Up Close and Dangerous (20 page)

“What’s wrong? What happened?” She stood motionless, her eyes wide as she watched him approach.

He reached her and took her elbow in his hand, turning her around and drawing her with him. “Someone tried to kill us,” he said, the words terse. “Rather, I think someone tried to kill
you
. I was collateral damage.”

Bailey stumbled, shocked speechless for a moment. “What?” she asked incredulously, her voice climbing into a squeak. Her heartbeat leaped into a gallop.

His strong hand held her as she recovered her balance, his fingers tightening on her elbow. “The fuel tank was sabotaged to make it register more fuel than it actually held.”

Her thoughts split in two directions. Part of her mind concentrated on the fuel tank, trying to understand how, while the rest of her brain was preoccupied with his bald statement that someone had tried to kill her. “
Me?
How? Why do—” She clamped her lips shut on the incoherent babble and took a deep breath. “Start over. What makes you think the fuel tank was sabotaged, and why do you think I’m the target?”

“When the wing was torn off, the fuel tank ruptured.” He paused. “You did know the fuel tanks are in the wings, right?’

“I’ve never given it any thought,” she said honestly. “I don’t care where they are, so long as they hold fuel.” They reached the shelter and stopped, both of them a little breathless from exertion.

Cam turned her to face him, holding both her elbows now. His grim mouth curved into a brief, wintry smile as he looked down at her. “There was a clear plastic bag in the tank. Extremely low tech. You fill the bag with air, close it up, and it takes up volume in the tank. You can trick the valve to show the tank is full when in reality most of the space in the tank is taken up by the bag. And because it’s clear, you can’t see it when there’s fuel in the tank.”

“But…but—
why?
” Muted anguish filled her tone. This whole experience had been a nightmare, but she’d coped. She’d handled the terror of crashing; she’d handled being solely responsible for their survival that first day. She’d handled freezing cold, miserable wind, lack of food, being sick and feverish, even being dirty; she didn’t know if she could cope with the idea that someone had deliberately tried to kill them. “Why do you think I’m the one—” Her throat clogged.

“Because Seth Wingate called J and L the day before we left, asking about your flight,” he said bluntly. “He’s never done that before.”

The words hit her like a body blow. “Seth—” For all their hostility, she’d never thought he’d physically harm her. She’d never been afraid of him, even though she knew he had a hot temper. She even understood his and Tamzin’s hostility toward her, because she was certain if she’d been in their shoes she’d have felt the same way. That didn’t mean she’d liked it, or them, but she’d understood it. To know that someone hated her enough to try to kill her made her sick to her stomach. She wasn’t an angel, but neither was she a low-life scum who deserved killing.

“No,” she said numbly, shaking her head. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe him, it was that the whole scenario was more than she could grasp. “Oh, no…” In her memory she heard the echo of Seth’s snarled
“You bitch, I’ll kill you”
the last time she’d talked to him, when she had let him provoke her into taunting him with a possible reduction of his trust fund disbursement. She’d never before responded to any of his jibes and accusations, instead acting as if he hadn’t said anything at all. If that had tipped him over the edge…this was all her fault.

She grasped for any flaw in Cam’s theory, any hole in his logic. “But…but you have more than one plane…. How would he know which one?”

“If you know anything about planes, you could figure out which one we’d use for your flight to Denver. The Lear—nope, it’s the biggest plane, the one we use for cross-country. The Skyhawk doesn’t have the necessary altitude to cross the mountains, so it was either the Skylane or the Mirage. I would have used the Mirage, but it was in for repairs—and now that makes me wonder if the Mirage wasn’t deliberately damaged, forcing us to use the Skylane.”

“But why? What difference would it make?”

“Maybe he’s more familiar with the Cessnas. I do know he’s asked Bret about flying lessons before, and Bret steered him to an instructor. Flying isn’t the same as sabotage, but it shows he was interested. And hell, the information isn’t hard to get. I don’t know how he worked it, if he damaged the Mirage himself, or if he talked to Dennis and found out the Mirage was in for repairs. The only way we’ll find out for certain is to ask Dennis—or go straight to the cops and let them do the asking, which is my preference.”

“When we’re rescued—” she began, but he shook his head, interrupting her.

