Willing Hostage (25 page)

“Dear God, what am I doing here?” she thought and leaned back against the gear as the river caught them. The floor of the boat buckled and warped as if trying to heave her out. There was nothing to hold onto except the paddle, which wouldn't do her much good if she and it ended up in the water alone.

“Turn back, Wyndham!” Brian ran along the shore, his suit jacket flapping, his city shoes slipping on the rocks. Behind him, Charlie stood on the bank and raised both arms to steady the aim of the weapon in his hand.

“Duck!” Glade yelled and Leah slipped sideways along the duffels at her back, but not before a cracking echoed across the river and water spewed several inches from the opposite shore.

“He's bluffing … shooting high.” Glade's voice came muffled behind her. “They can't risk me till they've got the papers.” And then only seconds later, “You can sit up now. We're out of range, anyway.”

Brian and Charlie were tiny in the distance. Leah turned to face what lay ahead and tried to force down sickness.

The funny-colored river whispered derision. Trees slipped by rapidly in the dingy dawn light. A fine spray wetted her face. It came over the rim in front of her and soon dampened her hair, too, began to bead her lashes. The floor of the boat was cold through her jeans.
And there was nothing to hold onto
!

“I guess we can let the cat out for a while,” Glade said. “He can't jump ashore here.”

Goodyear put two front feet on her shoulder, his whiskers brushed her cheek. “Yowl!” he roared in her ear. Leah almost dropped the paddle. He slithered down her front, digging in his toenails, until he could sit on her lap and glare slit-eyed up into her face, his ears laid back.

She undamped a fear-frozen hand from the paddle to pet his head. His fur was already damp. “I'm sorry, blimp. I didn't mean to get you into anything like this. I told you two strays were no good for each other. This wasn't my idea. I crave hot baths, flush toilets, central heating, a roof over my head, and warm food like some people crave cigarettes and cocktails.”

Goodyear hissed and jumped to the pile of rubber duffels.

Glade laughed. “Listen, city girl, there's no time to feel sorry for yourself. I was going to give you a quick lesson on river running, but our friends interrupted us. Now, pay attention. If we're not both going in the drink, you have to help get us down this river.” He went on in a steady patient drone for a half-hour, explaining what to do in an emergency, repeating himself endlessly, trying to instill confidence in his boatmate—but he only increased her fear.

Goodyear hissed and yowled and paced the unsteady boat. A line of living trees stood to their knees in water. A piece of sod that had broken loose from the river's edge floated by like a small lost island. It rocked gently as it passed, dandelions still in bright bloom amid the grass on its undulating surface. Leah watched it sink.

“This river's in flood,” Glade interrupted his discourse long enough to explain, and there were nasty undertones in the way he said it.

Leah drew her knees up to her chin and hugged them.

“Rapids. Straddle the left side of the boat as if you were riding a horse bareback. Tuck one foot under the rim of the pontoon where it meets the floor. The other under the boat in the water. Grip the paddle—”

“But I'll get wet.”

“You're going to be wet anyway. The point is not to drown,” he suggested dryly.

The sun rose behind clouds offering no warmth. Breeze rippled the water and blew chill through her damp clothes. Her muscles felt cramped and stiff already.

Birds called good mornings to each other across the river.

Goodyear crawled into his duffel voluntarily, moaning evil-sounding cat curses at his human companions.

The current rippled down the river's center, leaving foam-flecked eddies to slip around and back on themselves on each side.

A cow, stiff and bloated, turned in a slow grotesque death circle near the right bank. Her legs extended as if she had been stuffed with metal rods to make her stand up in a museum display case, but had tipped over.

The boat nosed toward the cow and the foul, putrid stench of decay, the odor gaining new dimensions when water-soaked.

Glade barked an order and they paddled back to the main current.

“Leah, pay attention. I asked, what do you do if thrown from the boat and get ashore?” he went on as if the cow had never been.

Thrown from the boat … panic sent nasty tingles through her body.

