As suddenly as the shooting had begun, it was over. An eerie silence pervaded the village. Lisa could do nothing but stare at the still form of the man she had killed while a ringing sound went off over and over again in her ears; she hoped vaguely that she wasn’t permanently deafened from shooting that wretched gun. Sam emerged from the trees, moving quickly toward her with his pistol drawn, taking the precaution of stopping to assure himself that the man she had shot was really dead. Lisa saw all this, but it didn’t really register. She felt as if she were watching through a thick pane of plate glass.
“Are you okay?” Sam had dropped to his knees beside her, removing the rifle from her slackened grasp. Lisa’s tongue came out to wet her lips; she nodded. Sam rolled her over, scooping her up into his arms and holding her tightly against him. Lisa, shaking, her arms going around his neck to lock behind his head in a strangle hold, saw fresh blood pouring from a wound in his neck.
“You’re hurt!” The sight of his blood—bright red like a child’s poster paint—running down the side of his neck to stain his shirt brought her out of the trance of fear that had held her in its grasp.
“It’s nothing. Just a graze.” His hands closed over her arms and he pulled her a little away from him so that he could see her face. His own face was white and drawn, and Lisa couldn’t tell if it was from pain from his wound or if it was from fear for her.
“You stupid little bitch, you scared me to death!” he said gratingly after his eyes raked her thoroughly from head to toe, searching for and not finding any signs of injury. “When I heard that gun go off, I nearly had a heart attack! I thought the bastard had decided to kill you before he came after me! Then I saw you with that damned gun—you, who couldn’t even shoot a fucking tree!—and I couldn’t believe it! Don’t you know, if you’d missed, he would have blown your head off?”
“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.
Sam shook his head, closing his eyes momentarily. Then he pulled her back against him again. “Don’t ever do anything like that again,” he admonished, his voice muffled as he pressed his mouth to her hair. “Next time trouble starts, you stay the hell out of it! How do you think I’d feel if something happened to you? I’d want to blow my own head off!”
Lisa was gradually recovering from her fright, and she felt faintly indignant that he should scold her for what she had done. After all, she had been trying to save his life. . . .
“I got him,” she pointed out with immense dignity, pulling back her head so that she could see his face.
He met her eyes, disbelief in his. Then a reluctant grin split his face. “Christ!” he said, dropping a hard kiss on her mouth. “You’re something else, you know that? Yes, you got him! That was damned good shooting, honey, but please, if you love me, don’t ever do anything like that again. I don’t think my system can stand the shock.”
“You must be getting old,” Lisa muttered disdainfully, and Sam grinned again. Then he stood up, pulling her to her feet with him.
“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here before somebody else comes nosing around. The boat makes everything a lot easier: we should be out of the country by nightfall.”
As he spoke he was pulling Lisa after him into their hut; together they snatched up the gear, cramming it into the A.L.I.C.E. pack as best they could. Then Sam hurried her toward the boat, which had drifted several feet away from the bank. They waded in after it, and Sam reached it first, hauling himself and the gear aboard and then reaching down a hand to help Lisa up. When she was safely aboard, Sam started the engine, then reversed until they were far enough away from the shore so that he could turn her prow around. It was just a matter of a few minutes before they were headed downstream.
Lisa cast one quick look back at the village as the boat rounded a bend. From that distance, she could see nothing except the thatched, cone-shaped roofs silhouetted against a background of trees. It was a scene of peaceful serenity; she found it hard to believe that just a short time before, four men had lost their lives there—one of them at her hands.
“Don’t think about it,” Sam advised quietly, seeing where she looked and correctly divining what was on her mind. “You did what you had to do.” Then his eyes softened on her white face. “In case I forgot to say it earlier in all the excitement: Thanks. You probably did save my life. When that bullet winged me, I took my eyes off your friend for a minute. At the rate he was moving, it’s very possible that he might have managed to get around behind me before I located him again.”
