Darkness (16 page)

“Mmm?” the scary stranger sharing her tent murmured in sleepy inquiry.

She didn’t answer. Instead she stayed very still. After a moment his deep, rhythmic breathing began again.

Oh, God
.

Listening, she felt her every nerve ending being scraped raw.

He was, she thought, sound asleep once more.

While she felt like she might never sleep again.

Drawing her legs up close to her body, she wrapped her arms around them. Then she dropped her head so that her forehead rested on her knees.

She didn’t cry. What was the point? She’d already shed multiple oceans’ worth of tears, and not one single thing had changed.

It’s just breathing.
She forced herself to listen to it, hoping that she would soon grow desensitized to the sound.

Her mind was on board, but her body, her senses, her emotions seemed to be having trouble adjusting.

Gradually they did. Or else she just grew so tired that she couldn’t feel anything anymore.

After the shakes went away, after the knot in her chest loosened, after the bile receded, exhaustion finally claimed her. She lay down, huddled in a little ball facing away from him. Deliberately she thought about birds: the rare ones she’d spotted on the island, the eagle she’d helped save, the tests she hoped to perform to better assess the health of various species before leaving. She loved working with the island’s horned puffins, the funny-faced, black-and-white clowns of the seabird world. To test their diets for pollutants, she’d placed screens in front of their burrows while they were out fishing. When they returned with their beaks full of fish, they had to spit out their catch to remove the screens, which they could do easily once their beaks were empty. While the birds dealt with the screens, she nabbed a sample of their diets. They didn’t seem disturbed by her presence, and just recalling their head-bobbing, foot-shuffling dance as they approached their burrows made her smile. From there her thoughts segued to the plovers, the terns, the northern fulmars, the pigeon guillemots, all of which she’d seen in her brief time on the island. Seven hundred different kinds of birds had been identified as living on Attu. Deliberately she began ticking them off one by one, and smiled a little as she recognized that what she was doing was an ornithologist’s version of counting sheep. But it focused her mind, and eventually sleep claimed her.

Chapter Fourteen

G
ina was heavy eyed and cross-looking as she struggled into a sitting position inside the cramped and gloomy confines of the tent. She thrust the tangled fall of her hair out of her face, then, with a grimace, rolled her neck from side to side. The storm was history, but overnight it had gotten cold enough in the tent to turn the tip of her nose red. Watching her, Cal found himself thinking it looked cute, that
she
looked cute, actually way more than cute, and immediately dismissed the thought. He’d felt her up and kissed her and made both of them hot, but that was the end of it. His life, and maybe her life, too, and countless other lives as well, were on the line here. He didn’t have time to waste on anything but managing the situation so that they all stayed alive.

“Stiff neck?” he inquired.

She gave a nod as she scrunched her shoulders up toward her ears in an apparent attempt to ease the tension in them. “I should have let you keep the backpack.”

“What can I say? Being nice has its rewards.” Cal sat up, too, wincing as what felt like a white-hot poker pierced his abdomen. His hand automatically went to the wound, but other than that he ignored the pain. This bullet wasn’t going to kill him, or even slow him down much. He’d been shot before, on the ground in Afghanistan, much more seriously, and had seen a fair number of others shot, too. He knew bullet wounds, and this one didn’t amount to much. He was lucky there’d been a metal door between him and the gun as the shot was fired, which meant that by the time the bullet drilled into his flesh it was all but spent.

Still, the sucker hurt. When he got home, which was a beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, that he shared with Harley and that, because of work, he left vacant for way too many days of the year, that bullet was coming out.

Chalk up one more scar to add to his collection.

“How’s your wound?” she asked. Having followed his hand as it went to his side, she glanced up and met his gaze. Now that she was fully awake, he could see that she felt equal parts awkward and wary around him. He was sorry about that, some, but it couldn’t be helped.

“Better,” he said.

