Night Flight

by Donna Ball

  After a moment Cathy managed a slow, reluctant smile. "I just realized something," she said. "That's the first time anyone has talked to me like a grown-up in a long time. I guess it's okay. I might even learn to like it."

  Dave looked at her a moment as though he did not quite know whether or not she intended him to take her seriously, and then he gave a slight shake of his head. "Maybe some day you’ll tell me who it was that taught you to believe in your own incompetence."

  Resentment prickled, and she wanted to object to that, but she didn't quite know what to say. And perhaps there was a small part of her somewhere that even recognized a grain of truth in what he said, as much as she wanted to deny it.

  At any rate, Dave gave her no time for argument. He was all business as he took the hand that held the pistol and lifted it into her line of vision. "This is the safety," he said. With his thumb, he pushed a small red button behind the trigger guard. "Now it's off." He moved the button back to its original position. "You keep it here until you're ready to pull the trigger, until there's absolutely no doubt that you're going to pull the trigger. All right?"

  She nodded.

  "Do it."

  He moved his hand away and she moved the button forward, then back.

  He stepped behind her, putting his hands under her arms as he moved them into position. "Put your feet apart. No, farther. Find your center of balance, be comfortable. Pretend like you're bracing against a big wind, that's it. This gun is too heavy for a woman, it's not going to be easy to handle. The best thing for you to do is hold it with both hands and brace your arms against

  something—a tabletop, a car hood, a rock, something to keep your arm from shaking. If you can't, hold the gun with your right hand and use the other hand to support your arm, like this." He positioned her left hand beneath her wrist. "Look down the sights. Get one of the cans centered."

  She shook her head. The gun was still wavering, not much, but enough to keep the small tin can floating in and out of the frame of the sights. "I can never hit that. It's too small."

  "Don't worry," he said calmly, "A man makes a much bigger target. And you're not even going to take the safety off until he's close enough to hit with a rock. Right?"

  She swallowed hard. He made it sound like a game, and they both knew that was the last thing it was. He was talking about a real man, a man with a face and a name, a man who would bleed if a bullet tore through his flesh ... a man who only last night would not have hesitated to use this very gun on Cathy if he had had the chance.

  Dave was saying, "Now there's going to be a hell of a kick, but don't stiffen against it. Let your arms take the impact, stay as relaxed as you can. Squeeze the trigger, don't jerk it. Get your target in your sights and when you do, don't hesitate. Fire." He stepped away from her. "Go ahead."

  "Do you mean now?"

  "You need to get used to the feel. We'll take a couple of practice shots."

  Cathy hated this; she hated the act and the reason for it, but she knew arguing with Dave would only prolong the inevitable. She knew she couldn't pull the trigger on another human being. Throughout the night she had physically fought for her life; she had used force when she had to, and it had sickened her, but it was a force she could control. A gun was different. Holding it had made her feel secure, pointing it made her feel powerful, and she liked that feeling. But she had known with horrible certainty when Dave approached her down the barrel of the gun that she couldn't pull the trigger, that she wouldn't pull the trigger no matter what the provocation. Firing a couple of shots at a rusty tin can was not going to change that basic truth.

  But she didn't want to argue with Dave. She tensed her arms against the impact and squeezed her eyes shut even as she tried not to avert her face. She tugged on the trigger, and nothing happened.

  Dave said, "Cathy."

  She looked at him, but he said nothing more. He simply reached forward and flipped the safety button. His expression was bland but she knew he was disappointed, and that irritated her. She braced herself tightly and pulled the trigger.

  The explosion was shattering; the recoil threw her arm up and sent her staggering backward. She didn't come close to the tin can, which wasn't surprising. She couldn't even remember whether she had glanced at the sights before she fired.

  She had forgotten or ignored everything Dave had told her, and she expected him to be angry. Instead, he took the gun from her hand, pushed the safety back on, and said mildly, "Most women don't like guns. They're loud, they're messy. My wife once said that if men had to worry about who was going to clean up the mess, there'd be a lot less violence in the world."

