She staggered to a halt at the edge of the outer cavern. Light flickered. There he was, up at the hole, shoving his pack though the gap! Szabo swung around—she ducked aside—
Blam! Rock chips flew, stinging her face.
“And don’t think you beat me!” he yelled. “I’ll be back!”
Daylight flickered again as he squirmed through the hole. What a shot if she’d only had her blowgun! Raine stood, panting and frustrated. Her right hand smoothed absently up her left arm, till she found warm wetness—then pain to make her wince. Seemed to be just a graze, but when had he hit her?
Deal with that later, she told herself. First there was Cade.
He lay where he’d fallen, facedown. “Oh, Cade!” She yanked the dart out of his arm and threw it away. Hauled his dead weight over, lay her cheek to his mouth, felt no breath. “Oh, love…” She ripped his shirt open, smoothed her palms down his sweaty, sculpted torso. “Breathe, sweetie!”
Under her hands, his rib cage jerked, spasming the tiniest bit. “Yes! Oh, yes!”
Curare paralyzes the voluntary muscles. Give the appropriate dose and the target faints for lack of air, then revives. For all she knew, she’d given him enough to drop a five-hundred-pound boar. There’d been no time to calculate or measure. Raine cupped his chin and started breathing for him, murmuring wordless pleas between breaths, stopping every three to compress his chest. Come on, come on, we can do this! Don’t leave me! Breathe, dammit, Kincade, don’t you dare give up on me! Breathe!
Breathe!
Breathe!
The cave closed down, the darkness closed in, or maybe she was fainting? How long could she suck air for two? If she couldn’t keep this up and he couldn’t breathe without her and Szabo was coming back…Her tears dripped, she sat back on her heels, swearing and gasping, “Dammit, you lazy bum, if you’d just—” She stooped to kiss her life into him again.
His mouth curved beneath her lips.
“Oh! How long have you—”
Cade wasn’t wasting his wind on speech. His eyes gleamed faintly in the twilight. Sobbing and laughing, she kissed his nose, his brow, his lean, bristly cheeks. “Can you breathe without me?”
No answer, but a faint labored exhalation puffed against her ear. “I’m going to keep pressing your chest to help you, okay? We’ll do it together.”
She kept on helping, praising each breath as Cade made it, stooping to feed him more air, to kiss him and coax the effort out of him. Suddenly his hand jerked across the dirt to touch her knee. “Yes!”
Oh, he’d make it now. She hadn’t killed him! Weeping with relief, she lay down beside him and stroked him all over. “You’re going to live!” She felt as if she’d made him herself—birthed him or carved him, like Michelangelo dragging his David out of the stone. “You really are going to live!”
At least he would till Szabo returned.
Stretched on the cold hard ground, wrapped in each other’s arms, Raine told Cade about her skirmish with Szabo. “He didn’t realize he’d smashed my blowpipe, so I guess when that last dart hit him, he lost his nerve and ran.”
“Took a penicillin break,” suggested Cade. He told her about Szabo’s infected arm, a memento from Lia. “Bet he’s out there, tearing the landscape apart, hunting for my pack. And he just may find it. I hid it down near the pool. When he realizes I was lying, that there’s no antibiotics, he’ll really be ready to shoot me.”
“Except he thinks you’re dead,” Raine pointed out, smoothing her hand up to his beating heart. She’d brought her own pack into the cave; hidden it when she heard the men talking. “But I used the last of my antibiotics on White Dog’s people.”
“White Dog?”
“A friend of mine. The Punan who took the tooth, the watch and the notebook from the pack on the body out there—Szabo-the-paratrooper’s pack. At least that’s my best guess of how things happened. I think he found this cave while exploring the mountain early this summer. He traded the stuff to Ah San and so on, till here we are.”
“Here we are,” Cade agreed wryly. “Wonder how long we have before Szabo starts Round Two?”
“I’m betting we’ve got till tonight. He’s afraid of the Punans’ poison darts, and so he ought to be. But once the sun goes down and this cave goes pitch-black? Then it’s totally his advantage. Remember what my guide Dibit said, back at the Kapuas? Szabo’s got some kind of night-vision gear. He walked right up to the Dayaks and shot Baitman. “So tonight, I imagine he’s coming back for me.”
