Danger Mine: A Base Branch Novel (12 page)

“Your find, your lead.”

“You just want to stare at my bum, huh?” Street held both arms out like an airplane and negotiated the slick path toward the brush.

“That’s just a bonus. I want you to clear the path through that mess.”

He didn’t have to see her to know she likely stabbed a finger and rolled her eyes at the waist high, tightly-woven bushes fringing the forest head. “If five guys—one of them not going willingly—dozed through there even a week and a half ago, they did the worst part for us. And if there’s not a path, we know they didn’t go that way.”

“True.”

“What did Vail say?” Street maintained an easy pace on the hazardous path and Khani stayed on his six.

“He has a friend at Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage who owes him a favor.”

“What are they going to do? Write our last will and testament?”

“It’s a joint military base, not a law office. They’ll send a bird to get us whenever, wherever.”

“We’ll find him, Khani. I can’t guarantee what shape he’ll be in after a week, but we’ll find him.”

Street stepped over a narrow gap in the ice and came face to face with infinity. “Blow me.” White ice swirled with blue, turning brighter and brighter in color the deeper it went. The skinny chasm went deep enough that his balls tucked close to his body for fear of dropping in and never being recovered.

“Is that an invitation?” Khani laughed. The jolly noise died abruptly. She stepped across the cleft, cleared a safe distance, and then leaned over the edge and peered down. “Give me a jungle, desert, or city any day of the week. This shit creeps me out.”

He crossed and yanked a rope from his pack. After a few twists and a tug he created a slipknot, and then held the loop low for Khani to step into. “If that creeps you out, the ones you can’t see are sure to make you piss your pants.”

K
hani wrestled
with the last strap on her shoe-claw things. “Why do we need these things? We didn’t need them for the last three.”

“They’re called crampons.”

“I don’t give a shit. If I could use them to stomp someone to death, they’d be cool and maybe I’d care, but now.” She shook her head. “Nope.”

“This soldier is a little bit wider than the rest, wouldn’t you say?”

Street stood at the edge of a precipice too wide to cross with an adrenaline-fueled leap as they’d done before. It was also so long they couldn't see either end of it, if it ever ended. He held an ice pick over his head and sucked in a deep breath.

She scrambled to her feet. “Wait a minute,” she shrieked. “Aren’t there ropes—as in plural—and carabiners and ladders and helmets and harnesses involved in this too?”

“Yep, supposed to be. But we’re not Sherpas or professional climbers.”

“What the hell is a Sherpa?”

Before she completed her sentence Street threw himself toward death. His arms arched. His torso stretched. The metal points of his crampons nearly pierced his wide, firm butt. Then he crunched, turning all those nylon-covered muscles onto the sheet of ice. The gleaming point of the axe pierced the ice. It hacked shards of crystalline water into the air. The spiny tips of his crampons serrated the wall. Then gravity took hold.

Like a magnet tossed onto the side of a refrigerator, he hit the side of the glacier and slid. Khani’s eyes followed the line of rope from his waist, across the dark chasm, and to the other ice pick sticking out of the glacier that the rope looped and knotted. Was it enough to hold him? Was she strong enough to pull him out?

She sat and braced her heels on either side of the axe. Her hands encircled the cross of the blade points to offer reinforcement to the anchor he’d established before leaping. She found him still sliding toward the nothingness.

“King!” She screeched his name, unable to stop herself.

He dug into the wall. A grunt gave voice to the effort it took to slow his decent. Finally his feet stuck more than ten feet from where he’d landed. The rope pressed into the ice on Khani’s side of the fissure.

One foot at a time, Street crawled up the wall. He reposted the axe, and then repeated the process. After five excruciating minutes, he heaved himself onto the frozen shelf.

Khani collapsed, her relief more clear than his own, but she didn’t care. The ice chilled her and again she didn’t care.

After several still minutes save for the rise and fall of his chest—and hers—Street hoisted himself to his feet. “I’ll tell you what a Sherpa is when you join me,” he echoed across the expanse.

“I don’t want to know anymore,” she hollered from the ground.

“Make the leap, Khani, and I’ll let you kiss me.”

She propped onto her elbows. “If I make this leap, it better earn me way more than a kiss.”

He spread his arms wide. “Anything you want. Come and get it.”

Well, how badly did she want King Street? Or her brother for that matter?

Khani’s panted breaths roared in her ears. Her heart rammed into her sternum and the back of her ribs like a crash-test-dummy. She’d faced down cold-blooded killers, land mines, and her abusive father. Could she do this?

“Hell, yes.” She stood, cleaved the axe from the ice, and loosened the rope. One quaking foot after the other, she stepped into the circle. The rope cinched around her waist. Her fingers wrapped around the handle of the pick.

