Darkness(83)

Gina was still shuddering at the thought when, as they pelted around a bend in the tunnel, she saw gray fingers of light stretching down from what had to be the cave opening. A waft of fresh air reached her. The temperature dropped by at least ten degrees.

Her stomach dropped straight to her toes.

Oh, God, she thought as Cal pulled her after him toward the light, we’re here. This is it.

The area right inside the opening was the size of a small room with a flat, relatively even floor. After racing through it, Cal stopped at the edge of this fissure in the mountain’s face to look out. Hauled up to stand beside him, Gina stood on the black lip of the precipice and got her first glimpse of the dizzying vista he was expecting her to leap into. Jagged mountain peaks turned a misty lavender by the frosty light of the newly risen sun surrounded them, the tallest of them piercing a fast-moving field of dark clouds. A frigid wind gusted from the east, its force slanting the heavily falling snow sideways. Below them, Terrible Mountain fell away in a sheer straight drop for at least several hundred feet before shooting up a secondary peak and ridges and a whole solid mountainside. That they could crash into. If they tried parachuting down.

It was a long, long way to the ground. Almost three thousand feet, to be exact. The river skirting through the mountains appeared so tiny from Gina’s vantage point that it was no more than a glinting silver thread in the vast white fields of snow. Just looking down gave her vertigo.

If she didn’t jump, she wondered frantically, what were the chances that she’d be caught and shot?

“Come here.” Grabbing her before she could reach any solid conclusion, Cal pulled her away from the edge. She was wearing her snow gear, as was he, and he zipped her coat the rest of the way up to her chin. “Make sure your hood is on tight. It’s going to be cold.”

She secured her hood, watching with dismay as he shrugged into the army-green, backpacklike parachute housing and secured the straps around his chest and waist.

“How about we try climbing down the mountain?” Still faintly breathless from their flat-out run, she looked up at him despairingly, already as sure as it was possible to be that she knew what he was going to say.

“You saw the dogs. If they’re here, they’re able to track us. They’ll have found Ivanov by now, and they probably put the dogs onto our scent from there.” He bundled her into one of their regular backpacks as he spoke. Its contents had been pared down to the bare essentials they needed to survive, and it was light. “If they’re not in the cave yet, they will be at any minute. They’ll follow us up here. As long as your feet are touching ground, you can’t hide from dogs. We could stand and fight, but I don’t like our chances: there are too many of them. If we try climbing down from here, there’s no way we’ll be out of rifle range before they spot us, because the dogs are going to bring them here. Even if we did somehow manage that, they’d still be right on our tail. If we jump, we lose the dogs and buy ourselves some time. If we don’t, we’re essentially dead.”

“If we jump off a mountain and the decades-old parachute doesn’t work, or something else goes wrong, we’re just as dead.” As she spoke he was wrapping rope he’d found in the cavern around her waist and between her legs.

“I checked the rigging and the canopy: it’s all good. Anyway, I thought you weren’t afraid of heights.” He knotted the rope at her waist. She remembered their exchange at the natural bridge and grimaced.

“I’m not a fan of jumping off heights, that’s for sure.” She threw his words, slightly modified, back at him.

Apparently he also remembered, because a corner of his mouth ticked up in a quick flash of a smile.

“It’ll be fine. You’ll see.”

“Shouldn’t I at least have my own parachute?” Her voice was getting higher pitched again as she realized that the ropes he was knotting around her formed a makeshift harness.

He shook his head and tied a final knot at her waist before stepping back. “We’d get separated. Anyway, if you tried jumping by yourself, you’d die.”

“Oh, that makes me feel all better.”

“I guess what it boils down to is, do you trust me?” He pulled the straps of two of the rifles over his head so that he was wearing them like a woman might wear a cross-body purse, and stuck the pistol in the pocket of his coat. He looked big and tough and competent, Special Forces to the max—and also, just incidentally, so handsome he stole her breath.

“I trust you.” Her tone was grim because she could scarcely believe that she was saying it. She was so nervous that she was jiggling from foot to foot. Her heart was beating a mile a minute and her stomach was in a knot and she had a really bad feeling about what they were getting ready to do—but she’d spoken the truth: for better or worse, she did trust him. That’s when she knew her decision was made: she was going to jump off a damned mountain with him. God help her.

“That’s my girl.” Cupping her face in his hands, he bent his head and kissed her. It was a quick, hard kiss, but her lips opened under his and she kissed him back in helpless surrender to the way even that brief caress made her feel. Her body softened and her blood heated and her head spun. They hadn’t had a chance to discuss anything—not the earthshaking sex, not the soul-baring confidences he’d coaxed from her or his own revelations—but the night had changed everything, at least for her. As juvenile and anachronistic as it sounded, she now felt like his girl.