by Kyle Mills
She pulled the backpack off her shoulders and fished around in it until she found the lighter at the bottom. The desperate shouts started below the moment she lit it and the cave came flickering to life around her.
She ran around the cave throwing rocks off any formation that looked like it might not have occurred naturally, the sound mimicking the clatter rising from below as the three men scurried to the base of the cliff.
“Fuck the shoes! Go! Go!”
Darby froze for a moment and listened.
“Move, goddamnit!”
The voice was deafening, as though it was aimed directly up at the cave. Or perhaps at someone climbing toward her. She went back to her search, frantically kicking and throwing rocks at the back of the cave until she started to hear the labored breathing and occasional grunts of a climber moving toward her. She picked up a rock and considered rolling it off the edge, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. What if it was just a local guide they’d hired? Maybe someone she knew?
A gust of wind blew the lighter out as she started back the way she’d come. She flicked it again and the intensity of the flame as it exploded to life created a dull glitter beneath the sand at her feet.
She dropped to her knees and brushed it away, feeling the unmistakable cold smoothness of plastic. She shoved a large rock aside and started to dig as the sound of the mysterious climber continued to close in on her.
Whatever it was, it had been encased in at least a half-inch of shrink-wrap. She held it up for a moment, but the glare from the flame was too intermittent to see anything but its shape and deep brown color.
Darby shoved it in her backpack and slung the pack over her shoulders just as a loud grunt echoed through the cave and the blond head of the man she’d seen from the cliff top appeared at the mouth. She ran within three feet of him as he struggled to pull himself over the lip, dropping the lighter and lunging at a line of softball-sized holes gouged in the rock by a million years of water flow.
She forced herself not to look back again—there was nothing she could do but go straight up. Moving right would bring her into view of the men on the ground and left would take her back into the cave. Desperation gripped her as she threw herself recklessly at each hand and foothold, forgetting how high she was off the ground, forgetting everything but the man behind her.
She remembered the huge hold at the base of the little alcove above the cave and launched herself at it. She felt her feet and hands leave the wall and her body arc through the night air as a gunshot sounded and a bullet skittered off the rock close enough to kick dust into her eyes. She latched the hold with her right hand and used the powerful muscles in her arm to continue her upward momentum. She rolled into the alcove and hit the back of it hard, then froze and listened for the sound of pursuit.
Nothing—only the sound of her own breathing. Then, a moment later, a quiet, heavily accented voice. “Darby?”
She leaned forward out of reflex. The voice was familiar.
“Darby, come down.”
That was enough to put a nationality to the man. Slovenian. She scooted forward a few inches. “Vili?”
“Come down now, Darby.”
She almost leaned her head over the edge to see if there was enough light to make out his features, but then remembered the gunshot that couldn’t have come from anyone but him.
“You shot at me, Vili.”
“Just to scare you.” His voice was calm and even, but obviously forced. “The men I am with hired me to help them find you. To bring you to the police for what you did to Tristan.”
“I didn’t do anything to Tristan. You know that.”
“Of course I do. Come down, we will take you to your police. You can tell them.”
Whoever the people after her were, they were smart. It had only been three days since she’d escaped from the old farmhouse and they’d already found the perfect person to track her. Vili had been a professional climber for years—he knew the ins and outs of her lifestyle and probably most of her friends. But more, he hated her with a burning passion that she would never understand.
It had been three years ago on Gasherbrum IV in the Himalaya. She’d gone there to attempt a solo ascent of a new route on the west face of the mountain. But he’d sneaked in a week before, with a map she’d drawn, to try to steal the ascent out from under her.
She’d found him about halfway up it, his leg broken and half frozen. She’d almost died about ten times getting him down. He hadn’t even tried to help; he’d just lain there and whimpered while she dragged him along the steep slopes in subzero temperatures and blinding snow. A week after he’d been evacuated by helicopter, she’d completed the route, and worse, made the cover of Climbing magazine.
She hadn’t really been looking for gratitude and she hadn’t gotten any. Apparently embarrassed by his behavior and for being saved by a woman, he’d somehow managed to convince himself that his accident had been her fault and that she’d stolen the climb from him.
“Why are you doing this, Vili?”
A shout from below floated up, but he didn’t answer it. “To show the world who you really are. Darby. What you did to me.”
“You would have died up there.”
“You say!” His voice suddenly went from a whisper to a scream. “You forced me down. You took that climb from me!”
It occurred to her again just how pointless Tristan’s death had been. He was the victim of the stunted, adolescent egos of supposedly full-grown men. Politicians searched for power, captains of industry pursued for money. For climbers, it was glory. But it was all an illusion. No matter how much they amassed, they would still grow old and weak and die. Tristan should have known better.
Darby stood and looked up the pitch-black chimney cut into the rock behind her. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the most difficult sections that she had passed on her way down and project how hard they’d be in the dark and with the extra weight in her pack.
She calculated a one-in-three chance of making it to the top alive. That could be improved to fifty-fifty if she took her time, but the men below would undoubtedly take the same dirt road up the back that she had and try to be there to meet her.
“Wait!” Vili yelled when he heard Darby start up the chimney. “Darby! Wait!”
She continued on, picking up her pace when she heard him step around the edge of the cave and start the climb to the alcove. She found a spot that she could comfortably stand for a moment and looked down into the blackness. “There’s a lot of loose rock up here, Vili.”
She heard his progress come to a sudden halt. The meaning of her statement was clear—if he continued up behind her, she’d kick off enough debris to ensure that he took the express to the ground.
“Wait, Darby! Wait!” He switched to his native language, speaking slowly and deliberately, enunciating every word very carefully. Her Slovenian was horrible—self-taught during a six-month climbing trip there a few years back.
He repeated himself, even slower this time, and she struggled to translate. She couldn’t nail every word, but the gist was that if she threw the file down he’d let her go and lead the men who had hired him away from her.
Darby reached up and tested a small flake in the rock that was just big enough for her to get her fingers behind. “Don’t follow me, Vili. You won’t make it,” she said, pulling herself up a few more feet. He screamed something she couldn’t translate and she heard the crack of another gunshot. She continued on, satisfied that there was no way he could hit her from where he was standing, and that he wouldn’t follow. In the end, Vili Marcek was a coward.
Books by
Kyle Mills
FREE FALL
RISING PHOENIX
STORMING HEAVEN
BURN FACTOR
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to
actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by Kyle Mills
ISBN: 0-06-101251-3
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
EPub Edition © JUNE 2010 ISBN: 978-0-062-03113-6
First HarperTorch paperback printing: July 2004
First HarperPaperbacks printing: January 2000
First HarperCollins hardcover printing: July 1998
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