  Cathy was ashamed. He had been trying to help her and she had deliberately, almost spitefully, ignored him. And instead of reproaching her or throwing his hands up in exasperation, he understood. He understood, in fact, a great deal better than Cathy would have done under the same circumstances.

  She said, "Your wife sounds like a smart woman."

  "She was." He said it matter of factly, without bitterness or wistfulness, a simple statement of fact.

  She extended her hand for the gun. "Let me try it again."

  He started to hand it to her, and then a sound tore across the day—almost an echo of the gunshot that had gone before; not as explosive, yet at the same time sharper, cleaner, more purposeful. Cathy didn't recognize it; she refused to recognize it; even when she saw the ragged shock on Dave's face as he shouted, "Get inside!" Even as he grabbed her arm and literally flung her toward the door, even as the sound came again and splintered the branch of the tree behind them, even as she dived for the door and even as she saw Dave running, low and close to the building, with the gun in his hand—she refused to believe what she knew it was.

  She pressed herself against the inside wall of the shack, gasping and shaking, waiting for another gunshot —a bomb, a cannon, waiting for the world to end and thinking, No, it can't be. Dave said he wouldn't find us. I believed him. It can't be. She had been there less than thirty seconds when Dave burst in the back door. His face was pale and tight with urgency.

  "He's about two hundred yards below us." He moved quickly across the room, throwing open a cupboard door and pulling out a moth-eaten blanket, a ratty-looking alpine sweater. "He must've been waiting for nightfall to move in. The shot probably made him think we'd spotted him. It'll take him about ten minutes to get up here." He spoke rapidly, stuffing the blanket into the backpack, tossing the sweater toward Cathy.

  "But how could he?" she cried. She caught the sweater by instinct but immediately dropped it through clumsy fingers. "How could he find us? Nobody knew where we were, he couldn't have followed us, he couldn't have . . ."

  Dave's lips tightened as he stuffed one of the pistols into the pack and the other into his belt. It came to him now, what he should have put together sooner, what the chief was trying to tell him. Certain players are expendable. . . . The chief had known where he was going. Everybody in the squad room knew about Dave's fishing shack, most of them had been here at one time or another. Now Kreiger knew, too. Because in an operation like this, certain players were expendable.

  He scooped up his windbreaker and grabbed the pack. "Take that sweater," he commanded shortly, "you're going to need it tonight. Let's go."

  He caught her arm and propelled her roughly before him through the door.

  ***************************

  Chapter Fifteen

  For the first twenty minutes Cathy was too breathless, too terrified and driven, to question or even think. Dave forged ahead of her along a narrow wooded trail, pushing back branches, tearing through brambles, and Cathy struggled to keep up with his long stride. After a time the trail became less distinct and seemed to disappear altogether in places. Her calf muscles strained as the climb grew more definite, and her lungs burned. Dave never even looked back to see if she was following. Sometimes it seemed he had forgotten she was there at all.

  She was afraid to pause or turn around, afraid to
see the form that was in pursuit, as though as long as she could not see him he might not be following. She even allowed herself to think that perhaps they had escaped unnoticed, and eventually she stopped holding herself rigid in expectation of the shotgun blast that would sever a tree limb over her head or explode the ground at her feet or send Dave pitching forward or rip through her spine.

  And when the climb became so arduous that her dragged-in breaths were like staccato moans, when she was aflame with exertion and her leg muscles on the verge of spasm, she was confident enough to grasp the trunk of a sapling and gasp, "Stop! I can't—I can't go any farther. Need to rest."

  Dave continued for several strides as though he hadn't heard her. When he turned the dark scowl on his face surprised her, and then she realized it wasn't directed at her. He barely even saw her.

  But he was breathing hard, too, and after a moment the angry preoccupation in his eyes faded. He took a few steps back toward her, unscrewing the lid of one of the canteens. Cathy's throat ached too badly with the effort at breathing to try to swallow, so she waved the canteen away. He took a drink, gazing back down the trail the way they had come.

