The Alex King Series, A BATEMAN [good books for high schoolers .TXT] 📗

holed up, scared and all out of options, and ready to fight to their last breath and drop of blood. The Taliban had not had night-vision goggles. After first contact, when they extinguished all lights, they hadn’t even known he was there. It had been butchery. But his experience hunting in those caves gave him a newfound respect for the Sami hunter who would do such things for a pelt of fur and some fresh meat.

They trudged through the snow and ice and into a belt of trees. The forest was sparsely grown. The thickest tree was no more than the average man’s waist in circumference. The branches started at around four feet from the ground, around six-inches thick. To King, they looked like wispy Christmas trees, but he could see there were different varieties, although none of the trees were as big as he would have expected. He knew that trees only grew so far north, another fifty miles and there would be no trees at all, merely scrub and tundra.

King stopped walking. He was tuned into his surroundings. Once the engines had been switched off, the only sounds were of their own footsteps in the crisp icy crust of the snow. He could hear no sounds of nature. Now that his ears had stopped ringing at the incessant hum of the snowmobile, it felt was so quiet that he could hear his own heartbeat with the exertion of walking in the cumbersome clothing and thick boots. He could hear Lena’s breathing, her efforts, but nothing more. But then he had heard something else. Something out of place. He looked to his right. The same trees. The same monochrome landscape. Snow and trees. Nothing more.

“What is it?” Lena asked, stopping in front of him.

“I don’t know,” King replied. “I thought I heard something.”

“An animal, perhaps?” she asked. “There are arctic foxes, wolves. Partridges roost in the trees as well.”

“Maybe.”

Snow blew down on them, then as they looked up, the sky filled with diamonds as ice crystals filled the air. The air grew thick, and the trees started to sway. In a matter of seconds, the trees were blowing wildly, ice crystals shut out the light and the already dull sky became darker.

“A storm!” she shouted.

She pulled him by the arm and led the way down an embankment. She continued to pull at him, but he broke free and could already see what she was attempting to do. King powered his legs against the ice and pushed her down into the lee of the wind. She fell onto her knees and checked the rifle’s safety catch before she used the butt like a shovel and dug into the bank. The wind was savagely cold, blowing ice over their heads as she dug. Once the ice crust lifted, King got his gloved hands into the snow and dug as hard and as frantically as he could. He could feel the super-chilled wind on the exposed parts of his face, and the clothes were only holding out so much. He glanced at Lena, the look on her face said it all.

“This is the precursor to the storm!” she shouted. “If it hits, it could be like this for days…”

They both dug hard, and soon there was enough indentation in the bank to get themselves flush to the ground. King started spreading the broken ice into mounds beside them, to afford more cover. They tucked up together, Lena abandoning the rifle and wrapping her arms and legs around King as he did the same. The wind howled savagely through the trees and the occasional crack resonated around them as the weaker trees, brittle from the cold, snapped off and fell to the forest floor.

The light was all but gone. The ambient glow of light from the snow was all they could see by. The ice particles, emptied out of the trees, blew over them and covered them in the refuge of their shelter. King could feel Lena hugging him tightly. She was scared, taking comfort in him, as much as trying to keep herself insulated from the savage wind.

There was a violent buffeting, a screech of wind like that of an old vacuum cleaner, then almost as quickly as it had hit them, it dispersed, and the ice particles fell out of a still sky like a gentle fall of snow.

King let go of Lena and brushed the layer of snow and ice from his clothes. “What the hell?” he said, as he pushed himself up and dug out the rifle. He released the magazine, unloaded the live round from the breach. He looked at the round. .300 Winchester Magnum. A large calibre which could take down anything on land. He checked the barrel for snow by blowing down the breech. He saw his own breath at the muzzle and reloaded the rifle. He glanced and saw Lena staring at him. She had a hand inside her pocket and a look he recognised in her eyes. He would have bet his life her hand was wrapped around the butt of her service Glock 9mm. He held the rifle out to her and she took it cautiously with her left hand, took her right hand back out of her pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “Force of habit.”

“For Home Office investigators?”

King smiled. “So, what the hell was with that wind?”

“Arctic squall,” she answered. “If the forecasters were right, then there’s a lot more than that on the way.”

“When?”

“A couple of days,” she said, quickening her pace. “Back there, I’m amazed you sensed it coming.”

“What?”

“The squall,” she said. “I’m amazed you sensed it.”

King said nothing. That wasn’t what he had sensed, but in truth, with the suddenness of the squall, he had forgotten what had spooked him. It had been a moment of survival. The dramatic drop in temperature, the severity of the wind and