Mission Raptor Read online

  Mission Raptor

  A Beck Granger Adventure

  Bear Grylls

  About the Author

  Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognised faces of survival and outdoor adventure. His journey to this acclaim started in the UK, where his late father taught him to climb and sail.

  Trained from a young age in martial arts, Bear went on to spend three years as a soldier in the British Special Forces, serving with 21 SAS. It was here that he perfected many of the skills that his fans all over the world enjoy watching him pit against mother-nature.

  His popular survival TV shows include ‘Man Vs Wild’ and ‘Born Survivor’ which became one of the most watched programmes on the planet with an estimated audience of 1.2 billion. He has also hosted the hit adventure show 'Running Wild' on NBC, where he takes some of the world's best known movie stars on incredible adventures. Most recently US President Barrack Obama asked to appear on the show for a worldwide ‘Running Wild Special’.

  Bear is currently the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and is an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos.

  He has authored 22 books, including the international number one Bestselling autobiography: Mud, Sweat & Tears and his hugely popular titles Survival Guide for Life and True Grit, a bestselling novel Ghost Flight and his Mission Survival fiction books which have sold over 4 million copies in China alone.

  * * *

  If you’d like to know more, please visit Bear’s website, www.beargrylls.com where you can sign up for his most recent news.

  Also by Bear Grylls

  Mission Typhoon

  Mission Dragon

  Mission Raptor

  Mission Jaguar

  Mission Raptor

  Bear Grylls

  This edition published in 2016 by Ipso Books

  Agora Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd

  55 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1BS

  Copyright © Bear Grylls, 2016

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  To young Robbie — a hero of a boy who always gave life his best and shared light with all who knew him.

  * * *

  Never forgotten.

  Character Profiles

  Beck Granger

  Beck Granger is just fourteen but knows more about the art of survival than most adults learn in a lifetime. As a small child, he picked up many traditional survival skills from the remote tribes around the world that his parents stayed with in their work for Green Force. Since then he has practiced and polished his abilities in tropical jungles, arid deserts and frozen wastes all over the globe. One day he intends to follow his parents in to Green Force.

  Jonas Eriksson

  Fourteen-year-old Jonas hails from the Swedish port of Gothenburg, where his father is a senior official in the Customs agency, but being city-born and bred hasn’t stopped him becoming a self-taught expert on Swedish wildlife. Even though the one thing he loves more than the Swedish wilderness is a good meal and a warm bed, like Beck he is determined to work one day for Green Force, taking direct environmental action in the parts of the world where it is needed.

  Chapter One

  The growling of diesel engines cut through the icy air, so Beck Granger heard the convoy before he saw it, a bass throb rising above the gentle shush of his skis.

  The road had a light covering of unbroken snow from the season’s first fall the previous night, making it a white slash through the dark conifer forest. No traffic had used it since then, so Beck and his new friend Jonas had been taking advantage of its smooth run. Further ahead, the road bent and disappeared into a cutting that had been blasted out of the rock. That was where the convoy now appeared. A bus, then another, then another, trundling along in single file.

  Beck quickly aimed his skis off the road and braked to a halt on the verge with a swoosh of his skis, as he skidded them parallel. Jonas Eriksson drew up beside him. Beneath the winter clothing, Jonas was a Swedish boy the same age as Beck, blond and a little chubby in contrast to Beck’s dark hair and wiry frame, and they had got on immediately when they met. Like most young Swedes, he spoke English almost perfectly, while Beck could only manage a few words of Swedish.

  The wheels of the convoy carved out dark ruts in the fresh snow and threw up sprays of dirty ice on either side, so that Beck and Jonas flinched away as the buses rolled past them.

  Beck dared a glance up. He had a brief impression of misted windows and wrapped, muffled figures in the warm interior. As far as he could see, every bus was full, every seat taken. There had to be well over a hundred people, of all ages and sizes, being transported.

  They watched the buses disappear around the next bend until they were all hidden by the close-packed conifers. Above and beyond them rose the snow-capped, sheer, craggy western face of Mount Storkittel — all two and a half thousand metres of it.

  Silence returned very quickly, apart from the far-off, far-up cry of an eagle circling the upper crags of Storkittel. Down at ground level the ubiquitous spruce trees soaked up the sound and there was nothing else — no cars, no people — to make any noise. From horizon to horizon, apart from the road and the telegraph wires that ran along it, there was nothing here in the far north of Sweden. This was big sky country: 200 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle. The horizons were far apart and the sky was a massive grey dome above them, punctured by the mountain.

  “They must be heading for the lodge,” Beck commented. “Funny — I thought the season was over.”

