Way of the Wolf (2 page)

Someone tugged at his elbow. Beck turned away from the window to look at the plane’s third passenger. The twenty-first century’s greatest fan.

Tikaani was in the seat next to Beck’s. Like Beck he was thirteen years old. His accent was pure American, but one look at his features and his sleek
dark hair told you where his ancestry lay. He belonged to the Anak, one of the Inuit peoples native to this area. In fact Tikaani’s father was the headman of Anakat. He was a forward-thinking man and had decided the village’s isolation couldn’t last. Someone had to go out and learn the ways of the modern world.

So Tikaani had been bundled off to school in Anchorage. When Beck and Uncle Al stopped off there, Al’s contacts in Anakat had called and asked if they could pick up the boy for the last leg of their journey.

Rather than use the intercom, Tikaani just leaned close to Beck, pulled back the earphone and shouted.

‘What are you looking at?’

Beck replied the same way, putting his head close to Tikaani’s. ‘This landscape!’ he called. ‘It’s amazing!’

‘Uh-huh . . .’ Tikaani craned his neck to look out of Beck’s window, but there was only polite interest on his face. He was just trying to be friendly. There wasn’t anything down there he hadn’t seen almost
every day of his life. ‘Right. Uh’ – he waved the thin plastic sliver of Beck’s iPod, which he had borrowed back in Anchorage – ‘how do you make it shuffle?’

Beck fought the temptation to roll his eyes. He took the iPod gently out of Tikaani’s hand and showed him how to scroll through the options on screen.

‘Thanks!’

Tikaani sat back in his seat again. The iPod’s thin wires disappeared inside the padding of his earphones. Beck smiled to himself and shook his head. Tikaani’s father’s plan to help his son learn the ways of the modern world had been a little too successful. For all Tikaani’s Anak heritage, Beck suspected he would gladly drop the oral tradition and culture of Anakat down a deep dark hole and leave them there.

And perhaps he would get the chance, because his world was about to change in a way that even Tikaani’s father had never dreamed of.

Two years ago surveyors from the oil giant Lumos Petroleum had learned that Anakat sat slap-bang on top of a huge untapped oil field.

There had been village meetings to discuss the matter, of course – to discuss what to do when a multinational oil corporation wants to buy your ancestral land, destroy your way of life, relocate you . . . and sweetens the pill by offering every man, woman and child a brand-new home, with all modern amenities, and enough money in the bank to buy all the iPods you could ever want.

Beck knew that Tikaani, for one, was all in favour of it. He couldn’t wait to be relocated. Among the adults of Anakat, the matter wasn’t so clear cut. Even the money Lumos was offering didn’t mean a lot to people
who had never wanted much in the first place. It was that oral tradition again. They knew that what they could lose from their way of life was priceless in a way that Lumos’s accountants would never understand.

And so Uncle Al was flying up to film a TV documentary about the village and the traditional Anak way of life. If it all changed, then at least there would be some record of it. Even better, the programme would make more people aware of just what was going on.

Suddenly there was a huge
BANG
and the plane lurched. Beck clutched at the armrests of his seat. The plane stabilized again; the engine was still running smoothly. Tikaani was sitting bolt upright, staring ahead, his face pale. Beck forced a smile. Wow! They must have hit an air pocket, and how! For a moment he had thought—

The engine stuttered and the plane shook. And then Beck realized that a trail of dark smoke was streaming past his window. It was coming from the engine. It grew thicker as he watched, from an innocuous wisp to an evil dark cloud in the freezing air outside.

And now the plane was very clearly banking to one side. It steadied again, but Beck could feel his insides lurching. The plane was dropping, and fast.

‘Something’s blown.’ The pilot’s calm tones in the earphones had gone, replaced with professional crispness. ‘Oil feed’s not getting through and engine temp’s way up. I’m going to put the nose down and hope the air cools her enough to restart.’

Hope!?
Beck wanted to scream. With the plane plummeting out of the sky, he could do with something a little more concrete than that . . .

The static went away and all that was left in Beck’s ears was the roaring of his blood. The engine had stopped. No noise, no vibration. He pulled off the earphones. Air rushed past the plane’s hull.

All he could see through the front windows was ground. Beck could hear the pilot’s calm, urgent tones. ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday. Anchorage, this is Golf Mike Oscar . . .’

‘Beck . . .’

Beck barely heard. He was staring at the approaching trees.
This must have been what it was like
—

‘
Beck!
’ Uncle Al had turned in his seat again and his shout broke into Beck’s reverie. ‘And you too, Tikaani.’

Tikaani was also staring ahead like a mesmerized rabbit. Al had to click his fingers in front of the boy’s face to get his attention.

‘Both of you. You know the emergency position. Adopt it now.’

Beck and Tikaani glanced at each other, and then without a word they bent over double in their seats, arms wrapped around their knees, and waited. Beck had no idea what was going through Tikaani’s head but his own thoughts continued to run away with him.

This must have been what it was like for Mum and Dad
.

Three years earlier, they had been in a plane like this. It had crashed in the jungle. The plane had been found; they had not. They were presumed dead.

It had never occurred to Beck until now that a plane crash isn’t instant. Something falling out of the sky takes time to reach the ground. And all you can
do if you’re on it is wait, and try not to picture the ground approaching . . .

