Darkness (36 page)

“In case of—anything,” he said, his tone as grim as his face—the slight hesitation told her that the “anything” he was referring to was something bad—“I want you to be able to protect yourself. I’m going to give you this, along with a quick lesson in how to use it.”

Okay, now she got it: the “anything” referred to his death or incapacitation.
Nice
. Gina looked at the gun, looked at him, and held out her hand.

“Can I hold it?” she asked sweetly.

A slightly wary look flickered over his face. He passed the gun to her, grip first. It was big, black, and heavy.

“Basically, all you have to do is point and shoot,” he instructed, leaning close. “But first you have to release the safety, right here—”

Before he could finish, she released then reengaged the safety lever on the back of the slide, ejected the magazine and the chambered round, snapped the magazine back into place, and pulled the slide back to rechamber a round, all in a series of crisp, practiced movements that, when she finished and looked at him, had him rocking back on his heels with his eyes wide.

Pocketing the gun, she raised her eyebrows at him. “What is it they say about assumptions? I traveled to some very unstable regions of the world with my father. I learned to use a gun.”

Recovering from his surprise, he practically crowed with delight, then wrapped his arms around her, rocking her from side to side as he hugged her against him.

“So, okay, I’m an ass,” he said, clearly getting her “assume makes an ass out of you and me” reference. “That was awesome.
You
are awesome. Gorgeous, sexy, smart, can handle a gun. Honey, you’re my wildest dream come true.”

He was grinning as he said it, but then as he looked down at her and met her eyes his grin faded. A serious, intent expression took its place. Gina was instantly dazzled by the look in his eyes. He kissed her, a slow, lush kiss that made her all melty and dizzy and had her kissing him back as if the world would stop spinning unless they generated sufficient heat. The thought that beat like a pulse through her brain as she twined her arms around his neck and returned the hungry insistence of his mouth was, maybe, just maybe,
he
was
her
wildest dream come true.

Sleet broke them apart. Not just a sprinkling of sleet. A deluge, as if the angry-looking clouds overhead had gotten tired of politely seeding the island with snow and had decided to disgorge their contents in a massive, freezing moisture dump.

“Holy shit,” Cal said as he flipped the waterproof hood of his coat up over his cap. One arm was still around her and his mouth was close to her ear as he raised his voice to be heard over the loud rushing sound of the falling sleet. “We got to move. If we don’t get in the air soon, the wings will ice over and we won’t be able to take off.”

Grabbing her hand, he took off at a brisk walk—anything faster was dangerous to impossible given the worsening conditions underfoot—and pulled her along with him. Bending her head against the pounding sleet, Gina didn’t know whether to be glad or sorry that the camp was only about half a mile away. The thought of trying to steal a plane and fly away in it made her stomach knot. The thought of trying to steal a plane with possibly iced-over wings and fly away in it into a sleet storm caused her stomach to twist into a pretzel.

By the time they were close enough to see the buildings, Gina was so cold and so physically miserable that she would have been pulling out the tent and taking shelter in it until the weather improved, and never mind what Cal thought about that, except for the fact that they’d left the tent behind in the cave to lighten the backpack’s load. She was shivering uncontrollably, her face stung, and she could no longer feel her hands and feet. They skirted the camp’s perimeter, skulking low like animals on the prowl for fear that their dark shapes against the white snow might be visible even through the gloom and the driving curtain of silvery sleet. It was early afternoon, although the weather made it seem much later. The main building appeared to have only a few occupants: Gina saw a couple of indistinct shapes moving past the windows. She could only suppose that anyone not at camp when the sleet storm hit had taken shelter in place, as she would have liked to have done. While Cal searched the shadows for sentries—there didn’t appear to be any—she listened to the rattle of the generator, looked at the light pouring out of the windows, and felt envy mix with her fear. What she wouldn’t give to be inside where it was warm and dry! The only thing she wanted more than to thaw out was to be safe.

“The plane’s gone.” Gina saw with relief that the runway was empty. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized just how tense she was, how tight with anxiety her stomach was, how dry her mouth was at the prospect of getting on a plane.

