Manna From Heaven (9 page)

“I really don’t want to do this.” The prospect of leaving their safe haven terrified her. The shore was close, but the falls were closer, and the current was strong and swift.

“We don’t have any choice.”

He was already scooping Sadie up and handing her over. Charlie accepted her blissfully ignorant pet because there was nothing else she could do, and cradled the shivering dog close. A glance upriver and the increasing volume of the roaring in her ears confirmed that the helicopter was still there, its spotlight sweeping pitilessly from side to side.

Clearly, somebody upstairs was having a huge laugh at her expense.

“Here we go. Take a deep breath, hang onto the dog, and trust me, baby. We’re going to make it.”

With that he submerged. Charlie only had time to take a terrified breath that wasn’t nearly as deep as she’d meant for it to be before he was pulling her under after him. The icy depths claimed her once again. Her heart was pumping so fast that a heart attack seemed like a foregone conclusion. She could feel Sadie’s heart thudding, too. She had the little dog tucked under her arm like a football with her hand clamped over her muzzle. Did dogs know to hold their breath? Sadie seemed to. Caught up by the current, Charlie’s hair wrapped seaweedlike around her face, covering her eyes, her nose, her mouth. Not that there was any need to use any of those organs. She could neither see, nor breathe, nor speak. She could only hang onto Sadie and trust in God and Jake as he pulled her with surprising speed through the water. She kicked, and gripped the slippery wood of the submerged log with the hand that was chained to his, but on her own she would have been swept away, she knew. The river was just too powerful. The current sucked at her feet, her legs, her body, drawing her toward the falls and certain death.

A sudden brightening of the depths made her eyes widen. It was only then that she realized they were open, and had been all along. The water around her was lit from above, turning a clear golden brown that was aswirl with twigs and clumps of mud. She could see Sadie’s bug-eyed and terrified expression as her tiny paws paddled frantically, and Jake’s big black shape in front of her, his hair standing on end as he pulled them along the log, and the solid gray cylinder of the fallen
tree itself. All that she glimpsed in an instant, as if a camera had flashed, illuminating the scene. Then the light was gone, moving on, and she realized that the spotlight, and the helicopter with it, had just passed them by.

Without warning, Jake pulled her close, and his arm locked around her waist. An instant later she felt his legs bunch and then give a powerful thrust as, having reached the root of the tree, he abandoned their protector and launched them defenseless into the maelstrom. Hanging grimly onto Sadie, she kicked, but there was no doubt that Jake was propelling them both. Not that he seemed to be accomplishing much. They were being swept sideways despite everything he could do. The river had them at its mercy now; their best efforts were puny against its strength. Any minute, any second, she feared to feel the world dropping away beneath her, and herself going with it, shooting out into space, falling, falling, to drown or be crushed at the foot of the falls.

In seconds fear took a backseat to a more immediate need. Her lungs were bursting. She needed air. She had to breathe or die. Sadie, obviously in like distress, was struggling in her arms. Thrashing her legs, tugging frantically on her shackled wrist in an attempt to signal Jake, Charlie fought to surface. Her side crashed into something hard, and then her head was above water and she was gasping, coughing, drinking in air, lifting Sadie so that the little dog, too, might breathe. They had fetched up against another rock, she saw, blinking, and saw too that Jake stood—stood!—no more than chest deep in front of her. He grabbed the back of her jacket and hauled her to her feet. Knees shaking, still clutching
Sadie, Charlie threw herself against him, clutching the soaking front of his coat in both hands as if she never meant to let go again.

“Hey, we made it.” His arm came around her waist, hugging her close. Charlie’s head was bent, and her forehead rested against his broad shoulder. It was a luxury, a wonderful, unimaginable luxury, to feel solid ground beneath her feet, and be able to breathe. A sideways glance showed her that the rock she had hit jutted like a finger about three feet out from the bank, and that without it they probably would have been swept over the falls, which were now no more than a hundred yards away. The helicopter with its spotlight was still visible, but it was moving away from them, continuing the search downriver. For the moment, at least, they were safe.

“Thank you, God,” she muttered devoutly.

“Come on, let’s get out of here.” Taking Sadie from her, gripping her hand tightly, he started sloshing toward shore, pulling her behind him. Even with the rock to lean against, the current was strong and the footing was uneven. Her knees were still unreliable, and her stocking feet slithered and slid. It was hard to keep from falling, but Charlie managed it. If she could help it, she was never going to be submerged in water again, not even in the bath.

“Did we time that right or what?” Jake was climbing the rocky bank now toward the thick pine woods beyond, hanging onto Sadie and pulling Charlie behind him. He paused to nod upriver. Charlie looked, and felt her heart give a great leap of fear. Just as he had predicted, a boat was on the river. Its running lights and the
powerful hum of its motor were unmistakable. It was small, an aluminum fishing boat perhaps, and coming downstream fast. Undoubtedly it was looking for them.

“They’re better equipped than an army.” Despair almost dropped her to her knees. She had no strength left to struggle on. Her muscles were as limp as wet shoelaces. Her bones seemed nonexistent. Her soaked jacket and jeans were unbelievably heavy and cumbersome. She was so wet water poured from her in streams, so cold goose bumps were racing along every square inch of her skin, and suddenly totally devoid of willpower. Jake the indefatigable dragged her on, hauling her up the slippery bank in his wake until the scent of pine replaced the muddy smell of the river and the first few feet of a thick growth of old forest stood between them and the unseen eyes of those on the boat.

Then he pulled her to him, and let her rest against his strength while she caught her breath.

“They are an army. A renegade army with one purpose: to make money. We’re talking billions and billions of dollars here. This group is just one small branch of an enormous tree. And with what I know, we can start chopping that tree down.”

