by Sherrilyn Kenyon; Dianna Love; Cindy Gerard; Laura Griffin
It was all she could do to keep her legs under her, let alone assemble a coherent thought.
“Nothing to say to that?”
“I… um… gulp?” She finally managed to answer his smile with one of her own.
He pressed another kiss on her forehead. “Well said.”
When he pulled back and searched her eyes he was all business again. “Ready to do this now?”
“Yeah.” She drew a bracing breath. “I’m ready.”
He squeezed her arm. “Like glue,” he reminded her.
Then he turned toward the tent flap and led her into the night, either to freedom or to death.
Eight
Gripping the rifle in his left hand, Cav crouched low to minimize his profile. He thanked God and good fortune that the sky was still cloud heavy and the night dark. He chanced a glance over his shoulder and motioned for Carrie to follow his lead.
She instantly mimicked his movements and, as promised, stuck like a tick as they skittered across twenty yards of open ground, then ducked down behind the relative cover of the five vehicles parked in a tight row in front of the silent cook tent.
Even though he’d clicked into combat mode, a small part of Cav’s body and brain—as well as a big part of his libido—was still engaged in that kiss she’d laid on him. The proper southern belle just kept surprising him. He had every intention of relishing that kiss for a long, long time… later.
Right now, he had more pressing issues. Like the sleeping dogs on the far side of the camp. And the two guards on foot patrol who, if he’d timed this right, would be walking down the path any moment and filing right past the jeep they were hiding behind.
He slipped the safety off the AK as quietly as possible, then touched Carrie lightly on her arm. When he had her attention, he pressed a finger to his lips, signaling her to be quiet. Then he dropped to his haunches behind the front wheel well, urging her down behind him.
Less than twenty seconds later the sound of voices and the muffled crunch of sandals drifted too close for comfort. The pair of guards walked toward them, AKs slung over their shoulders, their footsteps unhurried.
The guards walked directly in front of the jeep. Some six feet and the width of an engine block separated them. And then they stopped.
Cav barely breathed. While Carrie was still sleeping, he’d retrieved the KA-Bar Warthog from his backpack frame. Very slowly, he lifted his pant leg and pulled the knife out of his boot. Behind him, Carrie was statue still in the shadows. The gentle warmth of her breath against his back, where she huddled against him, told him she was doing fine.
Come on, come on, he willed the guards silently. Move on, you lazy bastards. Finish your rounds.
Just when he was certain they would be on their way, a match flared in the dark.
They were taking a smoke break.
Carrie’s hand tightened on his belt loop but she didn’t make a sound. Several more minutes passed. Sweat ran down Cav’s face and trickled down the middle of his back as they waited it out.
She had to be miserable. Even in the middle of the night the heat was killer, depleting their bodies of fluids and salt. His calf muscles started to cramp from the awkward way he was crouched. He was betting Carrie was struggling with muscle issues as well.
He could tough out the pain. But she was already in a weakened physical and mental state, and he was worried about how much more she could take.
If the guards didn’t move on soon he was going to have to do something. The last thing he wanted to do was shoot them. The gunfire would wake up the entire camp, and dodging bullets on the run was a surefire way to get her killed. He could take one guard out with his knife, but the other would be yelling bloody murder before he could shut him up.
Move, move, move!
And still they stood, leaning against the jeep, passing the cigarette back and forth, talking about women. Carrie pressed her forehead harder into his back, a sign that she was struggling.
He had to do something before she gave them away.
He felt around on the ground until he found a Ping-Pong ball–sized stone. After hefting it to get a feel for the weight, he looked around for overhead obstacles, then gave it a hard fling in the opposite direction from their flight path.
Both guards stopped their chatter and came to attention. So did the damn dogs. Six deep-throated barks rang across the mountainside. He couldn’t pick up the guards’ new conversation, but when they took off at a fast walk toward the spot where the stone had landed Cav didn’t waste any time.
He helped Carrie to her feet and knew by the slow way she rose that she was cramping up.
“Foot or calf?” he whispered close to her ear as the dogs wound down with a few halfhearted yelps and finally fell silent after a shouted order from the guards.
“Calf,” she ground out between clenched teeth.
He handed her the rifle, quickly dropped back to his knees, and felt along the backs of both of her calves. He found the knot—rock hard and the size of a marble—in her left calf and started working it out with his fingers.
Her quick intake of breath and her fingers digging into his shoulders spoke of the pain, but she toughed it out.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered but was relentless until he was satisfied he’d worked out the knot and the muscle wouldn’t seize up again, at least not immediately.
“Can you walk?” He stood and dug into his pack for the salt tabs he’d brought with him.
“Yes,” she answered without hesitation and downed the pills with some water. He did the same, then recapped the water bottle and stowed it in the pack.
“Hold on a sec.” He opened up the KA-Bar, dropped to his back, and shimmied under the first jeep in line. If he remembered right, the fuel line ran along the driver’s side of the frame.
He felt around. Bingo. He then felt around for the rubber fittings leading to the fuel filter and cut them. The gas wouldn’t leak out immediately, but when they started her up the fuel pump would spray gas all over, and the engine would run for a bit but then die of fuel starvation.
