Mission Raptor by Bear Grylls

Author:Bear Grylls [Grylls, Bear]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Agora Books

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The fast flowing stream had gouged a gully several metres deep through the rock, right across their way, before running out over the edge in a waterfall almost 40 metres high.

“Walk across?” Jonas said — very, very doubtfully. Beck shook his head. They weren’t even going to try. The gully was a slippery tube of rock, water, snow, ice and moss — they would be swept to their deaths as sure as eggs were eggs.

And besides, in the corner of his eye he had seen what Jonas hadn’t. Straight lines, which when it comes to nature is very uncommon. To Beck that meant something man-made...

“Hopefully no need,” he said, and walked a few metres back up the length of the gully.

“Oh no…” Jonas groaned when he saw what had attracted Beck’s attention.

It was the faint remains of an old rope bridge — or rather, what looked like one. Once it had been a pair of ropes strung from one side to the other, with planks of wood hung between to tread on.

Now the planks were gone and it was just a pair of ropes covered in mould and moss. Beck took hold of one and tugged on it experimentally. It was old, but it felt secure. Kind of.

“We could just go a little further up, cross there?” Jonas said hopefully. But his eyes answered his own question. Further upstream, the land grew steeper and the gully was maybe thirty metres or more deep. And no obvious way across.

“Or back…?” He trailed off and answered his own question again. “No. Not with…” Beck could finish it in his head. Not with her potentially on their tail. That thought was the constant pressure driving them, always pushing them on, even more so than the need to reach the authorities and warn their friends.

“Plus we could just end up bouncing back and forth along the ridge, trying to find the best way down,” he added. “We’ve got to keep going. And if this bridge is here, that means someone before us decided this was the best way. I’ll go first.”

It needed planning. The ropes were wet and slippery after who knew how long in the harsh arctic elements, so Beck gave them several sharp jerks, tugging them in every direction he could. Eventually he was confident they should hold his weight — but they would still be impossible to keep a grip on. First though he cut a short length from his rope, and tied it round his waist in a bowline with short tail hanging down in front of him. Then he carefully undid one of his shoe-laces from his boots.

Jonas looked at him quizzically.

“Please tell me you aren’t going to do some ninja magic with that shoelace!” he asked.

“You said it.” Beck replied.

Beck then tied the two ends of the lace together and then wrapped the loop round and round the old handling rope.

“This is called a prusik,” Beck explained. “As I move across the bridge I can slide the

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