Darkness

by Karen Robards

  He looked interested. “Caves?”

  She nodded. “There’s this massive cave system throughout the mountains. Lots of natural caves, and then the Japanese apparently dug tunnels connecting them so that they could move around the island and launch guerrilla attacks on our guys during World War Two.”

  “Any in the right place so we can shelter in it while keeping watch on the runway?”

  “The entrance to one is up there.” Gina pointed to nearby Terrible Mountain, the southern face of which overlooked the camp.

  “And you know this how?”

  “Some of the puffins I’m studying have burrows up around it. I’ve seen the entrance, but I’ve never been inside the cave.”

  “How long approximately would it take us to get there?”

  “Without going back through camp”—which would be the quickest and shortest route—“probably about four hours. We’d have to go through Jackson Pass.”

  “You know how to get there from here?”

  “Yes. Theoretically.”

  “That’s good enough. Let’s check it out. We going the right way?”

  Gina nodded. They had reached the point where the trail started narrowing, and he made a gesture to her to precede him, saying, “Lead on, Macduff.”

  That made her shoot him an aren’t-you-funny glance over her shoulder, but she kept going, climbing doggedly up the icy path, taking the left-leading fork despite the fact that it snaked around the edge of a cliff that fell away into clouds and felt as thin and perilous as a tightrope underfoot. There were a couple of questions she had to ask, and she braced herself for answers she was pretty sure she wasn’t going to like.

  Glancing at him over her shoulder, she said, “Why would we rather hide in a cave than, say, a Quonset hut?”

  Their eyes met, and there was something in his that told her she’d been right about not liking the answer she was about to hear.

  “If they haven’t already, they’re going to be launching a massive search for us. Not just a ground search, but a high-tech scan of the island. Thermal imaging, infrared, satellite pictures, the whole bag of tricks. If we’re in a cave, there’s less chance of us showing up on anything. Get deep enough inside a mountain and even thermal imaging won’t be able to spot us.”

  Okay, she’d known she wasn’t going to like it.

  “Who are these people?” she burst out. That was another question she really didn’t want to hear the answer to, but now she reluctantly concluded that she needed to know.

  He was close behind her. His broad frame blocked the worst of the wind that was huffing past in great gusts now, and once again she wondered whether he was shielding her intentionally.

  He said, “I’m not sure yet. I’ll let you know when I am.”

  That sounded evasive. She glanced back at him, but his face told her absolutely nothing. She decided to mark that as a topic to be pursued later and moved on to what she considered a more urgent question. “Why do we need to watch the runway?”

  “Because after it lands, we’re going to steal the plane that’s coming in.” He said it like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

  Gina stopped dead and turned to face him. “What?”

  “Careful.” His hands shot out to steady her, catching her upper arms and curling around them. He was clearly concerned with the drop-off beside them, while she, having traversed this trail a number of times, barely noticed it. He continued, “We need to get off this island. That’s the quickest and surest way I can think of to do it.” Turning her back around, he gave her a little push that started her walking again. “Keep going. You want to be out here in the open when whatever’s blowing in hits?”

  That last was a rhetorical question, so she didn’t reply. Anyway, even as she started walking again her mind was busy boggling. Just the thought of stealing a plane and escaping in it felt impossible.

  “That’s crazy.” She was suddenly short of breath, and not from the climb.

  “You worried I can’t fly us out of here? I can.”

  No, no, no. Gina shook her head emphatically. “I’m worried that trying to steal a plane, much less fly it out of here, is stupid.” Her mouth felt dry. “They’ll catch us. The smart thing to do is hide and wait. The ship that brought most of us here will be back in five days. So will the Reever—the plane that brought the rest of us.”

  “You got a ship and a plane coming for you?”

  “The Reever can carry a maximum of six passengers. And the ship is a freighter with a regular run to Siberia. It has accommodations for a few passengers, and it was just easier for some of us to travel on it. Bad weather sometimes keeps the Reever from flying, but the ship will definitely be here on time.”

  When he didn’t say anything, she glanced back again. His expression spoke for him. It was grim, and suddenly she knew why they couldn’t wait for the plane or the ship.

  They were never going to make it five days.

  Chapter Nineteen

  If he’d shown up five minutes later, she’d be dead. That was the thought that lodged itself in Cal’s mind as Gina cast a frowning glance back at him. Bundled up from head to toe like she was, she still made a slender and unmistakably feminine figure against the bleak backdrop of mountain and fog and threatening skies. Her blue eyes were clouded with worry, her cheeks were rosy with cold, and long strands of honey-colored hair had escaped from her hood to blow around her head. Even pressed tightly together as they were at the moment, her lips remained enticingly full. Kissable, he thought as his eyes dropped to them, and he remembered the hot way she’d kissed him before he shook the recollection off. Sexy as hell was his instant assessment of how she looked as she climbed the path ahead of him with long, athletic strides. Beautiful and brave were also in the mix, the beautiful part obvious and the brave because she was still trucking, still making rational decisions after finding her friends dead and nearly being killed herself. Not that any of that made any real difference to any course of action he planned to take. She was under his protection now, and he was going to do his best by her whether she agreed with it or not. He found himself thanking God that he’d listened to his instincts earlier and followed her back to her camp.

