Mission Raptor Read online

  “I think so…” Jonas said hesitantly.

  “And it does that on the windward side. Moisture in the air hits a solid object and turns to ice. Works on trees, rocks — heck, it would work on us if we stood still long enough. So, the wind’s blowing from this direction.” Beck closed his eyes and tried to remember the weather report that had been playing on the big screen in reception back at the lodge — animated arrows and icicles drifting across the screen. “And the wind today comes in from the East,” he said, “so this way is where east is. We went south off the road, so now we need to head north.” He pointed to the left. “This way. Come on.”

  He dug in with his poles and set off. Jonas was quick to follow him.

  Five minutes later, they were back at the road. The tyre marks left by the buses were slowly filling in.

  “We were heading due east,” Jonas marvelled. “We would have gone all the way to Riksliden — that’s about fifty kilometres. Boy, we would have got hungry!”

  “You know,” Beck laughed, “I think I can smell that meal too now. Let’s go get it.”

  * * *

  Twilight was settling in as they returned to the lodge, which was actually a complex of buildings set into a hollow of the gentle slope that led up towards the sheer heights of Storkittel. The lights twinkled in a way that made the boys feel several degrees warmer just by being there. The ice storm had blown out and they could cruise lazily down the approach track, skidding to a halt by the steps that led up to the main building which was heaving; the buses they had seen earlier, all dark and empty now, were pulled up in the parking area and all the passengers — men, women, children, all talking loudly — seemed to be crammed into the reception area.

  They took their skis off and pushed their way through the doors. A man bearing a clipboard bore down on them, and then saw from the skis and the clothing that they belonged here.

  “We are from Green Force,” Jonas said — in Swedish, but it sounded so much like the English equivalent that even Beck could understand it. He carried on talking, so rapidly that Beck had no chance of following it, and the man nodded and shrugged. He pointed at the crowd thronging around the front desk, saying something in return. They chatted a bit longer, and then they were allowed to push through the crowd to the stairs that led to the locker room where they could dump their skis and outdoor gear.

  “He said they’re refugees,” Jonas translated. “From the Middle East.”

  “Really?” Beck looked back in surprise, just before the doors swung shut and cut reception off from view. “They’ve come a long way.”

  “Hey, you know Sweden has to find accommodation for nearly 170,000 asylum seekers? That’s about the same as the population of Uppsala, which is our fourth largest city. So we’re running out of room for them and the Swedish Migration Agency has struck a deal with empty resorts like this one.”

  Beck whistled. He had known there was a migration crisis all over Europe but figures like that put it into real perspective. What must it be like for these people? How desperate did they have to be; what had they gone through that they had to throw away everything they had back home, travel in fear and desperation to north of the Arctic Circle, and actually feel that things had improved for them?

  The Green Force office was in a room at one end of the admin wing of the lodge. It didn’t look much — a handful of desks and workstations, and maps stuck up around the walls, but Beck knew their work was crucial. Only their supervisor Anna-Britt, a cheerful Swedish woman in her thirties, was in the office. She looked up from her keyboard with a big smile.

  “Jonas and Beck! Just in time! All sorts of jobs are piling up.”

  “Yeah? Well, we were just going to upload the data and then head for the canteen—” Jonas began.

  “None of the permanent residents can eat before seven p.m. today,” Anna-Britt said casually, going back to her screen, and Beck had to stifle a laugh. Jonas looked like she had just told him his pet kitten was dead.

  “B-but that’s hours!” he protested.

  “Two hours,” Anna-Britt corrected. Beck had gone hungry for longer than that before, so with quiet resignation he sat at his own workstation and logged in.

  “You saw all the new guests, yes?” Anna-Britt asked them. “They need to eat first and the kitchen is overstretched. Come on, Jonas, you can hold out a little. Beck, the CO2 distribution charts need to be updated with the latest figures. Jonas, you upload today’s data and then start the analysis.”

