Cover Of Night

"I love you, too," she replied, and went. She had to force herself away from him, and she’d gone only about fifty yards when she stopped to look back.

He had already vanished.

Chapter 30

Once he was safely our of Cate’s site. Cal use the walking sticks he’d cut for himself, digging them in and propelling himself forward almost as if he were on skis, looking for every bit of speed he could muster. He wasn’t hiking across miles of mountainous terrain, wasting precious time; he was going down in as straight a line as he could manage, as last as he could manage without turning cartwheels and landing headfirst on a boulder. He wanted to be in the valley while there were still hours of daylight left.

He’d used thermal scopes himself. They were heavy, and during the day the images blurred, lost their distinctness. He’d bet his life – he was betting his life – that those guys put the thermals aside during the day and used normal scopes and binoculars for surveillance. That’s what he would do in a situation like this, where they were dealing with normal, mostly middle-aged people, men who occasionally went hunting but for the most part farmed or worked in shops. Against people like that, regular surveillance would be good enough.

But they didn’t know about him. He wasn’t normal, and no way in hell would they spot him with a pair of binoculars, much less a magnification scope with such a narrow field of vision. He wasn’t waiting for the cover of night. By the time twilight came and they switched back to the thermals, he’d be in their front yard, practically under their noses, and they wouldn’t know a thing until it was too late.

Cate was their target – Cate. He didn’t care what their objective was, what they wanted; as far as he was concerned, they had signed their own death warrants.

Cate was in the valley by noon, her muscles shaking with fatigue. The unfamiliar gait forced on her by the snowshoes had left her thigh muscles sore and trembling. At the first rappel she’d been forced to make she was still inside the snow line, so she’d had to leave the damn snowshoes on, which had matte for an interesting experience. She wasn’t fond of rappelling anyway and had never done it alone. A rappel looked like easy fun to the casual observer, but it wasn’t. It was a demanding physical maneuver, and if she slipped, if she did it wrong, she could maim or kill herself. To make things even more interesting, her arms and shoulders were sore from the unaccustomed climbing.

When she was finally out of the snow, she cut herself out of the improvised snowshoes – and promptly fell, tumbling several feet and banging her right knee hard against a large rock. "Son of" a bitch! Swearing between her clenched teeth, she sat on the wet ground and rocked back and forth for a few minutes, holding her injured knee and wondering if she’d be able to walk on it. If she couldn’t, she was screwed.

When the pain lessened from agony to merely severe, she tried to pull up the leg of her sweatpants and long Johns so she could see her knee, but the long johns were too tight. She tried to get to her feet, and the knee gave out in the middle of the first effort. Oh, shit. She had to be able to walk. The joint had to support her, because she had another rappel to make, longer than the first.

She grabbed one of her walking sticks and jammed it into the ground, using it as leverage to swing her body around so she was closer to a skinny tree. Seizing one of the lower branches, she pulled herself to a standing position and swayed there for a minute; holding on to the limb for dear life, she gradually eased her weight onto her knee. It hurt, but not as badly as she’d feared.

The only way to inspect the knee was to pull her pants down, so she did. The skin was broken, and a huge knot was beginning to swell and darken just below her kneecap. At least it wasn’t the kneecap itself.

An ice pack that she could strap on would be nice right about now. She turned and looked up at the snow, and shook her head. Not even for the joy of packing snow on her knee could she climb back up that slope.

Holding the tree for balance, she took a tentative step. Again, it hurt, but the joint held and felt stable. The injury was nothing more than a severe bruise, then, no torn ligaments. When she could put all her weight on the leg and walk normally, she continued down the slope, swearing every step of the way because going downhill was hard on the knees anyway.

The last rappel, the longest one, was a nightmare. She had to stay squared off on her legs or she would fall sideways into the rock. Her right knee didn’t want anything squaring off on it, didn’t want to absorb any impact. It was so swollen now that she could barely flex it. When she was finally on the bottom, she was bathed in sweat.

The air in the valley was cool, but pleasantly so. She looked up at the towering mountains around her, at the white caps they now wore, the dusting reaching halfway down the rugged slopes. That was where she’d been, all the way up there.

Cal was still up there, but he would be farther to the west, toward the cut. She sent a brief but fervent prayer for safekeeping winging his way, then turned and began the long trudge around the land spit to where she and Cal had climbed down the bluff. She remembered that the base of the cliff was nothing but rocks.

and she almost burst into tears. She couldn’t depend on the knee on that kind of footing, and she certainly couldn’t crawl over the rocks because she couldn’t bear to put her weight down on the swollen part of her knee. The only way she could negotiate those rocks was sitting down and sliding from rock to rock. Oh, joy.

She didn’t have to, at least not the entire trip. In the two and a half days she’d been gone, the townspeople had organized watches so they wouldn’t be caught by surprise. Roland Gettys spotted her and came down the chiff to help. Getting over the rocks and to the top of the cliff still took time and considerable effort, longer than she had expected – almost as long as it had taken her to get off the mountain.