To Love a Man (28 page)

Lisa felt her stomach heave, but she had no time now to spare for her body’s squeamishness. Where was Sam? Looking beyond the two corpses, she saw him running, then throwing himself to the ground and rolling as one guerrilla emerged from a hut and the other leaped from the boat, both with rifles firing. He seemed unhurt, she noted thankfully, watching as he dived into the safety of the trees, positioning himself so that a tree trunk shielded him from the hail of gunfire as he fired volley after volley at the guerrillas, who were trying to inch up on him while remaining under cover as much as possible. None of the three men seemed to spare the slightest thought for Lisa’s presence; she might have been as much out of the picture as the two dead men before her.

The guerrilla who had stayed with the boat was darting from hut to hut on Sam’s left, trying to circle around behind him. Lisa could see quite clearly what he was up to, but she thought that Sam was taken up with the man who was approaching him from the right; anyway, most of Sam’s gunfire seemed to be heading that way—maybe he just feared hitting her if he shot at the boatman who was between Sam and herself. She thought about shouting to warn Sam, then immediately thought better of it. She had no desire to draw the guerrilla’s attention to herself. He could deal with her in a matter of seconds. But still, she had to do something. She couldn’t just lie helpless on the ground with her head in her hands while those murderers did their best to kill Sam!

Keeping a cautious eye on the man nearest her, Lisa began to crawl toward the rifle of one of the dead men, which lay just a few feet away. He had been shooting when he’d gone down; the rifle would still be ready to fire. All she would have to do was point it and pull the trigger. At this range—perhaps twenty-five feet—how could she miss? Sam had told her once that if one just continued to hold down the trigger, any automatic rifle would keep shooting until it ran out of bullets. That was an automatic rifle—she could tell from the cartridge. Silently Lisa blessed Sam for his lessons in marksmanship. She had hated them at the time, but they might save his life today.

The guerrilla was closer by the time Lisa reached the rifle. She lay looking from it to him for a moment, suddenly suffering severe qualms about what she was about to do. If she missed—and she very well might, she thought, remembering the untouched target tree—he would undoubtedly kill her. Maybe she would do better to stay quietly out of the way and leave the fighting to Sam.

The decision was made for her perhaps three minutes later. There was a sharp burst of gunfire, followed by a hoarse cry that she recognized as Sam’s. The guerrilla closest to her was immediately on the move, headed in a circular, crouching run toward the trees where Sam had taken cover. Without even thinking about it, Lisa snatched up the fallen guerrilla’s rifle, put it to her shoulder, caught the running man in her sights, and pulled the trigger. The gun roared in her ear so loudly that it seemed to fill the world; it kicked back against her shoulder with the force of a locomotive. For one horrible instant, as the guerrilla whirled around and seemed to be moving in her direction, she thought that she had missed and he was coming to kill her. Then he fell to his stomach on the ground; blood gushed in a bright red stream from his mouth.

As suddenly as the shooting had begun, it was over. An eerie silence pervaded the village. Lisa could do nothing but stare at the still form of the man she had killed while a ringing sound went off over and over again in her ears; she hoped vaguely that she wasn’t permanently deafened from shooting that wretched gun. Sam emerged from the trees, moving quickly toward her with his pistol drawn, taking the precaution of stopping to assure himself that the man she had shot was really dead. Lisa saw all this, but it didn’t really register. She felt as if she were watching through a thick pane of plate glass.

“Are you okay?” Sam had dropped to his knees beside her, removing the rifle from her slackened grasp. Lisa’s tongue came out to wet her lips; she nodded. Sam rolled her over, scooping her up into his arms and holding her tightly against him. Lisa, shaking, her arms going around his neck to lock behind his head in a strangle hold, saw fresh blood pouring from a wound in his neck.

“You’re hurt!” The sight of his blood—bright red like a child’s poster paint—running down the side of his neck to stain his shirt brought her out of the trance of fear that had held her in its grasp.

“It’s nothing. Just a graze.” His hands closed over her arms and he pulled her a little away from him so that he could see her face. His own face was white and drawn, and Lisa couldn’t tell if it was from pain from his wound or if it was from fear for her.