  The only place to stay for miles around was Storkittel Fjällstation, the hiking lodge at the base of the mountain. During the spring and the summer, people came here to hike around the gently rolling pine forests and lakes, and at the height of the season the lodge could take two hundred guests. Now it was that in-between time when autumn was over and winter was not quite beginning. No one came to Storkittel to ski for fun — it was too steep on one side, and dominated by a massive glacier on the other — so until next spring the lodge would be almost empty apart from a skeleton staff, and the Green Force office where Beck and Jonas were interning.

  Jonas shivered, though like Beck, he was bulked out in an insulated jacket and trousers, winterproof and waterproof, over a couple of layers of normal clothes beneath, and he wore a peaked, army-style cap with flaps pulled down over his ears. He came from Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, a long way to the South, but he had told Beck he had spent every summer of his life up here. So he was no stranger to Swedish winters or the Swedish wilderness — but the Swedish wilderness in the winter was a whole different game to the idyllic summers.

  “And the lodge is where I would like to be, so shall we move?” he suggested.

  “Sure,” Beck said with a grin. “Come on.”

  They turned off the road and dug in with their poles, sending themselves gliding on their way into the forest.

  The real snowfall, which would coat the countryside in snow that was metres deep and which would last for months, had yet to set in. The road behind them was lined with orange snow poles two metres high, which told Beck exactly how much snow the Swedes were expecting. The last night’s snow had just been a preliminary taster of what was to come, and it would probably all be gone in another day, but there was enough of it now for the boys to have broken out th
e skis.

  Fir trees whizzed by as they glided over the rough terrain, up and down hill. This was cross-country skiing, the kind people did for work, not sport. It used all kinds of different muscles in the legs but Beck loved it, almost as much as the conventional, downhill kind. Their skis had strips of short hair-like strands strapped on beneath them. When the skis moved forward, the hairs were brushed smooth and the skis glided freely. If the skis tried to move backwards, friction dragged the hairs upright so that they dug into the snow and the ski stopped. It made it possible to walk yourself up slopes with long, sliding steps and then ski down the other side without a break.

  Even when the ground was snow-free, like a lot of it was in the shelter of the trees, with just patches of snow between the pine needles and moss, you could slide your way forward over it. It felt like the most natural way of moving there was, and Beck had missed it. He had got the taste for it as a kid, when he and his parents had stayed in a Sami village in the north of Finland as part of their work for the environmental direct action group Green Force. He had never really had the chance to get back into it.

  That was one reason why, when his Uncle Al offered him a choice of Green Force offices around the world for his work placement, he had chosen this one. Beck had always declared that he wanted to work for Green Force — and one day he had every intention of doing it full-time. This first step brought him to the remote north — but what he was about to experience here would stay with him forever.

  Chapter Two

  The boys knew the route by heart, having done this several times already that week. Ten minutes later they were in a clearing among the conifers, where a wooden box the size of a large suitcase with slatted sides stood on a tripod as tall as their heads.

  Jonas unlatched one of the sides and swung it open to reveal a bank of measuring instruments that recorded every available bit of data about the local environment. Beck dug a tablet out of his thick weatherproof coat and slotted it into a data port inside the box. It took a few moments for the data to transfer from the monitoring station — just one node in the vast net Green Force had thrown around the environmentally sensitive Arctic Circle. In addition, as part of their training, the boys were expected to record their own observations in paper notebooks: any signs of animals, the approximate number of birds they could hear, weather conditions at the time of the recording, and anything else that struck them.

  Jonas bent his head over his notebook and wrote the date. Then he looked around him with an air of studied detachment as though he was weighing up all the possibilities in his head.

  “Cold,” he said, and wrote the word carefully down in Swedish. Kall.

  “You say that every day,” Beck laughed.

  “Still true.”

  Then he cocked an ear at a distant bird sound. It sounded to Beck like the sound someone might make falling off a cliff — a sudden burst of crying out that quickly faded to silence.

  “Buzzard,” he said, and made a note of that too. “Rough-legged.”

  It was always when Beck was thinking Jonas would always be a city boy, that he did something like that — not just identifying a bird from a snatched half-second cry, but the type of bird too. Raptors — birds of prey — seemed to be his speciality.

  When he had first mentioned his interest in raptors, Beck had thought he was talking about dinosaurs, before realising that ‘raptor’ just meant ‘hunter’.

  “Probably looking for food,” Beck commented.

  “I know the feeling,” Jonas said pointedly. “Snow on the ground, harsh environment, prey animals forced out into the open — and the hunters come out after them.”

  “‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’,” Beck quoted. He had read that line in a poem at school for English.

  “Nature-ally,” Jonas replied, with a shy, sideways smile, showing a pride in his bad English joke. He latched the box back up and they started to move on to the next station, half a mile away.