“Somebody had the good sense to move it inside the hangar,” Cal replied. They crouched behind the fuel tanks for cover, and he had his hand up, shielding his eyes from the driving sleet, while she had her hood pulled low over her eyes for the same purpose. Looking farther down the runway, Gina saw that he was right. The door to the hangar was open, the first time she’d ever seen it that way. The shadow inside had to be the plane.

Her breathing quickened as she realized what that almost certainly meant: his plan was still on. She could feel the sudden thumping of her heart.

She said, “The runway’s solid ice.” That was easy to see: sleet had formed a visible layer over the pavement that gleamed even in the muted light.

“We’ll have to risk it.”

Cal was so close that their bodies brushed. Looking at him, she saw that he was assessing the runway, his eyes intent. Determination was visible in every hard line of his face. She could feel him gathering himself, preparing for whatever the next step was. Her gaze flitted desperately around, looking for danger, for some reason to call a halt to what she now, more than ever, really, truly did not want to do. What she saw made her pulse skitter with horror. She grabbed Cal’s leg.

“They’re here,” she whispered to him, leaning in close and gesturing urgently at the large party of armed men who appeared like wraiths out of the sleet. The men were at the eastern edge of the compound, jogging at double time toward the buildings. Alarm made her stiffen and reach toward the gun in her pocket, only to abort the maneuver. The falling sleet would coat it with ice in seconds, just like she and Cal were coated with ice. She wanted to keep it dry and operational for as long as she could. Anyway, Cal had one of the rifles, both of which he’d tucked inside his coat when it became obvious the sleet wasn’t going to let up, in his hands. “Oh, my God, did they track us here?”

She didn’t dare raise her voice to the level they’d previously been using, which had been fairly loud to be heard over the combined noise of the sleet and the generator. Cal heard her anyway. He shook his head.

“They’re not coming toward us. Look.”

He was right: they were heading straight for the buildings. From the pair of dogs with them, she deduced that these were the men who had tracked them to Terrible Mountain. She shut her mouth and shrank against the nearest ice-coated tank: the search party was passing terrifyingly close. At that moment only the twelve or so car-size capsules of fuel stood between her and Cal, and them.

Her heart started to slam against her breastbone.

Thankfully the men seemed to be more interested in getting out of the storm than they were in looking around. It was obvious that they had no inkling that she and Cal were anywhere in the vicinity, and she prayed that nothing happened to clue them in. Nothing did. Minutes after Gina first spotted them, the last of them filed inside the building.

She drew a deep, shaking breath of relief.

“We’re going now. Run as fast as you can to the hangar. Stay low. I’ll be right behind you.”

Cal’s words sent her gaze slewing around to him. Her stomach seized up, and a hard knot formed in her chest.

“But we can’t—they’ll see us. They’ll see the plane. Did you see how many of them there are?”

“If we don’t go now, we won’t get another chance. As soon as the sleet stops, this yard is going to be crawling with gunmen. And in the meantime, all it’s going to take is for one of those dogs to have to take a leak and in the process pick up our scent, and we’re done.”

Their faces were inches apart as they leaned closer to make themselves heard. Their eyes met and held. Gina realized that this was it, the fork in the road, the moment of choice. All she had to do was say,
you know, I think I’ll give this a miss
. He wouldn’t leave without her, she knew.

Wordlessly she got up on the balls of her feet, then took off at a sprint across the icy open field toward the hangar. She stayed low, her back bent against the lashings of sleet, her boots slamming through the layer of ice that covered the stabilizing snow. The pounding of her pulse in her ears was louder even than the drumming of the sleet hitting the hangar’s corrugated metal roof.

Bursting through the open garage-style door into the shadowy darkness beyond, Gina processed the instant absence of pelting sleet with a rush of gratitude. Then she looked at the small plane with its large single propeller in front of her and felt her stomach sink straight to her toes. The thing was yellow and white, about the size of a mosquito, and looked like it was held together with duct tape.

She had zero confidence that it could make it into the sky, much less carry them across an ocean.

Cal was right behind her. His eyes touched on her, seemed to register that she was in one piece, moved around the interior of the hangar as though checking for any potential threat—it was empty—and fastened on the plane.