“You stupid little bitch, you scared me to death!” he said gratingly after his eyes raked her thoroughly from head to toe, searching for and not finding any signs of injury. “When I heard that gun go off, I nearly had a heart attack! I thought the bastard had decided to kill you before he came after me! Then I saw you with that damned gun—you, who couldn’t even shoot a fucking tree!—and I couldn’t believe it! Don’t you know, if you’d missed, he would have blown your head off?”

“I’m sorry,” she said in a small voice.

Sam shook his head, closing his eyes momentarily. Then he pulled her back against him again. “Don’t ever do anything like that again,” he admonished, his voice muffled as he pressed his mouth to her hair. “Next time trouble starts, you stay the hell out of it! How do you think I’d feel if something happened to you? I’d want to blow my own head off!”

Lisa was gradually recovering from her fright, and she felt faintly indignant that he should scold her for what she had done. After all, she had been trying to save his life. . . .

“I got him,” she pointed out with immense dignity, pulling back her head so that she could see his face.

He met her eyes, disbelief in his. Then a reluctant grin split his face. “Christ!” he said, dropping a hard kiss on her mouth. “You’re something else, you know that? Yes, you got him! That was damned good shooting, honey, but please, if you love me, don’t ever do anything like that again. I don’t think my system can stand the shock.”

“You must be getting old,” Lisa muttered disdainfully, and Sam grinned again. Then he stood up, pulling her to her feet with him.

“Come on, we’ve got to get out of here before somebody else comes nosing around. The boat makes everything a lot easier: we should be out of the country by nightfall.”

As he spoke he was pulling Lisa after him into their hut; together they snatched up the gear, cramming it into the A.L.I.C.E. pack as best they could. Then Sam hurried her toward the boat, which had drifted several feet away from the bank. They waded in after it, and Sam reached it first, hauling himself and the gear aboard and then reaching down a hand to help Lisa up. When she was safely aboard, Sam started the engine, then reversed until they were far enough away from the shore so that he could turn her prow around. It was just a matter of a few minutes before they were headed downstream.

Lisa cast one quick look back at the village as the boat rounded a bend. From that distance, she could see nothing except the thatched, cone-shaped roofs silhouetted against a background of trees. It was a scene of peaceful serenity; she found it hard to believe that just a short time before, four men had lost their lives there—one of them at her hands.

“Don’t think about it,” Sam advised quietly, seeing where she looked and correctly divining what was on her mind. “You did what you had to do.” Then his eyes softened on her white face. “In case I forgot to say it earlier in all the excitement: Thanks. You probably did save my life. When that bullet winged me, I took my eyes off your friend for a minute. At the rate he was moving, it’s very possible that he might have managed to get around behind me before I located him again.”

Lisa felt a rush of warmth at Sam’s words. She smiled at him, wondering if he was telling the truth or if he had said that merely to make her feel better about having killed a man. Whatever his motive, she did feel better. She would have shot down a whole army without a qualm, to keep them from hurting Sam.

“I love you,” she said. His eyes turned toward her again; she saw that they were smiling. She was fascinated by the way the sunlight seemed to sparkle off the blue of his eyes. With his raggedy, bloodstained clothes and week’s growth of bristly black beard, he looked like the roughest kind of roughneck. She loved him so much that it hurt.

“You tell me that at the damnedest times,” he complained, a groove deepening in his hard cheek as he half-smiled at her. “Come here, honey.” He held out his hand to her.

Lisa, who had been sitting on the vinyl-covered seat that ran around the rear half of the boat, almost flew to where he stood at the controls. He folded her against him, his mouth coming down to brush her lips before bestowing a harder, longer kiss. All the while he kept his eyes trained on the water in front of them. When he returned his full attention to the boat, Lisa still stood beside him, her head resting contentedly against the hard sinew of his shoulder, her arms linked loosely around his waist. She had no doubt that Sam would bring them out of this safely. She knew that she could, and did, trust him with her life.

“Oh, your neck!” she exclaimed after a while, suddenly remembering that he had been shot again.

He smiled down at her, dropping a quick kiss on the tip of her small nose. “I told you—it’s just a graze,” he said. “I’ve done worse to myself shaving. It’s already quit bleeding.”