  “I think it’s time you told me what’s going on.” Her voice was sharp.

  That the runway was being cleared bothered him. There was already a ton of muscle here—who or what were they bringing in? Pondering that question, he answered her almost at random. “We’re running for our lives?”

  The look she gave him told him that she wasn’t in the mood for even that lame attempt at humor.

  “It’s the why I’m interested in,” she said.

  He couldn’t tell her. His contract was subject to the rules that governed the highest security clearances, and anyway, the objective of saving her life was to let her keep living it after it was saved. Around the circles he ran in, people who knew too much tended to die young. Their current situation being a case in point. The man he’d killed back there in the camp kitchen—he hadn’t known him, but he knew the type. He was hired help, a paid killer whose allegiance went to the employer with the biggest bank account. The only question was whom he was working for. Whom they were working for. Cal still didn’t know, not for sure. Somebody who could infiltrate his company, get to Hendricks, and do what Cal would have thought was impossible, which was get to Ezra.

  When Ezra had fired through that door on the jet, he’d aimed low. The only conclusion Cal could draw from that was that Ezra hadn’t been intending to kill him. Although how Ezra had thought that was going to work out in the long run Cal couldn’t quite fathom. He refused to feel anything—grief, loss, anger at the betrayal—for his erstwhile friend. He had no time for emotion now. Emotion got you killed. He meant to live, and to keep the woman frowning at him alive, too. It was a big job, and he wasn’t going to let feelings get in the way of that.

  The fact that he had one gun, a Beretta 92FS semiautomatic pistol with about half a clip in
it, only served to make things interesting.

  He told her, “You’re better off not knowing.”

  Her frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “You know what you can do with that. My friends were murdered today. I was almost murdered today. I think I have a right to know why.”

  She stumbled on a rock in the path. He once again automatically reached out to steady her. He let go almost instantly, as soon as it became obvious that she wasn’t going to pitch face-first over a cliff, but not before he registered that the body part he’d grabbed had been her slender upper arm, which he could feel even through his gloves and her parka.

  Damn. He was still all too aware of her as a woman.

  Which was a complication their situation did not need.

  “Well?” she demanded, sounding testy.

  In the spirit of throwing her a bone to keep the peace, Cal said to her back, “You and your friends fall under the heading of collateral damage. My plane was the primary target.”

  “Why?”

  Jesus, she was persistent. “Because of some information we had.”

  “What information?” she shot back.

  Okay, enough. “Can’t say.”

  She cast another dark glance over her shoulder at him. “Oh, wow, way to be transparent.”

  Hugging the very edge of a five-hundred-foot drop, the path took a sharp turn upward at that point. As she looked back at him she was silhouetted against nothing but gray fog and grayer sky. For a moment there it looked as if she would fall off the side of the mountain if she took one more step, and he felt a stab of alarm over her safety.

  “Quit looking back at me. Watch where you’re going,” he said irritably.

  “What, are you afraid I’m going to die?”

  If she’d ever been afraid of him—and she had been at first, he knew, and was also forced to admit that her fear hadn’t been without reason—she was clearly over it. Her eyes snapped at him. Her tone was caustic.

  “Falling off a cliff works as well as catching a bullet for that.” His response was mild.

  She made a hmmph sound but focused her attention on the trail. Climbing behind her, Cal absentmindedly admired her ass, admired her legs—he was nothing if not a multitasker—while turning the pieces of the nightmare they were trapped in over in his mind, trying to make sense of them. Seeing the bodies in that building, seeing the firepower that had turned out, the only conclusion he could reach was that they—the nameless they he couldn’t quite pin an identity on yet—somehow knew or suspected that someone had survived the crash. It was possible that pictures of his rescue had been picked up by satellite. Remembering the cloud cover, he thought it was far more likely that someone on the ground, most likely whoever had fired that surface-to-air missile, had spotted Gina pulling him from the water. They would have had to have been close enough to see what was happening, but too far away to do anything about it—like, say, shoot him and Gina both and be done.

  “Tell me something: are you with the military?”

  There she went again, frowning back over her shoulder at him. As precarious as the trail was, her inattention to it made him nervous. And annoyed.

  “No.”

  “Some kind of government agency? CIA? FBI? Something like that?”

  “No.”

  “You must work for somebody. Who?”

  That much he could tell her. “I work for myself.”

  “Is that another way of saying you’re a mercenary?”

  He shrugged. “We’re all mercenaries, one way or another.”

  “You know, someday I’d love to engage in that philosophical debate with you. Right now, I’d just like a straight answer.”

  “I’m a private contractor. Okay? End of discussion.” His tone was short, and she made another of those hmmph noises in response. But they’d come upon a patch of ice, and she let the conversation lapse as they picked their way over it.

