“Yes,” she replied, totally composed, totally over what had just been going on with her.
“Now that your friends can’t reach you on the radio, they’re going to come looking for you, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” But not before the storm clears, and not before daylight. She didn’t say that, though. It was probably a good thing for him to think that it was possible that her fellow scientists could stumble upon them at any moment. It made her feel a little safer, at any rate.
He said, “But they won’t come looking for you until morning at the earliest.”
Okay, so he wasn’t worried about her colleagues finding them right away. Well, she’d told him herself that nobody would be out in the storm. Big mouth.
More slowly, he added, “It’s better if you don’t tell them about this.”
Gina frowned at the noisily fluttering tent wall she couldn’t see. “What?”
He repeated his words, adding, “You need to get away from me.”
She blinked in surprise. “At last we agree on something.”
He ignored that. “The people who are after me—you don’t want them after you, too. You don’t want to get on their radar.”
Gina was wide awake now. “You’re right, I don’t.”
“No one has to know that you saw my plane crash. No one has to know that you saw me.”
“That’s true,” she replied slowly.
“If the people who are after me find out that you saw me, talked to me, it’s a good bet they’ll kill you.”
Gina shivered. Goose bumps racing over her skin, she rolled over to stare fruitlessly in his direction, unable to see anything except a wide expanse of blank darkness.
“Wonderful.”
“So you don’t let them find out,” he replied while an army of cold little feet duckwalked down her spine. “You don’t tell your colleagues about me. You don’t tell anybody about me. For all intents and purposes, you got caught in the storm and spent the night out here in your tent, alone.”
She thought that over. “I can say that.”
“In the morning you need to head back to your camp bright and early, before any of your friends have a chance to track you down.”
“Okay.” That had been her plan anyway, although he didn’t know it. Only she’d meant to tell her colleagues the whole story, alert the authorities, and come back here with them so that they could all keep collective watch over him until help arrived.
She liked his plan better. Because what he said made terrifying sense. If bad guys with guns were after him, she definitely did not want them after her and her group, too.
He said, “Once you get back, I need you to do something for me.”
Her reply was cautious. “What?”
“How does your group communicate with the outside world? E-mail? Phone?”
“Not e-mail. There’s no connection. We have a satellite phone.”
“Ah.” It was a sound of satisfaction. “Do you have access to it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you make a call without anyone knowing?”
This time her answer was more uncertain. “I suppose I could.”
“I need you to make a call for me. As soon as possible after you get back to camp. No one else can know.”
“Who would I be calling and what would I say?”
“I’ll give you the number before you leave. All you have to do is dial it and key in another set of numbers I’ll give you. That will bring somebody here to pick me up and give me a ride home.”
Her silence must have conveyed some of the doubt she was feeling, because he added persuasively, “One call, and I’ll be gone within a matter of hours. Out of your life forever. You can pretend like you never laid eyes on me.”
That sounded promising, but—
“The other people on the plane—their deaths have to be reported to the authorities,” she said. “So does the crash.”
“Will you trust me to take care of that?”
He must have taken her silence to mean precisely what it did—she didn’t trust him—because he added, “Believe me, you don’t want this to come back on you. I’ll make sure all the right people are notified. And you and your friends stay safe.”
It was the “stay safe” part that did it. “All right.”
“So you’ll make the call.” From his tone, she could tell it wasn’t really a question.
Still she hesitated. “Will I be aiding in the commission of a crime? Or committing treason or something equally hideous?”
“No.” From the sound of his voice, it seemed that made him smile.
“Would you tell me if I was?” Suspicion dripped from every word.
“Probably not.” He was smiling. She could tell.
“Then I don’t think—”
“The alternative is, I can go to your camp tomorrow and commandeer your phone and place my own call, but then I’d be putting every single one of you in danger.” He no longer sounded like he was smiling.
Persuasive argument. She made a face into the dark. “Fine, I’ll do it.”
“Thank you.”
Gina snorted by way of a you’re welcome.
He didn’t say anything after that, and she didn’t, either. After a few minutes, she turned over and tried to fall asleep.
She couldn’t. Of course she couldn’t. She didn’t know why she was even surprised. The backpack felt like a stone beneath her head. Even through the pad, the ground felt almost as hard and bumpy. She was so tired she felt boneless, but her mind raced.
It was the mind-racing part that kept her awake.
It would be tricky to place the call without anyone taking notice. And she still had no real proof she wouldn’t be abetting a crime by doing so. But all things considered, taking the chance to get away from him and then doing what she could to get him off the island as quickly and quietly as possible seemed like the lesser of a number of evils. Just as pretending that she’d never seen him or his plane seemed like the smartest thing she could do.
Having made the decision, she tried to empty her mind, tried to go to sleep.
He was asleep.
