The Untamed Hunter

by Lindsay McKenna

  With a curse, Tennyson said, “Juan, you and I will get them out of the way. I don’t want you blowing the horn, Alex, and alerting anyone. They’re dumb animals, they’ll move if we shout and wave our hands.”

  Braking to a stop, Alex nodded.

  Juan quickly moved to the rear of the van, opened the doors and hopped out.

  This was Maggie’s chance! Swallowing against a dry throat, she waited until Tennyson and Juan had covered their heads with their jackets and started running toward the disinterested dairy cows. Looking around, she spotted a piece of pipe, about two feet in length and big enough to do damage, lying near her feet. The attaché case was there, too. Hands growing icy cold, Maggie watched Alex. His attention was fixed on the action taking place on the highway, which seemed to stretch endlessly across the flat land. There was no other traffic in sight.

  Maggie tried to quell her fear. With a jerk, she reached awkwardly down for the pipe, grabbed it and straightened.

  Alex turned at her sudden, unexpected movement. “Hey!”

  It was the only word he got out of his mouth. Grasping the pipe with both hands, she swung it as hard as she could. The blow caught him just above the nose with a sickening thunk. Romanov groaned and slid against the door unconscious. Blood spurted from a cut across his brow where the pipe had connected.

  “Oh, Lord!” Maggie grabbed up the attaché case and scrambled on shaky legs toward the rear of the van. Escape! She had to escape! The instant her feet touched the wet asphalt, she ran from the van toward the trees at an angle that would hide her from the terrorists line of sight. How long would it be before Tennyson found her gone? Seconds!

  The rain slashed at her face. She ran openmouthed, hoping the harsh sound of her feet on the pavement wouldn’t be picked up by them. No one was coming to her rescue. Maggie knew that. Slipping, almost falling, she leaped for the berm. Steadying herself, she saw the trees, less than fifty feet away. Oh, Lord, let her make it! Let her make it to safety! It was so hard to see where she was going! The rain pummeled her brutally, the drops icy and huge. Her hair quickly became a soaked mass around her neck and shoulders.

  “Stop!”

  Tennyson’s shout was drowned out by a roll of thunder.

  Maggie involuntarily flinched, but kept running. She heard the zing of bullets. Pistols were being fired—at her. Only twenty-five feet to go! The grass was slick. She nearly fell twice. Gasping wildly for breath, she stretched her short legs as far as they could go. Lightning flashed so close that it made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. Instinctively, Maggie dove for the trees.

  There! Safety at last! Looking around wildly in the graying light of dusk, the rain slashing violently at her face and eyes, Maggie kept on running. Her lungs burned. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps. She again heard Tennyson’s voice. Close! He was so close! Maggie knew he was strong and athletic and had a much longer stride than she. It would be no time before he caught up with her.

  The trees swallowed her up. Brush grew in clumps here and there, and thick brown pine needles carpeted the forest floor. Because sunlight didn’t reach the earth in these massive groves of pines, the undergrowth was nearly nonexistent. She heard pistols being fired. Bullets sang by her head once again, some striking pines nearby. Flinching, she tried to shield her eyes with her free hand as she ran. Like shrapnel, the splinters could easily wound her or enter her eyes and blind her.

  Running, her knees weak with fear and exhaustion, Maggie felt the attaché case numbing her wet, slick fingers. It was slowing her down. She had to get rid of it! Up ahead, she suddenly saw a clearing. What was it? Barely able to make it out through the thick veil of rain and the buffeting wind, Maggie tried to quicken her pace on the slippery pine needles. As the trees thinned ahead of her, she realized she’d reached a river. A river!

  A plan came to mind. She jerked a look over her shoulder. The rain was so heavy that she couldn’t see her pursuers. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. Changing direction, she headed toward the muddy-looking ribbon of river. As she neared the marshy bank, she tossed the attaché case into the tall, dark reeds growing there. It promptly disappeared, swallowed up. Good!