Leah reached into her jacket pocket and drew out the gun. She twisted around and rested it on Goodyear's duffel, bent down to sight along the barrel and aimed for the space between his eyebrows. “
Get me out of here
!”

His eyes went dead.

“I mean it, Glade Wyndham!”

“Leah,” he said softly, “there is no way out. For once in your life you're committed, whether you like it or not.”

She meant merely to force him to pull to the safety of the shore but she shivered just them, and the cold finger clamped around the cold trigger jerked.

Chapter Thirty

“Another lesson learned,” he said calmly. But the index finger that reached out to move the barrel of the gun aside trembled. “You pulled the trigger only far enough to cock it. Let me show you.” He took the metal monstrosity from her carefully. “Do you really hate me that much?” Surprise and a fleeting hurt look on his face.

“I hate … I hate danger.” Leah was crying and didn't care. She'd almost killed someone. She'd almost killed
him
.

Her gun, in his hand, came right up to her nose. “Leah, it is now cocked. See the hammer? If I pull the trigger the rest of the way, it will fire. Never point this revolver at anyone … unless you mean to kill him. And be sure to pull the trigger all the way back.” He aimed the barrel toward the sky and eased the hammer gently into place with his thumb. “But you don't want to kill me. You need me now because there is no way off this river except in this boat. There are rapids ahead. You can't get down this river alone and neither can I. We're both committed.” He put the gun in her hand.

She replaced it in her pocket and looked away.

“Your aim was dead center and steady there for a minute. Don't forget how you did that.” He loosened the strings on a duffel and brought out a large plastic bottle. “Here, I bought three bottles and emptied them into this. It's Maalox.”

She took a long sip. And then another. “Why? Why do we have to do this … river thing anyway?”

“The papers are here … downstream.”

“Damn the papers! You're just going to make a deal. And after all you've put us through.”

“We could get down this river in two days. I've given us three to allow for difficulties. We meet the CIA and the FBI at a place called Split Mountain Ramp in Utah. It's a place to haul boats off the river. Now, if we make that rendezvous and Swords keeps his word, there's a chance that we'll both get out of this with our hides.”

“And if this Swords doesn't keep his word? What do we rendezvous with then? Death? And what makes you think the goons won't be at Split Mountain Ramp?”

He just shrugged and looked away.

She was still twisted around to face him when the river began a low murmur behind her; the boat slipped faster through the water. Glade looked beyond her, reached to pull up the strings on the cat's duffel.

The murmur grew in intensity.

“Okay, here we go. I know you can do it.” He gave her a confident smile. “Turn around and climb onto the rim.”

Leah turned around and froze. A line of mist above white water … and through the mist, the river changed levels as if in an illusion … the Yampa wound on past the splayed water ahead, but lower … much lower.… The murmur was now a roar. Leah tasted Maalox.

The floor of the boat buckled and bulged beneath her. She slid from her giddy, uncertain seat to slip a leg over the inflated pontoon rim and mount it. The water washing over her lap was cold. The mist in her face turned to spray. The boat and river raced faster.

Remembering to grip hard with her knees only at the last minute, she felt the boat rear and her paddle flailed air. A spout of water hit her full in the face. She couldn't see.

Then the boat bucked, trying to throw her as the back came up and they swooped down into chaos, with a lurch that almost knocked her over, almost pushed her stomach up her throat.

When her vision cleared, a rock loomed ahead. Instinctively, Leah paddled to steer away from it. But they caught it on the side with a sickening thud and then a pause while everything but them seemed to be in frantic motion … a tortured screech as rubber and rock rubbed together and the boat tore loose, turning slowly around until Leah was going backward and sitting high in the air.

When the boat lowered, she was looking at the rapids that should have been behind her and the roar was diminishing. She turned to find Glade smiling.

“Shall we turn around?” He stuck his paddle into the Yampa and held it still until Leah once again faced forward. “You did pretty good, but …” and he began to recite instructions again as she crawled shakily back to the floor of the wallowing boat. It was four inches deep in water.