“Good.” She glanced away from him, toward the front of the tent, then started to crawl toward it.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Out.” Her tone was short. He got the distinct impression that she didn’t want him following her. Probably she had personal business to attend to.

Fair enough.

It required conscious effort on his part to keep from looking at her ass as she crawled away from him. Then he slipped up, did a quick Check Six, and was rewarded by not being able to see anything of her ass at all. Between her coat and snow pants, she was well covered. Although when he’d searched her he’d been able to feel—

Don’t go there
.

Instead, as she un-Velcroed and unzipped and otherwise worked her way out of the tent, he turned his attention to the cold, dead remains of what had been their furnace. The technique she’d used to build it was both simple and effective. He’d seen it used before, by commandos in the field. Her knowing how to do it was interesting, but he didn’t think it was especially significant.

Too many things—she was unarmed, she was clearly half-afraid of him, she went out of her way not to ask him any questions, she was too, well, young and pretty—argued against her being an operative.

The kiss had clinched it. It had gotten her hot, he knew. But after the first few seconds in which she’d kissed him back like she meant it, she’d gone cold as ice.

If she was an operative, he couldn’t see where that got her.

A night spent huddled on opposite sides of the tent, a parting at dawn. Not one bit of information gleaned. She hadn’t even tried.

No, she wasn’t an operative. He was almost 100 percent sure.

That conclusion made him truly sorry that she’d gotten caught up in this mess. Except, of course, for the fact that she’d saved his life.

“Stay close,” he told her right before she disappeared through the opening, his mind instantly going to who else might be around. There was almost certainly no one in the immediate vicinity, because if someone had known he had survived and where he was, and that someone was within range, he and Gina would already have found themselves under fire. He was taking it as a given that there was at least one enemy operative on the ground, because someone had to have fired the missile that brought down his plane. He wasn’t quite sure which of many possible groups that operative was affiliated with, or which group was at that moment closing in on Attu, but he was as sure as he was that he needed air to breathe that at least one of them was. Maybe more than one. He was fairly confident, though, that there was no way anyone could know that he’d survived the crash. They had to be thinking everyone who’d been on board his plane was dead.

For the time being, he’d like to keep it that way.

But as sure as God made pretty women, whatever group had given the order to shoot down his plane would be sending backup to the island to check that the danger Rudy and his information posed had been dealt with. They would have been there already if it hadn’t been for the storm.

By way of a reply to his warning to stay close, Gina sent him a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder. He smiled at her; she frowned at him. Then she crawled on outside, and he found himself watching her disappointingly well-covered ass again until she disappeared from his view.

If she wasn’t what she said she was, if she was a plant, then whoever had sent her was a genius. And she was an actress worthy of an Academy Award.

He didn’t think he could possibly be that wrong about her. But then, he’d been that wrong about people before.

Ezra being a case in point.

The thought would have hurt if he’d let it. So he dismissed it. He focused on his unlikely rescuer instead.

She was, as he’d realized in the tent last night as she’d wriggled out of her parka under the unforgiving glare of the flashlight, a beautiful woman. Big blue eyes, full pink lips, slender nose, high cheekbones, delicate jaw and chin. Fair skin, long, straight hair the color of honey. Slim, but with plenty in the T & A department. At least, plenty to suit his tastes.

Add in the way she’d kissed him, and it was a shame he didn’t have time to get to know her better.

But he had bigger fish to fry. Survival-level fish. National security–level fish.

He had to find a way to get the information he possessed to the people who could do something about it. To do that, he had to stay alive. And he meant to keep her alive, too.

Whatever it took.

With that resolution firmly fixed in his mind, he made what preparations he could to face the weather, then crawled out of the tent to find Gina.

Chapter Fifteen

T
he Zodiac was gone, of course. One of the first things Gina did upon leaving the tent was step out from behind the protection of the outcropping and look toward the bay, trying to spot it. Because the camp was much farther away by land than by water, she’d been hoping that the boat might have washed up somewhere nearby, without really expecting that it would have done so. It was nowhere in sight.