She ran for all she was worth, and then leapt into the abyss.

Pick first. Feet second. Pick first. Feet second.

A bloody image of her landing on the sharpened tool flashed in her mind. Then it passed. The ice came fast. The landing came hard. It knocked the little bit of breath she had in her lungs out through a trap door. She held fast.

When oxygen filled her chest again she climbed one claw at a time to the top. King’s arms encompassed her. He tugged her against his chest. Her feet dangled in the nothingness, but her heart dangled near the most dangerous cliff of all. Fucking love.

His mouth sealed around hers and stole what little oxygen she’d managed to gain. The axe slipped from her grasp and she clung to him with all her remaining strength. She slipped her tongue inside his mouth and he let her take the lead.

The whip of the wind stung her cheeks, but the security of his hold and the eagerness of his response voided the cold. She wrapped her legs around him, eager for the contact.

He jerked away and gripped her ankles. “I’m all for being your whipping boy, but can we start small with spurs or something? Crampons in the arse might be fatal out here.”

“Oh shit.” She lowered her leg to the ground. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, but a quarter inch and you’d have left your mark.”

Boy, that though erased all the anxiety she’d had about the terrain. She’d like to leave a mark on him all right. A thick leather collar with two handles for her to hold while she rode him sounded like a great place to start. Too bad they were thousands of miles from her toys and too many away from central heat.

“Then we’ll save the marking for later.”

King blinked.

“I promise to make it much less invasive.” She drew an X over her heart. “Promise.”

“In that case, let’s get a move on. The faster we get Zeke, the faster we can get out of here.”

“Lead the way,” she said.

They traipsed across two more narrow slits in the ice and made it to the edge of the brush by ten o’clock. King stopped. “You hungry?”

“Always.”

He dug what remained of their MREs from the previous day out of her pack and handed hers over. She couldn’t hold back the groan. The bean and rice burrito she’d attempted to eat two years ago almost chipped her tooth. She’d opted to eat the individually wrapped sides and dessert yesterday and save the worst for last.

“Come on, it’s not that bad.”

“Easy for you to say. You drew a ham slice.” Khan rolled her eyes to the sky. “Why you didn’t scarf it already is beyond me.” She sat in the rocky middle ground between ice and forest and dumped the package into her lap. She pried open the brown plastic and found slabs of pink ham where a rock-hard tortilla should’ve been.

When she’d thought she’d found Zeke’s dead body she hadn’t wanted to weep. Her body had automatically reacted. Now she wanted to cry. No one had ever done anything more thoughtful for her in her entire life. And through the years Law had done a lot for her and Zeke. This hit harder because King knew what it was to be hungry. And she knew what it was to give away a scrap of food you yearned for because someone you cared for wanted it.

She stared at the hunk of meat as though it were gold.

“Dig in. We need to get moving. If we push, we’ll make it halfway by nightfall.” He demolished the burrito with three bites and shrugged. “It wasn’t so bad.”

Khani ate with trained efficiency and kept her emotions at bay by not looking at King until again he offered her a hand. She took it without hesitation, which told her she was too far gone for anyone’s good. Damn, what was she going to do with this man? He’d wormed his way past her defenses despite their world-class construction.

Like he’d said, the trail her bothers’ abductors left behind made passage through the thicket bearable. Why’d she use that word? She wanted nothing bear-related in her life right now. It was bad enough her neck ached from the constant swivel she maintained.

The bushes unlocked into an airy scape sprinkled with sharp conifers and thin undergrowth. “Look.” King walked to a skinny tree and noted a dangling limb snapped at the trunk. “That’s deliberate.” He urged her on with a hand. “So is this.” A continuous pattern of step, step, scuff, corrupted the dirt.

Khani pushed ahead, taking the lead, hardly able to keep her excitement at bay. Zeke had left her a trail. He’d known she would come for him. That powered her resolve to cover as much ground as possible today. She barreled through the moss, stepped over logs, and weaved around trees. The sting in her hips didn’t matter. Neither did the burn of her lungs.

One step after the other, King stayed with her.

“I guess it’s later and we have some time to kill,” she said, broaching the subject she’d wanted to avoid. She longed to escape it forever, but Street wouldn’t let it rest much longer, and she always kept her word.

“Yeah.” He gasped it out as though he never expected her to hold up to her end of the bargain.

And really, she couldn’t believe it herself. “I have scars—big, small, dark, light—all over my body. My dad gave me all but three.” Khani churned through the leaves and underbrush as she talked. “He wasn’t a drunk. I don’t think I’d have forgiven any of it if he were, but it would have been an excuse.”

“There’s no excuse for hurting the innocent. Not ever.”

“I know that. But my mother came up with a thousand for him. He worked long hours. He had a stressful job. His boss picked on him. My grandfather had been a mean bastard.”

