Necessary Evil (25 page)

Kier heard her breathing and could see her sides heaving. Sprinting up this mountian with all the rubble and loose rock under the snow was physically punishing. Altitude with the resulting lack of oxygen made it worse.

For just a moment he would stop.

"How are you?"

"Maybe I should just end the pain—let you go alone and save the world. I'm holding you back."

"Give me your gun. Everything," he said.

Woodenly, she handed him the M-16, the pistol, and two grenades.

"I need you to give this everything you've got . . . like at the pond. I'm not leaving you and we're going to jog—even on the ledge."

"No." She shook her head.

"Yes."

He turned up the creek. The pep talk wasn't working. Awakened from a sound sleep, her belly full of food, and now sprinting, no doubt to the point of nausea, she looked wiped out. Probably making her angry was the best medicine.

''I don't know how they let women in the FBI,'' he mumbled.

She grabbed his arm.

"What did you say?"

"I don't know how they let Tillman get past the FBI."

"That's not what you said."

Then he started running up the mountain.

She was almost certain she understood him. It was such a stupid thing to say. Trying to suggest that she wasn't tough or lacked determination just to get her to run up a hill. It was infuriating. After all their talks, how could he resort to this sort of thing? She wanted to tell him to get lost, but she wanted to really skewer him, and he wouldn't slow down. Her chest burned, and killer pain squeezed at her temples. Making her yet more miserable, borderline nausea had begun creeping into her gut. She considered that she might be suffering a mild heart attack. God, she would get even with him.

Slick from the constant wet, the limestone made for ankle-jarring, knee-banging frustration. When they reached the bottom of the chute and her memory of it returned, she gave an involuntary groan.

"Wait here," Kier said.

"Is that a joke?"

Without a word he began scrambling furiously with hands and feet up the edge of the water-filled shoot. He disappeared in the dark shadows of first light. She heard a rock tumbling and then another. Instinctively, she stepped back. When at last she heard a yell she began groping for a line and was almost disappointed when she saw its outline in the gray light. Knowing Kier, she tied it firmly around her waist, managing only through great effort to stay on her feet as he pulled her up.

At last they were on the dreaded ledge. Before they began, Kier looked at her. Dawn was just breaking.

"The cavern is the one place they can't corner us or catch us. Not even infrared will work. Once we go in there, they have to either bring in an army or wait."

"Okay."

She was thinking about how exposed they would be. She forced herself to follow Kier's brisk walk along the ledge until he dropped flat on his face and she almost landed on top of

him, lying between his legs, her chin on his butt. Kier looked 360 degrees, then pointed to something that froze her body stock-still.

An M-16 will kill at a mile, although aiming at such great distances was problematic because the bullet traveled in an arched trajectory. Shooting a couple of people at six hundred yards was a simple matter.

There were two groups of men, one on the slope far beneath their ledge and one on the mountainside at their elevation, but behind them. Each group stood perhaps six hundred yards distant. Both groups had emerged from the heavy forest at about the same time. She and Kier had five or six hundred feet remaining to reach the cave, at least half the length of the ledge. The worst part was ahead. It was inconceivable that they would not be seen.

Now they crawled. Sharp rocks grated over her thighs and belly. Nothing could be dislodged; not a single one of the hundreds of golf-ball-sized chunks could leave the ledge. One
ping
would bring field glasses searching around to their tiny outcropping. Watching Kier, she did as he did. An elbow and a knee moved together, but slowly, carefully, with exasperating precision. There was no option as to where to place her reddened elbows and skinned knees. Using the captured binoculars to study their hunters, Kier moved when the groups moved, stopped when they stopped.

Keeping Kier's pace while maintaining concentration was punishing. Soon Jessie found herself groaning every time an elbow caught the rock or came down too hard. Each little stone that branded a knee became hateful.

