Darkness(39)

Don’t go there.

Instead, as she un-Velcroed and unzipped and otherwise worked her way out of the tent, he turned his attention to the cold, dead remains of what had been their furnace. The technique she’d used to build it was both simple and effective. He’d seen it used before, by commandos in the field. Her knowing how to do it was interesting, but he didn’t think it was especially significant.

Too many things—she was unarmed, she was clearly half-afraid of him, she went out of her way not to ask him any questions, she was too, well, young and pretty—argued against her being an operative.

The kiss had clinched it. It had gotten her hot, he knew. But after the first few seconds in which she’d kissed him back like she meant it, she’d gone cold as ice.

If she was an operative, he couldn’t see where that got her.

A night spent huddled on opposite sides of the tent, a parting at dawn. Not one bit of information gleaned. She hadn’t even tried.

No, she wasn’t an operative. He was almost 100 percent sure.

That conclusion made him truly sorry that she’d gotten caught up in this mess. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d saved his life.

“Stay close,” he told her right before she disappeared through the opening, his mind instantly going to who else might be around. There was almost certainly no one in the immediate vicinity, because if someone had known he had survived and where he was, and that someone was within range, he and Gina would already have found themselves under fire. He was taking it as a given that there was at least one enemy operative on the ground, because someone had to have fired the missile that brought down his plane. He wasn’t quite sure which of many possible groups that operative was affiliated with, or which group was at that moment closing in on Attu, but he was as sure as he was that he needed air to breathe that at least one of them was. Maybe more than one. He was fairly confident, though, that there was no way anyone could know that he’d survived the crash. They had to be thinking everyone who’d been on board his plane was dead.

For the time being, he’d like to keep it that way.

But as sure as God made pretty women, whatever group had given the order to shoot down his plane would be sending backup to the island to check that the danger Rudy and his information posed had been dealt with. They would have been there already if it hadn’t been for the storm.

By way of a reply to his warning to stay close, Gina sent him a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder. He smiled at her; she frowned at him. Then she crawled on outside, and he found himself watching her disappointingly well-covered ass again until she disappeared from his view.

If she wasn’t what she said she was, if she was a plant, then whoever had sent her was a genius. And she was an actress worthy of an Academy Award.

He didn’t think he could possibly be that wrong about her. But then, he’d been that wrong about people before.

Ezra being a case in point.

The thought would have hurt if he’d let it. So he dismissed it. He focused on his unlikely rescuer instead.

She was, as he’d realized in the tent last night as she’d wriggled out of her parka under the unforgiving glare of the flashlight, a beautiful woman. Big blue eyes, full pink lips, slender nose, high cheekbones, delicate jaw and chin. Fair skin, long, straight hair the color of honey. Slim, but with plenty in the T & A department. At least, plenty to suit his tastes.

Add in the way she’d kissed him, and it was a shame he didn’t have time to get to know her better.

But he had bigger fish to fry. Survival-level fish. National security–level fish.

He had to find a way to get the information he possessed to the people who could do something about it. To do that, he had to stay alive. And he meant to keep her alive, too.

Whatever it took.

With that resolution firmly fixed in his mind, he made what preparations he could to face the weather, then crawled out of the tent to find Gina.





Chapter Fifteen





The Zodiac was gone, of course. One of the first things Gina did upon leaving the tent was step out from behind the protection of the outcropping and look toward the bay, trying to spot it. Because the camp was much farther away by land than by water, she’d been hoping that the boat might have washed up somewhere nearby, without really expecting that it would have done so. It was nowhere in sight.

She felt a pang of disappointment, but no real surprise.

Finding her way back to camp on foot wasn’t going to be a problem: directly behind the former LORAN station stood Weston Mountain. If she followed the ridge that the outcropping was part of through the pass that she could see from where she stood, she should have no trouble locating the top of the mountain, which was one of the highest on the island. To make it even harder to miss, a World War II–era lookout tower (for enemy planes) had been erected at its summit. In partial ruins now, it still stood out as a landmark against the skyline for anyone who knew where to look.

The problem she had with walking back to camp was the length of time it would take. Her colleagues hadn’t been able to reach her by radio since before the storm hit, and she’d been missing overnight while the storm raged. They already would be sick with worry, she knew. By the time she walked back into camp, they would have launched a search party and done God knew what else.

At least the storm seemed to have passed. On this wintry gray morning, the waves rolled in with a murmur rather than a roar. The sea was up, covering the beach completely and extending fingers of water into lowlying areas around the rocks so that the area where she stood had been turned into a peninsula. The sky was heavily overcast. A thin layer of snow frosted the ground. Something—the force of the wind, the combination of snow and sleet, who knew?—had prevented much in the way of accumulation. While there were drifts against the rocks, the ground was covered with maybe an inch, no more.