Cal was so close that their bodies brushed. Looking at him, she saw that he was assessing the runway, his eyes intent. Determination was visible in every hard line of his face. She could feel him gathering himself, preparing for whatever the next step was. Her gaze flitted desperately around, looking for danger, for some reason to call a halt to what she now, more than ever, really, truly did not want to do. What she saw made her pulse skitter with horror. She grabbed Cal’s leg.
“They’re here,” she whispered to him, leaning in close and gesturing urgently at the large party of armed men who appeared like wraiths out of the sleet. The men were at the eastern edge of the compound, jogging at double time toward the buildings. Alarm made her stiffen and reach toward the gun in her pocket, only to abort the maneuver. The falling sleet would coat it with ice in seconds, just like she and Cal were coated with ice. She wanted to keep it dry and operational for as long as she could. Anyway, Cal had one of the rifles, both of which he’d tucked inside his coat when it became obvious the sleet wasn’t going to let up, in his hands. “Oh, my God, did they track us here?”
She didn’t dare raise her voice to the level they’d previously been using, which had been fairly loud to be heard over the combined noise of the sleet and the generator. Cal heard her anyway. He shook his head.
“They’re not coming toward us. Look.”
He was right: they were heading straight for the buildings. From the pair of dogs with them, she deduced that these were the men who had tracked them to Terrible Mountain. She shut her mouth and shrank against the nearest ice-coated tank: the search party was passing terrifyingly close. At that moment only the twelve or so car-size capsules of fuel stood between her and Cal, and them.
Her heart started to slam against her breastbone.
Thankfully the men seemed to be more interested in getting out of the storm than they were in looking around. It was obvious that they had no inkling that she and Cal were anywhere in the vicinity, and she prayed that nothing happened to clue them in. Nothing did. Minutes after Gina first spotted them, the last of them filed inside the building.
She drew a deep, shaking breath of relief.
“We’re going now. Run as fast as you can to the hangar. Stay low. I’ll be right behind you.”
Cal’s words sent her gaze slewing around to him. Her stomach seized up, and a hard knot formed in her chest.
“But we can’t—they’ll see us. They’ll see the plane. Did you see how many of them there are?”
“If we don’t go now, we won’t get another chance. As soon as the sleet stops, this yard is going to be crawling with gunmen. And in the meantime, all it’s going to take is for one of those dogs to have to take a leak and in the process pick up our scent, and we’re done.”
Their faces were inches apart as they leaned closer to make themselves heard. Their eyes met and held. Gina realized that this was it, the fork in the road, the moment of choice. All she had to do was say, you know, I think I’ll give this a miss. He wouldn’t leave without her, she knew.
Wordlessly she got up on the balls of her feet, then took off at a sprint across the icy open field toward the hangar. She stayed low, her back bent against the lashings of sleet, her boots slamming through the layer of ice that covered the stabilizing snow. The pounding of her pulse in her ears was louder even than the drumming of the sleet hitting the hangar’s corrugated metal roof.
Bursting through the open garage-style door into the shadowy darkness beyond, Gina processed the instant absence of pelting sleet with a rush of gratitude. Then she looked at the small plane with its large single propeller in front of her and felt her stomach sink straight to her toes. The thing was yellow and white, about the size of a mosquito, and looked like it was held together with duct tape.
She had zero confidence that it could make it into the sky, much less carry them across an ocean.
Cal was right behind her. His eyes touched on her, seemed to register that she was in one piece, moved around the interior of the hangar as though checking for any potential threat—it was empty—and fastened on the plane.
“Come on.” He headed toward it.
No. No, no, no. Every instinct she possessed screamed in protest. Gina followed him anyway. The ice that had accumulated on his clothing fell off in thin sheets as he did a quick walk around the plane, checking it out. She supposed that ice was sliding off her in a similar fashion as well. She was too agitated to look.
Hoping for a locked door was hoping for too much, Gina knew even before Cal pulled the door open. The plane’s dark interior yawned before her, as terrifying as anything she’d ever seen: the mouth of the beast.
She thought, I can’t do this.
“Put your foot there and climb in.” He patted a wing strut even as he turned to look at her. She didn’t know what he saw in her face, but she knew that her heart had pushed way beyond pounding to go into panicked palpitations.
“Hey.” He turned to her, cupping her face in his hands. Her cheeks were frozen. His gloves felt frozen. Neither was as cold as the blood pumping through her veins. “You trust me, remember?”
“Oh, God.” She gripped his wrists, nodded jerkily.