“Jump.”
If his reply was terse, it was because the situation was desperate. Anyway, her question was largely rhetorical. She’d heard him perfectly well the first time he’d said it: he was proposing that they jump out of a cave entrance some three thousand feet up, on a different side of Terrible Mountain from the cave where they’d entered the mountain last night. With a parachute. A World War II–era parachute. That had been stored since the war ended in one of the garbage cans in the cave along with a couple dozen other parachutes and all kinds of other military odds and ends.
The horrible thing about it was, she couldn’t think of a better alternative.
“There has to be another way,” she said. Alarm spiraled through her system at the very idea. At his urging, her feet flew over the uneven stone floor. She’d stumbled several times already. His iron grip on her hand was all that had kept her upright.
He glanced back at her. “Look, I know what I’m doing. I’ve jumped under worse conditions than these. I’ll get you down alive.”
“Are we even high enough for a parachute to work?”
“Yes.”
The brusqueness of his reply told her that he’d made up his mind. But she hadn’t yet made up hers. She’d already had an object lesson in the inadvisability of letting domineering personalities make life-or-death decisions that affected her. She had to decide for herself what the best thing to do was—and she wasn’t feeling that parachuting off a mountaintop was going to be it.
Moments before, Cal had urgently wakened her. She’d dressed at light speed while he’d gathered the supplies he deemed they needed and explained the situation. Then they’d headed upward through the tunnel as quickly as they could go. Apparently during the night he’d found a map of the tunnel system, and both the cave they’d slept in and this other one, which was right below the summit on the western face of the mountain, were clearly marked. Gina had seen the higher entrance before as well, in a notation on a birder’s map, because a colony of ptarmigans nested near it. That it existed wasn’t in question.
The need to jump out of it was what had every brain cell she possessed screaming at her to put on the brakes.
Only, on the way up they’d paused at the first entrance for just long enough so that she could look out. What she saw had frightened her into turning tail and running with him, and kept her from digging in her heels and shouting Hell no now.
Armed men were swarming up the side of the mountain. The scarily silent tracking dogs that were leading them had been right below the now empty puffin burrows when she’d looked out. Gina had had a brief flashback to Arvid’s death, to Mary’s and Jorge’s bodies on the common-room floor, and had known without a shadow of a doubt that if she and Cal were caught, they would be killed.
At Cal’s insistence the two of them were now dashing for the fissure near the top of the mountain instead of fleeing through the interconnecting tunnels that would take them into the adjoining mountain, and from there into other adjoining mountains, because, as he’d pointed out, the dogs could track them through the tunnels as easily as they could along the trails outside. And she had just minutes in which to make up her mind about whether she was going to go along with him and jump.
Gina was still shuddering at the thought when, as they pelted around a bend in the tunnel, she saw gray fingers of light stretching down from what had to be the cave opening. A waft of fresh air reached her. The temperature dropped by at least ten degrees.
Her stomach dropped straight to her toes.
Oh, God, she thought as Cal pulled her after him toward the light, we’re here. This is it.
The area right inside the opening was the size of a small room with a flat, relatively even floor. After racing through it, Cal stopped at the edge of this fissure in the mountain’s face to look out. Hauled up to stand beside him, Gina stood on the black lip of the precipice and got her first glimpse of the dizzying vista he was expecting her to leap into. Jagged mountain peaks turned a misty lavender by the frosty light of the newly risen sun surrounded them, the tallest of them piercing a fast-moving field of dark clouds. A frigid wind gusted from the east, its force slanting the heavily falling snow sideways. Below them, Terrible Mountain fell away in a sheer straight drop for at least several hundred feet before shooting up a secondary peak and ridges and a whole solid mountainside. That they could crash into. If they tried parachuting down.
It was a long, long way to the ground. Almost three thousand feet, to be exact. The river skirting through the mountains appeared so tiny from Gina’s vantage point that it was no more than a glinting silver thread in the vast white fields of snow. Just looking down gave her vertigo.