Kate asked Scott, "What are they going to do with us?"
"I make out something about taking us into the mountains. He's speaking a regional dialect that I don't know.
Bob Paxton still held his broken nose with both hands. A stream of bloody droplets dotted his tunic. "This isn't happening," he gurgled. "This can't be happening."
"Move it, Specialist," ordered Scott briskly. "We'll try to set that nose as soon as we get our asses out of here. We're worth more alive than dead to them. If they'd wanted us dead, we'd damn sure already be dead."
Kate did her best to pretend that a gnarly mountain bandit wasn't pointing an automatic weapon at her. She spoke to Scott, nodding toward the body at their feet. "What about Terri? We can't just leave our dead."
Scott sighed. His eyes were infinitely sad. "We can't help Terri now. We'll do whatever it takes to recover her remains. But for now . . . I promised this guy we'd go where he wanted to take us."
The bandit seemed to understand what they were talking about. With a smile of pure maliciousness, he summoned up phlegm and spat upon Terri Schmidt.
Kate held her emotions in check. It was easy enough to do. At the moment, her emotions were utterly numb to the point of being nonexistent. She eyed the bandit coldly and spoke to Scott. "Sir, do you think he knows about the shuttle?"
"Don't know yet. Can't tell."
Paxton made a whimpering noise. "If I see a chance, I'm making a run for it."
Scott hobbled to the mouth of the cave. "With this busted stem, I'm not running anywhere." Kate could tell that he was doing his best to keep the resignation and defeat he must have felt from filtering into his voice. He disappeared from the cave.
She followed, but not before sending Paxton a glower even under the gun of the bandit who covered them with his M16. She hissed, "Don't blow it, Bob. Follow orders or we'll all die."
The bandit lost patience, and she and Paxton were both shoved from the cave, Kate first through the shrubbery, to the knoll of ground outside. Three bandits stood waiting on the knoll. Except for the fact that they were younger, no more than teenagers, in every other respect—from clothing to armament—they were nearly identical to Han; including sour body odor and bad attitude. They stood with their rifles aimed at Scott.
Despite his splinted leg, the flight commander was steady enough to halt the forward momentum of Paxton as the scientist was pushed out from the cave's interior. Paxton would have tumbled over a sharp drop-off, to further injury and possible death, if Scott hadn't been standing there to intercept him. Han stepped from the cave. He stormed over to stand toe-to-toe with Scott, shouting directly into Scott's face.
Scott winced. "This bastard's breath is worse than his B.O.!" he said to Kate and Bob. "I think he's telling us that if we go with him, we might live."
"I have no problem with that," said Kate. She had difficulty keeping her voice steady in the face of four rifles aimed at her, but she succeeded.
Paxton was still gurgling painful complaints, his hands clenching his broken nose. "We're totally screwed! That old man who brought us here, he sold us out. I knew we shouldn't have trusted him!"
Scott turned without comment. He lifted his arms and extended both of his hands, to Paxton's face, batting away Bob's defensive gesture. With a nimble, self-assured twist, he delivered a single, savage jerking motion, resetting Paxton's nose with an audible clack!
Paxton stepped back, at first in shock, then becoming aware that he was no longer in excruciating pain. Han Ling and the other bandits viewed this with some good humor.
Han Ling snarled at Scott.
Scott listened, then said to Paxton and Kate, "Okay, let's do as the man says. We follow the trail that brought us up here, back down the way we came until we're told otherwise." He glared at Paxton, his eyes clouding. "Are you all right, Bob?"
"I—I'm all right," Paxton stammered. "But, Commander, we have to get away from these guys!"
"For now," said Kate, "let's just work at staying alive." Turning to face her commander, Kate offered, "Lean on me, sir."
"No, thanks, Kate. I can make it."
"Don't be macho, commander. Please."
"Sorry, ma'am," he said with a failed attempt at a Southern drawl. She happened to know that he was, in fact, from Minnesota. "It's just the way I was brought up. Let's move out."
