She ran, her heart thundering in her chest, her ears roaring, the blank rock walls rushing by, never changing. She felt as if she were caught in a maze without end.
Oh, God. Rick. Ben. The despair was almost paralyzing.
Ben bumped into Pepe and almost shot him before he recognized him in the deep grayness of dawn. “The senhora,” he hissed, grabbing the little Indian by the shoulder. “What happened to her?”
“She ran,” Pepe said politely. “Into the long black hole.”
“Good man. I’m going after her. Take care of yourself, Pepe.”
Pepe nodded. “We will wait, senhor. When the evil ones are gone, we will leave this place and return to Manaus. You must find the senhora.”
“I will,” Ben said grimly, and made for the tunnel. He knew Kates was still behind him, and Dutra was still in the camp, laughing as he fired at any imagined movement around him. Ben focused all of his attention on finding Jillian.
Jillian’s lungs were burning like fire, and her chest felt as if it would explode when she finally plunged out of the tunnel. She fell against the huge boulder that kept the entrance hidden, gasping for breath. Birds, startled by her crashing exit, rose skyward calling their alarm.
It was dawn, the first dim gray seeping through the foliage. Higher up, it would be much brighter, but down on the forest floor it was perpetual twilight. She used the flashlight to find her way around the boulder and out into the open. She was breathing too hard to tell if anyone was following her, but she had to assume someone was. She had to find a hiding place, fast, because she was too breathless to continue. Disregarding the danger, she crawled into the thick foliage and went limp, exhausted by terror.
“Goddammit, what do you mean they got away?” Kates shrieked. “Lewis has the goddamn diamond! He could be anywhere in this damn place, but he’s probably already on his way back to Manaus, laughing every step of the way!”
“I can catch him,” Dutra said, his small head lowered like a bull about to charge. His mean eyes seemed to glow red.
“Yeah, sure,” Kates sneered. “He’s probably waiting right outside the far end of the tunnel, waiting for us to step out. He can pick us off without half trying. We’re trapped in here, goddam—No, wait. Sherwood said there’s another tunnel. They found it in the temple. We can get out.”
“Yes,” Dutra said, that strange smile showing his wolfish incisors again.
Kates gave the camp a disgusted look. “All you had to do was shoot them when they came out of their tents, but you fucked that up too. You only got two of them. Do you know how many we’ll have to hunt down?”
Dutra shrugged, then lifted his pistol and calmly put a bullet in the middle of Kates’s forehead. Kates collapsed, his feet twitching momentarily before stilling forever. “Bastard,” Dutra said, and spat on Kates’s body. “I will find Lewis faster without you.”
Ignoring the three bodies as if they didn’t exist, Dutra calmly began gathering supplies. He had let Lewis have his own way for weeks, but now his time of waiting was over. He would hunt the bastard down, kill him and take his rock, and then have fun with the woman before killing her, too. Kates had been a fool to think that he could ever rule Dutra, and Lewis would learn the same lesson. Lewis thought he was ignorant in the jungle, but he would find that this was not so. Dutra would track him down like an animal, and there would be no escape, for he knew where the bastard was going. All he had to do was get there first, and wait for him.
Ben plunged out of the tunnel, the handkerchief-wrapped diamond tucked safely inside his shirt and his pistol in his hand. That had been a nightmare trip he didn’t want to repeat, accomplished in total darkness, for he had dropped the flashlight when Kates first jumped him. Sweat dripped from his forehead, and ran into his eyes. It had taken all his concentration to stay on his feet as he ran down those wide, shallow steps, and to keep from panicking at the sensation of being buried alive. Only the knowledge that Jillian had entered the tunnel kept him going.
The morning light that greeted him was like heaven; until he saw it, he’d had no idea how tight his nerves were stretched, and what a relief it would be to see daylight again. He edged around the boulder, out from under the thick latticework of limbs and vines, and the light became brighter, sunshine dappling the forest.
There was no sign of Jillian.
When they first reached the Stone City he had taken the precaution of slipping out during the night and hiding a pack of provisions at the outside entrance of the tunnel. Now he dragged his pack out of its hiding place, slipped the diamond into a pocket where it would be adequately protected, then swiftly lifted the burden to his back and buckled it in place. She couldn’t be too far ahead, but if he didn’t find her pretty soon, she would probably disappear into the jungle without a trace. His chest felt as if there were a tight band around it, continually pulling tighter. He had to find her.
Someone had come out of the tunnel. Jillian froze, not daring to lift her head for fear the movement would give her away. She lay with her cheek pressed to the ground, her eyes closed, her blood thundering loudly in her ears. She tried to hold her breath, to calm her pulse, so she could better track the person’s movements by sound. Insects rustled in the moist humus beneath her ear, and her fingers dug into the dirt.
It might be Ben. The thought crept into her consciousness. The terror that he had been killed by that first shot had been so great, so paralyzing, that she had barely been able to think. But Ben was tough, and supremely capable; he knew that they would have to get through the tunnel ahead of Kates and Dutra. She had to take the chance of moving, just to see.
Cautiously, inch by inch, she lifted her head and moved a leaf out of the way. She still couldn’t see anything. The sound began moving away from her.