Then, in a split second, the glimmer of hope that had spurred her on evaporated. Just ahead of them two more men walked on their very same ledge, toward the entrance to the cavern. Kier and Jessie could not go up, they could not go down, and they could not stay put. If they shot the two in front of them, the bodies would fall and the men below would see them instantly. The near certainty that she would die hid in the darkened corners of her mind, waiting like a cancer to take it over. There would be no need to continue struggling once she accepted it.

For a few seconds, surrender seemed sensible. On further reflection, it seemed fully justified. It was only her innate grit that made her want to go out fighting.

A strong arm needs a stronger heart.

—Tilok proverb

T
he two men on the ledge ahead wore camouflage whites. Any moment now, they would turn, check their back trail, and fire. When they did, bullets would start flying from three directions.

For once, Kier did not appear to have an immediate plan of action. Reaching up, she tugged at her M-16. Kier stopped to slip the carrying strap from his torso.

Something Dunfee had told Jessie came to mind. The most brilliant escapes relied on distraction. But how could these men be distracted?

Desperation hatched an idea. Crawling onto Kier's back, she whispered in his ear.

"We need them to drop on the ledge, right?"

"To shoot them without their bodies falling—yes."

Quickly she explained her idea.

Time stretched out. The passing seconds seemed like pearls dropping through honey. At any moment, they might be spotted—and her plan required time. They backtracked twenty feet to a slight bend where they would be less visible. After removing his pack, Kier donned the mountain-climbing harness he'd retrieved from under the cabin, then scampered up the rock face at the point offering the best handholds. He would have to traverse the face of the cliff above the men, using nothing but natural handholds and footholds. If no such climbing aids existed, or if he made a sound, or if the troopers happened to look up, that would be the end.

As he scaled the cliff, Jessie started to strip. There was no sexual purpose in what she did. These men would not be seduced on a rocky ledge or dissuaded from their plan by anything so pedestrian as sex. Of that she was certain. Rather her idea was to appear harmless. A naked person didn't pose danger. In the second or two that it would take for them to take stock of her, she had to convince them that she knew something important, even vital.

Her toes were three or four inches from the precipice. She held herself against the rock. After finishing the shirt buttons, she tried to shed the coats. First the outer arm. Dizzying height froze her mind and her movements. She took one hand from its solid perch, then shrugged her shoulder, slipping off the coat while rocking precariously on the balls of her feet. Her calves began to burn from the squatting.

Finally down to her bare skin from the waist up, she dangled her feet off the ledge, using it as a bench. Quickly she slithered from her pants, ending up in nothing but her panties.

Again she let her gaze go down the cliff. The drop was bad, really bad. One little teeter or slip and she would plunge. God, she had to put her mind someplace else.

Both groups on the ground had been moving continuously for an unusually long time. Surely they would stop and study the cliffs at any moment. When that happened, she would die

in a hearbeat. The men in front of her appeared as only partially visible shoulders and elbows. Maybe eighty feet ahead, they moved cautiously toward the cavern.

Glancing at her watch, Jessie saw that Kier had been on the cliff for five minutes. She leaned out to see, then clung to the wall. Leaning had given her a greater sense of the abyss. He looked to be up about thirty feet and twenty feet forward. Shaking his head in disgust, he had pointed at the men with his silenced pistol and motioned her forward.
Damn.
He would try it from where he was, with an obscured line of sight and too far for a one-handed pistol shot. She would need to lure them a long way.

Her hands trembled. She hated her fear. With every passing moment the two men were getting farther away. Over and over she pictured herself falling—alive and bullet riddled. She stood and shivered in the freezing air. She stepped over the pack, and almost stumbled. The ledge was barely a foot wide. Around the slight corner she continued. The men still moved. Faster now, over one hundred feet away, and still looking toward the cave. She scampered fifty more feet, then squatted in the wind.

"Help me," she said in a small, terrified voice.

The men whirled. One almost lost his balance.

"What the hell?" The first squinted and leveled his M-16.

"He's after me . . . Please . . . please . . . he's coming . . . "

"Shoot the bitch."