She felt a pang of disappointment, but no real surprise.

Finding her way back to camp on foot wasn’t going to be a problem: directly behind the former LORAN station stood Weston Mountain. If she followed the ridge that the outcropping was part of through the pass that she could see from where she stood, she should have no trouble locating the top of the mountain, which was one of the highest on the island. To make it even harder to miss, a World War II–era lookout tower (for enemy planes) had been erected at its summit. In partial ruins now, it still stood out as a landmark against the skyline for anyone who knew where to look.

The problem she had with walking back to camp was the length of time it would take. Her colleagues hadn’t been able to reach her by radio since before the storm hit, and she’d been missing overnight while the storm raged. They already would be sick with worry, she knew. By the time she walked back into camp, they would have launched a search party and done God knew what else.

At least the storm seemed to have passed. On this wintry gray morning, the waves rolled in with a murmur rather than a roar. The sea was up, covering the beach completely and extending fingers of water into low-lying areas around the rocks so that the area where she stood had been turned into a peninsula. The sky was heavily overcast. A thin layer of snow frosted the ground. Something—the force of the wind, the combination of snow and sleet, who knew?—had prevented much in the way of accumulation. While there were drifts against the rocks, the ground was covered with maybe an inch, no more.

The snow was crusted with ice that glittered even in the absence of any direct sunlight and crackled underfoot with every step.

Taking a deep breath of the moisture-laden air, Gina exhaled a soft, barely visible cloud: it was cold, but not freezing-to-death cold. Typical Attu early-morning midthirties cold. The air smelled of damp, and the sea. She looked out beyond the breakwater, where flirty whitecaps now broke in layers of ruffles against the rocks, to the sea itself. Nothing of the crashed plane could be seen from where she stood. She couldn’t even tell whether the tail was still there. What was visible of the sea undulated serenely, whispering rather than roaring, with no sign of having been disturbed. Last night’s violence had been replaced by a muted calm. Fog covered land and water alike, stretching as far as she could see, blocking out much of the horizon and most of her surroundings. Feathery tendrils of mist drifted across the iron-gray surface of the water, over the snowy tundra and around and over the black, rocky ridges that rose in increasingly majestic layers to peak in tall mountains in the center of the island. Sandpipers darted in and out of the foaming surf line, hunting breakfast. Kittiwakes and gulls swooped over the bay. There were no other signs of life. Gina found herself wondering about the eagles: had they made it safely back to their nests? Or, like her, had they been forced to shelter in place to survive the storm?

“How long will it take you to reach your camp, do you think?” Cal came up behind her, tall and solid in the pale dawn light. A quick, comprehensive glance over her shoulder took him in: he had the sleeping bag wrapped around him like a blanket. The waterproof bags that the tent and sleeping bag had been stored in had been drafted for use as temporary shoes. He’d bound them in place with surgical tape from the first aid kit. His eyes were bloodshot and tired looking, a day’s worth of black stubble darkened his cheeks and chin, and a bruise purpled on his left cheekbone.

He should have looked ridiculous. He didn’t. He looked big and tough and formidable.

He looks like a thug
.

For all she knew, he
was
a thug.

A thug she did not want to know. A thug she would shortly never see again. Gina realized that she was resisting even thinking of him by his name, because he—nameless
he
—would shortly disappear from her life. For her, he would for all intents and purposes cease to exist.

It was a good thing. She welcomed it.

“Two, two and a half hours,” she replied. Abandoning her fruitless search of the sea, she stepped around him and headed back toward the tent. He made her uncomfortable. She didn’t know whether it was his size or what she knew about him or what she didn’t know about him or the fact that he had kissed her and put his hands on her body and made her feel things she hadn’t felt in a long time or some combination of the above. She was anxious to get away from him. Anxious to put this whole traumatic episode behind her and get on with her safe and orderly life.