“Can’t have you.” Cade’s arm tightened fiercely around her waist.
That’s easy to say, but how do we stop him? Effectively blind, no long-range weapons. And you, love, after that overdose? Cade moved as if he’d been injected all over with Novocain, clumsy and slow; who knew how long that would last? They lay, staring grimly at the cave ceiling, a half shade lighter than black in the faint glow reflecting from the distant hole. “Maybe he won’t come back,” she said without conviction.
“He will. He’s figuring on taking some of the teeth. And the creep’s persistent, I’ll give him that.”
“The teeth.” She swung her head on Cade’s shoulder to stare at him. “Szabo found the T. rex? You’ve seen it?”
Cade laughed softly. “Now that’s what I call a tight focus. Turn around.”
“No!” She’d had a vague impression of a massive boulder at her back, while she worked on Cade. Almost dreading to look, Raine rolled in the circle of his arms. Stared up at a dark forest of intermeshing fangs, the overhanging snout—“Oh…my…God. Would you look at you, sweetheart!”
Her body shuddered, a near-orgasmic convulsion of delight. She swung back to demand, “Are her head bones made of fire opal, as well as the teeth?” Without a direct source of light, there was no way to tell. The skull was a merciless shadow, lunging brutally out of the dark.
“She?”
“Well, come on, Kincade, even in this light I can tell she’s the robust form of T. rex, not the gracile! Female dinosaurs are generally larger and heftier than males.” She scrambled to her feet. “You had a flashlight, didn’t you?”
She found it where it had rolled beneath the sledge when Cade dropped it, but its bulb was smashed. “Umm. Well, no problem. Stay here and I’ll go get mine.”
Raine returned with her pack, her delight somewhat tempered. In the outer cavern, the light was turning pink, up in the westward-facing hole. How long after sunset would Szabo wait to attack?
Later, she told herself firmly. Fishing out her flashlight, she aimed it, warning, “Watch your eyes,” as she touched the button. “Ohhhhhhh!”
Her knees gave out; she sat in a boneless heap. “Oh. My. GOD! Oh, my! Oh, Cade! Oh, you gorgeous thing, you!” She crawled across to the dino. Tears streaming over a double-wide smile, she played her light over bones made of shimmering fire.
Too shaken to stand, she crawled around the beast, worshipping it on her hands and knees from every angle, crooning to it softly. “Aren’t you just beautiful? The only one in the whole wide world! Fifty feet at least, with a head this size, oh, you’ve got to go to a museum! Everybody’s got to see you! Can you believe it, Cade, sixty-five million years old, and yet…here she is!”
Raine brushed her wet lashes, shook her head in amazement. “And you know, I think the rest of her may have survived, too, or at least most of her. I stumbled on the cliff they dug her out of, the far side of the pond, on my way to the cave. I think most of her bones are still buried, protected from the rain. If half a dozen feet of neck vertebrae have weathered away, well, when they mount her Ash and my father can—” She stopped, her smile fading.
“If I’ve got a prior claim,” Cade said dryly, “then Szabo’s got even a better one. But if we don’t figure a way out of this trap, then the question of ownership may be moot.”
“You’re right.” Raine tore herself away and came back to sit beside Cade. “Time to make a plan.”
Making a plan that will save or forfeit yo
ur life isn’t easy at the best of times. But when the planners are two opinionated, strong-willed people, each more accustomed to leading than following…And when each is determined to take care of the other, well, agreement isn’t exactly a given.
“Look, hiding’s the only sensible alternative,” Cade argued. “Szabo’s got a gun and night vision. We’ve got two knives, a failing flashlight—”
They’d turned it off as soon as its light dimmed; there was no telling when the batteries would be drained entirely—and it took a different size than those in Cade’s broken light. Besides, using a flash would only give Szabo a target to shoot for.
“And I’ve got one-and-a-half useful hands, which makes punching him out somewhat iffy, and my knife work not much better.” Cade had hurt his right hand in a fall on entering the cave. Raine was fairly certain his thumb was dislocated, and that the spasming muscles had locked to keep it out of joint. Later, maybe she could relax him with morphine and reduce it, but for now, she didn’t dare try. He’d have to muddle through.