The engine roared into life again and the pilot pulled back on the column. A mighty force pressed Beck back into his seat as the plane lifted. Tikaani shouted with triumph. Beck felt the plane levelling off, and lifted his head just in time to see trees rise up in front and smash into them.

Beck’s memory came together in broken fragments. The ground blurring in cartwheels outside the plane. A force like a giant’s fist hammering into his body. Pain and noise. And darkness.

Later, Beck wasn’t sure if he’d ever been properly knocked out, but when he could think straight again, his first thought was that he was
alive
! There was a stabbing pain in his head. His body was battered and bruised. But the plane had stopped moving and he was breathing.

A groan next to him told him that Tikaani was alive too. The other boy was, like him, gradually piecing his world back together again.

‘How are you?’ Beck asked. Tikaani just groaned again and clutched his head. The way he moved,
without any cries or intakes of breath, told Beck that at least no bones were broken.

Beck realized that both of them were covered in . . . bits. Bits of plane, bits of Perspex, bits of . . . He plucked at a piece and frowned. Wood?

Slowly, Beck looked up and forwards.

The plane had ploughed into a mass of undergrowth. Dead wood and branches, piled together by nature. The front of the plane had shattered and the pieces had been thrown back over the passengers inside.

‘Uncle Al?’ Beck asked. In the front seats, both Al and the pilot sat with their heads slumped. They weren’t moving at all. Beck felt ice seize his heart as he realized that if the front of the plane had taken most of the impact, so had they. He scrambled out of his seat, ignoring the twinges that stabbed into him all over, and worked his way forward. He mentally ran through the four priority ‘B’s: Breathing, Bleeding, Breaks and Burns, then put his index and middle finger against Al’s neck, just to one side of the Adam’s apple. Then he breathed out in relief. There was a pulse, faint but regular.

Then Beck tried it with the pilot, pushing back her hair to get at her neck. There was nothing. He tried again, with a sinking feeling, but he could already feel her going cold. Reluctantly he craned his head a bit further forward to see. The crash had forced the control column right back. It had struck her in the chest, probably killing her instantly.

The entire instrument panel was wrecked. The radio dangled in a tangled mass of wires. They wouldn’t be using that to call for help.

Now he was leaning forward he could also see that Al’s legs were stained red. There was a nasty gash just above his uncle’s knee and it was bleeding freely. That needed dealing with right away.

Tikaani was looking around with a glassy stare. He still wasn’t quite taking it all in. Beck wondered with a stab of worry if he had concussion. Even if there were no broken bones, no internal damage, an untreated brain injury could kill him.

He remembered the first aid course from his cadet training.

‘
There are four tests for concussion, gentlemen.
’ The medical instructor had paced up and down
in front of them, delivering his words like precisely targeted shots. ‘
Confusion! Memory! Concentration! Neurological! Repeat them please, Mr Granger.
’

‘
Uh . . .
’ Beck had said, taken by surprise.

The man had smiled without humour. ‘
A memory lapse! Or possibly confused, or maybe just not concentrating. Mr Granger is concussed, gentlemen. A bad start . . .
’

If Tikaani was OK, Beck could have really used his help. If he was concussed, all Beck could do was help him to rest. Beck had to know, now, which it was. He climbed back to face Tikaani and grabbed his head, making him turn so that he could look into his eyes. Both pupils were the same size, which was a good sign. That was the first Neurological test.

‘What’s your name?’ Beck demanded. That came under Confusion.

‘Uh . . . Tikaani . . .’

Beck moved on to Concentration: ‘Give me the months of the year, backwards, starting from December.’

‘Uh . . .’ Tikaani’s face creased with concentration.
‘December . . . November . . . Sept—no, October—’

‘OK, OK.’ Beck let go of his head. ‘Close your eyes and touch your nose.’ That was also Neurological.

Tikaani did exactly as he was told without any difficulty. Then he opened his eyes and prodded Beck’s nose as well.

‘I can do that too,’ he said. Beck grinned. It didn’t come into any of the tests he could remember but it looked like Tikaani’s thought processes were all present and intact.

‘Yeah, you’re OK,’ Beck agreed with relief. ‘We’ve got to get Uncle Al out of here. Let’s see what’s outside.’

He had to force his way past Al to get to the door. He tried it but it was jammed solid. He pushed harder but he could see that it was held fast by the undergrowth outside. The pilot’s door was the same. He was never going to get it open. The only way out was through the smashed front window.

Beck slowly worked himself out of the front of the plane, until he was standing on top of the fuselage. Immediately he was out of the cabin’s
confined space, he felt the cold wind and shivered. They all had coats in the plane and would need to wear them. He looked around to take in where they were.

The plane was half buried by dead undergrowth. Looking around, he could see they were at one end of a clear patch of ground, in an area of tundra and pine forest. The plane had carved out a groove in the ground behind it and fragments were flung about. The undercarriage had snapped off as the plane hit. The wings were shattered stubs. The engine ticked as it cooled down.

There was a whistle down by Beck’s feet. Tikaani had poked his head out of the shattered window and was gazing around at the destruction. Then he looked up at Beck and swung a small green box out onto the top of the plane.

‘I found the first aid kit.’

‘Great, thanks.’ Beck ducked back down into the plane. ‘Give me a hand with Uncle Al.’

Back in the cabin, the pilot was still strapped into her seat and Beck gave her a silent apology. It seemed indecent just to ignore her, so he covered
her up with the plane’s fire blanket. Then they turned their attention to Al.