  Turning on her heel, Maggie headed back into the relative safety of the trees. She heard Tennyson shouting to Juan. They were to her left. Good! Somehow she’d evaded them, but Maggie knew it wasn’t over by a long shot. Somewhere she had to find a place to hide. The land was becoming slightly hilly. Black rocks jutted out here and there. She had to hide! She knew Juan might find her. A trained mercenary, he was probably a ruthless hunter.

  As she ran, Maggie thought of Shep. She loved him! She’d never stopped loving him, she realized. Would she be given a chance to consummate her love with him? To let him know how she felt about him? Running raggedly now, because she was out of breath and not used to this kind of physical stress, Maggie knew she had to push on or die.

  Alex Romanov groaned. His hand went to his bleeding forehead. What had hit him? Blearily, he sat up and looked through the windshield soaked with rain. The dairy cows had gone back through the broken fence. Where were Bruce and Juan? Looking over his shoulder, he remembered that Dr. Harper had struck him and knocked him out. She was gone! No!

  Thunder caromed around him. Reaching for his pistol from his shoulder holster, he realized that his friends must be out trying to find her. Just as he prepared to open the door, he heard a strange noise. It wasn’t thunder. And it wasn’t lightning. What the hell was it? Stymied, he peered through the rain-washed windshield. His mouth dropped open. There, coming out of the slashing, wind-whipped rain, was a small white-and-red airplane! To his amazement, it was trying to land on the highway where they were parked! It wasn’t more than half a mile away from the van. What the hell was going on?

  Gripping the pistol, Alex stared at the aircraft. What should he do? Was the pilot having engine trouble? Was it the U.S. government? An enemy? He wasn’t sure, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. Even if the pilot managed to land in this frightening thunderstorm, he was a dead man.

  Sucking in a breath through tightened lips, Shep held the Cessna as steady as he could. Drafts from the thunderstorm were trying to wrench him up and down. For every downward pressure against the plane, he had to instantly compensate as he guided the lightweight aircraft toward Highway 17 below. And he knew that with every hundred foot drop in altitude toward that wet, slippery asphalt, the chances of him being killed were tripled. The storm raged around him. As it pummeled the aircraft the Cessna shuddered and bucked from side to side.

  Shooting a glance at his altimeter, Shep saw he was less than two hundred feet above the roadway. A half mile ahead, he saw the white van. Grimly, he used his feet on the rudders to keep the plane on the glide path. The rain became worse. He could no longer see the van. He was trying to land this thing in the worst possible conditions known to pilots. It might work in an airliner, but not in one of these little aircrafts. The small plane was too lightweight, too responsive to every blast of wind, to every purging veil of rain that avalanched around him.

  One hand gripping the yoke, the other on the throttle, Shep slowly cut his speed as the plane came closer and closer to the pavement below. Sweat popped out on his wrinkled brow. Shep’s eyes narrowed to glacial ice. The road suddenly loomed up in front of him.

  At the last second, a gust of wind slammed into the plane. It bobbled. The nose thrust upward.

  No!

  Jamming the yoke down to compensate, Shep saw the highway suddenly lunging upward at him. Damn! He’d overcompensated. Instantly, he yanked the nose up again. The asphalt still came at him, the Cessna’s fixed landing gear crashing into the pavement. The plane bounced back into the air. Shep sucked in a breath. He steadied the plane and cut the engine. He jammed the throttle downward, shutting off the fuel supply.

  The Cessna settled on the asphalt with a loud crunching sound. This time it didn’t leap back into the air. The wind shoved it to the left, so Shep a
pplied a strong left rudder to stop it from being blown off into the grass. He was down! Ahead, the veil of rain began to lift. Pushing on the rudder tips, he braked the plane, which came to a shuddering stop. Quickly grabbing his cell phone, he placed it beneath his jacket, then drew the Beretta out of its holster. As the rain curtain moved on past him, he saw that less than a quarter of a mile away the white van was parked in the middle of the road. Eyes narrowed and intense, Shep spotted a man in the vehicle.

