“Good. Go. Be as quiet and quick as you can. I’ll be right behind you.”
Gina turned and started walking. The first few steps required a major effort of will, but as she headed steadily away from the river, leaving got easier. As he had promised, Cal stayed right behind her. Again, she thought his intent was to block her from any bullet that might come their way. Nerves jumping, hideously conscious of every rattling pebble and crackling piece of ice underfoot, Gina went as quickly as she could, blessing the whoosh of the wind, the honking geese, even the distant murmur of the river that she couldn’t see, because it masked the sounds of their passing from any unseen ears that might hear.
After what had happened to Arvid, she was all too horribly aware that death could explode out of nowhere at any time.
She couldn’t let herself think about that, or about Arvid, or anything else. Not now, not while she needed all her concentration just to keep putting one foot ahead of the other.
Except for the occasional, nerve-racking moment when an unusually strong gust of wind swept through and lifted whole sections of it, the fog swirled around them, gray and thick. She knew that they probably owed their lives to it. It hid them, hid the marks their boots had to be leaving on the shell of ice and snow that covered the trail. They slipped through it as silently as possible. Listening intently, she continually searched the drifting banks of mist with frightened eyes, but nothing was there. She could see the trail for no more than a few feet in front of her; she was able to follow it only because she knew where it was and how it ran.
Snow began to fall, big, fat flakes that drifted down lazily at first, then came faster and faster. She welcomed it, knowing sufficient quantities would mask the marks of their passing. The temperature dropped until her face felt like it was freezing and each breath became a frigid assault on her lungs. Her feet got cold in her insulated boots. The wind picked up, whistling through the high passes, rushing down the slopes, blowing the fog and snow into wintry dust devils that rose like dervishes around them.
They reached Terrible Mountain as dusk fell, and began to climb. The rusted-out skeleton of a World War II–era vehicle—“A Weasel!” Cal murmured reverently upon spotting it—was overturned near where the almost invisible path to their destination branched off from the main trail. It was the landmark Gina knew to look for to find the way. The new path went almost straight uphill, and grew so steep and so slippery that Gina needed handholds in places to get to the next section. Thickening darkness made it hard to see by the time they reached the last little bit, and if she hadn’t had the familiar growling rumble to guide her she might have missed the final turnoff. What she had once considered an inconvenience she now knew was a blessing: the cave was not on any trail. It would, she thought, be almost impossible for anyone who was unfamiliar with it to find.
“Wait.” Cal stopped her with a hand on her arm when she would have scrambled up through the rocks toward it. Looming close behind her, he was a tall, broad-shouldered, reassuringly solid shape in a gloomy world that had been rendered almost phantasmal by the mix of heavily falling snow and shifting fog. The purple twilight made his eyes look black as coal. His hard, handsome face was grim.
Holding her in place, his grip hard enough so that she could feel the imprint of his gloved fingers through her coat, he leaned down so that his mouth was at the approximate level of her ear.
“What the hell is that?” His voice was just loud enough so that she could hear him. She looked up at him with a frown.
“What?”
“That sound.”
“Oh.” She supposed that to anyone who hadn’t heard it before, the continuous low, grinding errm coming from somewhere up ahead of them would sound ominous. To her, the sound was comforting: it reminded her of a giant cat purring. Lots of giant cats purring.
“Puffins,” she said. “They have burrows all along here, among the rocks. That’s how I found the cave.”
“Birds? You’ve got to be kidding me.” He released his hold on her.
Gina would have smiled in spite of herself, but her facial muscles were too frozen. “We’re here,” she told him, and started to climb.
Careful not to put her hands or feet into a burrow, catching glimpses of dozens of funny little red-beaked clown faces that were the puffins peering out at her anxiously as she passed, she ascended the black, snow-dusted, nearly vertical cliff until she reached the entrance to the cave. Impossible to see from the path, it had an unimpeded view of the valley where the LORAN station was located, and beyond it to the bay and sea. The entrance was tall and narrow, a slit in the rock no more than five feet wide that was all but hidden by a jutting stone formation beside it.