Line of Fire Read online

  The sounds behind them resolved into words and orders to be thorough and make sure the Americans didn't circle back and slip through the line.

  "Hurry, Princess," he urged her.

  "I am," she wailed back in a panting whisper.

  He looked up and frowned. The cliff wall above them had sheared away recently, leaving a nearly smooth granite surface ahead of them. It wasn't far beyond that he'd seen the shadow that might be a small cave.

  He glanced back. They were maybe eighty feet above the ground. From his vantage point, he glimpsed the red berets that formed the human net. Once the rebels broke out of the trees, they'd have a clear shot at him and Kimberly on that smooth cliff face. The two of them would be easy pickings.

  Since most politically motivated kidnappers expected to kill their hostages anyway, he didn't hold out much hope that they wouldn't kill Kimberly, too. They had to get to that cave before the rebels got out into the open at the foot of the cliff.

  "Let's go," he urged her.

  "Where?" she screamed in a bare whisper. "I'm stuck. I can't find anywhere to grab on."

  He looked over at her. Like him, she'd reached the base of the sheared area.

  To his experienced eye, he saw the tiny handholds and footholds that he'd need to scale the surface. It was going to take a lot of strength to pull himself past some big gaps in the footholds, but he could do it.

  "How are your arms holding out, Kimberly?"

  "They feel like rubber," she grunted.

  Damn. Just as he'd thought. Even perfectly fresh, she probably didn't have the upper body power to brute force her way up this stretch of rock. And after their earlier run, she was toast. He looked up, gauging how rough a climb it would be.

  No way around it. That was going to be one hard stretch of climbing.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the line of red berets. There wasn't time for him to go on ahead and drop a rope to Kimberly and haul her up. Besides, if her arms were as tired as he expected they were, she wouldn't be able to hang on to a rope anyway.

  Maybe he could fashion a foot harness for her to stand in and haul her up that way.

  A soldier shouted out in Spanish.

  Tex grimaced. They'd been spotted on the cliff face. The line of soldiers broke into a run.

  He didn't have the strength left to haul himself, all his gear and Kimberly up the cliff. He could drop one or both of the rifles or abandon Kimberly. Christ, what a choice. Drop the gear they needed to stay alive or sacrifice a human life. Kimberly's life.

  "Hang on, darlin'," he grunted as he wiggled out of the sling for the heavy sniper rifle. He popped out the clip, pocketed it, and then let the weapon go. It fell with a clatter behind him. Sixty-five pounds less.

  Every second counted now. He worked his way horizontally across the cliff face to where Kimberly clung to the vertical wall. "I need you to climb on my back, honey," he directed with urgent calm.

  "What?" She looked at him blankly.

  "I don't have time to explain. We've got to get up this stretch of rock and you're not strong enough to do it. Climb on me piggyback and hang on tight."

  "I'll throw off your balance!"

  "They're going to shoot us off this wall like flies. Now move!" he ordered her.

  Her eyes went wide. She spared one glance for the sheer wall above her and then did as he'd ordered. It was a dicey moment when she let go of the rock face and transferred her weight to his shoulders.

  He had no idea if he could do this, but it was their only hope.

  "Wrap your legs around my waist and hang on tight, sweetheart. Lean in close to me so your weight's right against my back."

  He'd never rock climbed with over a hundred pounds on his back before. The balance was completely different, and every few seconds he felt on the verge of oversetting and falling over backward.

  His fingers cramped, then his entire arms cramped. Even his toes were knots of pain before long.

  More crashing in the trees behind them. The rebels had to be almost close enough to break out into view.

  The next handhold was over his head. He was going to have to do a chin-up without any footholds at all, and then let go with one hand, reach up, and pull himself another two feet or so vertically before he could catch another crack with his foot.

  "Hang on tight," he grunted.

  She plastered herself against him, her face pressed tightly against his neck.

  He exhaled hard and began to pull. He thought of every pull-up he'd ever done. Of the ones he'd gutted out in Special Forces training when he was so tired he couldn't stand up. Of the dozens of them he'd popped off to show the new recruits how soft they were. He thought about failure and the flat refusal of the men of Charlie Squad to give up. He thought about Kimberly's mouth on his, of how bad he wanted to make love to her someday.