She chuckled, but its cynicism bounced off a tree and smacked her in the face. “I don’t know which of them I hated more—my mother, for her complacency, or my father. At lease he made no excuses for himself. He just liked to hit people. Especially people who weren’t big enough to hit back.”

Khani strangled the straps at her shoulders and pressed on. “After I was old enough to know what was going on, I know my mom had three miscarriages at his hands. I don’t know how many came before. But I counted those babies lucky.”

“Shit, Khani.”

“Yeah.” She choked on the past. Her mother’s blue-bird wallpaper filled her vision. “I was washing dishes after dinner one night. My hands were covered in soap. Lord have mercy on your soul, if you missed a spot. A tea cup slipped between my fingers.” She still saw the white suds fly off the rim of the ceramic as it bounced off the metal bottom of the sink. “It hit the basin and chipped. My dad threw his cup into the cabinet by my head. It splintered into a million pieces, but I didn’t even jump. He’d done things like that so often…”

“You became desensitized.”

“Yes.”

“And that set him off.”

“A little bit more every time,” she agreed. “He smashed my face into the counter, told me to lick it up.”

King didn’t try to stop her, comfort her, and most importantly he didn’t say something stupid like, ‘you poor thing.’ He said, “And you did.”

She nodded. “I did.”

They walked in silence for a long time, up a ridge and over to the next valley.

“How’d you get the other ones?”

King’s voice was loud and clear, but it took her a moment to process the question. If he said anything, she’d expected more questions about her past, but she instinctively knew he meant the other ones not by her father’s hand.

“Stabbed by a rebel fighter in Nigeria. Shot by a hooligan in Romania. And my happiest scar…is the skinned knee I got from crashing my bike off the ramp in Eden Park.”

King held back a prickly bush with the sleeve of his jacket, allowing her to pass.

She crossed so close to him their jackets brushed. “Time for you to fess up.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, you forgot to tell me what a Sherpa is?” She climbed onto a freshly fallen tree, and then hopped off the trunk, aiming for a comfy pile of leaves. The ground gave way as though it hadn’t been there at all. It swallowed her like a leviathan. Her arms scrambled for ground.

Pain shot through her fingers and zinged her shoulder. A splash interrupted the burning sting in her palm. Cold enveloped her feet and calves.

She jerked to a stop. The pack fastened around her waist slipped up. It jammed into the underside of her breasts. Her hands automatically grabbed at the straps at her shoulders.

“Hang on,” King gritted.

Below, a torrent of white water rushed around her legs, dragging her toward the blackness of an underground river. Panic clawed at her throat. She fought the urge to kick at the water.

Khani tilted her gaze as much as she dared to the light. A droplet of sweat slipped from King’s brow and landed on her cheek. The veins in his forehead bulged. One of his legs dug into the side of the washout. Rich black soil hugged his boot. His torso spilled into the hole, while the rest of him anchored to something above. Maybe the tree trunk? Whatever it was, she hoped it would hold their combined weight.

But his arm couldn’t last too much longer under the pressure.

“Can you reach your pick?” he asked.

She didn’t bother answering. With her stinging hand, she reached back and groped for the axe handle. Her finger wrapped around it. She tugged. The slick end slipped through her grip. “Fuck.” She tried again, this time locking her thumb around her first knuckles.

A scream threatened to escape her lips. The metal dug into her flayed flesh. She gritted past it and yanked the pick free. Blood coated the silver end. She changed hands. “Okay.”

“I’m going to swing you,” he panted. “When you can, drive that thing into the dirt.” The pendulum started. “It won’t hold long, but long enough for me to get to the rope.”

The back and forth grew, the black wall growing nearer with every swing. Khani readied the axe. The wall loomed loose and unconvincing. She put her trust in King’s hands—since her life was already there. She hacked into the side of the earth.

Khani dug her toes into the soggy soil. She gripped the axe with both hands. Agony lanced her left arm. Her muscles shook from the effort. She slammed the door on the pain, as she had so many times in her life. It shut out the roaring water below, the miserable death it would bring, and the aches. It no longer registered. Only her breathing blipped. In and out. In and out.

Something smacked her in the eye. Tears blurred her vision. Khani blinked furiously. The loop whipped back, and then flapped in front of her nose. She stared at it for several seconds.

The dirt gave under her right boot. Her right foot skidded down the wall. She pressed harder, finally finding purchase. The pick skidded two inches. Chunks of soil cascaded down her body.

“Grab it,” King bellowed.

She swallowed. Her gaze centered the slipknot. Khani lunged for the tangle of fiber. Like a vise her right hand clamped onto the rope. All the strain of her weight and the force of her jump combined, stretching her right side.