Lisa had to look for herself, just to make sure, but she found that he was quite right: the wound was barely deeper than a scratch, and the blood that earlier had welled so brightly had now dried. Still, Lisa shuddered to think what would have happened if that bullet had hit just a couple of millimeters to the right. It would have gone clean through his neck. . . .

“It didn’t happen,” he said quietly, once again seeming to read her mind. “A lot of things could have gone wrong back there,” this was accompanied by a reproachful look at Lisa, “but they didn’t. So let’s forget about it, okay? If my calculations are correct, we should be in South Africa in time for supper.”

“Really?” If he had meant to distract her, Sam succeeded admirably. Now that she no longer had to be worried about the parting from him that she had thought was inevitable, she longed to be safely back in civilization. She thought of food, a hot bath, and a real bed with longing. And Sam would share it all. . . . The thought made her smile.

As the day wore on, Lisa grew increasingly nervous. It had occurred to her that the dead men in the village might have been discovered by their comrades and that the chase might be on with a vengeance. She half-expected at any moment to hear boats roaring up the river behind them. But nothing happened. Hours passed, while the sun beat down and the water glinted and birdsongs filled the air.

The stream they had started out on had joined a river, probably a tributary of the Limpopo, Sam told her. If it was the river he thought it was, it bisected the southern tip of the country before joining the waterway that formed the border between Rhodesia and South Africa. Once they reached that point, they would be safe. They would continue on down the river, taking care to stay on the South African side, until they reached the South African town of Messina. After that, it would be relatively simple to arrange transportation back to the United States.

Lisa, sitting in the bottom of the boat and leaning against Sam’s muscular leg, listened to his voice without really registering the words. It was enough to be close to him, to know that he was alive and pretty much in one piece and that he loved her. Her earlier nervousness was beginning to seem absurd. They were so close now—what could happen?

But she knew when she felt his leg stiffen, even before she heard the urgent note in his voice.

“For God’s sake, stay down,” he hissed, and she felt a sudden surge of power beneath her as he gunned the boat.

“What . . . ?” she asked, struggling to see despite his order. His hand on the top of her head pushed her down again. Looking fearfully up at him, she could see that he was as tense as a tiger on the prowl.

“There are a couple of jeeps running alongside the river,” he said between his teeth. “They probably don’t know a thing in hell about us. But just in case they do, I don’t want you to do a thing but keep down and cover up your head. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you said the last time,” he muttered. “But this time, so help me . . .”

He never finished.

“Stay down!” he said again, sharply, crouching himself as the boat shot through the gently rolling water. Lisa risked a quick look over the side before she obediently lay down flat in the bottom of the boat. What she saw scared her clear to her toes. Instead of a couple of jeeps, as Sam had so casually said, there must have been half a dozen—at least three on either side of the river. Even as she looked, they slammed to a halt and soldiers leaped out. She was lying down before they opened fire, but it was clear what was happening: the soldiers were shooting at the boat. Situated in the middle of the open river as they were, she and Sam were sitting ducks.

XIV

S
IX
weeks later, Lisa sat in a semicomfortable chair in Sam’s hospital room in Annapolis, Maryland. It was a nice room, as hospital rooms go, its walls painted a cheery yellow instead of the usual dirty white and with deep blue carpeting on the floor. Saint Mary’s was a small, private hospital that cost the earth, and it treated its patients with as much deference as their various illnesses and injuries allowed. As a former marine, Sam could have gone to the naval hospital in nearby Bethesda, but Lisa had preferred to pay for his room and treatment at Saint Mary’s. Sam had been conscious for only brief periods since that horrible afternoon when four bullets had torn into his body, leaving him bleeding like a sieve, so he had not been consulted. The decision had been strictly Lisa’s.

Amos was so glad to see her alive and well that he had asked very few questions about this brawny stranger whose side she had refused to leave, except for such necessities as eating and sleeping, since the South African river patrol had pulled the two of them out of the half-submerged remains of their small, bullet-riddled motorboat. Lisa had had only a minor bullet wound to the arm; it was almost healed now and seldom bothered her. Sam was in much worse shape: he’d caught a bullet in the forehead just above his left temple, but fortunately it had bounced off his skull without doing too much damage; a bullet in the chest, which had punctured his left lung; and two bullets in his right thigh, one of which had broken the thick femur bone.