  In the ensuing silence, he had an epiphany: if they knew someone had survived the plane crash, they probably knew it was him. He, Ezra, and Hendricks might all prompt the degree of firepower that had been summoned to deal with the threat a survivor posed—Rudy’s survival would have merited the response equivalent of a flyswatter—but Ezra and Hendricks had presumably been on the other side. Unless they’d been tricked, which he considered possible. Surface-to-air missiles had a range of only fifteen thousand feet, and there was a chance that the thirty-million deal for Rudy had been offered as a way of getting the plane to descend under that ceiling so that it could be shot down.

  For safety’s sake, however, he had to presume that his sole survival was known, and all this was in his honor. The intensity with which they were going about ensuring his demise made him think, too, that this wasn’t just about Rudy’s information, or the crash of Flight 155. The way they were going full scorched-earth here, in attempting to wipe out not only him and the others on his plane but a dozen civilians as well, set off all kinds of alarm bells in his mind.

  Rudy had said that there was chatter that what had befallen Flight 155 was being set to happen again to another plane. For his survival to merit this kind of response, that almost had to be true. Whoever was behind this was prepared to do whatever was necessary to protect whatever was getting ready to go down.

  Cal was willing to bet all his money that another civilian airliner was getting ready to fall out of the sky.

  If he was right, it wasn’t just his and Gina’s lives at stake. Hundreds of others could die.

  Cal blew out a frustrated puff of air. “I’ve got to get off this damned island.”

  HAVING REACHED the edge of the patch of ice she’d been negotiating with such care, Gina responded to the first words Cal had said in several minutes with a skeptical “By stealing a plane.”

  “Yep.”

  “You don’t think hiding out for five days would be a better option?” Her pulse was picking up the pace big-time. Fear fluttered inside her like a trapped bird. She really, truly thought attempting to steal a plane from the midst of a camp bristling with killers (probably a whole lot more once the plane landed) was a terrible idea. That opinion was only influenced a tiny bit by the bitter truth that she was mortally afraid to fly.

  She had not been on a plane since the crash that she had barely survived.

  “What about you? Won’t anyone be coming to look for you? You said your transponder was off, but—”

  He cut in before she could finish. “It’s possible, but it’s nothing I’d be willing to bet our lives on. The plane was off course, for one thing. There might be some confusion about where we went down. Or even if we went down.”

  That made Gina frown. But before she could follow up with more questions, they reached the pass and started across what was basically a natural rock suspension bridge between two mountains. Sheer cliffs dropped down into nothingness on both sides, and the lowering gray sky suddenly felt so close that she could have reached up and touched it if she’d wanted to. A bucking, writhing mass of dark gray clouds churned below. Looking down at them, Gina thought that the clouds appeared solid enough that you’d almost think you could jump down on them and hitch a ride.

  Without the mountain to act as a barrier, wind gusts buffeted them from all directions, some strong enough to part the clouds and the underlying fog, allowing glimpses of the silvery river that, far below, ran beneath the bridge.

  “Whoa. Slow down.” Cal caught the back of her parka as she strode out on the bridge with the confidence of someone who’d crossed it before, which she had: a pair of gyrfalcons that she’d been documenting had a nest on the other side.

  Gina glanced back at Cal in surprise. “You’re not afraid of heights, are you?”

  “I’m not a fan of falling off heights, that’s for sure. How about you pay attention to what you’re doing?”

  “I’m very sure-footed,” she said. She did slow down, though, partly because it was so windy and partly because he’d kept his hand fisted in her parka. The rock underfo
ot was frosted over and slick, and the natural buttresses on each side were only a few feet high: it would be easy to go over. She started paying more attention to where she put her feet. As they approached the middle of the bridge she could no longer see the mountains that anchored it. All she could see was a swirling mass of gray clouds above and below. It was like being suspended in midair. The wind blew strongly, smelling of the sea, and had an icy bite to it. She had the sudden fanciful notion that if she spread out her arms the wind would catch her up and she could fly away on it.

  If only.

  A few moments later they were off the bridge and trudging across the face of the adjoining mountain. It was another narrow, rocky path, only this time they were going down. She was in the lead, and was acutely conscious of the vast bleakness of the jagged, treeless mountains rising all around, as well as the potential treacherousness of the path beneath her feet. The thin patches of snow weren’t a problem: they were easy to avoid. The ice was harder to see. Snow-frosted boulders lay everywhere, blocking the path at times so that they had to skirt around them. This mountain and the next were like conjoined twins that became separate entities about two hundred feet above sea level, and that juncture was where they were heading. As they descended they plunged into thickening fog, and every outside sound—wind, sea, more honking geese—grew increasingly muffled. In contrast, Gina could hear her and Cal’s breathing and footsteps in perfect tandem. Cal stayed so close behind her that she could have stretched a hand back and touched him, and again she was glad to have him there. He made her feel far safer than she had any business feeling under the circumstances, she knew.

  “So tell me what happened back there at the camp,” he said, his voice a deep rumble that cut through the increasingly high-pitched whining of the wind.