Gina devoutly hoped they wouldn’t be. She was freezing cold, dead tired, aching in every muscle, and scared to death. Under such conditions, it was difficult to maintain a warm little glow of happiness. But she was managing it.
Cal seemed pretty cheerful, too, for a man armed with two rifles, a pistol, and a knife in his boot, who was keeping a wary eye out for anyone wanting to kill them so he could kill that person first. At her urging, he told her about his beach house in Cape Charles, Virginia, and his company, and his dog, Harley, whose very existence Gina found completely charming. Without revealing too much, he also filled in more details about the circumstances surrounding the plane crash that had dumped him in her lap. In turn, she talked about her life, telling him about the time she’d spent in the hospital and how she’d passed the long, slow days of her recovery watching the birds they kept in giant cages there and developing a fascination with them, which had spurred her, when she was released at last, to go on and get her master’s and PhD in ornithology. She told him about her life as a college professor, and her condo, and beautiful, sunny Northern California.
At length they found an old army road, which Cal instantly mistrusted even though Gina assured him that, to her knowledge, there were no operational land vehicles on Attu other than the tractor. He felt that the road made too obvious a target for a search party, and also that there was no way to know whether the bad guys had brought something like, say, ATVs with them. But since they were sure to hear anything like that coming, and walking was so much easier with the firm surface of the hard-packed dirt road beneath the snow than with the squishy tundra, and time was of the essence, they were trudging along it anyway.
Cal said, “With the weather looking like it is, the trackers and any other search parties will most likely be heading back to the Coast Guard station. We want to beat them there if we can. It’ll be a lot easier to steal a plane out from under the noses of a few men than twenty or more.”
As much faith as she had in Cal, the thought of attempting an escape via plane still made Gina queasy.
She said, “Don’t you think somebody’s going to notice when the plane starts to move? I mean, the only way it can go is down the runway right past the buildings.”
“Once we’re moving, it’s too late.”
“Aren’t you the person whose plane just got shot out of the sky by a surface-to-air missile? What’s preventing whoever shot your first plane out of the sky from shooting you out of the sky again?” If there was a note of exasperation in her voice, it was because they were getting worrisomely close to camp and close to the whole steal-a-plane scenario, which she wouldn’t even have dreamed of agreeing to if it had been presented to her by anyone other than Cal.
“First, I wasn’t flying the plane when it got shot down. Second, as far as I’m aware nobody had any reason to suspect we might get shot down. Now that I’m flying, believe me, us getting shot down just ain’t gonna happen.”
That cocky flyboy answer earned him a jaundiced look. But, whether it was idiotic of her or not, it also made her feel better. It both unsettled and alarmed her to discover that her trust in him apparently knew no bounds.
“Which brings me to something I’ve been meaning to do,” he said, and stopped walking to pull the pistol out of his pocket. She stopped, too, looking silently down at the gun in his gloved hand before glancing up at him. Even through the veil of thickly falling snow, he seemed suddenly bigger and more formidable. His jaw was set, his mouth was unsmiling, and Gina realized that he’d gone into warrior mode: she was face-to-face with the hard-eyed, scary man she’d first encountered. For a second she was taken aback. Then she got a grip and reminded herself that he was now her bear.
“In case of—anything,” he said, his tone as grim as his face—the slight hesitation told her that the “anything” he was referring to was something bad—“I want you to be able to protect yourself. I’m going to give you this, along with a quick lesson in how to use it.”
Okay, now she got it: the “anything” referred to his death or incapacitation. Nice. Gina looked at the gun, looked at him, and held out her hand.
“Can I hold it?” she asked sweetly.
A slightly wary look flickered over his face. He passed the gun to her, grip first. It was big, black, and heavy.
“Basically, all you have to do is point and shoot,” he instructed, leaning close. “But first you have to release the safety, right here—”
Before he could finish, she released then reengaged the safety lever on the back of the slide, ejected the magazine and the chambered round, snapped the magazine back into place, and pulled the slide back to rechamber a round, all in a series of crisp, practiced movements that, when she finished and looked at him, had him rocking back on his heels with his eyes wide.