“Bailey…no one’s coming for us. No one knows where we are.”

“The ELT. You said the ELT—”

“It’s dead. The battery’s dead. Or the ELT was tampered with, too. Either way, it isn’t working. I’m not even sure my radio was working, there at the end. I know it was at the beginning, but thinking back, I can’t remember exactly when I last heard radio traffic.”

“But how can that be timed?” she demanded. “How do you make a radio stop working at a certain time? How could anyone know where we’d be when we ran out of fuel?”

“Our location would be simple math. A weather report would give the winds, I’d be flying at normal power, the Skylane has a known range. Our
exact
location couldn’t be pinned down, but someone smart could figure out how big the plastic bag should be to displace
X
gallons of fuel, and make sure we had enough to reach the mountains.” He lifted his head and looked around him, at the silent, majestic, unbelievably rugged landscape. “I’d say getting to the mountains would be critical to the plan—somewhere remote, where the plane wreckage likely wouldn’t be found. Hell’s Canyon is pretty damn remote. The hiking trails don’t even open for another month, so there isn’t anyone in these mountains to maybe spot the plane coming down and give searchers an idea where to look.”

“How do you know I’m the target?” she asked miserably, because she was dying inside. “How do you know it isn’t you?”

“Because Bret was supposed to take the flight,” he pointed out. “He was going to take it even though he was sick. Karen called me at home at the last minute to take his place, because he was too stubborn to admit he shouldn’t be flying. Face the facts, Bailey,” he finished with an undertone of impatience.

“So you—” Her throat closed on the words, nausea rising in her throat. She swallowed, tried to get control of her voice. “So you’re the—”

“I’m the unlucky bastard who got to die with you, yeah.”

She flinched at the words, the hated tears burning her eyes. She wouldn’t cry, she
would not
.

“Hell,” he said roughly, cupping her chin in his cold hand and tipping it up. “I meant that he would look at it that way, not that
I
do.”

Bailey managed a tight little smile that didn’t waver too much, though hurt had congealed in her like a giant ball. She handled it the way she always had, by locking it away. “You have to look at it that way; it’s certainly how I would. You had the bad luck to fill in for a friend, and you almost died because of it.”

“There’s another angle.”

“Oh, really? I don’t think so.”

She was completely unprepared for the way his expression changed, morphing from the cold, set anger of the past several minutes to something that was almost more alarming. His gaze grew heated, the curve of his mouth that of a predator closing in on his prey. He adjusted his grip on her chin so that his thumb probed at her bottom lip, pulled it open a little. “If I hadn’t almost died,” he drawled, “I might never have found out that cold-ass bitch act you put on is just that: an act. But you’re unmasked now, sweetheart, and there’s no going back.”

21

B
AILEY SNORTED, GLAD FOR THE MOMENTARY DISTRACTION,
which she suspected was why he’d changed the conversation. “For that matter, I thought you were a stick-up-your-ass sourpuss.” She knew the subject of someone trying to kill her wasn’t finished, but she needed some time to absorb the details, time for her emotions to settle.

“You did, huh?” He tweaked her lower lip, then released her. “We’ll discuss that later. God knows we’ll have plenty of time, because we won’t walk out of here in a day—or even two days.”

She glanced around the site; strange how familiar it had become, how safe she felt here in comparison to how she felt about striking out on their own. For one thing—the shelter. They couldn’t take it with them, and the thought of building another one
every day
was daunting. On the other hand, there was no food here. If no one was coming for them, they had to save themselves, and that meant getting off this frozen mountainside before they became so weak they couldn’t.

“All right,” she said, bracing her shoulders. “Let’s get packed up.”

His lips quirked a little in that way he had. “Not so fast. I don’t think I could make it very far today, and we could probably both use another day to get acclimated to the altitude.”

“If we wait another day, we’ll be out of food before we even start,” she pointed out.

“Maybe not. If we could find my suit jacket, I put a couple of trail mix bars in the pocket. I haven’t mentioned it before because neither of us was capable of looking for the coat, plus I expected we’d be rescued and wouldn’t need it.”

