Deadly Promises (Tracers #2.5)(53)

One more step. One more after that. Just… one… more.

A brilliant light hit her full in the face, as blinding as a fireball. The piercing blast would have sent her to her knees if Cav hadn’t grabbed her.

Suddenly he was laughing and lifting her off her feet. “You did it! You amazing, astonishing woman, I don’t know how you did it, but we made it!”

His words registered in a haze of pain as she buried her face against his shoulder to block the burning brightness.

The sun, she realized finally. She lifted her head and squinted against the glare. They had broken through the jungle and stumbled onto a road. Narrow, filled with potholes, nothing but dirt. But it was a road.

“Drink,” Cav ordered after setting her back on her feet and handing her a water bottle.

The water was warm but wet. And the protein bar he handed her would go a long way toward making her feel attached to her limbs again.

“Whoa.” Just as she felt herself sway again, Cav grabbed her arm and steadied her. “Come on. Let’s sit you down for a bit.” He eased her to the ground.

“You may never get me on my feet again,” she said, peeling the wrapper off the energy bar.

He checked his watch, his GPS, then gave her arm an encouraging squeeze. “Hold on. If all goes as planned, you may not have to. Be right back.”

Before she could ask him what he meant he was gone, jogging down the road and disappearing around a bend.

She was too weary to be concerned. She just sat there, drinking water and eating the protein bar. She’d just finished both and was starting to feel marginally human again when she heard voices coming from the direction Cav had disappeared.

Moving as quickly as she could she scuttled back up the embankment and into the forest, then hunkered down and hid behind a tree surrounded by heavy foliage.

“Carrie, it’s okay. Come on out.”

Wary, she popped her head up and spotted Cav and a Burmese boy who looked about twelve or thirteen, driving a two-wheel cart harnessed to a team of horned oxen.

“Your chariot, awaits, m’lady,” Cav said with a grin as he climbed up the embankment to help her back to the road and the grinning boy.

“Nanda.” She repeated the boy’s name when he introduced himself and returned his handshake.

“English means river,” he announced proudly.

Carrie looked from the boy to Cav.

Cav gave her a wink. “Come on. We’re hitching a ride.”

He lifted her into the back of the cart filled with bolts of cotton fabric.

As he hitched himself up beside her, Cav explained, “from what I’ve gathered, Nanda’s father is a merchant in the village. Nanda is on his way home with a delivery.”

“He wasn’t afraid of the gun?” she asked as the oxen started lumbering down the curving mountain road. Then she got it. “Oh wait. We’re the delivery? He was expecting us?”

“Thanks to Wyatt. He’s been putting things in play at his end,” he told her. “Lie down and take advantage of the ride. We’ve got a ways to go.”

He didn’t have to tell her twice. She laid back on the bolts of cotton that were hard yet so much softer and cleaner than the ground she’d tried to sleep on at the camp. Immediately, she was gone.

SHE’D CRASHED LIKE a shooting star, as he’d known she would. Cav watched as Carrie slept on a pallet of blankets in the corner of the small bedroom in the tiny house where Nanda lived with his mother, father, and three younger sisters.

She hadn’t even awakened when Cav had picked her up and carried her into the cool interior of the house in a village whose name he still hadn’t figured out how to pronounce. Just like he still hadn’t figured out how to deal with his feelings for this woman. Feelings that just kept getting stronger.

Nanda’s mother had met them at the door. Thura was a lovely Burmese woman somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five. Three darling little dark-eyed girls peeked out at him from behind their mother’s legs, and Cav had felt guilty for taking advantage of the family’s willingness to help.

Their presence here was placing the family in danger. If it were up to him, they’d eat, rest for an hour, and be on their way. But it wasn’t up to him. Time remained the enemy, but now it was too much time instead of too little. They had no choice but to hold out here until the extraction team could get into place at the prearranged time he and Wyatt had decided on forty-eight hours ago.

He’d worked this end of the equation too many times to worry that Wyatt wouldn’t come through. And given that they had no options but to impose on Thura and her family, all he could do was wait it out.

Earlier, Thura’s husband, Tun, had joined them, making certain they were settled. When Cav had expressed his gratitude, the young father had shown Cav into the living area, then pointed to a framed photograph on the wall.

It was a picture of Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected prime minister of Burma, who had never been allowed to govern. Instead, the Nobel Peace Prize recipient had been placed under house arrest by the Junta military regime. Twenty-five years later she was still a virtual prisoner.

“You fight Junta. You are friend,” Tun had stated solemnly.

And since the Junta military government ran the slave labor camps that worked the mines, it was apparent that Tun and Thura considered Cav and Carrie their friends. It was a measure of the oppression the people of Burma felt, ruled by a brutal military regime that had even taken away their country’s name, renaming it Myanmar.