The Babylon Idol

Chapter 39

They abandoned the car and started making their way down the hillside, picking out a wandering path between the snow-laden conifers and thorny bushes that dotted the steep incline. If the hut hadn’t arrested their descent when it had, they might have come down the hill much more quickly, with a one hundred per cent chance of getting killed in the process.

Ben had no idea where they were going, just that they needed to keep moving in the hope of finding either some kind of shelter, or some kind of vehicle. But keeping moving in near-blizzard conditions wasn’t an easy thing to do. Without his jacket, he could feel the killer cold gradually seeping into his body.

The ground levelled out into a wooded valley where the snow wasn’t quite as deep. Every so often a fallen tree blocked their way, making them skirt around or scramble over it. An hour passed. The going was slow and they hadn’t come far in real terms, but as the wilderness closed in around them Ankara could have been a thousand miles away. On the far side of the wooded valley the terrain became rougher and rockier, full of hidden boulders lurking beneath the snow that could easily trip an unwary foot. Ben walked behind Anna so that he could keep an eye on her. His relief at giving their pursuers the slip was overshadowed by his concern for how she was doing. Her temper had long ago subsided and she was very quiet as she struggled gamely on, kilometre after painful kilometre, stumbling more often and slowing her pace until she eventually halted and slumped on a big rock that jutted out of the snow.

‘My feet. I can’t feel them any more.’

Ben knelt in the snow in front of her, clamped his flashlight in his teeth to see by, unshouldered his bag and undid the straps. From inside he took out both pairs of spare thick socks. ‘Put your feet here,’ he said, pointing at his thighs, and she did. He pulled off each of her shoes in turn and tossed them away. They disappeared in the snow.

‘Those are Prada.’

‘I’m sure some fashionable Turkish lady will find them in the springtime and cherish them forever. You don’t need them any more.’ He rolled up the hems of her flimsy trousers, then peeled off her thin socks and threw them away too. They were soaking wet. Her toenails were carmine red, while the skin of her feet, ankles and calves was almost blue with cold.

‘Am I going to get frostbite?’ she asked anxiously.

‘Can you wiggle your toes?’

She wiggled them. ‘Just about.’

‘Then we won’t have to chop them off anytime soon.’ He rubbed everything dry with a spare T-shirt, then pulled the socks onto her feet, two pairs apiece. He used a length of duct tape to attach them to each trouser leg, so they couldn’t slip off. ‘Good enough for the Norwegian Army,’ he said. ‘And those blokes know a thing or two about keeping your feet toasty in cold weather.’ He closed up his bag, stood up. Anna peered at her feet, holding them clear of the snow to keep them dry.

‘They feel warmer already, but now I can’t walk.’

‘You don’t have to,’ he said. He reached down to pick her up. ‘Put your arm around my neck.’

‘You’re not going to carry me?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m going to do.’ He lifted her off the rock, one arm around her torso and the other under the crook of her knees.

‘But we’re in the middle of nowhere. You can’t carry me all that way.’

He gave her a reassuring smile. ‘You ever been to Wales? There’s a mountain there called Pen Y Fan. In winter it makes this place look like Miami Beach. For SAS training we were expected to march right the way over it in full pack, plus rifle and ammunition. My bergen alone was heavier than you.’

But that pack had been on his back, held tight to his body by wide webbing straps, the science of weight distribution and ergonomic efficiency all carefully worked out by military minds. Even that kind of load, carried for too long, occasionally proved enough of an endurance test to claim the lives of strong, fit young warriors twenty years or more his junior. Ben knew all that even as he set off with her in his arms, but outwardly he just smiled and acted as though it was nothing.

After a mile, though, his arm muscles were screaming, his spine was arched backwards to counter the forward drag and his neck felt ready to snap off. He was afraid of stumbling in the snow and dropping her. The big fat flakes were falling even more thickly from the sky, drifting down like feathery moths that clung to his hair and eyelashes, making him blink. The temperature was still dropping. The cold was seeping deeper towards his core. His face was numb. His denim shirt was soaked through to the skin. He was trembling and his teeth were chattering. Which was a good sign. It was when they stopped chattering that you needed to start worrying.

Just one of the tell-tale signs of hypothermia. Others included headaches, loss of coordination, blurred vision, slurred speech and increasing stupor that eventually led to unconsciousness. After another mile, he was still doing reasonably okay himself but he was worried that Anna was becoming drowsy and unresponsive. ‘Hey,’ he said close to her ear. ‘What was the birth date of Alexander the Great again? Remind me.’

She mumbled back, ‘Three fifty-six BC.’

‘What month?’

‘August,’ she answered after a pause.

‘Wrong. It was June. What day?’

‘I don’t know,’ came the slurred reply. ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’

He marched on, trying to keep her talking, but before long she stopped answering and her arm drooped loosely from his neck, putting even more dead weight on his straining biceps. If he didn’t find shelter for them both before the night was out, her core temperature was going to drop to critical point, her organs would begin to shut down, and she was going to freeze and die.

Then, sometime afterwards, exactly the same thing was going to happen to him. Nobody would find them until the snow melted, sometime next year. Perhaps never at all.

He marched on, half-blinded, snow in his eyes. Snow in his hair, snow down his neck. The chill gnawing right through him. His feet were two blocks of wood and he could no longer feel his arms. His blood was chugging to a standstill in his veins. He had thought he’d been cold crawling from the Arno River in Florence. He couldn’t take much more of this, but he made himself do it anyway. Step after step. Always a little further. Like the words of the James Elroy Flecker poem that adorned the wall of the SAS chapel at the regimental HQ in Hereford.

The poem had always inspired him, kept him fighting and struggling and driven him to survive even when the odds appeared insurmountable. And that was what it did now.

And then, through the swirling blizzard, he saw the dark shapes of the buildings up ahead.