For a long time the only sound was their feet crunching in the snow. Their tracks were like marking a large arrow in the snow labelled ‘here they are’, pointed directly at their heads, Beck thought.
Every step broke through a tiny crust of ice on the ground. The sound was dry and lifeless, like the air that blew in their faces. All the moisture in it had frozen out, and what was left would slowly freeze-dry them as they walked. Already Beck’s lips were tingling and they tasted of dry leather when he ran his tongue over them. How long since either of them had last drunk something? Too long.
Beck shrugged the pack off his back and swung it round to his front without breaking step, so that he could pull the water flask out. They took turns to drain it, and Beck thought it was a sign of how dehydrated they already were that a litre of water disappeared into each of them with barely a pause.
“Refill,” he said. Now he did stop, only briefly, to kneel and scoop the empty flask full of snow, before screwing the topper back on and stuffing it inside his coat, and setting off again. “Before long, it’ll have melted into lovely clean water all over again. We’re going to need at least two litres a day, and we should make extra sure we don’t dehydrate up here. But there’ll be plenty of water down below.”
“This is Sweden,” Jonas agreed. His face was set and determined but he let out a smidgen of pride. “Ten percent of it is lakes.” He cast an eye around them. “Or we could just eat the snow? It’s only water in a different form.”
“Yeah, frozen water,” Beck explained. “We could eat it but the reality is that it will just give us cold burns on our lips and mouth, like the worst ulcer ever. No, we’ll have to wait. But meanwhile — breakfast!”
Jonas’s face lit up as Beck pulled out the sandwich and the apples from the pack. They divided the food between them, still on the move. Jonas’s portion disappeared entirely, and in seconds. Beck kept steadily working his way through his half of the sandwich, chewing every mouthful, hoping to get as much energy out of it as he could.
“There were biscuits too…” Jonas pointed out.
“Later,” Beck said firmly. “There’ll be plenty to eat down in the forest, but until we’re off the mountain we’ll conserve supplies.” He had to laugh at Jonas’s unhappy look. “Green Force is all about conservation, anyway!”
“Conservation also means staying alive, Beck!” Jonas replied dryly.
After that they concentrated on walking. It wasn’t just the snow that made it tiring on the legs. They were heading downhill, so every step came down a little lower than the last one, and it sent an extra little shock up the leg. Beck was doubly glad their kidnappers had thought to include their outdoor gear, even if it had only been so they could literally get away with murder. Making this trip in his indoor shoes, melted snow soaking into his feet with every step, did not bear thinking about. He focused on the knowledge that every step took them further down Storkittel and closer to the forest below, and once they were off the snow, there would be less of a trail for anyone to follow.
They angled around the steeper parts of the slope, Beck always trying to find the compromise between the easiest ground to walk on and the route they needed to take, sticking to eastwards as much as possible. But then they came to a section that they simply couldn’t avoid.
A sheer slope of snow and ice cut across their path, dropping fifty metres to a pile of jumbled boulders. It was like a gash in the mountainside. On the other side, only about ten metres away, Storkittel’s gentle incline resumed — but for those few key metres, the angle had to be something like forty degrees or more. One wrong step and they would skid straight down into those boulders, unable to brake their fall.
They stood on the edge, looked down, looked up. The slope ended another fifty metres above them, in a sheer wall of rock. Up above them, the wind had carved a cornice — something like a wave of overhanging snow, a smooth, curved half-tunnel which could be lethal if it decided to collapse onto them.
He peered down, and then back the way they had come, and ahead. Retracing their steps until they could find another way around would just cost them valuable time and run the risk of bumping slap bang into those pursuing them, if the woman had picked up their footprints.
“We just have to do this quickly,” he said. He pulled the rope from his pack and swiftly tied a large bowline loop in either end. One loop went under his arms, the other under Jonas’s.
“Sit down,” he told his friend. “Dig your heels in and face forward. And then—”
“And then, if you fall, I catch you. Got it.”
Jonas set his face — the look he got when he was going to do something he wasn’t looking forward to — and plonked himself down in the snow. He kicked his heels in, one at a time, and took a firm hold of the rope. “Okay, go.”
And so Beck leaned onto the first part of the slope, resting his hands against the snow and kicking his right foot hard into the compacted snow. It sank in as far as his instep, creating a foothold. He stepped out, right foot supported and left foot hanging over the drop until he kicked that one in as well. Now he was a good two metres away from Jonas, and if the snow gave way then Jonas holding him was his only hope to save him from the rocks fifty metres below.
So, he told himself, try not to fall…