  Through the breaks in the trees a magnificent backdrop of rugged mountains could be seen, jagged peaks still snow-topped in places, mountain pools and streams glinting like strips of tinfoil in the valleys. The hiking trail they had been following was such a steep, winding ascent that by simply moving out of the cover of foliage they could look down on where they had been. When Cathy's breathing had steadied enough for her to speak, she managed, "Is he there? Can you see?"

  Dave shook his head. "I don't see anything. That doesn't mean he's not there."

  "Maybe he won't follow us. Maybe—"

  "He saw where we were," Dave' said harshly. "It'll take him maybe three minutes to toss the cabin. Then he'll start looking. Sooner or later he'll figure out which trail we took. All we can do is hope it's later."

  His words went through her like the cold blade of a knife, and then she realized something else— belatedly, stupidly. "We're going up. We're not going toward town at all, we're going in the opposite direction!" Her voice rose as the significance of this sank in. "The town is on the other side of the mountain, so why did you bring us up here?"

  Dave's jaw tightened and his gaze remained steadfast on the trail by which they had come.

  Cathy took a step toward him. "How did Kreiger find us?" she demanded, horror and accusation sharpening her voice. "You said he couldn't find us, but he came right to you! He couldn't have gotten here any quicker if he'd had directions, and now you're leading me back into the wilderness, away from civilization, away from help-"

  "You don't get it, do you?" Dave turned on her, frustration churning in his eyes. "You really don't goddamn get it!"

  "I get that you lied to me!" Cathy screamed. "For all I know you've done nothing but lie to me from the beginning, and if you think I'm going to keep on following you across this mountain, waiting for you to lead me God knows where--"

  Even as she spoke she was turning away from him, ready to plunge back down the trail. He grabbed her arm and spun her around. "We're cut off, don't you understand that?" he shouted. "We're on our own! You go back down that trail and you're going to walk right into his trap! You show up in town and he'll be on you within an hour. There's nobody you can call he can't find, no place you can go he doesn't know about, nobody you can trust. We're on our own!"

  He punctuated the last sentence with a shake of her arm , and then he released her. For a moment Cathy was too stunned to react. She simply stared at him.

  He stood there, breathing hard as he slowly tightened his fists against an enemy he couldn't see, but it was an enemy Cathy recognized. Betrayal.

  She brought her hand to her throat, rubbing away a sudden tightness. "Who was it?" she said hoarsely. "Who told him?"

  Dave drew a deep breath and expelled it through his teeth, as though with the gesture he could also expel the fury, the hopelessness, the hurt. It didn't work.

  "Shit," he said softly. "He tried to warn me." He lifted his hat, blotting his damp brow with his sleeve. "Hell, I've been playing this game too long to get used to a whole new set of rules now."

  Then he looked at Cathy. "It was my fault," he said simply. "I should've realized which way the wind was blowing, I should've seen it coming. I don't have any authority over you, I can't make you stay with me, and I sure as hell don't blame you for not trusting me. But I'm telling you, lady, you're in deep trouble. So am I. And right now, I can't see where it's going to end."

  Cathy wasn't sure whether it was shame or sorrow that made her unable to meet his eyes. She swallowed hard and said, in a subdued tone, "You figured he'd try the trail that led into the valley, toward town, first."

  "Maybe." He sounded uneasy, and his muscles were still tight. "Maybe he's got a course in tracking under his belt. Maybe he's clairvoyant. Maybe he is the goddamn Terminator. I don't know."

  Hesitantly, Cathy reached for the canteen. "How can we know where this trail goes? What if it just ends at the top of a gorge or something?"