She could tell from the way he was breathing.
Slow and deep. Rhythmic.
Close.
Too close.
The wind screamed. The tent rattled and shook. Some combination of sleet and snow clattered relentlessly down on the ground outside. In the distance she could hear the boom of the surf, the roll of thunder, the occasional crack of what she thought must be lightning.
But what bothered her was his breathing. The more she listened to it, the more it made her tense up. Made her own breathing quicken. Made her heart beat faster.
Finally she figured out why.
It wasn’t just that he was so near. It wasn’t just that she didn’t trust him, or that she was, in fact, slightly afraid of him.
It was that his breathing sounded so very—male.
She hadn’t slept this close to a man since David’s death.
The last night of his life they’d cuddled together on a single cot in a tent in the Yucatán. They’d made love. Afterward, he’d fallen asleep and she’d lain there in the dark listening to him breathe. She’d thought, I’m happy.
David’s breathing had sounded slow and deep. Rhythmic. Unmistakably male.
Her insides quivered at the memory.
The next morning the two of them, plus her father and sister, had gotten on that plane.
And taken off into the teeth of a threatening storm.
She could still hear the patter of rain on the fuselage—
No. Gina sat up abruptly, desperate to banish the memory. It was too late. She was trembling. Her chest felt tight. Bile rose in her throat.
“Mmm?” the scary stranger sharing her tent murmured in sleepy inquiry.
She didn’t answer. Instead she stayed very still. After a moment his deep, rhythmic breathing began again.
Oh, God.
Listening, sh
e felt her every nerve ending being scraped raw.
He was, she thought, sound asleep once more.
While she felt like she might never sleep again.
Drawing her legs up close to her body, she wrapped her arms around them. Then she dropped her head so that her forehead rested on her knees.
She didn’t cry. What was the point? She’d already shed multiple oceans’ worth of tears, and not one single thing had changed.
It’s just breathing. She forced herself to listen to it, hoping that she would soon grow desensitized to the sound.
Her mind was on board, but her body, her senses, her emotions seemed to be having trouble adjusting.
Gradually they did. Or else she just grew so tired that she couldn’t feel anything anymore.
After the shakes went away, after the knot in her chest loosened, after the bile receded, exhaustion finally claimed her. She lay down, huddled in a little ball facing away from him. Deliberately she thought about birds: the rare ones she’d spotted on the island, the eagle she’d helped save, the tests she hoped to perform to better assess the health of various species before leaving. She loved working with the island’s horned puffins, the funny-faced, black-and-white clowns of the seabird world. To test their diets for pollutants, she’d placed screens in front of their burrows while they were out fishing. When they returned with their beaks full of fish, they had to spit out their catch to remove the screens, which they could do easily once their beaks were empty. While the birds dealt with the screens, she nabbed a sample of their diets. They didn’t seem disturbed by her presence, and just recalling their head-bobbing, foot-shuffling dance as they approached their burrows made her smile. From there her thoughts segued to the plovers, the terns, the northern fulmars, the pigeon guillemots, all of which she’d seen in her brief time on the island. Seven hundred different kinds of birds had been identified as living on Attu. Deliberately she began ticking them off one by one, and smiled a little as she recognized that what she was doing was an ornithologist’s version of counting sheep. But it focused her mind, and eventually sleep claimed her.
Chapter Fourteen
Gina was heavy eyed and cross-looking as she struggled into a sitting position inside the cramped and gloomy confines of the tent. She thrust the tangled fall of her hair out of her face, then, with a grimace, rolled her neck from side to side. The storm was history, but overnight it had gotten cold enough in the tent to turn the tip of her nose red. Watching her, Cal found himself thinking it looked cute, that she looked cute, actually way more than cute, and immediately dismissed the thought. He’d felt her up and kissed her and made both of them hot, but that was the end of it. His life, and maybe her life, too, and countless other lives as well, were on the line here. He didn’t have time to waste on anything but managing the situation so that they all stayed alive.
“Stiff neck?” he inquired.
She gave a nod as she scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears in an apparent attempt to ease the tension in them. “I should have let you keep the backpack.”
“What can I say? Being nice has its rewards.” Cal sat up, too, wincing as what felt like a white-hot poker pierced his abdomen. His hand automatically went to the wound, but other than that he ignored the pain. This bullet wasn’t going to kill him, or even slow him down much. He’d been shot before, on the ground in Afghanistan, much more seriously, and had seen a fair number of others shot, too. He knew bullet wounds, and this one didn’t amount to much. He was lucky there’d been a metal door between him and the gun as the shot was fired, which meant that by the time the bullet drilled into his flesh it was all but spent.
Still, the sucker hurt. When he got home, which was a beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, that he shared with Harley and that, because of work, he left vacant for way too many days of the year, that bullet was coming out.