Desperately she sat up and crawled halfway out of her hiding place. A set of broad shoulders burdened by a backpack was disappearing into the foliage, broad shoulders topped by a head with very dark, too-long hair curling over the shirt collar.
Relief shot through her, relief so sharp that it was almost as debilitating as the terror had been. She sank to the ground. “Ben!”
She couldn’t put much force in her voice, but he heard her, or heard something, for he stopped and whirled, ducking into concealment. She grabbed her flashlight and struggled to her feet. “Ben!”
He stepped back into view and was beside her with three long strides, crushing her in his arms, his head bent down to hers with his cheek resting on top of her head. She clung to him, tears burning her eyes, the feel of his hard body safe and whole against hers so sublime that she never wanted to let him go. For an hour of hell in the dawn, she hadn’t known if he lived or not, and the pain of it had been crushing. She had lost Rick; she didn’t know what she would have done if anything had happened to Ben, too.
“Shhh,” he whispered. “I’ve got you. Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Rick’s dead,” she said in a choked voice against his chest. “Dutra shot him. I saw it.”
He stroked her hair. Personally he didn’t feel that Sherwood was any great loss, but hell, he’d been Jillian’s brother. “I’m sorry.” He began urging her forward. “Come on, sweetheart, we can’t stay here. We have to move, and move fast.”
She went, but her mind was beginning to work again. “Why can’t we stay here and ambush them when they come out the tunnel?” As soon as she said it, she remembered the other tunnel. “No. We don’t know which way they’ll come out, do we?”
“I’d bet on the other tunnel, since we don’t know where it exits the bowl. It would be safest. They’ll have to work their way around, but they need to come back here so they can retrace the way we came. We need to take advantage of what time we have to put as much distance between us as we can.”
“But what about Jorge and the others?”
“Pepe said they would hide, and wait until Dutra and Kates left. Then they’ll make their way back to the river. They’re experienced in the jungle,
they’ll be all right.”
She fell silent then, saving her breath. Ben pushed her ahead of him at almost a run. Jillian shut her mind down and let her body take over. She didn’t want to think, because if she did she would think about Rick and she couldn’t afford the weakness of crying right now. There would be time for tears later on, when they were safe, when the cocoon of shock had worn off and could no longer keep the grief at bay. All she had to do right now was keep placing one foot in front of the other as fast as she could, without the usual caution of looking both overhead and underfoot before taking a step.
Finally Ben slowed her down with a hand on her arm, and moved in front of her now that the danger of a bullet coming at them from behind had passed. “We can take it easier now,” he murmured, keeping his voice down even though he hadn’t been able to detect any sign of pursuit. “Pace ourselves. We have a long way to go.”
A very long way, she thought. Around a thousand miles, give or take a hundred or two. The thought of it was daunting; they had traveled that far to get there, but they would be returning under very different circumstances, without the support of a substantial party. Ben had somehow managed to get a backpack, but he couldn’t possibly have enough supplies in there to last them all the way back. They would have to hunt for their food, and any gunshot could guide Kates and Dutra right to them. She had a heartening thought: Jorge and the others outnumbered Kates and Dutra; they might overpower them. She and Ben might not be pursued at all. But they wouldn’t know, and couldn’t afford to assume that they weren’t.
She had gone to bed the night before thinking that she had never been happier. Now she was numb from shock. Her brother had been shot dead right in front of her, and she and Ben were running for their lives. The irony of it made her want to scream, but she didn’t dare do that, either. She could do nothing but keep walking, for only by surviving could she hope to see Dutra brought to justice.
“We have to make it past the ledge today,” Ben said.
She remembered the ledge, and her mind recoiled from it. “We can’t cover that much distance! It’s over a day’s walk, remember? It was almost noon of the second day, after we got off the ledge, before we found the tunnel.”
“We also set a very easy pace and took a lot of breaks because of your shoulder. It’s about one day’s normal walk, and we’re going to do it faster than that. If they beat us there, we’re caught. Once we’re past the ledge, there’s no bottleneck where they’ll be able to find us.”
“It took us several hours to walk the ledge,” she pointed out. “We’ll be on that thing in the dark!”
“I know,” he said grimly.
Her protest hadn’t been in argument, only to state the difficulty of the task he had set for them. Once it was said, she put it out of her mind and concentrated only on doing it. They had to get past the ledge, so they would. No matter what pace he set, she would keep up.
He paused briefly after about an hour and they each took a small drink of water. Neither of them had eaten, of course, but food could wait. Ben studied her face with sharp eyes; she was wan, but he could see the determination there. She would make it.
The morning had been one nightmare after another, and the headlong dash through the jungle to the ledge was yet another. She marveled at how different the horrors could be and still be nightmares. Rick. The horrible fear for Ben. The tunnel, and the panic. And now this endurance race, when she was hungry and tired and dazed from everything that had happened. The textures and forms of the nightmares were very different, but they were all the stuff of bad dreams.
After a couple more hours they stopped for water again and ate some canned fruit. “We’ll take the time to eat tomorrow,” Ben promised.
“I know,” she said, getting to her feet, ready to push on. “I’m okay.”
