by Jenna Kernan
Abruptly, the towline stilled, then shuddered and moved two measured feet along. She was snagged or across. He counted the time in the rapid rasp of his breath and the sweat that rolled periodically down his back. Finally, he felt the four short tugs that signaled him to retrieve the kayak.
Dragging the craft back to him was not as easy as he had anticipated, and he was sweating and cursing by the time he sighted her kayak.
He took a moment to catch his breath and check the two vials he carried in their custom pack. Both they and the thumb drive were intact and dry. He zipped closed the case, returning it to his side pocket. Then he checked his personal weapon.
“Ready or not,” he said, and climbed into the kayak, where he shimmied until the bottom cleared the bank and the river took him. Moving fast and paddling hard. The water seemed a glittering deadly ribbon. He could not see the rocks that jutted from the churning surface until they flashed past him. One pounded the underside of the kayak, making it buck like a bronco. He continued on, realizing that he was riding lower and lower in the water with each passing second. The kayak’s bottom was compromised. He was certain.
The hollow core of the craft was filling with water. In other words, he was sinking.
Chapter Six
Erin’s damp skin turned icy as she watched the dark shape of her kayak sinking below the surface. She caught a glimpse of the paddle sweeping before the craft and held her breath. Her husband was in the river, swimming for his life.
She grabbed her pack and cursed. It was a stupid dangerous idea to have him try to cross the river alone and at night. She knew this section and the location of the rocks that loomed from the water. Dalton did not and, as far as she knew, he had never kayaked before.
Brush and brambles lined the bank, but she raced along, searching for his head bobbing in the dark water.
“He’s a strong swimmer,” she told the night, but he wasn’t. He was only average, his muscle mass making him what she called “a sinker.”
And he should be at home on medical leave recovering from the abdominal surgery that followed the bullet wound.
She tripped, sprawled and righted herself.
“Dalton!” she shouted.
Where was he? The kayak had vanished and her paddle had been carried off. She judged the river’s flow and imagined a line from where he went into the Hudson to where he might be.
He’d had loads of time in the pool and the ocean practicing escapes from crafts. He had jumped out of helicopters in to the ocean. So he’d know not to fight the river. The only thing to do was to use the forward momentum and patiently angle your stroke toward the shore.
How far would the river take him?
Her heart walloped against her ribs as she raced around tree trunks and scrambled over rocks.
What if he hit his head? What if he were unconscious?
She’d wanted a break, a time to think and a time for him to hear her fears. She didn’t want him dead. That was why she’d called for a separation. He didn’t see what he was doing, how dangerously he lived. And he didn’t understand how his decisions affected her. If he died, oh, what if he was drowning right now?
He could be pinned against a rock or held down under a snag that wasn’t even visible from above. Had he left her, finally, once and for all?
Something was moving up ahead.
Erin ran, howling like a wolf who had lost her pack, crying his name and wailing like a banshee. Her legs pumped. When had she dropped her pack?
Was it him? Had the Fates brought him back to her once more?
I swear, I’ll never leave him again. Just don’t let him die. Please, please, dear Lord.
It was big, crawling up the bank. A man. Sweet Lord, it was her man.
“Dalton!”
He turned his head—lifted a hand in greeting—and collapsed on the bank.
The roar of the river blocked any reply, but he’d seen her. She fell on her hands and knees before him. Gathering him up in her arms. Rocking and weeping and babbling.
He patted her upper arm, gasping but reassuring her with his action. It only made her weep harder. He shouldn’t even be here. He could have died.
It would have been her fault. He was here because of her. He’d tried the river because of her, and he’d nearly drowned...because of her.
Dalton struggled to a seat on the muddy bank. His skin was as cool as river water and his clothing drenched. It didn’t have to be that cold for someone to die from exposure. Being wet upped the chances. And being weakened from exertion and the healing wounds all made him more susceptible.
She needed her pack.
“Can you stand?” she asked.
He struggled to his knees and then to his feet, leaning heavily on her. The amount of weight that pressed down upon her nearly buckled her knees and terrified her further because he wouldn’t lean so heavily if he didn’t have to.
The sound of the river changed. There was a rhythmic quality that lifted to her consciousness and caused her to look skyward. A field of stars littered the velvety black and then, from upriver, came a cone of light.
“Helicopter,” she said.
Dalton straightened and glanced up. “Cover,” he said, and struggled up the bank. The tree line loomed like a dark curtain, impossibly far. They lumbered along, he the bear, she the fox. Nearly there when the helicopter shot past them.
The searchlight swept back and forth across the river’s surface.
“They’re on the logjam,” he said, his voice shaking with the rest of him.
The chopper hovered, the beam shining on something beyond their line of sight.