One of the bandits took the point position. The other two fell in behind, and their small group began making its way down the winding path. Han strode with the Americans. Kate was thankful that they were upwind of the man. From time to time, one of the renegades would laugh or shout out something to prod the Americans, and would laugh when someone cried out or stumbled.
Scott's splinted leg nearly gave out from beneath him twice. Each time Kate was there to lean a shoulder in against him so he did not fall, but kept moving along the treacherous path. Each time, he would grunt a quiet, "Thanks, Kate" for her ears only, excruciating pain etched into his whisper, but he was determined that their captors not know the extent of his suffering, which they surely would somehow exploit. For his part, Paxton stumbled along as if in a trance.
The mountainside sloped gently, but the thickening of the forest was dramatic, hardwood trees and teak cloaked in darkness. Trees to either side of the trail were towering giant pillars. The trail became more winding.
After awhile, the bandits grew tired of the harassing. They continued on in silence, except for Han Ling's occasional snarled command, indicating a change in direction when they reached a fork in the trail. A jab with the barrel of his M16 into the back of the nearest prisoner would emphasize a new direction to take.
They continued on for what Kate's wristwatch indicated was about forty minutes. From time to time, a helicopter gunship could be heard rotoring overhead. The forest was dense, the treetops meeting far overhead. The choppers would eventually fly away.
During one such flyover, Kate asked Scott, "What do you make of it, Commander?"
"Han and his boys aren't concerned," Scott mumbled through teeth clenched against pain, "so why should we be?"
"Whoever brought us down," she mused, "someone's catching hell back at that landing field."
Scott grunted. "Never underestimate an American space shuttle crew. They should have had their choppers in the air. Then they could've followed us. They lost time, and we used it to cover up and evacuate." Weary to the bone, he sighed. "Poor Terri. Damn, I hate to lose her."
Bob Paxton continued stumbling along like a zombie. Only his eyes seemed fully awake, continuing to anxiously flit about.
Ahead of them, the point man halted where the trail crested a hill. He whispered a frantic, low-pitched warning and dived into foliage along the trail. Kate heard what the point man heard: the clumping of feet, a small group of men advancing toward them from beyond the crest of the hill, advancing at a good clip. Kate heard snippets of conversation in Korean, and that universal clinking and clanking of field-outfitted soldiers on patrol.
The bandits reacted with speed and silence, accustomed to eluding and surviving in this hostile wilderness. Han flung himself at the clustered Americans, knocking Kate, Scott, and Paxton collectively off their feet, into the brush. Han landed atop Kate. Scott was gasping in agony. Paxton's ragged breathing sounded like he was having a panic attack. The undergrowth clawed at Kate's face. Han snarled in Korean.
Scott started to translate. "He says—"
"I think I know what he said." Kate spoke with difficulty because of the foul-smelling bandit atop her. "Stay down and keep quiet or we'll be the first to die."
Bol Rhee's patrol had seen no trace of a space shuttle. They had seen nothing but inhospitable, uninhabited, rugged terrain, and Bol expected nothing but hours more of the same before the afternoon rendezvous with a gunship that would transport them back to the base. His platoon was traveling at combat intervals along the winding path. He overheard the muttering of his men, the eternal soldier's lament about the cold, the sore feet, hunger and sleep deprivation. He was not incl
ined to quell these grumblings, as he felt much the same.
He walked next to the radio man, though he knew full well that there was no way a helicopter gunship could be called in, considering the density of the surrounding forest.
His platoon was cresting a ridge when a figure unexpectedly jumped from the trail—shouting, screaming, and gesticulating wildly—startling everybody. A man, blond-haired and wild-eyed, came running at them. Blood was smeared across his pale face. He came, shouting in what Bol recognized as English, though he did not understand the language. Screams seemed to be of warning.
Something was not right. Bol opened his mouth to order his men to fall back, to seek cover. Saffron muzzle flashes spat like fiery arrows from either side of the trail. Next to Bol, the radioman's head exploded, spraying Bol's face with hot droplets of blood. He darted for cover with his men, some of whom were falling, mowed down under the hellish onslaught. Bol and a few others managed to return fire.