Lisa felt a rush of warmth at Sam’s words. She smiled at him, wondering if he was telling the truth or if he had said that merely to make her feel better about having killed a man. Whatever his motive, she did feel better. She would have shot down a whole army without a qualm, to keep them from hurting Sam.
“I love you,” she said. His eyes turned toward her again; she saw that they were smiling. She was fascinated by the way the sunlight seemed to sparkle off the blue of his eyes. With his raggedy, bloodstained clothes and week’s growth of bristly black beard, he looked like the roughest kind of roughneck. She loved him so much that it hurt.
“You tell me that at the damnedest times,” he complained, a groove deepening in his hard cheek as he half-smiled at her. “Come here, honey.” He held out his hand to her.
Lisa, who had been sitting on the vinyl-covered seat that ran around the rear half of the boat, almost flew to where he stood at the controls. He folded her against him, his mouth coming down to brush her lips before bestowing a harder, longer kiss. All the while he kept his eyes trained on the water in front of them. When he returned his full attention to the boat, Lisa still stood beside him, her head resting contentedly against the hard sinew of his shoulder, her arms linked loosely around his waist. She had no doubt that Sam would bring them out of this safely. She knew that she could, and did, trust him with her life.
“Oh, your neck!” she exclaimed after a while, suddenly remembering that he had been shot again.
He smiled down at her, dropping a quick kiss on the tip of her small nose. “I told you—it’s just a graze,” he said. “I’ve done worse to myself shaving. It’s already quit bleeding.”
Lisa had to look for herself, just to make sure, but she found that he was quite right: the wound was barely deeper than a scratch, and the blood that earlier had welled so brightly had now dried. Still, Lisa shuddered to think what would have happened if that bullet had hit just a couple of millimeters to the right. It would have gone clean through his neck. . . .
“It didn’t happen,” he said quietly, once again seeming to read her mind. “A lot of things could have gone wrong back there,” this was accompanied by a reproachful look at Lisa, “but they didn’t. So let’s forget about it, okay? If my calculations are correct, we should be in South Africa in time for supper.”
“Really?” If he had meant to distract her, Sam succeeded admirably. Now that she no longer had to be worried about the parting from him that she had thought was inevitable, she longed to be safely back in civilization. She thought of food, a hot bath, and a real bed with longing. And Sam would share it all. . . . The thought made her smile.
As the day wore on, Lisa grew increasingly nervous. It had occurred to her that the dead men in the village might have been discovered by their comrades and that the chase might be on with a vengeance. She half-expected at any moment to hear boats roaring up the river behind them. But nothing happened. Hours passed, while the sun beat down and the water glinted and birdsongs filled the air.
The stream they had started out on had joined a river, probably a tributary of the Limpopo, Sam told her. If it was the river he thought it was, it bisected the southern tip of the country before joining the waterway that formed the border between Rhodesia and South Africa. Once they reached that point, they would be safe. They would continue on down the river, taking care to stay on the South African side, until they reached the South African town of Messina. After that, it would be relatively simple
to arrange transportation back to the United States.
Lisa, sitting in the bottom of the boat and leaning against Sam’s muscular leg, listened to his voice without really registering the words. It was enough to be close to him, to know that he was alive and pretty much in one piece and that he loved her. Her earlier nervousness was beginning to seem absurd. They were so close now—what could happen?
But she knew when she felt his leg stiffen, even before she heard the urgent note in his voice.
“For God’s sake, stay down,” he hissed, and she felt a sudden surge of power beneath her as he gunned the boat.
“What . . . ?” she asked, struggling to see despite his order. His hand on the top of her head pushed her down again. Looking fearfully up at him, she could see that he was as tense as a tiger on the prowl.
“There are a couple of jeeps running alongside the river,” he said between his teeth. “They probably don’t know a thing in hell about us. But just in case they do, I don’t want you to do a thing but keep down and cover up your head. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“That’s what you said the last time,” he muttered. “But this time, so help me . . .”
He never finished.