  “They sure must be hungry to be hungrier than me…” Jonas muttered, and he plonked himself down in front of his own screen. The boys got to work, Jonas still grumbling under his breath.

  Beck tapped away at the keyboard, and watched the charts Anna-Britt had mentioned flow and reshape on the screen in front of him. He would be the first to admit it wasn’t fascinating work — in fact, it bored him to tears. Some people were cut out for this kind of work, tied to a desk in an office. He wasn’t one of them.

  But he knew what else Green Force did around the world, and he believed in it and wanted to be a part of it. It did more than campaign for environmental issues — it organised them. If the needs of the western lifestyle meant that ecosystems were coming under threat, if poor people in other countries were being dispossessed, if natural resources were disappearing — Green Force stood up and said no. It took action, it lobbied in parliaments, and it sent helpers — field workers, Green Force’s front line, like Beck’s mother and father — in at ground level to stand alongside the people being affected.

  It wasn’t easy. It could be downright dangerous. Beck’s parents had made enemies of the powerful Lumos corporation, and it had cost them their lives, which was why Beck now lived with his uncle back in Britain. But it had only made him all the more determined to step into their shoes one day.

  And all that high level work meant that Green Force needed data to inform their policies. Lots and lots of it. The figures he was compiling every day disappeared into Green Force’s databanks and were used by people much higher up than he was. And one day, by working his way up from the bottom like this, learning about every part of Green Force’s work as he went, he would be one of those people himself — someone who went out and changed things. For the better. Oh yes. He had a plan and he was sticking to it.

  And he vowed that when he was a field worker, he would always be nice to the people back in the office. He would appreciate that their work was just as important as his.

  And with that thought, his stomach rumbled like a rhinoceros.

  Chapter Four

  Anna-Britt let them go at seven on the dot and they headed to the canteen via reception. It was totally dark outside by now and the temperature would be heading for minus twenty, but the lodge was built to the best ecological principles, with passive insulation and a biomass generator that let it stay comfortably warm for a minimum amount of energy. Beck loved the Swedish — they had such a can-do attitude to winter.

  The crowd had dispersed and reception was almost empty. A woman and a man, both very fair-haired like many Swedes, sat at a table in one corner with a couple of coffees and a map — late arrivals for the season, Beck assumed. They both looked kitted up for some pretty heavy duty hiking, with well-worn gear that was comfortable and familiar on them. Some tourists wore their stuff like it was a costume, as if they were playing a part they didn’t really believe, but not these two. Their faces were serious and they were talking intently with their heads just inches apart.

  Beck wondered if their plans had been upset by the mass arrival of refugees. He only really noticed the woman because her eyes drifted over him and Jonas as they came in. For a split second, she looked as if she was wondering if they were also refugees, before she could see that they obviously weren’t, and she went back to saying something to her partner.

  A group of four or five men were checking in at the main desk, all wearing jackets with a logo on the back that Beck recognised at once — a cartoon globe with a ban
dage tied across it, and the name ‘Medics Around the World’ written around it. Beck knew the name well. The charity was frequently associated with refugee work and Beck’s Uncle Al regularly gave money to it.

  The men were giving their names to the reception manager, one by one, for the computer. Beck and Jonas passed by them on the way to the canteen, close by enough to hear one of them say, with the kind of slow voice some Brits use to speak to foreigners:

  “Doctor… Henry… Winslow.”

  Beck took another step while the words passed through his brain, and then he stopped abruptly in his tracks as they hit a memory. He stared back, wide eyed, his heart suddenly pounding.

  The doctor hadn’t noticed the two boys. He turned to his colleagues and they talked among themselves.

  “Hey, Beck, come on! You want to wait until seven in the morning?”

  Jonas almost dragged him away, and Beck tried to turn his attention to the task of preparing to eat.

  But even as he tucked in to his beef casserole and roasted sweet potatoes, his thoughts were spinning at the back of his mind, emotions rushing through him.