“My kayak or my pack,” he guessed.
“They’ll think we drowned.”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they come after us? They must have found what they were looking for by now.”
Dalton said nothing, just sank to his knees on the cushiony loam of pine needles.
“Where is your pack?” he asked.
“I dropped it.”
He lifted his head and stared at her, his eyes glittering.
“In the open?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Go get it, Erin. Hurry. Take cover if they go over again. Find it if you can.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll be here.”
She stood, indecision fixing her to the spot. Go? Stay?
“We need that gear,” he said.
They did.
“And if they spot it...”
Erin set off again as the helicopter continued to hover. She didn’t look back as she returned to the shore and hurried upriver. She couldn’t see more than a few feet before her. It would be easy to miss a green pack, but the frame, it was aluminum. She’d come too far, she thought. Must have missed it. She must have been carrying it here.
And then, finally and at last, she caught the glint of her silver water bottle.
She dashed the remaining distance and scooped up her pack. Then she turned to see the helicopter descending low on the river. Was it in the same place?
No, it was moving, shining its light on the opposite bank. The ruse was working. Still she hurried under cover and waited as it surged past her position. Then she retraced her steps.
“Dalton?”
She wasn’t sure how far she needed to go, but this seemed the right distance.
“Dalton?”
“Here!”
She followed the direction of his call and found him sitting against a large tree trunk, arms wrapped about his middle. He wasn’t shivering. Instead of taking that as a positive change, she saw it for what it was. When the body was cold and stopped shivering, it was dying.
Erin tore the lower boughs from the pines and set them beside the log. Then she unrolled her black foam
mat and shook out her sleeping bag because the down filling needed to trap dead air within the baffles in order to insulate and help hold body heat.
When she finished, she helped him rise. He staggered and fell and then crawled as she urged him on, whispering commands like a hoarse drill sergeant. She stripped him out of his jacket, shoulder holster and personal weapon, then she tugged off the wet T-shirt and cargo pants that were predictably heavy and likely carrying his service weapon and extra clips for his pistol. All were wet, but that was a problem for another time.
“I’m not cold,” he whispered, his words slurring.
He stretched out in the open sleeping bag and lay on both the mat and pine boughs. She zipped him in.
Erin thought about calling the emergency number of the Department of Environmental Conservation. The rangers could call the New York State Police Aviation Unit or the Eagle Valley Search Dogs, but she very much feared that rescue would be hours away. So she left her phone off and stowed for the time being. Right now she needed shelter and to get Dalton warm.
She was a survival expert and knew the rule of threes. The body could survive three minutes without air, three hours without shelter, less depending on the weather and their physical condition, three days without water and three weeks without food.
She fitted her pack half under the log at his head and then set to work on the shelter. Fallen sticks and branches littered the forest floor and she gathered them by the armful, making a great pile. Then she constructed a brush shelter around him using the log beside which he lay as the center beam and leaning the larger sticks against it. It was low to the ground, easy to miss if you were not looking. She did not know if the men who had killed her party would follow them into the woods, but she was taking no chances.
Her tent was too geometrical and too light to make good cover. But her camo tarp could work if she used it correctly. Erin laid the ten-by-ten tarp over the logs and sticks, then staked it down on the opposite side of the downed trunk. The remaining four feet she stretched out away from the log before securing it to the ground. Then she added evergreen boughs to further disguise their burrow.
Erin stepped back to study the structure she had built. The resulting shelter was roughly the shape of a lean-to and stood only two feet tall at the highest point, tapering to the ground from there and was no taller than the fallen tree trunk. The tarp would break the cold wind that was rising carrying the scent of rain.
As the helicopter searched the far bank, she finished all but the small gap needed to crawl inside. This she would close once she was beside her husband. The fact that Dalton did not move to help her frightened her greatly.
Shivering herself, exhausted and sick at heart, Erin crawled in next to Dalton. Before she closed the opening, she watched as the helicopter hovered beyond the barrier of tree trunks and crossed the glistening water. That too was a problem for another time. They could no longer run. So, it was time to hide.
Erin wiggled in beside her husband. His skin was cold as marble. She managed to get the zipper up and around them. The bag was designed for one, but accommodated them both with Dalton on his back and her tucked against him on her side. She knew how much body heat was lost from the top of a person’s head so she tugged at the drawstring, bringing the top of the bag down around Dalton’s head like the hood of a parka.
Still at last, she pressed her warm body to his icy one. Gradually, her temperature dropped and she shivered. Dalton lay unmoving except for the shallow rise and fall of his chest.
What if he was bleeding inside again?
She could do nothing if he was, and that was why her mind fixed upon it. Why was that?