Chapter Eight
For what seemed like forever, Kate did not know if she was alive or dead. Her senses were pummeled by the astoundingly loud, blazing gunfire that made her body tremble and her mind tumble. Is this what dying was like? Paxton had broken from cover. Han had shouted an order at his men. Then the gunfire, the racket intensified by the closeness of towering trees.
She was not dying. She smelled the gunpowder. She heard the screams of those dying, and other, strangely magnified, smaller sounds like the clinking of spent brass cartridge casings striking the ground.
The gunfire ceased. She was alive. She opened her eyes, raised her head and observed her surroundings, struggling to regain her senses.
Scott was beside her, doing much the same. Han Ling stood in the center of the path, reloading an ammo clip into his rifle. Then Kate saw the tangled cluster of fallen bodies sprawled across the trail ahead, dead arms and legs askew.
Paxton emerged from the side of the trail, looking completely disoriented. His blond hair was matted with dirt, his face streaked with sweat. He took one look at the remains of the army patrol and stumbled back, emitting a frightened, child-like yip. Han's outlaws were prying amid the corpses, relieving the dead of weapons, ammunitions, wallets and watches. Paxton turned unsteadily to face Han, his eyes glazed with panic.
The instant Kate saw Paxton, she was consumed with a blinding rage. As if catapulted, she charged at Paxton, both of her hands held up like claws. "You bastard! What the hell did you think you were doing? He said he was going to kill me!"
Paxton held up his bloodied arms to ward her off. But her onslaught was interrupted when Han threw back his head, blustering out an alcoholic sound that must have been laughter. The bandit placed his stolid body in the center of the path, blocking her trajectory. She caught herself, halting her momentum and pulling back, trying to acknowledge the sliver of sanity that was screaming for recognition within her. She drew another deep breath, held it and, when she exhaled, her rage was vanquished, her emotions again under control.
When he was through laughing, Han spoke to Scott, who was hobbling more noticeably than before, favoring his splinted, broken leg. Though Scott's eyes were clear, Kate clearly saw that he was far worse for the wear. His shoulders sagged. Their commander was growing weaker by the minute. Haltingly, he translated what Han Ling had just said. "We're only alive because he was told by his leader to find us and bring us back alive."
Kate concentrated on keeping her eyes and her thoughts away from Paxton. "Then it was just luck—our bad luck and their good luck—that they found us?"
"Seems that way." Scott turned his attention to Paxton, glaring his displeasure. "That was a goddamn bonehead move, Specialist, almost getting us all killed. When we do get home, you're going to be in it real deep, mister."
Paxton cowered, eyes looking toward the ground. "I was only trying to help."
Before Paxton could say anything further, Scott's knees buckled. The commander's eyes rolled back in his head He started to collapse.
Kate moved forward, placing her shoulder under one of his. She was able to prop Scott up, but not without effort.
She snarled at Paxton, "Get your ass over here and help."
Paxton scampered forward to prop up Scott from the other side. "Kate, I'm sorry. I thought I'd get those soldiers to help us. I knew that bandit wouldn't kill you."
"Like hell you did."
Scott's drooping head hung between them like an eavesdropping presence.
Paxton was slowly regaining some of his trained, professional steadiness, as well as a vaguely defensive tone. "So why didn't he shoot you?"
"You didn't know what he was going to do or what he wasn't going to do." She eyed Paxton with pure loathing. "You put my life on the line, you chickenshit. Now stop talking to me. You make me sick."
Han Ling may not have understood English, but he understood the substance of their exchange, and found this amusing. He threw his head back for more unsavory hoots into the air.
The march continued. They worked their way up and around the mountain. Gray fingers of dawn slanted through the forest. The climb became more difficult. There was no further conversation between Kate and Bob Paxton. Scott remained unconscious, a dead weight balanced between them, his feet dragging. It was a torturous trek, prodded by the guns of the bandits who were emboldened and celebratory after having wiped out an army patrol.