His big hand touched her hair in a brief caress, and then they began walking again.
They kept walking through the daily rainstorm, though the wetness made them cold and miserable. They had a lot of time to make up, and even so, it was almost sunset when they reached the long ledge that had taken Martim’s life and almost stolen Rick, too. She had saved her brother’s life, only to lose him a week later. She tried not to think about it.
They paused for a moment, staring at it. “Remember,” Ben said. “Stay close to the wall.”
“We’ll have to use the flashlight in a little while,” she said. “Anyone coming up behind us will be able to see it.”
“That’s a chance we’ll have to take. I came down that damn tunnel in the dark, but we can’t walk this ledge like that.” He had stashed a flashlight in the pack he’d hidden away, but he hadn’t had the pack with him when he’d been barreling down the tunnel. All of the flashlights had heavy-duty batteries, but there was no telling how long they would last. They would use only one on the ledge holding the other as a reserve.
She walked. She had been walking since dawn, and it was sunset now. The darkness began to intensify, but she didn’t let herself flag. She turned on the flashlight, hoping they had put enough turns between them and the beginning of the trail so that anyone following them wouldn’t see the telltale beam.
Her legs were trembling with fatigue. The small can of fruit hadn’t been much fuel. “Do you have a candy bar?” she asked over her shoulder.
“No, but I have some cooked rice that I saved.”
“Can you get to it?”
He did, and passed the pouch up to her. She plunged her hand into it, got a handful of rice, and squeezed it into a ball. She gave the pouch back to him. “Thanks.” She began munching on the ball of cold rice. It wasn’t very tasty, but it was food, and her body could use the carbs.
Behind her, Ben did the same thing. There wasn’t much to be said for cold gooey rice, except that it stuck together really well, which made it easy to eat.
Her flashlight beam caught the gleam of yellow eyes and she froze, her scalp prickling.
“Easy,” Ben murmured, drawing the pistol and clicking it off safety. “It’s a coati. They’re not particularly dangerous, but they do have nice long claws. Let’s not crowd him.”
She played the flashlight over the longsnouted animal with a banded tail like a raccoon’s. “I thought they lived in trees.”
“Usually. I don’t know what this guy is doing by himself. C’mon, scat.” He picked up a stone and threw it at the coati. It recoiled, but remained solidly in the middle of the ledge.
He threw another stone, striking it on the paw. “Scat!”
The coati remained, confused by the bright light shining in its eyes. Ben sighed and picked up a larger rock. “I don’t want to have to hurt you, little guy, but you’re moving one way or the other.”
The third rock struck it on the haunch, and the coati made a high-pitched noise of pain and startlement. Swiftly it scrambled over the side of the ledge, out of sight. They heard the branches of a bush rustling, telling them that the cliff below wasn’t completely vertical at this point.
Relieved, they hurried on. She wondered what they would do if they met a jaguar on the trail, or an ocelot. Who gave way then?
The ledge seemed unending. The day had been full of things she refused to think about, and here was another. She didn’t let herself anticipate the end or try to guess how long they had been on it. All she had to do was keep walking, and when the time came, the ledge would end and the day would be over.
Ben’s presence behind her was as solid as a brick wall. She kept walking. She knew they had spent hours on the ledge when they crossed it the first time, but they had also sat out a storm and been delayed by Martim’s death and Rick’s accident as well as by her own injury. Her shoulder barely gave a twinge now and then, having healed in the week that had passed. She was stronger, and they were moving faster. It wouldn’t take much longer.
Her thoughts were so turned inward that she didn’t even notice when the ledge ended and the jungle spread around them once more.
Ben halted her automatic
strides, sliding his big hand under her hair and gently massaging the nape of her neck. “We did it,” he said gently. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll find a place where we can sleep for the night.”
17
How did you get the pack and all of these supplies?” Jillian asked in confusion, indicating the tent that Ben was swiftly and efficiently erecting.
“The tent and pack were Martim’s,” Ben said. “I sneaked most of this stuff out of camp not long after we got there. It seemed like a smart precaution to take, and damn if it wasn’t. If nothing had happened, we wouldn’t have needed it. I had it stashed in the rocks outside the tunnel entrance, because I knew if everything started popping, I sure as hell didn’t want a pack slowing me down when I was coming through that tunnel.”
The small tent seemed like heaven to her, a safe place where she could stretch out and relax for the first time that day. She had been dreading sleeping out in the open, and when she realized that Ben had managed to get one of the tents she had been almost giddy with relief.
“Are you hungry?” he asked. “I don’t want to risk a fire, but there’s stuff here that doesn’t need cooking.”
“No, I’m not hungry at all now.” The rice ball, and anxiety, had taken care of her appetite. She had been thirsty, but the first thing they had done on stopping had been to drink water.
She held the flashlight for him while he finished setting up the tent. He had found a shallow overhang to provide a bit of shelter, and now he cut fronds and vines to drape over the tent, further camouflaging their position.
“After you,” he said, indicating the tent, and gratefully she crawled in; he followed, and zipped the flap, closing out the jungle.
“Get settled, sweetheart. We can’t afford to keep the flashlight on any longer than we have to.”