  Dave slipped the straps of the backpack over his shoulders and handed her the canteen. Cathy drank, sparingly, as he took out a couple of maps from the backpack and spread them on the ground. One was a hiking map, an almost unreadable conglomerate of circular land contour lines, dotted lines, and wavy lines, marked upon occasion by the depiction of an evergreen. The other was a more recognizable road map. The first Dave had picked up at the general store that morning, the second he had brought from his car. He arranged the folds of both maps to the same section of southern Oregon. Cathy tried to control the painful constriction of her heart as she realized how far away she still was from Jack —far away, and on foot.

  Dave said, after a time, "It's hard to tell, but it looks like we might not be completely up the creek. If we leave the trail here" —Cathy followed the course of his finger with a sinking heart — "and bear northeast until we pick up this logging road, it should take us right down here . . ." He consulted the road map. "I don't see a road number, do you?"

  Cathy knelt and looked at the map, trying to match the reference points from the hiking map, but her eyes were caught by the numbers along the top and down the side of the map. Bold letters and numbers in single digits, and smaller sections running north to south, east to west.

  "Coordinates," she said softly.

  Dave looked at her questioningly, and Cathy sank back on her heels, stunned by how easily it all fell into place. "Of course," she repeated softly. "Not a code at all. Coordinates."

  Every muscle in her body tensed with excitement as she turned to Dave. "That's what Kreiger

  needs to know—not the time, but the place. It doesn't matter when, don't you see—the when could be now, or two weeks from now, or two weeks ago—it doesn't matter who knows when, if no one knows where."

  "And the safest way to ensure that," Dave said, slowly picking up her line of reasoning, "would be to make the drop from a plane. And to do that you'd need—"

  "Coordinates," Cathy finished for him, on a muted note of triumph.

  For a moment they simply looked at each other, conscious of the thrill of the breakthrough they had made, yet wondering what good the information could do them. Then Dave said slowly, "That's why . . ."

  He looked at Cathy, and the surprised discovery in his eyes grew grim. "The FBI doesn't know where, either. They're counting on you to lead them there—or on Kreiger, to be more accurate. Plan A failed when you put their best man out of commission. In Plan B, their best man is the enemy."

  Cathy's head was starting to ache at the temples, as if something heavy were pressing there. "I don't understand."

  Dave said abruptly, "If we knew what those coordinates were, we could let the FBI know."

  "But they're the ones who set me up, who sent Kreiger after us — "

  His smile was brief, and as cold as the distant mountain peaks. "But it was nothing personal. And th
e only way we can win this game might be to play by their rules. Let them set the trap while we lead Kreiger into it."

  "Do you mean . . ." She felt herself growing cold. "Deliberately let Kreiger find us, and tell him what he wants to know?"

  Dave shook his head sharply. "No. Staying alive means making sure Kreiger doesn't find us. But if we could lead him to where we want him . . ."

  A thread of horror crept up Cathy's spine. "It sounds dangerous."

  Dave's expression was grave. "It may be our only chance."

  She knew then what he was thinking. How much did she trust him? Would she see this as a trap in itself? And it could be. The information in her head was worth thirty-three million dollars. People had killed for much, much less. Even nice people.

  And so he waited, and didn't ask.

  Cathy said calmly, "Nine oh double-u one five, four oh en oh two."

  And she saw, reflected in the simple understanding in his eyes, everything about their relationship change and settle into certainty. It was a good moment; the only good and true moment she had known since the world started spinning out of control two days ago.

  Then Dave turned to the backpack, and scrambled through one of the outer pockets until he

  found a pocket atlas. After a few moments searching, he released a low breath. "Makes sense," he murmured. "Looks like a place called Cave Springs. Less than a hundred miles from Portersville. Why else would something like this start out in a little place like that?"

  Cathy said, "We can't reach it on foot."

  "No.” He took out his phone, flipped it on, and gazed at it grimly. She did not have to ask what he saw there. They were far too deep in the mountains to get a signal. “What we've got to reach on foot is a telephone. If we start back down the mountain now I can guarantee you Kreiger's shotgun will see us before we see him. I say we keep climbing and try to stay ahead of him 'til we reach a public road."