Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(13)

And the handheld device. Some sort of locator.

So they had funding, and technical support.

They were definitely pros.

Riot Grrrl was in serious trouble. And now Peter was, too. But it wasn’t his first time.

Peter got the second ascender locked in place. He looked up. Did he see Riot Grrrl’s pale freckled face looking down at him?

He should have the ascenders’ safety lines clipped to his climbing harness, in case one of them slipped. They would have let him rest, too, on the way back up. But he’d left them behind. He was afraid they’d jingle on his harness.

He started climbing, slowly. The ascenders made a faint sound as the rope slipped through the mechanism. Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. Making his way back up, a foot at a time. His arms were already tired. Suck it up, Marine.

“C’mon, take my picture.”

“Don’t be stupid. You want photographic evidence that you were here?”

“Shut up,” said a fourth voice. “All of you, shut up.”

Peter stopped. He hung by his hands, maybe ninety feet off the ground. Not quite hidden in the fog.

It would have been nice to be able to hang from his harness, and rest.

Falling would be bad.

The men had gone silent. He looked down. They were scanning the tangled underbrush, guns at the ready position. The fourth man with the odd, thick-barreled weapon stood motionless. Then, as if he could somehow feel Peter’s eyes on him, he slowly tilted his head, peering up into the dim green light.

“Look up,” he called. “Look up.”

Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. Peter climbed the rope as fast as his arms would carry him. Distance and motion meant a more difficult target, and the farther up he went, the harder it would be to see him in that filtered twilight.

“Hey, you up there. Stop or I’ll shoot.”

They’d shoot eventually whether he stopped or not, thought Peter as he did his best to move faster yet. His arms burned. Zizz zizz zizz zizz, zizz zizz zizz zizz.

Then they fired. The shots came, as he knew they would, in those same disciplined three-round bursts, takatak, takatak. But they didn’t hit him or even seem to come close. These would be warning shots. They didn’t know who he was, or what he was doing there. Or even whether he had any relationship with the woman they were hunting.

Peter didn’t have any breath left to respond. His arms were slowing down already. Zizz, zizz, zizz, zizz. How far had he come? How far left to go until he disappeared into the fog?

“Get back down here. Or we’ll drop you hard.”

His arms, fuck. The muscles on fire. Keep going, no safety lines, no choice. Think of it as motivation.

His sphincter clenched tight as he waited for the searching rounds to find him.

Then he felt himself rising through the air. The rope trembled slightly. He looked up and saw that big branch, getting closer. Even though he was just hanging by his hands.

“Hold on, you fucking idiot.” Her voice came down from above, thin but clear.

He held on, and kept rising. She was pulling him up.

He heard the rifles again. Takatak. Takatak. They had a crisp, Germanic sound, a muscular purr that reminded him of a big BMW starting up. Not like the cheap metallic rattle of an AK-47, or the cheerful round pop of his old M4. The high-velocity NATO rounds parted the air around him with staccato whispers. He waited for the punch of hot pain, but it didn’t come.

Rising, he was getting harder to see from the ground.

Then a feeling of impact in the sole of his right boot, but not hard, and no pain, not yet. He looked down. No hole in his boot, no spreading red bloom. He looked up, saw the big branch closer still, and a long spool of rope coming down the other side.

As he neared the branch he saw her sitting on a burl twenty feet away, feet braced, hauling away on the rope. She’d rigged a pulley block to the top of his rope and used the ratio to lift him. He could hear the faint tick of the cam lock as the rope spooled through the mechanism.

Then he was up, holding the webbing with both hands and stepping onto the thick rough bark with his left foot, careful of the right, still unsure if he’d been hit. She was red-faced and sweating as she reversed the cam and started pulling up the unspooled rope and coaxing it into a coil. The ratio was four to one, making his two hundred pounds into fifty. Which she’d hauled up at least a hundred feet.

Way to go, Riot Grrrl. “Thank you,” he said.

Then her red face turned white. “Don’t move.” She pointed at his foot.

He looked down. A thin tube with a puffy red tail stuck out of the bottom of his boot. He reached down and pulled it out of the dense sole. Held it up.

It was a dart. A tranquilizer dart? They’d tried to shoot him with a tranquilizer dart? What was he, a rhino?

Peter looked at her. “Who the hell are these people?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Well, they seem to want you alive,” he said, displaying the dart. “Me, they don’t seem to care about one way or the other.”

He thought about the four deadly men waiting at the bottom of the tree. About the device the man had held, turning in a slow circle. Some kind of locator.

He said, “Did you have that backpack when those men tried to grab you?”

“No,” she said. “I had my messenger bag.”

“Did they have access to the bag? Could they have put anything into it?”