A String of Beads (Jane Whitefield, #8)(113)

The other three men entered the tunnel, but Jane concentrated on the man with the rifle. He reached the crest of the hill and moved off to the right. Jane counted to twenty and then began to move after him. She could tell by listening to his footsteps that he was walking along the rim of the open-pit mine, probably looking down for his prey as he went.

He was easy to hear in the stillness of night. His heavy feet crunched on a gravelly surface, and kicked a larger stone or two that rolled out of the way. He changed to a careful, shuffling step. Then the sounds stopped. He had found the place he’d been searching for.

Jane moved closer until she was twenty feet from him, a few feet higher and directly behind him, beside some bushes and a scraggly conifer with twisted limbs. She began to crawl toward him, very slowly, until she was within ten feet.

When she stopped she could see him clearly. He was right at the rim. He crouched, then lay on his belly and pulled back the charging lever of his rifle to seat the first round.

Jane could see the mine beyond him in the moonlight, a deep canyon at least a third of a mile long. From here the floor of the mine seemed about two hundred feet down. The long chasm was shaped roughly like a figure eight, with two round canyons connected by a narrower passage. The first section, directly below the man with the rifle, was marked by a series of cave openings, several of the largest at ground level, but the smaller ones forty or fifty feet up the opposite cliff wall.

The cliffs on the opposite side glittered in the moonlight. There were deposits of some shiny mineral that caught and amplified any glow. One of the men far below shone his flashlight up the opposite wall and made the minerals sparkle. The beam swept away, its round halo setting off bright flashes of minerals wherever it moved.

Minutes passed, and then the man with the rifle seemed to see something. He edged forward on his belly slightly and peered down.

Jane remained still and turned her attention to the area around her. In her reach were grasses, thin upright woody plants, and a gnarled tree. She wondered if the tree had dropped any limbs she could use as a club or a staff, but there was nothing lying below it. She moved her head and caught a glint of light. She reached out and touched a rock with sparkly mica flakes on the surface. It was big, about the size of a volleyball—too heavy to throw at the man from here. She pushed it back and forth to loosen it. Maybe she could—

The air below exploded with noise as gunshots echoed from one wall of the mine to the other. It sounded like five, then at least ten more shots. The man with the rifle rose to his knees. He shouldered the assault rifle and aimed downward.

Jane sprang from her hiding place and charged toward him. He seemed to hear her coming and began to spin toward her just as she reached him, but he hadn’t enough time to turn before Jane dived at him and pushed. Both of her arms shot forward, the heels of both hands pounded his left shoulder at once, and he toppled.

When she skidded to a stop with her belly on the gravel, he was out over the brink and already falling, his face a mask of terror looking up at her. He shrieked, but she heard only the first second because his hand tightened spasmodically on the trigger of the rifle and it fired. The recoil of the rifle tore it from his hand and the rifle fell beside him, hurtling downward with him for second after second toward the chasm floor. When he hit, there was a terrible, hollow crack, and she knew his head had hit the rocks.

Jane lay at the edge and looked down at the rifleman’s body. She squinted and moved her head a little from side to side. There seemed to be a second body lying a distance away across the mine floor, near the mouth of one of the caves. Her breath caught for a second. Had they killed Jimmy?

Far below, two men ran across the open space to the body of the rifleman. Two men. There had been three down there. As the two men reached the body, Jane saw a muzzle flash from the mouth of the cave, and the two men ducked down behind the rocks where the rifleman lay. They both fired pistols toward the cave mouth, and she heard the bullets ricochet several times in the stone cavern before the sounds faded.

Jane crawled back from the edge, stood, and found a few fist-size rocks. She threw one, then another, then another, gauging their trajectory to try to hit the two men near the dead rifleman. The first two rocks hit close to them, but as she threw the third, one of the men fired several pistol shots up at her while the other snatched up the dead man’s rifle. He looked at it, then threw it down again.

She stepped back out of their view and heard a dozen pistol shots pound the edge of the cliff or fly upward, hitting nothing. The angle seemed to change, and she knew the two men were stepping back, trying to improve their angle to shoot at her.

She heard other shots coming from across the mine, and she hoped someone was hitting the two men, but didn’t try to see. Instead she ran back to the gnarled pine tree behind her and squatted to pick up the volleyball-size rock. She carried it in both hands and ran along the edge of the cliff until she reached a clear space directly above the entrance to the tunnel. More shots echoed. She moved to the very edge and looked down.

The two men were backing toward the mouth of the tunnel, still firing into the entrance of the cave where Jimmy, Chelsea, and Mattie must be hiding. The men seemed to be trying to carom their shots off the walls, hoping to hit someone with a ricochet, but their main intention seemed to be keeping their opponents’ heads down while they retreated.

Jane breathed deeply, watching and waiting, judging the two men’s course as they backed toward the tunnel that would lead them out of the mine and up to the parking lot. Thirty-two feet per second, she thought. Thirty-two, then sixty-four, then ninety-six. Now. She dropped the heavy rock. It fell, gaining speed.