“Always hoping you live to tell it.”

He grinned. “Yeah, well, there is that. If we can keep alive until morning, though, we’ve got a shot. Come six
A.M
., my guys are staging a raid on the farm where the stuff we dropped tonight was supposed to end up. When they find out I’m not there, they’ll come looking. I figure it’ll take ’em maybe two, three hours after that to get out here, tops.”

“So all we have to do is survive for, what, another
eight hours?” Charlie’s tone made it clear that she thought it was an impossible task.

He lifted the wrist that was manacled to hers, and checked his watch. The faintly luminous blue glow as he pushed a button drew her eyes.

“No more than five or so. It’s three seventeen.”

“Piece of cake.” The sarcasm was unmistakable.

He chuckled. “You’re still alive, aren’t you? I mean to keep us both that way. Trust me.”

Charlie sighed. Under the circumstances, what choice did she have?

“Okay, I trust you. So what do we do now?”

9

W
AS THE ANSWER TO THAT
, it seemed. Walk until Charlie had lost all sense of time and direction, until she was staggering like Frankenstein’s monster through the tangled growth that covered the forest floor, until she wished her poor abused feet were once again numb as they were bruised and pricked and stubbed by countless rocks and sticks and brambles and who knew what else underfoot. Walk up a slope that was growing ever steeper. Walk until she was gasping with every breath she took, until the muscles in her legs ached, until she was ready to collapse with exhaustion. The only good thing she could say about all that walking was that it was probably keeping her from freezing to death. The temperature was in the forties, the wind was strong enough to intermittently shower them with dislodged pine needles, and the water weighing down her wet clothes seemed to have turned into about two tons of icy slush.

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t even glance back, just strode
relentlessly on. He was in his stocking feet, too, his boots having been lost to the river just as hers had been, but if his feet were being systematically tortured he gave no sign of it. His fingers were entwined with hers and the warmth of his hand was appreciated, but that hold she could have broken. It was the unbreakable link of the thrice-cursed handcuffs that kept her on her feet. That, and the knowledge that Woz and Denton and who knew how many others were fanned out behind them, pulling out all the stops to find and kill them before they could make it to safety.

“Is it a secret?” There was an edge to her voice when he didn’t elaborate.

“Are you always this sarcastic, or am I just getting lucky tonight?”

“Look, pal, I’m scared out of my mind and soaking wet and freezing to death and hurting in places I didn’t even know I had and I lost my brand-new, five hundred dollar ostrich-skin boots in the river, which means I’m tromping around here next door to barefoot and my feet are being cut to ribbons and the whole thing is basically all your fault, so if I were you I wouldn’t mess with me.”

“I figured that sooner or later you’d get around to blaming all this on me.” The long-suffering-male tone of his reply made her long to bop him in the back of the head. Lucky for him she didn’t have the energy.

“If the shoe fits …”

“You’re the one with no better sense than to go driving into a deserted area all by your lonesome in the middle of the night.”

“Well,
you’re
the one who parachuted out of an airplane
and crashed into the roof of my car and made me wreck and …”

“That was Skeeter,” he interrupted mildly.

“Oh, that’s right,” she said with bite.
“You
just mistook me for poor Laura, and dragged me into a fouled-up drug bust I’d much rather not know anything about, and nearly got me murdered, and …”

“I’m also the one who saved your life. Who towed your fanny all the way across that river, hmm?”

“Who made me jump into it in the first place? And anyway, I saved your life first. Remember the snake?”

“Oh, yeah, I remember it. Does screaming and wrecking a car because a snake is crawling up your leg count as saving somebody’s life, do you think?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?”

“So are you. So I’d say we’re even.”

“Well, I wouldn’t. And I’m tired of walking. My feet hurt, and I need to rest.”

Having come to an overturned tree, Charlie plopped down upon it without further ado. She was tired and cross and frightened and freezing times about a thousand each, and all she wanted to do was go home.

Fat chance.

The handcuffs worked both ways, she discovered. He was forced to stop walking when she sat. He backtracked, and Sadie was abruptly plopped into her lap. He’d been carrying the little dog, because Charlie needed all her energy to walk and he feared, despite Charlie’s assurances to the contrary, that Sadie might go running off and somehow give them away. Fed up with his attitude toward her and her dog, Charlie cuddled Sadie close. In a burst of mutual feminine pique,
they both glared up at the man who towered over them.

“Damn it … .” He broke off, snapped his teeth together, and ran his hand through his hair. “Charlie, look: There’s a cabin around here close. Just over the top of this ridge, I think. When we get there, you can rest. If we’re really lucky, there might even be a telephone. We can call for help.”

Charlie’s eyes widened as she took that in. A fresh little bud of hope surfaced inside her like the earliest crocus nosing up against a still-thick layer of crusty snow. Cabin, rest, phone—it all sounded amazingly good—in fact, too good to be true.

“How do you know?” she asked suspiciously. It was probably just a ploy to get her on her feet again, and make her keep walking. She was beginning to know how he operated.

“Because I had this whole area scoped out as soon as I found out they meant to use it as a drop zone. Aerial photos, maps, the whole works. Sometimes knowing the lay of the land can mean the difference between life and death.”

That was so obviously true in this case that Charlie didn’t reply. Instead she rallied her uncooperative body enough to stand up. The lure of a cabin was irresistible.

“Lead on,” she said.

“Attagirl.”

He scooped Sadie up, his hand closed around hers again, and he was off, once again pulling her through the dark woods at a killer pace while she hobbled along in his wake as best she could. If there was pursuit, she could neither see nor hear it. The darkness was breached by no
more than an occasional glowing pair of eyes, and the only sounds besides the ones they made were the wind rustling through the treetops and the cries of nocturnal animals.