“I’m trained in hand-to-hand combat,” she reminded him crisply. “If it comes to that—”
“It’ll come to that over my dead body! Szabo’s been a soldier of some sort, you can see that at a glance, and I’d bet Special Forces. He’s snake-mean, crazy with pain, and even injured, he’s too big and too quick for you.”
“Don’t be so sure of that!”
“Don’t make me knock you on the head and drag you out of harm’s way, because I will!”
She burst out laughing. That was precisely what she’d been considering, with him! “Look, if we start fighting between us, we’ll solve Szabo’s problem for him. We’ve got to agree, and we’ve got, what, an hour till dark?”
“If I was him, I’d wait till after midnight. Let my quarry decide I wasn’t coming, so he’d lose his edge, maybe even fall asleep. That means—right now—we should go as deep into the mountain as we dare. Find a hiding place, and wait him out. Maybe it’s not heroic, but it’s damn-sure prudent. And it puts time on our side. The guy’s arm is going septic. Another day and he’ll be out of his mind with fever, if he’s not dead from blood poisoning. Tomorrow, when we’ve got daylight to see, we can creep out, handle him however we have to.”
“It’s smart, it would work, I don’t deny it. But—” Raine shifted warily out of head-knocking reach. “You said Szabo wanted to take some teeth? If we stay out of his way, then that’s just what he’ll do. He’s got to know time is running out—that his one chance to live is to get back to the clinic in Putussibau ASAP.
“So he’ll grab and smash—take as many teeth as he can carry. And he’ll wreck her! She’s big, but she’s relatively fragile. She’s survived millions of years, Cade. No way will I let her be busted to bits in my lifetime!”
“Which could be a very short one.”
“I’ll risk it. You can go hide if you want to. Face it, you aren’t really here for fossils, but for some sort of grudge against my family. So compared with that, maybe she doesn’t mean that much to you.
“But me? I’m a bone hunter. I get my dino and I bring it back intact. I have to stay and fight.”
“That’s almost as gallant as it is stupid! And as for my grudge—”
“Cade, I want to know about it—every last thing about it. If Ashaway All owes you amends of some sort, I’ll see you get them. But if we don’t live till morning…” Raine pleaded.
“True.” He blew out a harsh breath. “You’re right. Okay, Tiger, what’s your plan?”
“We take him out. Not in here where she might be damaged, but somewhere out in the corridor.”
“How?”
“I…haven’t got that far.” She groped for her pack, unzipped a pocket, explored its contents by feel. “Let’s see what we’ve got that might be useful. I still have some trade goods.”
A hasty inventory showed that they had about five hundred feet of fifty-pound-test nylon fishing line, half a hundred fishhooks, Raine’s circular casting net, a few handfuls of glass beads.
“If your fish line was heavier, we could set a snare. But this’ll never hold him,” Cade observed.
“Ye-es. But think of a clothesline, with a pulley running along it. We could string it up between stalagmites, hang things from it, pull them back and forth along it? The line is so thin, I doubt he’d see it, even with night-vision goggles.”
“What do we have worth pulling?”
“Well, there’s Carleton.” When Raine went for her pack, she’d found the second paratrooper’s skeleton.
Chapter 29
Raine woke with a wild start—then relaxed as Cade’s arm around her shoulders squeezed reassurance. “Have I been asleep long?” she whispered.
“Maybe twenty minutes.” He checked the dial of his luminescent watch, then tucked it out of sight again. “Half past midnight.”
They’d completed their preparations, and now they sat waiting, just inside the tunnel that led back to the dino cave. “Maybe Szabo isn’t coming.” He’d collapsed into septic shock. Or he’d cut and run for civilization, or—
“Listen!”
Somewhere a rock creaked. Raine sucked in a breath as a pebble rattled, up near the hole. They’d placed dozens of small rocks along the larger stones up there, so Szabo couldn’t sneak up on them unawares.
They’d debated unbalancing the first few boulders inside the entrance, so that they’d fall away when he stepped on them—send him tumbling all the way to the cavern floor. But the fear that they might set off a larger rockslide had stopped them.