When one shoulder began to ache, she pushed herself on top of Dalton. She inhaled fresh pine, damp earth and the aftershave that still lingered faintly on Dalton’s skin. He lifted an arm across her back, holding her in his sleep. His movement made her tear up. By the time she shifted to his opposite side, he was shivering.
The helicopter rotors continued to spin and the beam of light crossed over them twice. She wasn’t sure when the chopper finally moved off. Sometime after Dalton had stopped shivering.
She fell asleep with the uneasy feeling that the men who had murdered her party had not given up. A cold wind rushed through the shelter, cooling her face. She tasted rain.
Sometime later, the storm struck, hitting the tree canopy first, rousing Erin from uneasy slumber. Dalton’s breathing had changed to a slow, steady draw and his heart beat in a normal rhythm. Eventually the rain penetrated the interlocking branches of the trees and the droplets pattered on the dry leaves. The torrent of water grew in volume until she could no longer hear the river rush.
The sky lit in a brilliant flash of white and Erin began her counting as she waited for the thunder. She didn’t like being under the trees in such a storm. Tall trees were natural lightning rods, and the wind could bring down limbs and dead trees on hapless campers. It was why she had selected the fateful rocky outcropping.
She imagined the rain merging with the drying blood on the bodies of the ones she had left behind, and her chest constricted.
“Erin?” Dalton whispered.
“Yes?”
“You okay?”
“I don’t think so.”
“The chopper gone?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I just saw the spotlight.”
The thunder rolled over and through them.
“It’s the storm.”
He relaxed back into their nest. “Good. Make it harder to track us.”
“Why would they want to track us?” she asked, and in answer heard his gentle snore.
Erin rolled to her side, pressing her back against him and curling her arms before herself. The thunder was still a mile off, but over the next quarter hour it passed overhead.
The cascade of water finally penetrated their burrow, soaking the evergreen and running down the needles and tarp away from where they rested.
Gradually the rainfall diminished, and the sound of the river returned, rushing endlessly. When she next roused it was to some unfamiliar sound. She stiffened, listening. The gray gloom inside their nest told her that morning approached. She could now see the sides of the shelter above her.
The sound came again, this time recognizable. It was the snapping of a stick underneath the foot of something moving close at hand.
Chapter Seven
Erin strained to listen to the creature moving close to their shelter. Squirrel or possum, maybe. Or a deer, perhaps. When animals moved, they sounded much larger than they actually were. She’d seen grown men startle in terror from the crackle of dried leaves under the paws of a scurrying chipmunk.
The sound came again. That was no chipmunk.
Now there was another snap of a branch, this time coming from a slightly different direction. Dalton’s eyes popped open and she pressed a hand over his mouth. Whatever was out there, she did not want to reveal their position.
* * *
DALTON WOKE WITH a jolt to feel Erin’s warm hand pressed across his mouth. He shifted only his eyes to look at her. In the gray predawn gloom, he could see little. But his body was on high alert.
She had heard it, too. He was certain from the stiffness of her body and the way she cocked her head to one side, listening. Something was coming. To him it sounded like the even tread of boots. He had been on enough covert ops to recognize the sound of a line of men moving in sequence.
He lifted his head from the sleeping bag. Listening.
Where was his gun?
The sound came from the right and left. He counted the footfalls. He heard three distinct individuals moving together, searching, he guessed, the forest on this side of the river.
Had they already finished their sweep of the opposite bank?
Where the hell was his gun?
The group contin
ued forward and then passed them. Why hadn’t they seen them?
Dalton gazed up at the unfamiliar roof some eight inches above his head. They were in some sort of shelter constructed of broken sticks leaning on a large fallen log and then covered with a camo tarp. More branches on the outside, judging from the way the light cut through the tarp. His gaze swept above his head and down to his toes. Then he turned his face so that his lips pressed to his wife’s ear.
“They missed us.”
Now she turned her head to whisper into his ear.
“What if they come back?”
He did not answer. But he knew exactly. It was not to tie up loose ends or to silence them forever. It was to retrieve what had been stolen from them or from their employers. They were acting on orders to retrieve the contents of the red nylon cooler. Just as the pilot had told them. These men would keep coming until they recovered what he carried. And he would stop at nothing to get it into the hands of his own government.
But first he had to empty his bladder.
Erin was still for a very long time. Finally, she shifted beside him, lifting her knee across his thigh, rising up to one elbow to stare down at him.
“They were searching along this side of the river.”
“Yes.”
“Should we stay here or make a run for it?”
“I’ve got to get up. Let me do a little recon.”
“Good plan, except you’re naked, your clothes are wet, your gun is wet and recon means leaving me alone. Let me rephrase that. Bad plan. Really, really bad.”
“I still have to get up.”