Chalk up one more scar to add to his collection.
“How’s your wound?” she asked. Having followed his hand as it went to his side, she glanced up and met his gaze. Now that she was fully awake, he could see that she felt equal parts awkward and wary around him. He was sorry about that, some, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Better,” he said.
“Good.” She glanced away from him, toward the front of the tent, then started to crawl toward it.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Out.” Her tone was short. He got the distinct impression that she didn’t want him following her. Probably she had personal business to attend to.
Fair enough.
It required conscious effort on his part to keep from looking at her ass as she crawled away from him. Then he slipped up, did a quick Check Six, and was rewarded by not being able to see anything of her ass at all. Between her coat and snow pants, she was well covered. Although when he’d searched her he’d been able to feel—
Don’t go there.
Instead, as she un-Velcroed and unzipped and otherwise worked her way out of the tent, he turned his attention to the cold, dead remains of what had been their furnace. The technique she’d used to build it was both simple and effective. He’d seen it used before, by commandos in the field. Her knowing how to do it was interesting, but he didn’t think it was especially significant.
Too many things—she was unarmed, she was clearly half-afraid of him, she went out of her way not to ask him any questions, she was too, well, young and pretty—argued against her being an operative.
The kiss had clinched it. It had gotten her hot, he knew. But after the first few seconds in which she’d kissed him back like she meant it, she’d gone cold as ice.
If she was an operative, he couldn’t see where that got her.
A night spent huddled on opposite sides of the tent, a parting at dawn. Not one bit of information gleaned. She hadn’t even tried.
No, she wasn’t an operative. He was almost 100 percent sure.
That conclusion made him truly sorry that she’d gotten caught up in this mess. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d saved his life.
“Stay close,” he told her right before she disappeared through the opening, his mind instantly going to who else might be around. There was almost certainly no one in the immediate vicinity, because if someone had known he had survived and where he was, and that someone was within range, he and Gina would already have found themselves under fire. He was taking it as a given that there was at least one enemy operative on the ground, because someone had to have fired the missile that brought down his plane. He wasn’t quite sure which of many possible groups that operative was affiliated with, or which group was at that moment closing in on Attu, but he was as sure as he was that he needed air to breathe that at least one of them was. Maybe more than one. He was fairly confident, though, that there was no way anyone could know that he’d survived the crash. They had to be thinking everyone who’d been on board his plane was dead.
For the time being, he’d like to keep it that way.
But as sure as God made pretty women, whatever group had given the order to shoot down his plane would be sending backup to the island to check that the danger Rudy and his information posed had been dealt with. They would have been there already if it hadn’t been for the storm.
By way of a reply to his warning to stay close, Gina sent him a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder. He smiled at her; she frowned at him. Then she crawled on outside, and he found himself watching her disappointingly well-covered ass again until she disappeared from his view.
If she wasn’t what she said she was, if she was a plant, then whoever had sent her was a genius. And she was an actress worthy of an Academy Award.
He didn’t think he could possibly be that wrong about her. But then, he’d been that wrong about people before.
Ezra being a case in point.
The thought would have hurt if he’d let it. So he dismissed it. He focused on his unlikely rescuer instead.
She was, as he’d realized in the tent last night as she�
�d wriggled out of her parka under the unforgiving glare of the flashlight, a beautiful woman. Big blue eyes, full pink lips, slender nose, high cheekbones, delicate jaw and chin. Fair skin, long, straight hair the color of honey. Slim, but with plenty in the T & A department. At least, plenty to suit his tastes.
Add in the way she’d kissed him, and it was a shame he didn’t have time to get to know her better.
But he had bigger fish to fry. Survival-level fish. National security–level fish.
He had to find a way to get the information he possessed to the people who could do something about it. To do that, he had to stay alive. And he meant to keep her alive, too.
Whatever it took.
With that resolution firmly fixed in his mind, he made what preparations he could to face the weather, then crawled out of the tent to find Gina.
Chapter Fifteen
The Zodiac was gone, of course. One of the first things Gina did upon leaving the tent was step out from behind the protection of the outcropping and look toward the bay, trying to spot it. Because the camp was much farther away by land than by water, she’d been hoping that the boat might have washed up somewhere nearby, without really expecting that it would have done so. It was nowhere in sight.
She felt a pang of disappointment, but no real surprise.
Finding her way back to camp on foot wasn’t going to be a problem: directly behind the former LORAN station stood Weston Mountain. If she followed the ridge that the outcropping was part of through the pass that she could see from where she stood, she should have no trouble locating the top of the mountain, which was one of the highest on the island. To make it even harder to miss, a World War II–era lookout tower (for enemy planes) had been erected at its summit. In partial ruins now, it still stood out as a landmark against the skyline for anyone who knew where to look.
Darkness Page 12