  Heart beating hard, Shep waited a moment to fix his position. There was no doubt that it was the Black Dawn van. So why was it parked there? He saw the dairy cows off to the side and the broken fence. Rapidly putting things together, he wondered where the other Black Dawn members were. This didn’t look good. Had Tennyson stopped the van, taken Maggie out and shot her in the head, leaving her body in the woods that surrounded them? Heart aching, Shep wanted to deny that possibility. Maybe the cows had blocked their path? If so, why was the van still parked? It didn’t make sense.

  A flash of lightning overhead made Shep wince. The driver in the van still hadn’t moved. The hair on Shep’s neck went up in warning. Shep got out of the airplane with pistol in hand, the man would know he was an agent or someone who recognized the van. That was a giveaway. Yet Shep didn’t like the odds. He saw another curtain of heavy rain approaching from his left. The tree line there was about a hundred feet away. He would use the cover of the thunderstorm to make it to the woods. And then he could watch and wait. Or at least try to buy time until he could figure out what was going on.

  As the rain struck, Shep waited until the van disappeared behind its fury. Scrambling out of the plane, he launched himself toward the trees. All the while, as he sprinted, he listened for gunfire. Nothing. The rain soaked him instantly. Wiping the water from his face once he got inside the woods, Shep tried to steady his breathing. As the veil of rain lifted, he saw the van again. Only from this angle, he realized the back doors were thrown open and there was only one person in the vehicle. So what had happened to Tennyson? The woman who had seen Maggie taken had said there were two men.

  Panicking at the thought that two of them had taken Maggie into the trees to kill her and leave her body, Shep turned and began jogging alertly toward the river, which he knew was less than a quarter of a mile away. As he jogged, he took note of his surroundings. The forest floor was covered with a thick mat of slick brown pine needles. He heard shouting—a man’s voice. And then gunfire ahead of him.

  Dodging behind one of the slender pine trees, Shep halted. He breathed through his mouth, the rain washing across his frozen features. Blinking rapidly, he looked around the trunk. Frantically, he tried to fix the sounds, but they were blurred and distorted by the thunderstorm rolling violently across land.

  More gunfire. To the left! Yes!

  With a curse, Hunter shifted and dug his toes into the soft, muddy soil littered with pine needles. They were chasing someone! He heard two male voices drifting toward him from time to time. They seemed to be moving away. If only the storm weren’t roaring around them! Other sounds were muffled so that Shep couldn’t get a good fix on where they were coming from.

  Running hard, he kept his gaze fixed to his right. Somewhere in this pine grove were two Black Dawn members. And if he was right, they were chasing Maggie down like a dog. Had she escaped? She must have! But how? His hopes skyrocketed. He held the gun high in his hand as he raced among the trees. Suddenly he tripped and fell. Slamming into the ground, Shep groaned, rolled once more and leaped back on his feet, barely missing a stride as he headed at an angle toward the voices of the terrorists.

  Inside his head, inside his wildly beating heart, he prayed that Maggie was still free. He prayed that she could outsmart them in this brutal thunderstorm, use it to hide in, use whatever was around to keep her safe from the murdering thugs. Because, as Shep knew too well, if Maggie had escaped, and Black Dawn found her, they would kill her on the spot. There would be no mercy for the woman he knew he loved with a passion that had never died.

  As he continued to sprint through the grove, he wasn’t sure any longer if his eyesight was blurring because of the slashing rain or because of his own tears at discovering that he had never stopped loving Maggie through all this time. He wanted a second chance with her. Yet they were up against one of the top terrorist groups in the world, one of the best trained. Maybe Maggie’s event riding would give her a better sense of how to use the terrain as a friend, as camouflage, than most people would. Maybe her superb athletic condition could give her the edge she needed to outrun these terrorists who wanted her blood and her life.

  Swallowing hard, Shep tried to steady his breathing and keep up his ground-eating stride. When lightning suddenly sizzled above him, the entire area lit up like a million-watt lightbulb. Blinded momentarily, Shep hit the ground hard. Air woofed out of his body as he struck the earth. The thunder that followed milliseconds after the nearby lightning strike pounded his body like a pugilist’s punishing blow. Stunned by the nearness of the strike, Shep slowly got to his feet. Damn, that was too close for comfort. Raking his face free of the water, he looked around, trying to separate sounds of nature from the sounds of the terrorists.