“Come on.” He headed toward it.

No. No, no, no
. Every instinct she possessed screamed in protest. Gina followed him anyway. The ice that had accumulated on his clothing fell off in thin sheets as he did a quick walk around the plane, checking it out. She supposed that ice was sliding off her in a similar fashion as well. She was too agitated to look.

Hoping for a locked door was hoping for too much, Gina knew even before Cal pulled the door open. The plane’s dark interior yawned before her, as terrifying as anything she’d ever seen: the mouth of the beast.

She thought,
I can’t do this
.

“Put your foot there and climb in.” He patted a wing strut even as he turned to look at her. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but she knew that her heart had pushed way beyond pounding to go into panicked palpitations.

“Hey.” He turned to her, cupping her face in his hands. Her cheeks were frozen. His gloves felt frozen. Neither was as cold as the blood pumping through her veins. “You trust me, remember?”

“Oh, God.” She gripped his wrists, nodded jerkily.

He kissed her, a quick brush of his lips against hers. His lips were cold—and firm and possessive. It was a measure of her terror that she didn’t even respond.

“I’ve got you. I’ve got this,” he said as his hands dropped away from her face and he patted the strut again. The look he gave her was compelling. “Gina. Climb in.”

Mute with fear, she looked from his face to the big gloved hand resting on the fragile-looking strut to the darkness waiting for her beyond the open door.

Then she steeled herself and climbed in.

The interior smelled old and musty. The narrow cylinder was cramped enough that she had to bend her head as she made her way toward the nose. If there had once been passenger seats, they’d been removed in favor of making cargo space: only the pilot and copilot seats remained. There were dog crates and other items in the back: it seemed pretty certain that the tracking dogs and their handlers had arrived on this plane. She didn’t really look at anything else, because she didn’t care.

She was too busy keeping it together, keeping a lid on the panic that washed over her in waves. It was bad. Her nerves felt as if they were jumping beneath her skin, her stomach had turned inside out, and her chest was so tight that it required effort to breathe.

Cal was behind her. She concentrated on him and tried not to think about the fact that she was inside a plane. That she would soon be
flying
in said plane.

The cockpit was so small that she had no other option but to sit down in the copilot’s seat to make room for Cal to enter. Memories crowded into her mind. She forced them back, mentally slamming the door in their face. Instead of looking at the windshield curving so close in front of her, she pulled off her gloves, pushed back her hood, and looked at Cal. He had the rifles under his arm and was carrying the flashlight, she saw as he tucked the rifles away on the floor behind the pilot’s seat. He switched the flashlight on, shielding the beam with his fingers as he played it over the instrument panel: old wood, a dozen or more round, glass-fronted dials, twin yokes. Her gaze steadfastly followed the light’s path.

“Don’t you need a key?” she asked faintly as the light zeroed in on the ignition.

“No. Hold this steady for me, would you?” He passed her the flashlight.

She took it, restricted the beam with her fingers so that it focused only on the ignition, and refused to let her hands shake. Instead she watched Cal work. He’d stripped off his gloves and his long fingers moved dexterously, despite how cold she knew they had to be, as he inserted what looked like a straightened paper clip into the ignition, following it with the blade of his knife.

“You know how to hot-wire a plane?” she asked.

He was manipulating the blade and the wire simultaneously. “A basic skill learned in Air Commando 101.”

“Seriously?”

“Sometimes stealing a plane is the best way to move across hostile territory anonymously. They can’t track you if they don’t know it’s you.”

Without warning the engine roared to life.

The sound was so unexpected that Gina jumped. The flashlight wavered, but Cal didn’t need its light anymore: he’d already withdrawn his improvised tools from the ignition.

“Won’t they hear?” she asked in alarm as he took the flashlight from her and switched it off before folding himself into the pilot’s seat. He had, she saw, pushed back his own hood and pulled off his cap. His black hair was ruffled. His hard, handsome face was taut with concentration as he checked the dials. Her seat vibrated with the force of the engine’s gyrations. Beyond the windshield, she tried not to see the propeller coming to life, rotating with increasing speed until it was no more than a blur.