He had no time to think; his body was already moving towards the path up the side of Scafell Pike from the Wasdale car park, and he sprinted towards it with vigour, calculations and scenarios whirring inside his head. Whatever had happened up there, he knew that the AW 139 could carry fifteen people, as well as two crew, and a spin like the one he’d just witnessed, followed by the crash, was in all likelihood not survivable. But he had to try. He’d done enough disaster training to know that the first people on the scene were crucial to the survival rate of those on the ground. The emergency services and the MRT wouldn’t be alerted yet, and they certainly wouldn’t be able to get up there any time soon.

His nerves jangled, but turned stress chemicals inside his body into a steely determination to help as many people as he could.

Then he remembered the fell race.

As he went through the first couple of gates on the slate path, his lungs heaved deeply and he knew it would be a hard slog. Jesus, the best fell runners took forty minutes to get up England’s highest mountain and he wasn’t that fit. As a major, he’d had too many desk jobs and too many boozy nights out to compete with that level of fitness. But he had to try. If it took him two hours to get up there, at least the emergency services would have another pair of hands.

He stopped and took some water from his bottle and was grateful that every time he went out around here, he always packed like a soldier. He had everything he needed: layers, water, whistle, compass in case the cloud came down again, and his mobile phone, which he’d already used to punch in 999. But down in the valleys of the national park, phone service was abominable, and so he kept trying, hoping that somebody on the mountainside had already dialled it in.

Chapter 7