Glade let a soaked Siamese out of the duffel, found what looked like a bicycle-tire pump in another and pumped out the boat while he talked. Goodyear shook water all over them, then settled down with a clinging hold on the duffel pile. An angry tail switched back and forth, making a slapping noise on wet rubber. The cat was even past moaning.

Leah was too cold and wet to talk, too miserable to comment when rain and wind began to lash at them, but she listened now to what the man behind her said.

And from what he said, she reasoned that they had a choice of dying by being sunk, or washed out of the boat, or ripping the boat on a rock and deflating. But they all added up to drowning.

Soon canyon walls, hundreds of feet high, surrounded them, sheer treeless sandstone monsters the color of the river, their sides pitted with holes and deep caverns cut into their bases. They resembled enemy fortresses in the dismal light of a rainy day.

Raindrops pocked the river and made bumpy ripples bounce under the boat. But it didn't wash the river's grit or its sour smell from her clothes and skin and hair.

The exhaustion of shock and fear, and over twenty-four hours of sleeplessness added weight to the heavy depression of certain doom and the cold, wet discomfort.

As they swept on, the river became angrier, noisier with unexpected twists and shoots through narrow cliff walls. They were up on the rim again and again to fight rock obstacles, or keep the boat from being swept into the low-ceilinged caverns at the base of cliffs.

“You're getting better,” Glade would yell encouragingly. “Good girl,” he would say and then start the endless process of pumping out.

Goodyear crept in and out of his bag, unable to find a dry hiding place.

The shoreline reverted to trees and rocks. Glade suddenly screamed to paddle for shore. Leah dragged a tired body back onto the rim and forced aching arms to pull at his command.

A giant round earth clod bore down on them in a swirl of white water, pushing a wave in front of it that would surely capsize them. The clod towered over the boat and managed somehow to stand on end.

Terror renewed failing strength. She paddled so hard that their boat hit the bank and swung Glade's end around behind her. With a struggling cat under one arm, he jumped out to anchor them to the shore as the boat bucked with the wave and an entire uprooted tree crashed by so closely she could have touched it with her paddle. The huge root system still embraced a glob of the earth in which the tree had grown … an ancient cottonwood, its trunk at least four feet in diameter … trailing soggy leaves against the pontoon rim … brittle branches splintering and cracking over the river's din.

They stared after it until it disappeared into the rain and murk ahead.

Leah shuddered. If the Yampa could conquer so massive a tree, what chance did they stand in their puny rubber raft?

They gave the cottonwood time to gain distance on them and paddled back to the current. The rain stopped but the wind was still cold through her wet clothes. They pulled over about noon to a patch of sheltered shoreline and he built a fire that smoked until the wood dried. Goodyear took off through the trees and Leah was sure they would never see him again. She stretched out on the damp earth beside the fire and soon the cat returned to huddle close while Glade heated water on his little stove.

“I'm afraid we're down to survival rations,” he apologized and offered her hot bouillon and dry granola.

Leah stared into her soup, listening to the roaring sound around the bend where the river would lead them after lunch. She knew the meaning of that sound in every cell of her nervous system … and she was committed.

When she finished the bouillon, Goodyear licked at her cup. “Why does he put up with all this? Why doesn't he just run off and leave us?”

“This is why.” And her crazy spy brought out a can of Kal Kan Mealtime for Finicky Cats. “He wasn't raised to be a wild animal.”

Leah watched in a state of shock as he chipped away at the lid with his pocketknife. “That cat's not finicky!”

Goodyear left her side, crawled onto Glade's lap, rubbed his neck against anything he could reach, and started his soggy motor. Glade emptied the kitty food onto a flat rock and chopped it into bite-size pieces.

“And I get bouillon and cereal. If you ever treated me as good as you do that oversized imbecile of a feline food machine … I'd …”

“You'd what?” He moved to her side of the fire, stretched out behind her, and warmed her where the fire didn't. “What?”

“I might … just might even shoot somebody for you.” She snuggled back against his body heat.