Another pebble clattered down. “Showtime!” Cade whispered.
Stealthily they rose. Raine had tied their guiding line to her belt. She turned and began pulling herself gently along the taut fishing line, coiling it up as she went. Gripping the back of her belt, Cade trailed blindly in her wake. Like Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth, this skein of nylon would lead them straight to the dino cave.
Szabo should be slower in following. She could picture him checking for ambushes before he wriggled warily through the hole. Scanning the front cavern as he descended. Bending over his grandfather’s skeleton to make sure it hadn’t been replaced by a live enemy, lying in wait.
She’d used night-vision goggles herself once, on an expedition to Africa. A field-worker had brought them along to enjoy nocturnal wildlife. The goggles came equipped with a built-in infrared light source for illuminating targets in total darkness. The IR beam would be pointed wherever Szabo turned his gaze. It worked precisely like a flashlight, lighting everything within its cone of illumination; leaving things beyond the cone in darkness. Like a flashlight, the range of the cone—of Szabo’s vision—would be limited by the power of his goggle batteries.
Cade and she wouldn’t see the IR beam, of course, since its rays were invisible without the goggles. But to Szabo, they’d stand out clear and helpless as a couple of jacklighted deer. So it’s simple. We make sure his beam never touches us, she told herself, coiling faster.
The goggles had only one weakness of which she knew. To protect the user’s eyes, they were made to shut down instantly if a bright light struck their lens. The wearer then had to reach up with his left hand, press a button to switch them back on.
For that moment he’d be not only blind, but distracted. He’d have the use of only one hand. They meant to capitalize on that weakness.
But for now…Is he coming? They were moving along the passage in ghostly silence, as if they drifted through starless space. What if Szabo had scouted the front cavern faster than they’d expected…was even now standing behind them, taking aim, smirking as his finger tightened on his trigger?
Her elbow bumped stone. Here already? Groping left-handed, she found the massive limestone column that framed both entrances to the dinosaur’s cave. Cade patted it, also.
The line led past it to the sledge. Arriving there, she crouched to cut the nylon, then tucked the coil into her back pocket. She sheathed her knife and turn
ed on her heels—reached out. Cade knelt before her, ready to sprawl facedown on the ground. Szabo expected to see his dead body—and so he would.
Gripping Cade’s shoulders, she leaned close. “Oh, be careful.”
Hard warm hands framed her face. He kissed her for answer—hot, deep and slow—as if they had all the time in the world.
I want more of those! she told any angels who might be listening while Cade arranged himself facedown, with their flashlight and half her blowpipe hidden beneath him.
Raine stroked the back of his head, then rose—patted the T. rex’s snout both to orient herself and for luck. Groping her way to the smaller gap beyond the king column, she hovered at this entrance to the passageway. Goose bumps rose as she listened. If Szabo was closer than they’d calculated—
Don’t think, act. Seize the day! She struck out from the gap, angling off to her right. Counted twelve paces to cross the passage—then swept her right arm through the dark. Oh, God, if I missed it!
But, no—her fingers brushed stone and she almost hugged the column she’d come to, on the far side of the passage. The left-hand side, as you walked deeper into the mountain.
This column was thick as a hundred-year-old oak. Raine circled it clockwise till her questing fingers found the smear of her lip gloss on its far inner side. Put her right knee to that mark and she could stand, knowing she’d be concealed from Szabo’s view as he approached the dino cave—then exited it the same way she had.
Good so far. With her foot, she felt for her casting net. It lay on the ground where she’d left it, spread out and ready to throw.
And now— Raine found the line she’d tied to the column. She took up slack in the gossamer thread till she felt a distant resistance. Paused. Okay, Carleton, ready for some payback? His ghost should have no fondness for Szabo.
Water dripped and tinkled somewhere far off, then—A pebble rolled, not much louder than the blood striding through her ears. There! Here he comes.
Raine stood motionless, except for her trembling. Listening to a troll stalking closer and closer with murder in mind…If he thinks to check Cade—feels he’s warm! She gulped, picturing the path she’d race to his rescue.
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