Yes. He gave a mental fist pump as he spotted the de Havilland Beaver on the runway. There was no snow accumulation yet on the wings, which told him that it hadn’t been on the ground long. This particular one looked a little battered, but the Beaver was a small, hardy Alaskan bush plane and would do the job he needed it to do.
Already turning back into the cave, busy making plans, Cal was startled when the puffins below him took off in a squawking, wing-beating mass, rising into the dawn sky in a noisy black cloud.
His gaze followed them automatically. As it did, it alighted on a sight so ominous that his blood froze. Whipping back around, he jerked the binoculars up to his eyes again to make sure.
Moving along the path he and Gina had taken the day before, with all the deadly silence of a squadron of stealth bombers, was a group of about twenty armed men. They had almost reached the fork in the trail that would take them up to the cave, and they were being led by a pair of what looked like native Aleuts with their tracking dogs.
Chapter Twenty-Five
We’re going to do what?” Gina squeaked. Cal gripped her hand tightly, pulling her after him as, flashlight illuminating the way, they raced up the last, steep section of the pitch-black stone tunnel that at its end would open out into nothingness at the top of Terrible Mountain.
“Jump.”
If his reply was terse, it was because the situation was desperate. Anyway, her question was largely rhetorical. She’d heard him perfectly well the first time he’d said it: he was proposing that they jump out of a cave entrance some three thousand feet up, on a different side of Terrible Mountain from the cave where they’d entered the mountain last night. With a parachute. A World War II–era parachute. That had been stored since the war ended in one of the garbage cans in the cave along with a couple dozen other parachutes and all kinds of other military odds and ends.
The horrible thing about it was, she couldn’t think of a better alternative.
“There has to be another way,” she said. Alarm spiraled through her system at the very idea. At his urging, her feet flew over the uneven stone floor. She’d stumbled several times already. His iron grip on her hand was all that had kept her upright.
He glanced back at her. “Look, I know what I’m doing. I’ve jumped under worse conditions than these. I’ll get you down alive.”
“Are we even high enough for a parachute to work?”
“Yes.”
The brusqueness of his reply told her that he’d made up his mind. But she hadn’t yet made up hers. She’d already had an object lesson in the inadvisability of letting domineering personalities make life-or-death decisions that affected her. She had to decide for herself what the best thing to do was—and she wasn’t feeling that parachuting off a mountaintop was going to be it.
Moments before, Cal had urgently wakened her. She’d dressed at light speed while he’d gathered the supplies he deemed they needed and explained the situation. Then they’d headed upward through the tunnel as quickly as they could go. Apparently during the night he’d found a map of the tunnel system, and both the cave they’d slept in and this other one, which was right below the summit on the western face of the mountain, were clearly marked. Gina had seen the higher entrance before as well, in a notation on a birder’s map, because a colony of ptarmigans nested near it. That it existed wasn’t in question.
The need to jump out of it was what had every brain cell she possessed screaming at her to put on the brakes.
Only, on the way up they’d paused at the first entrance for just long enough so that she could look out. What she saw had frightened her into turning tail and running with him, and kept her from digging in her heels and shouting Hell no now.
Armed men were swarming up the side of the mountain. The scarily silent tracking dogs that were leading them had been right below the now empty puffin burrows when she’d looked out. Gina had had a brief flashback to Arvid’s death, to Mary’s and Jorge’s bodies on the common-room floor, and had known without a shadow of a doubt that if she and Cal were caught, they would be killed.
At Cal’s insistence the two of them were now dashing for the fissure near the top of the mountain instead of fleeing through the interconnecting tunnels that would take them into the adjoining mountain, and from there into other adjoining mountains, because, as he’d pointed out, the dogs could track them through the tunnels as easily as they could along the trails outside. And she had just minutes in which to make up her mind about whether she was going to go along with him and jump.
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.
Breaking the kiss, he pulled her hard against him. Unfortunately, the action felt anything but romantic. Gina tensed. Her breathing quickened. Inside her gloves, her palms began to sweat. It was on, she knew.
“Put your arms around my neck.” His tone was all business, and as she complied he wrapped the trailing end of the rope that he’d tied around her around his own waist and hers several times before knotting it. “From time to time I’m going to need both hands free to operate the ’chute, but we’re tied together now. I need you to hold on tight, but even if you let go, you can’t fall.” Sliding an arm beneath her bottom, he lifted her off her feet. “Wrap your legs around my waist.”
Struggling against panic, Gina complied. In the distance, she thought she heard muffled sounds. Hushed voices. The thud of footsteps. The scrabble of claws on stone.
Alarmed, she glanced back down the passage. “Cal—”
“I hear it.” His voice was perfectly calm. “Hang on.” His arm clamped around her waist. He started to run, carrying her with him as if her weight was no hindrance at all.
Gina’s eyes widened. Her heart lurched. Her pulse pounded. She twined herself around him and clung like the proverbial monkey in a hurricane, bracing herself for—a horrifying drop into oblivion? A quick, hopefully painless death? A—
“Whatever you do, don’t scream,” he said in her ear.
Then he leaped out into nothingness like an Olympic long-jumper going for gold, like Superman launching himself into the stratosphere—only they fell like a stone.