He slid out from underneath the vehicle, motioned for Carrie to follow, and took the thirty seconds he needed to repeat the process with the middle and the rear vehicles. As tightly as they were parked, the other two weren’t going anywhere anyway.
“Okay,” he whispered, “let’s boogie before they decide to come back.”
He crouched low and, with Carrie close behind, he sprinted toward the far side of the encampment, keeping to the shadows, ducking between the mining equipment and steep wall cut into the mountainside. She stopped him with a hand on his arm before they’d traveled twenty feet.
“Are you sure we can’t free them now?” she asked looking back toward the caged slaves they were leaving behind.
“Trust me on this, Carrie. I’m not going to forget about them. I’ll be back with enough resources to get them out of here. Right now, we’ve got to worry about getting our own asses the hell gone.”
KEEPING HIS PROFILE low, Cavanaugh alternately sprinted and crept along the upper perimeter of the camp, leading them farther from the center of operations and higher up the mountainside. Carrie wanted to ask where they were headed, but she kept her mouth shut and her feet moving, and she made herself think past the painful cut on her foot and the exhaustion and her sore calf muscles.
She was physically depleted. Neither her muscle mass nor her motor control were what they should be, but adrenaline was a wonder drug. She just prayed the rush lasted long enough to get her past the worst of it, because when she crashed she was going to drop like a stone.
In the meantime she followed Cavanaugh’s lead, even though she wondered why he was taking them farther up the mountain instead of down.
“When they wise up to the fact that we’re AWOL,” he whispered as he tugged her down behind a boulder to catch their breath, “they’re going to figure we went down, not up.”
That was at least the second time he’d read her mi
nd. She wasn’t going to question it, just like she wasn’t going to think about the guard whose sandals she wore or the way his body had looked, slumped and lifeless where Cavanaugh had propped him in a sitting position outside the tent.
Except she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it.
“Drink,” Cavanaugh prodded, gripping her hand and shoving a bottle of water into it. “We need to keep hydrated.”
She drank, then handed back the bottle. The generator kicked on just then, flooding the mining site with dim light. A shout rang out. Then another.
“The jig is up,” Cav said, helping her to her feet. “Now we run like rabbits.”
She glanced over her shoulder as he took her hand and pulled her along behind him. Less than fifty yards away the camp came alive with soldiers scrambling, rifles at the ready, as the general yelled orders that needed no translation.
It was an all-out manhunt.
“Don’t look back,” Cavanaugh ordered as the dogs started baying and snarling. “It’ll only slow us down.”
He was right, so she forced herself to forget about the guns and the dogs. She concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other as Cavanaugh led her away from the mining road and into the thickness of the jungle.
“THE BAYING IS getting farther away, don’t you think?”
Cav leaned back against a thick tree trunk, boots braced on the ground against the steep downhill slope, and tried to listen past the blood pounding in his ears and his heavy breaths. They’d been on the run for at least an hour. The sound of the baying dogs was a powerful incentive to keep moving. This was only the second time he’d allowed them to stop and rest.
“I think so. Yeah. At the risk of another cliché, it sounds like they’re barking up the wrong tree.”
She smiled. It felt damn good. What felt even better was that the guards were searching down the mountain. As he’d also hoped, it appeared the dogs hadn’t been able to pick up their exit scent. When they tried to start the vehicles and gasoline sprayed all over the place, it would be even more difficult for the dogs, whose highly sensitive sense of smell would be bombarded.
“Once they figure out the dogs don’t have a trail, they’ll realize that we went up, not down.” He accepted the water bottle from her, drained it, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But we bought at least an hour. Maybe two.”
Now all they had to do was get off this frickin’ mountain, meet up with the contact Wyatt was supposed to have arranged for them, then lay low until the extraction team—also arranged by Wyatt—showed up at the designated landing zone.
Yeah. That’s all.
“Let’s move.” He folded up his map and consulted the GPS. He hadn’t bothered with his cell phone because his research had told him they weren’t anywhere near a cell tower.
“There’s a village about ten miles southwest of here, and that’s where we’re headed.”
“Because?”
“Because we’re expected.”
“You really did have a plan.”
Yeah. He had a plan. Normally he’d have taken weeks to plot out a rescue op of this scope. He and Wyatt had had only hours to pull this together and hold it together with kite string and duct tape.
“You’re going to start trusting me one of these days.” He grinned back at her as he pushed away from the tree, relieved her of the backpack, and adjusted the straps to fit his shoulders.
When he reached for her hand again, she didn’t hesitate or complain. She just hopped to. Cav’s admiration for her kept rising.
The jungle was dense and dangerous underfoot, so he’d risked using the miner’s flashlights from his backpack. He’d figured correctly that the general wouldn’t question the lights, since the supposed purpose of his visit was to tour the dark mines. The fact that he’d had an extra in his pack hadn’t raised any eyebrows, either because batteries died or bulbs got broken.
This far away from the mining camp, the risk of using the headlights strapped around their foreheads outweighed the risk of falling and breaking a limb in this rough terrain. Cav might be able to carry Carrie out if she sprained or broke something, but she sure as hell couldn’t carry him—although, knowing her, she’d damn well try.