"He's coming." She began the tricky task of retreating from the thugs while continuing to face them. Initially, she moved more quickly than they did.

"Wait. Don't shoot. I've got Volume Six."

Now they were coming closer. At any second they could blow her off the ledge in a bloody mist. But it was working. Glancing everywhere but up, they kept coming, gawking. Dropping her arms, she exposed her breasts. It took many more breaths than she cared to count for them to pick their way along the ledge.

"Get down, get down . . . he's behind me." She lay flat as she spoke, praying that they would follow suit.

Thirty feet from her, the first man dropped prone, aiming past her. His partner fell to one knee, doing the same. Then, as if seized by a new thought, the second man spun around and looked toward the cavern. The first now trained his M-16 on Jessie's forehead.

The farther man finally dropped to the ledge as the first lifted a radio to his lips. Kier had to fire.

Pffft.
The first man's head jerked, blood spraying from his neck.
Pffft. Pffft. Pffft.
Three more silenced shots jerked his comrade's body.
Pffft.
The last bullet went just below the second man's helmet. An arm went over the ledge. The body quivered in a spastic curl.

Already Jessie was up and running, hunkered down, trying to catch the falling dead man. He was slipping over the side. Kier dropped in front of her like a vulture landing on carrion. He grabbed the body as it fell. Twisting, turning, Kier and the man both went. She heard a snap, then the climbing line draw taut. Kier hung from the safety rope in his harness, clinging to the body of the slain soldier.

Now what?

Kier wrapped his legs around the dead man and, incredibly, began pulling himself up the line. Grabbing Kier's arm, she pulled as best she could within the limitations of her precarious position on an eighteen-inch ledge. She felt puny and weak, but her efforts seemed to help.

"Again," Kier grunted, this time getting his arms and torso on the ledge, still gripping the man between his legs. "Take the line off my harness and wrap it around him."

It would require her leaning far over the edge. Kneeling squarely on burning knees on the rough ledge, she undid the large snap on Kier's harness with relative ease. But the dead man hung three feet below her. As if reading her thoughts, Kier threw his right arm over the back of her calves, pinning her to the ledge. His left hand clung to the ledge.

"I can't do this much longer."

"Jesus," was all she said as she leaned over the side.

For a moment, vertigo paralyzed her. If Kier lost his grip on her or the rock, they would both go. She lowered the line between the mountain and the lifeless body, letting the snap dangle. She could not retrieve it except by hanging lower.

"I don't think I can do this," she heard herself say.

"We'll die if you don't."

Crying, she let herself go headlong, slithering down Kier's body, then over the dead man. Kier's fingers bit to the bone behind her knee. Life seemed so simple. The only thing between her and her maker was a single human hand.

"Lower," she said.

For a split second Kier let her leg slide through his hand until he locked his grip on her ankle. His arm shook with the strain. Sick with fright, she reached under and around the body. Stretching for the line, her muscles screamed all the way to her fingertips. She grabbed it, wrapped it once, then again around the dead man, and fastened the clip at the rope's end back onto the line.

"God, get me up," she said, almost certain he couldn't do it.

His arm quivered even more as he groaned with the effort of the one-armed pull-up. Dangling crazily, she clawed up the back of the dead body, and up Kier's thigh. Straining to reach behind herself, she felt the ledge and pulled sideways and up in a painful lunge.

Kier released the grip of his legs, allowing the body to hang from the line. He climbed the line onto the ledge and quickly hauled the dead soldier after him.

By cutting the snowsuits off the bodies, they made the dead men less visible against the cliff. The soldiers walking the mountainside below had disappeared from sight into the pines. Behind them the other group was moving through forest interspersed with meadows and at the moment were out of sight. Kier and Jessie raced along the ledge again as soon as Jessie had regained her own clothing. Now Kier carried two more radios, eight more grenades, and extra ammunition.

With any luck, their adversaries' expectations would work against them—any soldiers who saw them would assume the two white-clad figures walking the ledge were their own. Tillman would be powerless.