  Shouts! To his right. They seemed to be following the course of the river. His gut told him to stay among the trees and work at an angle away from the terrorists. If Maggie was escaping, she wouldn’t use the riverbank. Maybe she’d plunged in and tried swimming downstream? Shep was uncertain. Wiping his eyes again, he headed off through the darkening pines. Somehow, he had to pick up on Maggie before Black Dawn found her. It was an impossible task, yet Shep knew he had to try. He had to try because he loved her, and he couldn’t even think of life without her vivid, vibrant presence lighting the darkness of his unworthy soul.

  Eight

  Ragged gasps tore from Maggie’s mouth as she labored to cross a stream that fed the river. The thunderstorm was violent, the rain slashing against her like icy, pummeling fists. Holding one arm up to protect her eyes from the furious wind whipping through the pines, she stepped into the stream. Maggie slipped. With a cry, she threw her arms outward, caught herself and then plunged forward. The bottom was muddy. How close were her pursuers? Gasping, she splashed drunkenly across the knee-deep stream, which was lined with tall green rushes. She grabbed a handful of them to steady herself. Instantly, they cut into her palm.

  “Oww!” Maggie knew the reeds had to be handled carefully or they would lacerate her skin. Plunging her hand back into the water momentarily to wash away the blood, she wished she was taller. The rushes swatted heavily against her as she clambered up the bank on the other side.

  A flash of lightning sizzled overhead. Maggie crouched, then dropped to her hands and knees. It had been so close! Almost instantly, thunder followed in its wake, reverberating through her as if she were a drum being struck. Hanging her head, the water dripping off her nose and chin, she tried to orient herself. Tennyson was probably still hunting for her along the river, but she couldn’t be sure. She had to find somewhere to hide. Lifting her chin, she peered through the darkening forest. The flat land was swelling gently in a series of knolls, with more rocks jutting out here and there. Maybe, in the coming darkness and the overhang of one of those large, black boulders, she might be able to wait out her pursuers.

  Rising on rubbery legs, Maggie realized she’d pushed her body to its limits. She desperately needed a fifteen minute rest to fuel back up for another run. The sheets of rain eased as she cautiously looked around. Wait!

  A cry nearly tore from her. Was she seeing things? The dusk was deep, and there were so many shadows, so many things that resembled a stalking enemy. She quickly knelt down in order to be less of a target. Eyes narrowing, she gulped in unsteady breaths of air. Maggie gripped the wet, needle-covered ground to steady herself. There! Yes, she saw movement! But, who? It wasn’t near the river; quite the opposite. Was one of the terrorists scouting inland for her? It was growing so dark. If only she cou
ld see better!

  Just then, another bolt of lightning lit up the dusk, and Maggie’s eyes widened enormously. There, no more than two hundred feet from her, moving from tree to tree, pistol held up and ready, was Shep! How could it be? Was she seeing things? Was she making this up because she knew she was going to die? Her mind froze and her heart swelled wildly. It had to be Shep! He was real. He had to be!

  Rising unsteadily, Maggie wanted to call out to him, to get his attention, but she didn’t dare. If Shep could hear her, so could her enemy. Sliding unsteadily away from the stream, she finally found purchase and broke into an erratic trot in his direction.

  Something told Shep to look to his right. His lips parted as he saw a dark figure running toward him. Maggie! It was Maggie! She looked like a drowned rat, her hair a sleek dark ribbon against her skull, her clothes muddy, soaked and clinging to her skin. Her eyes were huge with terror, her mouth open in a silent scream. But she was all right! Shep turned on his heel and headed directly toward her with long, loping strides.

  Lightning flashed as they drew close to one another. Shep controlled his desire to forget the dangers and just hone in on Maggie. He knew he couldn’t resist touching her, though. Reaching out those last few inches, he curved his left arm around her sagging shoulders.

  “Oh, Shep!” Maggie sobbed as she fell against his tall, hard frame. “You’re here! You’re here!” She gulped unsteadily and felt him press her hard against his chest in a protective gesture. Clinging to him, she found herself half crying, half laughing.