It felt like getting hit by a train. Air slammed into her back with all the force of a ten-ton locomotive, forcing the breath from her lungs. Her heart rate skyrocketed. Every muscle she possessed went rigid with fright. If she’d wanted to scream—and she did—the g-forces would have made it impossible. It was almost impossible to breathe. Staring wildly up into the tumbling gray clouds, watching in helpless terror as the overcast ceiling receded above her head at an incredible rate, Gina felt the wind rushing past and practically saw her life passing before her eyes. Fast-forwarding through every prayer she’d ever heard in her life, she hurtled toward earth flat on her back, her arms and legs locked desperately around Cal’s hard body, which was no help at all because he was falling through the sky, too. Terrible Mountain’s black, snow-dusted face seemed to shoot upward, too horrifyingly close as she fell down it. The sheer drop that she’d looked out on from the cave entrance flashed past, and she arched upward in terrified anticipation, sure that at any second she would smash into the peak below, be broken, and die on solid rock—
The chute deployed, bursting into the air above them like a silken rocket, the narrow column of flimsy rope and gathered white cloth streaking toward the massing storm clouds.
It billowed, opened—
Just like that they were jerked upright and sent shooting skyward like a rubber ball on an elastic tether. The jolt was so unexpected that Gina almost became dislodged. It didn’t help that Cal’s arm, which had been clamped around her waist during their free fall, was no longer there. Instead, she saw in a terrified glance, he was holding on to two triangular handles that seemed to be attached to the parachute. In that same glance she caught a glimpse of his face. His jaw was hard, his mouth was tight, his eyes were narrowed, and he seemed to be looking down. He appeared intensely focused, but—thank God!—perfectly calm.
He must have felt her glance, because he yelled in her ear, “Doing okay?”
She didn’t yet have enough breath back to yell an answer. Instead, quaking with reaction, she nodded and tightened her death grip on him and watched Terrible Mountain falling away below them. They were soaring up and away, being borne along on the wind through the blowing snow, flying higher than the highest of the peaks, ascending into the clouds—
That realization scared her enough to shriek a question at him. “Shouldn’t we be going down?”
“Updraft,” he shouted back, not sounding at all alarmed but, rather, like a man in his element. He was holding on to the handles, using them to keep the parachute steady in the face of the buffeting wind that sent them skittering this way and that, and also, as she discovered as she risked a look down, to steer. He sent them around the backside of Terrible Mountain, then did his best to keep the parachute following the valley between the peaks. They were so high now that she could see a V-shaped formation of cackling geese flying below them. “We’re good now. Relax and enjoy the view.”
Gina almost choked. Her heart pounded and her pulse raced and her stomach felt as if it were lodged in her throat. Dangling from the floating mushroom above them, she and Cal rocked from side to side. The sensation of being suspended in midair, with nothing but a rope and her death grip on him standing between her and a fall of thousands of feet, was nightmarishly surreal.
“Enjoy the view?” she screamed at him disbelievingly, tipping her head back just enough to allow her to get a good look at his face.
He grinned, got a load of her expression, and said, “Or not.”
Then he kissed her. Another of those brief, hard kisses that thrilled her clear down to her toes. And, freaked out or not, she kissed him back.
The snow-covered landscape below was bleakly beautiful, she had to admit, once he quit kissing her to concentrate on getting them safely back to solid ground, and she recovered enough equanimity to actually look down and check it out. Soaring above it, she might even have appreciated the scenic side of their death-defying stunt if she hadn’t been busy keeping a wary eye out for bad guys with guns, and if her right leg hadn’t been developing a cramp, and if she hadn’t been totally scared to death because they were sailing along thousands of feet above the ground.
The descent was gradual. They dropped into the shadow of the mountains, went down past a nesting colony of rare red-legged kittiwakes (the location of which, under better conditions, she would have been itching to record), and skimmed rocks and snowdrifts before touching down in a narrow, horseshoe-shaped valley surrounded by mountains as softly as one of the snowflakes fa
lling around them. She’d thought that she would see the ground rushing up at her, that they would hit hard and maybe roll or something, but his feet touched and he took a few running steps while apparently doing something that freed the canopy part of the parachute. As the white silk went billowing away without them, he slowed and stopped.
“Thank God,” Gina said devoutly, mentally kissing the ground, which, since they’d landed in Henderson Marsh, was spongy tundra beneath about six inches of snow. Unwrapping her poor, cramped legs from their death grip on his waist, she let them drop with a sigh of relief, only to find as her feet touched the ground that they were full of pins and needles. Her arms slid down from around his neck until her hands clutched the front of his coat for stability, and she rested against him thankfully as her legs regained their feeling.
“You did great.” He rubbed her back in apparent congratulations, then cut her free of the rope that had harnessed them together. She hadn’t seen the folding knife, which he pulled from his boot and which he’d apparently found in the cave before.
“You enjoyed that,” she accused, resting her cheek against his wide chest.
“I haven’t jumped for a long time.” His faintly nostalgic tone made it an admission that she was right. After freeing her of the rope, he lifted the backpack off her back, then set it down in the snow. Not quite having recovered the full use of her legs yet, she sank down cross-legged in the snow beside it while he unstrapped himself from the parachute case and buried it by kicking snow over it.
“Do you think they saw where we went?” Pulling the backpack onto her lap, Gina dug inside it for essentials: water and a protein bar. They hadn’t yet had a chance to eat anything that morning, and the way she was feeling, she needed to if she was ever going to move again. Unscrewing the top of the water bottle, she drank.
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