Darkness(82)

That’s when he knew, for sure, that he had a problem.

Forget getting it on, he was getting involved.

Hell, face the truth: he was involved.

In the end, when she was all cried out in his arms, he loved her back to sleep.

Then, unable to sleep himself for the first time in as long as he could remember, he got up, got dressed, and started making preparations for the coming day.

As a last act before waking her, he headed out to the mouth of the cave to check the weather and see what he could see.

The fog had cleared. It was still snowing, but only moderately. No blizzard involved. There was a stiff wind, and it was still bitterly cold. Cal thanked God they’d had the protection of the cave during the night. The sun was just coming up, adding streaks of pink and orange to the leaden gray of the sky. The birds on the slope directly below him were stirring, emerging from their burrows and hopping around, making a surprising amount of noise. He ignored them, first squinting at the camp and then looking at it through binoculars to make sure.

Yes. He gave a mental fist pump as he spotted the de Havilland Beaver on the runway. There was no snow accumulation yet on the wings, which told him that it hadn’t been on the ground long. This particular one looked a little battered, but the Beaver was a small, hardy Alaskan bush plane and would do the job he needed it to do.

Already turning back into the cave, busy making plans, Cal was startled when the puffins below him took off in a squawking, wing-beating mass, rising into the dawn sky in a noisy black cloud.

His gaze followed them automatically. As it did, it alighted on a sight so ominous that his blood froze. Whipping back around, he jerked the binoculars up to his eyes again to make sure.

Moving along the path he and Gina had taken the day before, with all the deadly silence of a squadron of stealth bombers, was a group of about twenty armed men. They had almost reached the fork in the trail that would take them up to the cave, and they were being led by a pair of what looked like native Aleuts with their tracking dogs.





Chapter Twenty-Five





We’re going to do what?” Gina squeaked. Cal gripped her hand tightly, pulling her after him as, flashlight illuminating the way, they raced up the last, steep section of the pitch-black stone tunnel that at its end would open out into nothingness at the top of Terrible Mountain.

“Jump.”

If his reply was terse, it was because the situation was desperate. Anyway, her question was largely rhetorical. She’d heard him perfectly well the first time he’d said it: he was proposing that they jump out of a cave entrance some three thousand feet up, on a different side of Terrible Mountain from the cave where they’d entered the mountain last night. With a parachute. A World War II–era parachute. That had been stored since the war ended in one of the garbage cans in the cave along with a couple dozen other parachutes and all kinds of other military odds and ends.

The horrible thing about it was, she couldn’t think of a better alternative.

“There has to be another way,” she said. Alarm spiraled through her system at the very idea. At his urging, her feet flew over the uneven stone floor. She’d stumbled several times already. His iron grip on her hand was all that had kept her upright.

He glanced back at her. “Look, I know what I’m doing. I’ve jumped under worse conditions than these. I’ll get you down alive.”

“Are we even high enough for a parachute to work?”

“Yes.”

The brusqueness of his reply told her that he’d made up his mind. But she hadn’t yet made up hers. She’d already had an object lesson in the inadvisability of letting domineering personalities make life-or-death decisions that affected her. She had to decide for herself what the best thing to do was—and she wasn’t feeling that parachuting off a mountaintop was going to be it.

Moments before, Cal had urgently wakened her. She’d dressed at light speed while he’d gathered the supplies he deemed they needed and explained the situation. Then they’d headed upward through the tunnel as quickly as they could go. Apparently during the night he’d found a map of the tunnel system, and both the cave they’d slept in and this other one, which was right below the summit on the western face of the mountain, were clearly marked. Gina had seen the higher entrance before as well, in a notation on a birder’s map, because a colony of ptarmigans nested near it. That it existed wasn’t in question.

The need to jump out of it was what had every brain cell she possessed screaming at her to put on the brakes.

Only, on the way up they’d paused at the first entrance for just long enough so that she could look out. What she saw had frightened her into turning tail and running with him, and kept her from digging in her heels and shouting Hell no now.

Armed men were swarming up the side of the mountain. The scarily silent tracking dogs that were leading them had been right below the now empty puffin burrows when she’d looked out. Gina had had a brief flashback to Arvid’s death, to Mary’s and Jorge’s bodies on the common-room floor, and had known without a shadow of a doubt that if she and Cal were caught, they would be killed.

At Cal’s insistence the two of them were now dashing for the fissure near the top of the mountain instead of fleeing through the interconnecting tunnels that would take them into the adjoining mountain, and from there into other adjoining mountains, because, as he’d pointed out, the dogs could track them through the tunnels as easily as they could along the trails outside. And she had just minutes in which to make up her mind about whether she was going to go along with him and jump.