  Doctor Winslow. He ran the name in his head, over and over. Doctor Henry Winslow.

  Was it the same man? Could it be?

  Chapter Five

  Three weeks earlier…

  NEW HAND!

  Beck laughed when he saw the message title, and who it was from. He clicked and a new picture filled the screen. It showed a smiling nineteen-year-old Chinese boy who was holding up his right hand. At first glance it looked like any other hand. Anyone who didn’t know Jian wouldn’t have guessed what the big deal was.

  Shipwrecked on a deserted island, with no one else around except for Beck and their friend Ju-Long, Jian had got a bad case of blood poisoning from a lizard bite — a Five-Fingered Golden Dragon bite, to be precise — that could have killed him. With Jian unconscious and delirious, and no sign of rescue, Beck and Ju-Long had had no choice. The hand had to be amputated.

  Beck read the email quickly and his smile widened.

  I can pick up things and yes, it is waterproof so I will soon be sailing again!

  Sailing was Jian’s passion, which was how they had ended up on that island in the first place. Beck breathed a sigh of relief that his friend could continue doing what he loved.

  I hope you are well back in England. Ju-Long says hello too.

  Beck hit ‘reply’ and began to type.

  Brilliant to see the new hand. My uncle is keeping me busy this afternoon scanning in old photographs.

  It was a job Al had meant to get round to for ages, waiting for a wet Sunday afternoon when there would be nothing else to do. Go through the old albums, scan in the photos worth keeping.

  There are a lot of them…

  “Next up.” Al interrupted his typing with a very small, slim album.

  “Which ones am I scanning from this?” Beck asked casually as he opened it.

  “All of them,” Al said, with an unusual softness in his tone.

  “All of…?” Beck began, but then he opened it up and saw. “Oh.”

  The very first picture was of two babies, lying side by side in an incubator box. Their faces were crinkled and red, and their tiny bodies were dwarfed by their baby-grow suits.

  You couldn’t tell just by looking whether either was a girl or a boy, but their names were written below. Dian. Beck.

  If Dian was in the same picture as him, Beck knew that meant they were both less than a day old. Beck looked at the picture for a long time, gently tracing it with his finger.

  We’ve always stood beside you, Beck. That was what she had said. Mum, Dad, me and many angels.

  In China, with Jian and Ju-Long, he had surprised himself by suddenly thinking of Dian. He had hardly ever thought of her before that, though he had always known she had existed. His twin sister.

  And soon after that that, he had… what? Dreamt of her? Had a vision? He honestly wasn’t sure. Whatever explanation he came up with, nothing could match the depth of what he felt about it.

  Part of it was a feeling of… failure. He had been in many dangerous situations in his life and he had never lost a single friend. But, right at the start, his own sister had slipped away and he had been powerless to do anything about it.

  “Why are we in an incubator?” he asked. It was the first question that came out of his mouth.

  “It’s usual for twins. They tend to be undersized at first. And you two—”

  “Yeah, I know. Difficult birth.” His offhand manner masked the emotion that arose whenever he thought of Dian. He didn’t know the technicalities of what had happened. He did know the birth hadn’t been easy for his mother, and he did know there had been some serious complications. Complications that had caught up with Dian.

  “Were we identical?”

  Al shook his head.

  “No — identical twins are always the same gender. You’d have been fraternal twins — so if Dian had grown up, you’d look similar but obviously be different, like any other brother and sister.”

  Beck turned the page. The next two photos were close-ups of him and Dian on their own. Then there was a family shot. Their mother, lying in bed, looking tired and drawn, holding one of them. Their father, sitting beside her and holding the other. They weren’t labelled so he couldn’t tell which baby was which.

  On one side of the bed was a woman, a smiling nurse, whom Beck presumed was the midwife. And on the other, a doctor, a tall, lean man. His face was naturally stern, but he was smiling a little — like someone had maybe described to him how smiling was done, and he was doing his best without really believing it. They had been labelled — Sister Lorna Macadam, and Dr Henry Winslow.

