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
BAILEY 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 su
ffered 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.
She stood it for about three seconds. “A plain case of testosterone poisoning, if I’ve ever seen one,” she commented.
His head was partially turned away, but she saw his cheek crease as he grinned. “Are you talking to me?”
“No, I’m talking to this tree, with about the same result.”
“I’m okay. If I can get a fire started, I’ll get warm then.”
Some imp of Satan whispered to her and she said, “Well, if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Because I thought I might warm your hands the same way I warmed your feet, but since you’re okay—never mind.”
Her words hung in the frozen air. Part of her wondered if she’d lost her mind, but she couldn’t unsay them, so she tried her best to look casual.
He went very still, then slowly backed out, straightened, and turned to face her. “Maybe I spoke too soon. My hands really hurt.”
“Then you’d better hurry with that fire,” she said cheerfully, and made a shooing motion with her hands. “Chop-chop!”
He gave her an “I’m going to get you” look, then reached back into the plane’s innards. The angle at which it was resting made reaching anything awkward, and the trees were in the way. Finally he said, “Okay. Now let’s cut some wire. We need to have everything ready before I try this, because if there is any juice there may not be much, and one try may be all we get.”
“What do we need to do?”
“First, we fix a place as sheltered from the wind as we can manage, and make a fire ring with rocks. Then we find some dry wood to use as kindling. Probably some of the smaller pieces you stuck into the shelter to fill in gaps will have dried a little by now. I doubt we’ll find anything any drier. If you’ll do that, I’ll start scraping some inside bark from these trees.”
The wind was a problem; it swirled through the mountains, meaning there really wasn’t a sheltered area. Finally, frustrated, she opened up her suitcases and stood them on end, lining them up and making a rough hook shape in front of their shelter. It was an imperfect solution, at best, because the suitcases couldn’t be so close to the fire that they caught on fire, so they afforded only partial protection from the swirling wind.
She cleared snow out of the enclosed area, then Cam used the screwdriver from the tool kit to drive into the frozen earth, over and over, breaking it up. He used the claw of the hammer to dig out the loosened dirt. The fire pit was only a few inches deep when he hit rock, but it would have to do.
There was a plethora of loose rocks for lining the bed of the pit. Cam gathered them while Bailey looked for dry wood. As he’d predicted, the driest that she found came from their shelter. Every time she pulled a stick from its place, she blocked the space that was left with a new branch she broke from a tree. They still had to sleep in that shelter one more night, so she wanted it as snug as possible.
Using his knife, Cam peeled a section of outer bark from one of the trees, then scraped the inner bark until he had a double handful of what looked like the makings of a bird’s nest. Carefully he laid out the fire with the scraped bark and some rolled-up pieces of paper torn from her notebook, the kindling on top of that, then some bigger pieces of wood on top of the kindling. “It’s green wood so it isn’t going to burn all that hot, but the good news is it won’t burn fast, either,” he said. If they could get it to burn at all, she thought, but left that unsaid.
If the battery worked, they had to have some means of getting the flame from the plane to the waiting fire pit. The wind was unceasing, which meant he couldn’t just roll up a sheet of paper, catch it on fire, and walk it over to the pit. Bailey emptied all their first-aid supplies from the olive drab metal box and gave it to him. Using the handy screwdriver again, he punched holes in one end of the box, lined the bottom with some of the dirt from where he’d dug the fire pit, then stripped some of the needles from one of the evergreen trees and put them on top of the dirt. He rolled up another sheet of paper, then cut off a strip of gauze and loosely stuffed that inside the roll of paper.
Bailey watched silently. They had stopped talking during the past half hour, because the preparations were simply too important. Having a fire was too important. She felt almost giddy at the thought.
All that was left was the wire. He completely stripped the insulation from a short piece, then bared both ends of two much longer pieces. Then he quickly connected one end of each of the longer pieces to the short piece, twisting the bright copper wires together.
They approached the plane side by side. She held the box, he had the wiring.
“If this works, when the paper ignites, close the lid and take the box to the fire,” he instructed. “I’ll have to unhook the wires from the battery so we don’t waste any of the power; we might have to do this again. Rolling the paper up will slow down the burn, you’ll have plenty of time to get it to the fire. Go ahead and start the fire.”
She nodded. Her heart was pounding so hard she felt almost sick. Please work, she prayed silently. They needed this so much.
She stood beside him, holding one of the
insulated wires positioned so the uninsulated wire was touching the tip of the roll of paper. Cam had to actually wedge himself between one of the trees and the wreckage, a foot or so off the ground, so he could reach the battery with both hands and connect the long wires, one to the positive terminal and one to the negative. When he was finished he remained in position, his sharp eyes trained on the first-aid box in Bailey’s hands.
She tried not to shake as she held the naked wire to the paper. “How long will it take?”
“Give it a few minutes.”
She felt as if they gave it an hour. Time crawled as they stared in an agony of anticipation at the paper, waiting to see a wisp of smoke, a scorch mark, praying for something to happen.
“Please, please, please,” she chanted under her breath. Nothing was happening. She closed her eyes because she couldn’t bear to watch any longer. Maybe if she didn’t watch the paper would start smoking. It was a childish hope, a silly thought, as if her watching would prevent it from happening.
“Bailey!” Cam’s voice was sharp.
Startled, she opened her eyes. The first thing she saw was the thin, delicate twirl of smoke, as transparent as a mirage. It snaked upward almost hesitantly, to be snatched by the wind. Gingerly she shifted her position just a little, bringing the box closer to the protection of her body.
A brown scorch mark began growing on the paper, spread to the piece of gauze tucked inside. A bright, tiny flame began licking at the gauze. The edges of the paper caught, began to curl.
“Go,” said Cam, and she carefully closed the lid so it was almost shut, then wheeled and hurried to the fire pit. Kneeling beside the squat pyramid of kindling, paper, and wood, she gingerly opened the box, trying as best she could to shield the fragile flame. The roll of paper was half consumed.
Carefully she eased the roll out of the box, inserting the burning end into the nest of scraped bark and paper in the center of the stack.