“Stay down!” he said again, sharply, crouching himself as the boat shot through the gently rolling water. Lisa risked a quick look over the side before she obediently lay down flat in the bottom of the boat. What she saw scared her clear to her toes. Instead of a couple of jeeps, as Sam had so casually said, there must have been half a dozen—at least three on either side of the river. Even as she looked, they slammed to a halt and soldiers leaped out. She was lying down before they opened fire, but it was clear what was happening: the soldiers were shooting at the boat. Situated in the middle of the open river as they were, she and Sam were sitting ducks.
XIV
SIX weeks later, Lisa sat in a semicomfortable chair in Sam’s hospital room in Annapolis, Maryland. It was a nice room, as hospital rooms go, its walls painted a cheery yellow instead of the usual dirty white and with deep blue carpeting on the floor. Saint Mary’s was a small, private hospital that cost the earth, and it treated its patients with as much deference as their various illnesses and injuries allowed. As a former marine, Sam could have gone to the naval hospital in nearby Bethesda, but Lisa had preferred to pay for his room and treatment at Saint Mary’s. Sam had been conscious for only brief periods since that horrible afternoon when four bullets had torn into his body, leaving him bleeding like a sieve, so he had not been consulted. The decision had been strictly Lisa’s.
Amos was so glad to see her alive and well that he had asked very few questions about this brawny stranger whose side she had refused to leave, except for such necessities as eating and sleeping, since the South African river patrol had pulled the two of them out of the half-submerged remains of their small, bullet-riddled motorboat. Lisa had had only a minor bullet wound to the arm; it was almost healed now and seldom bothered her. Sam was in much worse shape: he’d caught a bullet in the forehead just above his left temple, but fortunately it had bounced off his skull without doing too much damage; a bullet in the chest, which had punctured his left lung; and two bullets in his right thigh, one of which had broken the thick femur bone.
It was a miracle that he hadn’t bled to death before the river patrol had arrived and rushed him to the nearest hospital. And getting him safely back to the United States had almost required another miracle. Lisa knew that only her stubborn refusal to leave him, which had resulted in Amos’s pulling a multitude of strings, had gotten him out of South Africa with a minimum of questions asked. To the South Africans she had said that he was a journalist like herself, caught up in the fighting through no fault of his own. After one long look at Sam, who exuded toughness even while lying unconscious in a hospital bed, they had been clearly skeptical. But once they found out who she was, and had gotten in touch with Amos through embassy contacts, they had not quite liked to question her word. So Sam, still unconscious in a portable hospital bed, had been allowed to leave the country with Lisa in the small private jet that Amos had sent for them.
All she had told Amos was that Sam had saved her life more than once and that she owed him. Amos understood that—he never could bear to owe anybody anything. Lisa would have told him the truth, would have said that Sam was the man she loved and was going to marry, except for two circumstances: one, she had discovered that it was a touch awkward to describe one man as one’s fiancé while still being legally married to another; and, two, she was not quite sure of Sam’s feelings about announcing their plans to all and sundry. Maybe he would want to tell his son first, or . . . Well, she would wait for him to get well enough to face the world with her. The doctors had assured her that it would be only a matter of time before he was himself again.
Since returning, she had quietly set the wheels in motion for a divorce. She had not yet broken the news to Amos, preferring to wait and tell him everything at once, but Jeff had been very decent about the whole thing. In fact, now that she no longer thought of him as her husband, Lisa had discovered that Jeff could be a very good friend. He was the only one in whom she had confided, and while he had lifted his eyebrows at the thought of her marrying a professional soldier, he had also been quick to offer his best wishes for her happiness. Like herself, he preferred to wait and present Amos and his own family with the divorce as a fait accompli; that way, there would be little anyone could do about it.