  He turned the page again. There were no more photos. He was holding in his hand the sole visual evidence that Dian had ever existed. He closed his eyes briefly.

  He felt Al’s hand rest gently on his shoulder.

  “We’ve both lost a lot, haven’t we?”

  Beck blinked and nodded. His parents hadn’t lived for many more years after that — murdered, blown out of the sky by Lumos’s hired assassin.

  “I’ll do these ones next,” he said. Al ruffled his hair and went back to the pile of albums.

  Beck started from the back of the album, because it was easiest that way. The picture began to preview on the screen. The awkward smile of Dr Henry Winslow was the first thing to appear. Beck felt a surge of gratitude to this man, and the midwife too, for what they had done to help his mother. But he wasn’t one to dwell on the past. It was better to look to the future and what could still be changed. He quickly finished off his email to Jian.

  Next week I am off to Sweden…

  Chapter Six

  “If you’re not eating that…” Jonas said hopefully.

  Beck realised he had been staring across the canteen, not concentrating on what was in front of him, and with Jonas around any unattended food was in danger.

  “No, no, it’s fine…”

  He quickly tucked into his meal, still stealing glances across Jonas’s shoulder.

  Dr Winslow sat at a table with his colleagues from Medics Around the World, talking and chatting quietly. Beck narrowed his eyes, willing himself to stay calm, comparing what he saw now with the stern man in the picture he remembered.

  But — Henry Winslow. Doctor Henry Winslow. It wasn’t a common name. There couldn’t be many of those, and there surely had to be even fewer doctors called that.

  And Medics Around the World mostly dealt with children.

  Beck knew he would never forgive himself if he passed off this chance. We’ve always stood beside you, she had said to him in China. Well, maybe, but she stood at the edge of his consciousness like a shape he couldn’t quite make out in the corner of his eye. Every tiny fact he learned about Dian — and there weren’t that many to learn — made her seem a little closer, more solid, more real. Now, just metres away, was the man who had brought Dian into the world and str
uggled to save her fragile life.

  Beck had to engage with this man for the same reason that he had to breathe.

  “Are you having dessert?” Jonas asked. Across the room, Winslow’s colleagues were getting up and carrying their trays to the counter. He and another man stayed seated. Winslow pulled a tablet from inside his coat and began to tap at the screen.

  “Yeah, in a moment. Go ahead and I’ll catch you up.”

  Beck pushed his chair back and stood up, ignoring Jonas’s surprised look as he began to walk across the room.

  The other man at the table noticed him first, his attention caught when it became obvious Beck was heading for them and not going to walk past. Winslow’s attention was still engrossed in the pictures that he was sliding across the screen. It was all locations in a town — Beck caught a glimpse of buildings around a pebbled market square, with lots of carved and painted wood, and the word ‘Riksliden’, which was the nearest town to the lodge. Winslow appeared to be browsing a tourist site. Then he swiped the screen to call up what looked like a road map.

  “Dr Winslow?” Beck asked.

  The man looked up in surprise, and Beck knew he had guessed correctly. The biggest difference was the hair — the man in the photo had a full head of it, neatly combed with a side parting, and this guy’s hair — fourteen years later — was a lot thinner on top. But he was still lean and still didn’t look as if he smiled a great deal, though Beck didn’t hold that against him. He had known many stern-looking people who were very warm and friendly once you knew them.

  “Yes?” Winslow said after a pause, and Beck realised he hadn’t really thought through what to say.

  “Uh. You won’t remember my name, at all, but, uh, I’m Beck Granger and I think you delivered me when I was born.”

  Winslow’s eyes went wide, but he smiled politely.

  “Possibly,” he replied slowly, eyeing Beck up and down, “but I’m a paediatrician — so yes, my speciality is children, but I’d only be in at a birth if there were complications.”