Lost in a nightmare, thought Kate. There was no trail that she could see. And yet they were being shoved along one rocky slope after another. The here and now was inescapable, and yet in ways was incomprehensible. Did anyone know where she was? She was adapting, she was improvising, as Trev had taught her. Paxton was right about that much, at least. This was never covered in astronaut training. Where were they being taken? What would happen next? The weight of Commander Scott, being dragged between her and Paxton uphill, was beginning to take its toll. She fought a numbness that wanted to weaken her, sapping her strength with every struggling step, causing her to falter.
She wanted this madness to end. She wanted to return to the "real world," where once upon a time . . . once upon a time. . . .
Once upon a time, a child named Kathleen sat with her mom and dad in front of a television set in their suburban home when she was only five—one of the clearest memories of her childhood—watching a man in a spacesuit walking on the moon. This had led her to a lifelong dual fascination with flying and outer space. As soon as she was old enough, she enrolled in a flying class for seven dollars an hour, and each Saturday for six months she had flown in the front seat of an old gray and maroon single-engine, dual-control Aeronca Champion. Working nights and weekends to pay for her college had not curtailed her flight time. By her senior year, she had become known as Kate, and had enlisted in an ROTC program that paid some of the expenses toward a doctorate in engineering, in exchange for four years of military service after graduation. She had applied for, and, after rigorous screening and testing, been accepted into the space program. Following her honorable discharge, the initial whirlwind of training—rides in T-38 jets and weightless training rides in the KC-135 "vomit comet"—settled down to classroom lectures on engineering and computer science: charts, manuals and diagrams about every inch of a space shuttle. After a year of classroom training had come the yearlong apprenticeship to veteran astronauts, who had taught her those engineering tasks that would be her responsibility on a shuttle flight. For months her schedule was a blur of fifteen-hour days, of grueling, round-the-clock sessions in shuttle simulators, interspersed with visits to contractors' factories to see equipment, technical briefings and the endless task of studying stacks of manuals that outlined every minute of a flight.
The workaholic grind took its toll. During her time at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, eleven astronauts dropped out, every one of them citing the pressure on their family life. Her own marriage had not gone unaffected, but the troubles with Trev had been there from almost the start. They had been separated for over a year now, but she did no
t blame the space program for that. Her work had only sped up what seemed to be the inevitable.
Three days earlier, when she and the crew had flown from Houston to the Cape in a NASA jet and she'd seen Liberty for the first time, she had known that it was all worth it. Not just the tradeoff from her troubled marriage but all those years of dreams and struggles leading up to her first view of the shuttle, mounted to its 154-foot rust-colored external fuel tank and twin 149-foot white-colored solid-rocket boosters. Of course, all of that had occurred in the normal, "real world" . . . not upon a desolate, wooded mountainside, on the other side of the world, herded along by rifle-carrying bandits.
I will survive, she assured herself. But inside, she felt as bleak as their surroundings. Could Houston possibly have any clue as to where we are? She didn't think so. Plodding along, she realized that allowing her mind to drift into the past had served to distract her from her aches and exhaustion. But she was pushing the limits of her endurance.
The huffing, puffing and lagging Bob Paxton wasn't doing any better. Even the bandits had grown quiet and surly as the arduous trek continued uphill.
Her nostrils twitched, her senses perked, at a first awareness of the scent of cooking food. Something unidentifiable, but definitely edible . . . a hallucination born of fatigue? She smelled it again, carried on an errant, nippy morning breeze . . . definitely the aroma of something cooking! Granite ledges rose above them to either side of a narrowing cut in the land.
Then they rounded a bend and left the heavy timber, and there before them was what she could only think of as a fortress.
Chapter Nine
The site occupied acres of a mountainside clearing, which looked out above the sheer wall of a cliff that dropped straight down for five hundred feet to the valley floor. The clearing was hemmed in tight on three sides against a severely sloped flange of a valley in such a way that this "hideout" could not be seen from the air. The camp gave every indication of having been long established: an organized scatter of clapboard barracks, equipment of every sort stacked everywhere, with random cooking fires and clusters of men clad similarly to Han and his crew.
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