Sam’s son, Jay, had been tracked down by one of Amos’s secretaries, and he had spent nearly as much time at the hospital as Lisa had. He was staying with her and Amos (she had moved back into her grandfather’s house, saying that it was nearer to the hospital, which it was; Amos had made no comment). At seventeen, Jay was a gangly version of Sam himself. For this alone Lisa would have loved him, but he was a very likable teenager, polite and well mannered, and clearly devoted to Sam behind the budding machismo that forbade him to say so. He had accepted Lisa’s explanation of how Sam had found her in the jungle and saved her life with much admiration for his father but with few questions. She liked to think that the two of them were on the way to becoming fast friends.
At the moment, Lisa was occupied in staring out the blue-curtained window at the gray waters of Chesapeake Bay. It was the middle of December, so the bright regatta that sailed the bay in summer was absent. Only scudding whitecaps and the occasional far-distant fishing vessel disturbed the rolling waters. Heavy, dark clouds hung low over the surface of the waves, threatening snow later in the day.
It was cold, and Lisa was dressed in a finely tailored jade-green wool skirt suit that she had always liked because it brought out the green of her eyes. A silk blouse with a high, ruffled collar in a paler shade of green and simple brown leather pumps completed her outfit. One of the first things she had done upon getting home was visit the hairdresser, so her blond hair hung in a simple yet sophisticated style around her shoulders, its deep waves caught up on one side by a jade clasp. Her hands were freshly manicured, the nails buffed and shaped into ten perfect ovals and polished a delicate rose. She knew she looked a far different creature from the ragtag female Sam had hauled out of the jungle, and she was eager to hear Sam’s reaction to her changed appearance. To tell the truth, she was dying to bowl him over. But it might be days or even weeks before he was really aware of his surroundings, so she would just have to be patient. At least the doctors seemed certain that he would recover, and that was the main thing.
Except for a brief phone call to Grace at the Star to let her know that she had made it back to the United States in one piece after all, Lisa had had no contact with anyone from the paper. She suspected that Amos had had something to do with that. Grace, upset by Mary Blass’s death but too much of a reporter not to think of the scoop Lisa could write for them—an eyewitness account of a massacre of an entire family, no less!—had almost pleaded with her to do the story. Lisa had said no as tactfully as she could, but Grace was persiste
nt by nature and profession. Lisa knew the other woman well enough to know that she would never have let the matter rest unless pressure was brought to bear. And Amos was the only one with the will as well as the authority to apply the necessary pressure. He had been horrified at her carefully edited account of what had happened at the Blass farm and afterward, horrified to think that his granddaughter had been exposed to such horror, had lived with such fear. Seeing the remembered horror and fear reflected in Lisa’s eyes, he had hugged her—an unusually emotional gesture for him—and told her to put it out of her mind. And he apparently meant to see to it that she did. At any rate, after that one phone call to Grace, no one at the Star had tried to get in touch with her. And Lisa did not contact them again. Aside from all the other considerations, it had occurred to Lisa that explaining just what Sam and his men had been doing in Rhodesia might prove a little sticky. She wasn’t positive, but Lisa suspected that there was some sort of law against what Sam had been up to. She thought it might even be illegal to be a mercenary. It would be best all around to keep the story out of the newspapers, she decided, and was thankful that the power that went hand in hand with Amos’s money permitted him to do that.
Sighing, she turned her attention from the view out the window to the man in the hospital bed behind her. His eyes were closed, and a small white bandage adorned his forehead where the bullet had struck just above his temple. His hair, which had been trimmed but was still longer than he usually wore it, looked very black against the crisp white pillow. His skin was still deeply bronzed. He was clean-shaven, thanks to the nurses who performed that chore for him daily, and his lean, hard jaw looked aggressive even in sleep. His wide shoulders were left bare by the blanket that came up only as far as his armpits. The outline of his powerful physique could be seen clearly through the bedclothes, and it had provoked more than one admiring glance from the younger nurses. An intravenous needle was taped to his left arm, its cord extending like a long, slender umbilical to the I.V. unit beside the bed. His right leg was in traction, strung up above the bed by a contraption that looked like a triangular pulley. It, too, was covered by the white blanket.
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