  Doing the rounds of all the stations was a job they had done every day of their placement, and it normally took most of the afternoon. With the skis, Beck expected it could be done in a couple of hours — which was just as well, he thought, looking up at the sky through the trees. The clouds were a very thick, dark grey, poised to drop something heavy on them.

  The weather struck on the last station. Icy rain began to fall as they made their way through the trees, and Beck was glad to be able to pull his hood up over his head and around his face. By the time they reached the clearing of the last station, it was coming down heavily — a very thick kind of sleet, somewhere between water and ice that swirled in the air and numbed any bare skin that it touched immediately.

  Jonas wrote down, mycket kall.

  “Very cold,” he said.

  “And wet,” Beck pointed out.

  “Visst,” Jonas agreed, which Beck had worked out meant ‘certainly’ or ‘right’. “Come on. There's a hot meal in the canteen calling me to eat it.”

  It was easiest to go in single file through the trees, and Jonas took the lead. Beck had soon learnt that it took a lot to hold Jonas back when he had the promise of being warm, dry and fed ahead of him. And Beck couldn’t really argue. There had been many times in his life when he hadn’t been any of those things.

  They always took care to be back in daylight, and they had been this way every day on foot for a week. So Beck wasn’t too worried that the thick ice clouds were making it prematurely dark, and he could only see a few metres through the trees. Jonas knew the way as well as he did.

  But he was taken by surprise when Jonas suddenly skidded to a halt, and Beck had to twist his body and skid sideways to stop running into him.

  “What’s up?” he asked peering past his friend.

  The track ran into a tangle of branches and shrubs that blocked their way. That wasn’t the problem. They could easily push their way through with a bit of effort.

  The problem was that Beck had never seen it before. It wasn’t something that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, since they had last done the rounds — the tangle would obviously have taken some time to grow. With a sinking feeling, Beck realised they had gone the wrong way.

  Jonas turned worried eyes on him.

  “I, uh, might have missed our turning. It must be back down the route somewhere. I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, no worries.” Beck didn’t know Jonas well enough yet to guess how well he would react to the unexpected, and he didn’t want his friend flipping out. He acted quickly to soothe the rising fear. “We’ll just retrace our steps. Come on.”

  It wasn’t hard to turn 180 degrees and head back the way they had come, this time with Beck leading.

  But five minutes later, Beck had to call a halt. And now he was the one feeling worried. The swirling ice-rain still filled the air and it had obliterated their tracks. All the ways through the trees looked the same.

  “Even if we missed the turn again, we should be back at the monitoring station by now.” Jonas said what Beck was thinking.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Beck rolled back his sleeve to show his watch. He angled the watch face up at the sky and turned slowly, looking for the sun. Even if he couldn’t see it — even if there was just a slightly lighter patch in the sky above — he would be able to work out which way was north, and that would help them navigate back to the lodge.

  But there was no sign of the sun either.

  With night coming on, and the temperature heading rapidly into the minuses, they were well and truly lost in the woods.

  Chapter Three

  “We… we need to keep calm…” Jonas’s voice shook but he was obviously trying to keep it level. “If we go in a straight line, we are bound to get somewhere. We will come to the road — or another monitoring station — or…”

  “Or miss them all and head in a straight line all the way to the North Pole,” Beck said flatly. “We can be more scientific than that.”

  Jonas craned his neck up, trying to s
ee through the trees.

  “If we could see Storkittel, we would know where we are immediately.”

  Beck glanced up at the swirling mass of flying ice. Not a chance. But at least Jonas was thinking along the right lines. If you couldn’t rely on your senses, you had to let nature provide the navigational cues.

  “Maybe we can’t see it, but the wind can. Wind gets stronger when it hits obstacles like cliffs, so if you feel it getting stronger, you know you’re getting near to something — what are you doing?”

  Jonas had pulled his hat off and stood there with his eyes closed, angling his head slowly from side to side. His head was now bare, and even though he shivered and winced as ice settled into his blond hair, he was obviously trying hard.

  “I… can feel the wind, I just can’t sense the direction…” he confessed. “I’m too numb — and it seems to coming from every direction.”

  Beck bit back a laugh. It wouldn’t be kind.

  “Put your hat on. There’s other ways.” Jonas gratefully complied and Beck turned in a slow circle, gazing at the trees. He studied them hard, eyes narrowed, slowly reaching a conclusion. “I’d say the ice is thicker on this side, wouldn’t you?”

  He gestured with his ski pole. The ice storm hadn’t been going for that long yet and not much of it had settled on the trees — but they all had a faint covering, white specks piling onto the dark green needles, and Beck was sure he could see a difference on one side of the nearest tree, compared to the other. And when he looked at other trees, he saw the same thing.