“Watch your step,” he warned. Every step over gnarled roots, tangled vines, and deadfall was a step toward life, just as every misstep could be tantamount to death.
They had ten grueling miles ahead of them. Ten miles that, in a perfect world, they would cover before sunrise. But this world wasn’t perfect. And this woman couldn’t possibly last until sunrise, as weak as she was.
It was inevitable that her body was going to fail her.
He just hoped to hell that he didn’t.
Nine
Carrie felt the shift before she understood what was happening. Like the pulse thrumming through her body, she could feel the mountain jungle transition from the deep, breeding gloom of night to a darkness fostered by shadows and shade.
The sun had risen. She couldn’t see it but she sensed that dawn had broken, even though daylight would never reach the floor of this dense, loamy forest.
She’d been moving on autopilot for hours, had lost feeling in her legs long ago. She made herself move because, if she stopped, she died. And she couldn’t die. Not after all she’d been through.
“Stay with me, Carrie.”
Cav’s voice was filled with concern and encouragement. She’d clung to the steady strength of it through the grueling trek down the mountain. Just as she’d clung to him to keep her balance, to keep her here in the moment, to keep her moving.
It would be so easy to just stop walking. Stop thinking. Stop wanting the pain to ease, just enough to make it bearable.
One more step. One more after that. Just… one… more.
A brilliant light hit her full in the face, as blinding as a fireball. The piercing blast would have sent her to her knees if Cav hadn’t grabbed her.
Suddenly he was laughing and lifting her off her feet. “You did it! You amazing, astonishing woman, I don’t know how you did it, but we made it!”
His words registered in a haze of pain as she buried her face against his shoulder to block the burning brightness.
The sun, she realized finally. She lifted her head and squinted against the glare. They had broken through the jungle and stumbled onto a road. Narrow, filled with potholes, nothing but dirt. But it was a road.
“Drink,” Cav ordered after setting her back on her feet and handing her a water bottle.
The water was warm but wet. And the protein bar he handed her would go a long way toward making her feel attached to her limbs again.
“Whoa.” Just as she felt herself sway again, Cav grabbed her arm and steadied her. “Come on. Let’s sit you down for a bit.” He eased her to the ground.
“You may never get me on my feet again,” she said, peeling the wrapper off the energy bar.
He checked his watch, his GPS, then gave her arm an encouraging squeeze. “Hold on. If all goes as planned, you may not have to. Be right back.”
Before she could ask him what he meant he was gone, jogging down the road and disappearing around a bend.
She was too weary to be concerned. She just sat there, drinking water and eating the protein bar. She’d just finished both and was starting to feel marginally human again when she heard voices coming from the direction Cav had disappeared.
Moving as quickly as she could she scuttled back up the embankment and into the forest, then hunkered down and hid behind a tree surrounded by heavy foliage.
“Carrie, it’s okay. Come on out.”
Wary, she popped her head up and spotted Cav and a Burmese boy who looked about twelve or thirteen, driving a two-wheel cart harnessed to a team of horned oxen.
“Your chariot, awaits, m’lady,” Cav said with a grin as he climbed up the embankment to help her back to the road and the grinning boy.
“Nanda.” She repeated the boy’s name when he introduced
himself and returned his handshake.
“English means river,” he announced proudly.
Carrie looked from the boy to Cav.
Cav gave her a wink. “Come on. We’re hitching a ride.”
He lifted her into the back of the cart filled with bolts of cotton fabric.
As he hitched himself up beside her, Cav explained, “from what I’ve gathered, Nanda’s father is a merchant in the village. Nanda is on his way home with a delivery.”
“He wasn’t afraid of the gun?” she asked as the oxen started lumbering down the curving mountain road. Then she got it. “Oh wait. We’re the delivery? He was expecting us?”
“Thanks to Wyatt. He’s been putting things in play at his end,” he told her. “Lie down and take advantage of the ride. We’ve got a ways to go.”
He didn’t have to tell her twice. She laid back on the bolts of cotton that were hard yet so much softer and cleaner than the ground she’d tried to sleep on at the camp. Immediately, she was gone.
SHE’D CRASHED LIKE a shooting star, as he’d known she would. Cav watched as Carrie slept on a pallet of blankets in the corner of the small bedroom in the tiny house where Nanda lived with his mother, father, and three younger sisters.
She hadn’t even awakened when Cav had picked her up and carried her into the cool interior of the house in a village whose name he still hadn’t figured out how to pronounce. Just like he still hadn’t figured out how to deal with his feelings for this woman. Feelings that just kept getting stronger.
Nanda’s mother had met them at the door. Thura was a lovely Burmese woman somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-five. Three darling little dark-eyed girls peeked out at him from behind their mother’s legs, and Cav had felt guilty for taking advantage of the family’s willingness to help.
Their presence here was placing the family in danger. If it were up to him, they’d eat, rest for an hour, and be on their way. But it wasn’t up to him. Time remained the enemy, but now it was too much time instead of too little. They had no choice but to hold out here until the extraction team could get into place at the prearranged time he and Wyatt had decided on forty-eight hours ago.