A couple of bars would double their food supply, and could well make the difference between living and dying. He also needed a coat, any coat, before they started out. Thinking of clothing sent her thoughts down another path. “You can’t walk out of here with those shoes.”

He shrugged. “I have to. They’re all I have.”

“Maybe not. We have the leather I cut from the seats, plus plenty of wiring to use as laces. How hard can it be to make some moccasin-type coverings for your shoes?”

“Probably harder than you think,” he said drily. “But it’s a great idea. We’ll take today to get ready. We need to drink as much as possible, to get ourselves hydrated before we start out. If we could melt the snow faster, we could drink more.”

“A fire would be nice,” she agreed with just a hint of sarcasm. The only heat source they had was their body heat, which
did
melt the snow they packed into the mouthwash bottle, just not very fast. “Too bad neither of us packed a box of matches.”

His head came up and his gaze sharpened. He turned and stared at the plane. His entire posture shouted that he’d just remembered something.

“What?” Bailey demanded impatiently, when he didn’t say anything. “
What?
Don’t tell me you have a box of matches hidden somewhere in that plane, or I swear I’ll take all my clothes away from you.”

He paused, said thoughtfully, “That just might be the most peculiar threat anyone’s ever made to me,” then headed to the plane.

Bailey hurried after him, crunching through the snow. “If you don’t tell me—!”

“There’s nothing to tell you yet. I don’t know if this will work.”

“
What
will?” she yelled at his back.

“The battery. I might be able to start a fire with the battery, if it hasn’t discharged too much, and if the weather isn’t too cold. For all I know, the battery might be dead. Or damaged.” He began pulling away the limbs that blocked him from the wreckage.

Bailey grabbed a limb and started tugging, too. The propellers hadn’t been turning when they crashed so the trees had suffered less damage than they would have otherwise, but that meant fewer of the limbs were broken, which in turn meant they weren’t easy to move out of the way. Where was a hatchet when she needed one? “You can start a fire with a battery?” she asked, panting, as the limb sprang back into place. She gritted her teeth and attacked again.

“Sure. It produces electricity, and electricity equals heat. That’s simplistic, but if there’s enough juice left in the battery”—he twisted a limb until it snapped, then tossed it aside—“I can connect a strand of this wiring to each of the terminals, then to a piece of wiring that I’ve stripped the insulation from. With luck and enough juice, that’ll heat the uninsulated wire enough that it’ll ignite a piece of paper, or some kindling if we can find any wood that’s dry.”

“We have paper,” she said instantly. “I brought a little notebook, plus a few paperbacks and magazines.”

He paused and slid a glance at her. “Why? One book I could understand, but you were going white-water rafting. I’ve been rafting, so I know how tiring it is. You’d have been too beat to do much reading. And what was the notebook for?”

“Sometimes I have a hard time sleeping.”

“You could’ve fooled me.” He grunted as he grasped another limb and pulled. “You’ve conked out both nights.”

“And these are such
ordinary
circumstances, aren’t they?” she said sweetly. “I’ve been absolutely
bored
to sleep.”

He chuckled. “Considering how much we both slept yesterday, the wonder is we slept at all last night.”

“The benefits of being sick and concussed, I guess.”

When they’d moved enough debris that he could get to the battery, he huffed a big sigh of relief. “It looks okay. I was really afraid it wouldn’t be, given how much damage there is back here.”

“Can you get it out?”

He gave a brief shake of his head as he surveyed the bent and twisted metal that partially covered the battery. “No way, not without some metal cutters. But if I can get my hand in here without slicing my fingers off—”

“Let me do it,” she said quickly, moving to his side. “My hands are smaller than yours.”

“And not as strong,” he pointed out, leaning his shoulder past a tree and reaching as far as he could with his right hand. As he did she noticed that his fingernails were blue with cold, and she winced. She knew from experience just how miserable and painful bare hands felt in this cold and wind.

“You need to warm your hands before you get frostbite,” she said.

He made one of those male grunting sounds that could have meant anything from “I agree” to “Stop nagging,” and other than that paid absolutely no attention to her. She couldn’t force him to warm his hands, so she crossed her arms and shut up. There was no point in wasting her breath talking to him. The sooner he either failed or succeeded, the sooner he’d stop to take care of himself.