, always the same answers. And always the same closing line: ‘So, Beck, what are you up to next?’ The honest answer to that was always: ‘Staying alive.’

  He read on: ‘ . . . but I always say, if you’ve got it, use it. You would be the perfect face for a Green Force video highlighting the issue of rhino poaching. These wonderful animals are on the brink of extinction. Ther
e are only a few thousand white rhinos left, and black rhinos are down to a few hundred. If we don’t change this now, then we never will.’

  Beck scanned ahead. ‘And then there’s some stats about poaching . . .’ He whistled. ‘Four hundred and twenty-eight rhinos known to be killed in the first six months of 2013. That’s, um . . .’

  ‘Over seventy a month,’ Al said grimly. ‘More than two a day.’

  ‘So anyway, she finishes: I hope this is of interest to you. Please email me at . . .’ Beck raised his eyes to his uncle, who was looking thoughtful. ‘So, what do you think?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  Beck thought that he could really do without having someone out to kill him. But two rhinos a day illegally killed . . . If there were only a few thousand of the creatures left, at that rate it really wouldn’t be long before they disappeared for ever. He hated being in the limelight, but as Athena said, if you’ve got it, use it. If his fame could help . . .

  ‘I want to do it.’

  ‘Of course you do. And it doesn’t occur to you for one second that going abroad on your own with Lumos on your tail would be the stupidest thing you could possibly do right now . . .’

  ‘Why should Lumos know?’ Beck asked. ‘We don’t have to tell anyone. I won’t announce my holiday plans on PlaceSpace. I can just go, make the video, and be back before Lumos realizes I’ve gone.’

  Al’s eyes narrowed in thought. ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea. OK. Email her back and tell her you’re coming.’ He gave Beck a nudge. ‘But don’t tell her I’m coming with you. Let’s surprise the lady.’

  ‘You want to come too?’ Beck said in surprise.

  ‘Of course. And this time I’m staying with you every step of the way. Things go wrong when you’re out on your own!’

  Chapter 4

  Beck and Al wheeled their cases into the arrivals hall of Johannesburg International Airport, and Beck scanned the waiting crowd. He had studied a couple more pictures of Athena, so he would know her when he saw her.