Cover of Night Read online

  “I will.” She was chilled, as much from fear as from the weather, and she carefully placed another stick on their little fire. She wasn’t afraid for herself, even though she was going back alone, rappelling down a rock face alone. A hundred things could happen to her, but all of those possible calamities were accidents. Cal was deliberately going into a situation where people would actively be trying to kill him. She had never been so terrified in her life, and she couldn’t protect him any more than she’d been able to protect Derek from the bacteria that ravaged his body.

  If anything happened to Cal, she would be emotionally destroyed. She couldn’t go through that again, couldn’t lose the man she loved and emerge in any way whole. Part of her would be dead, her capacity for love permanently stunted. No new people would be taken into her heart. She knew that, but she didn’t say it, didn’t lay that guilt trip on him. He was a hero, she thought painfully, a true hero, risking his life to save the world. Well, not the entire world, but people he cared about. Wasn’t that just her luck? Why couldn’t she have fallen for a math teacher or something?

  “Hey,” he said softly, and when she looked up, startled, she found he was watching her with an expression of such tenderness she almost burst into tears. “I know what I’m doing, and they don’t. They’re good shots, maybe good hunters, but I’m better. Ask Creed. I’ll be fine. I promise you—I promise—that we’re going to have that wedding, that new little kid we talked about, and a lot of years together. Have the same faith in me that I have in you.”

  She managed to glare at him through the tears that blurred her vision. “I can’t believe you’re so underhanded when you argue, pulling that line on me.”

  “I don’t argue,” he said.

  “Right.”

  Too soon, all too soon, he put out their fire by dumping snow on it, then scattered the ashes. She almost cried again, seeing the coals die. He was leaving most of his climbing gear behind so he could travel faster. He took his rope and trenching tool, and that was it as far as equipment went. She was slightly comforted by the big automatic weapon and holster that he slid onto his belt, and the knife in its scabbard. He put some food in his pockets and took one bottle of water. Then he used the knife to cut a hole in the middle of the blanket, which he then dropped over his head.

  He cut strips from the bottom of the blanket and motioned her over. Gently he held her hands and tied the strips around them to form makeshift gloves. Then he cut two sturdy limbs for her to use as walking sticks, to keep her balance on the snowshoes. Until she gripped the sticks, she hadn’t realized how much she needed the protection for her hands.

  “I love you,” he said, leaning to kiss her. His lips were cold and soft, his bristly cheeks were rough. “Now go.”

  “I love you, too,” she replied, and went. She had to force herself away from him, and she’d gone only about fifty yards when she stopped to look back.

  He had already vanished.

  30

  ONCE HE WAS SAFELY OUT OF CATE’S SIGHT, CAL USED the walking sticks he’d cut for himself, digging them in and propelling himself forward almost as if he were on skis, looking for every bit of speed he could muster. He wasn’t hiking across miles of mountainous terrain, wasting precious time; he was going down in as straight a line as he could manage, as fast as he could manage without turning cartwheels and landing headfirst on a boulder. He wanted to be in the valley while there were still hours of daylight left.

  He’d used thermal scopes himself. They were heavy, and during the day the images blurred, lost their distinctness. He’d bet his life—he was betting his life—that those guys put the thermals aside during the day and used normal scopes and binoculars for surveillance. That’s what he would do in a situation like this, where they were dealing with normal, mostly middle-aged people, men who occasionally went hunting but for the most part farmed or worked in shops. Against people like that, regular surveillance would be good enough.

  But they didn’t know about him. He wasn’t normal, and no way in hell would they spot him with a pair of binoculars, much less a magnification scope with such a narrow field of vision. He wasn’t waiting for the cover of night. By the time twilight came and they switched back to the thermals, he’d be in their front yard, practically under their noses, and they wouldn’t know a thing until it was too late.

  Cate was their target—Cate. He didn’t care what their objective was, what they wanted; as far as he was concerned, they had signed their own death warrants.

  Cate was in the valley by noon, her muscles shaking with fatigue. The unfamiliar gait forced on her by the snowshoes had left her thigh muscles sore and trembling. At the first rappel she’d been forced to make she was still inside the snow line, so she’d had to leave the damn snowshoes on, which had made for an interesting experience. She wasn’t fond of rappelling anyway and had never done it alone. A rappel looked like easy fun to the casual observer, but it wasn’t. It was a demanding physical maneuver, and if she slipped, if she did it wrong, she could maim or kill herself. To make things even more interesting, her arms and shoulders were sore from the unaccustomed climbing.

  When she was finally out of the snow, she cut herself out of the improvised snowshoes—and promptly fell, tumbling several feet and banging her right knee hard against a large rock. “Son of a bitch!” Swearing between her clenched teeth, she sat on the wet ground and rocked back and forth for a few minutes, holding her injured knee and wondering if she’d be able to walk on it. If she couldn’t, she was screwed.

  When the pain lessened from agony to merely severe, she tried to pull up the leg of her sweatpants and long johns so she could see her knee, but the long johns were too tight. She tried to get to her feet, and the knee gave out in the middle of the first effort. Oh, shit. She had to be able to walk. The joint had to support her, because she had another rappel to make, longer than the first.

  She grabbed one of her walking sticks and jammed it into the ground, using it as leverage to swing her body around so she was closer to a skinny tree. Seizing one of the lower branches, she pulled herself to a standing position and swayed there for a minute; holding on to the limb for dear life, she gradually eased her weight onto her knee. It hurt, but not as badly as she’d feared.

  The only way to inspect the knee was to pull her pants down, so she did. The skin was broken, and a huge knot was beginning to swell and darken just below her kneecap. At least it wasn’t the kneecap itself.

  An ice pack that she could strap on would be nice right about now. She turned and looked up at the snow, and shook her head. Not even for the joy of packing snow on her knee could she climb back up that slope.

  Holding the tree for balance, she took a tentative step. Again, it hurt, but the joint held and felt stable. The injury was nothing more than a severe bruise, then, no torn ligaments. When she could put all her weight on the leg and walk normally, she continued down the slope, swearing every step of the way because going downhill was hard on the knees anyway.

  The last rappel, the longest one, was a nightmare. She had to stay squared off on her legs or she would fall sideways into the rock. Her right knee didn’t want anything squaring off on it, didn’t want to absorb any impact. It was so swollen now that she could barely flex it. When she was finally on the bottom, she was bathed in sweat.

  The air in the valley was cool, but pleasantly so. She looked up at the towering mountains around her, at the white caps they now wore, the dusting reaching halfway down the rugged slopes. That was where she’d been, all the way up there.

  Cal was still up there, but he would be farther to the west, toward the cut. She sent a brief but fervent prayer for safekeeping winging his way, then turned and began the long trudge around the land spit to where she and Cal had climbed down the bluff. She remembered that the base of the cliff was nothing but rocks, and she almost burst into tears. She couldn’t depend on the knee on that kind of footing, and she certainly couldn’t crawl over the rocks because she couldn’t bear t