  A groan of Herculean effort slipped out from between his clenched teeth.

  And somehow he gutted through pulling three hundred combined pounds four feet up a cliff by nothing more than his fingertips and brutal determination.

  He blew hard, took one breath and shifted all his weight to his right hand. He threw his left hand up.

  It missed the handhold!

  His fingernails raked the cliff and he and Kimberly lurched precariously. His right hand cramped with the effort of hanging on.

  He flung his left arm up again. His fingers caught in a tiny crack. He reached deep in his gut and found one last bit of strength even he didn't know he had.

  He pulled one more time for all he was worth.

  His right foot scrabbled frantically at the cold rock wall. He was losing it. He couldn't hang on for much longer.

  His toe caught. He shoved hard with his thigh, taking the weight off his trembling arms. Another foothold, two more hand shifts and they were past the granite sheet.

  Shouts from below.

  "Oh, God, they've broken out of the jungle," Kimberly sobbed in his ear. "They're going to shoot us!"

  A small ledge came into sight at eye level. He pushed, pulled and scrambled the last few feet and fell onto the tiny shelf with Kimberly sprawled on top of him.

  A bullet zinged past them, nicking the rock and sending sharp bits of rock flying at them. His cheek stung from where the debris hit him. "Is there a cave?" he panted, too spent to turn his head and look for himself.

  Kimberly scrambled off his back and lay flat beside him. "There's an opening of some kind," she panted back. "It's pretty small, though."

  "Can we get through it?" He was too focused on the soldiers pouring out of the jungle below and on pulling out his AK-47 to spare a look at it.

  "I'll fit. It'll be tight for you."

  "Go. I'll hold them off until you're inside."

  She scrambled toward the opening behind him.

  The best way to slow down an army was to take out its leaders. He studied the posture and body language of the men pouring into the clearing. Then he took careful aim and shot the soldier all the others seemed to be looking at. The guy dropped like a rock, shot through the head.

  He ducked back as an answering volley of fire sprayed more shattered rock all around him.

  A grunt and an oompf from behind him and then Kimberly's voice. "I'm inside. It's pretty big in here. You'll be able to stand up."

  Praise the Lord.

  He wiggled backward on his belly as the soldiers congregated below. They buzzed like a horde of angry hornets. They'd stepped away from the guy he'd shot and were ignoring the body. A clean kill, then.

  They looked like they were waiting for someone else to arrive who could give them orders before they attempted to follow him and Kimberly up the cliff.

  His feet hit rock. He glanced back over his shoulder. It was more of a slit than an opening.

  Good thing he hadn't eaten much for the last couple days or he probably wouldn't fit through the narrow gap.

  He slid back until he could stand up beside the opening. By shimmying sideways and sucking in his
gut like crazy, he managed to squeeze through the jagged opening.

  He got stuck momentarily, but with a hard tug and the rending of his shirtfront, he popped through the entrance. He didn't look forward to squeezing back out of there. Please, he prayed, let that be a problem he had to face.

  A narrow shaft of light fell on the floor. The cave was probably thirty feet across and fifty or more deep, based on the echo from his movements.

  Using a cigarette lighter, he did a quick sweep of the cave. They had five, maybe ten, minutes before soldiers would start popping up over the edge of that granite wall.

  "Do you see another way out of here?" Kimberly asked hopefully out of the darkness to his right.

  He swept the flame along the cave's walls, floor, and ceiling. Nothing but solid rock.

  "Nope. Nothing."

  "How are we going to get out of here, then?" she asked. Desperation coursed through her voice.

  He thought fast. He had twenty-two rounds left in the AK-47. If he was conservative, and lucky, he could take out roughly that many men before he ran out of ammo. But the twenty-third guy up that cliff would kill them.

  There'd been at least fifty guys at the base of the cliff when he'd ducked in here. The rebel soldiers were expendable to their leaders. He had no illusions about the twenty-third guy. He'd get sent up the cliff. It was just a matter of time. He needed a different plan.

  "Okay, Kimberly, here's what we're going to do. The first guy up that cliff is likely to be a scout type. He'll have more training than most of the other grunts down there. I'm banking on the fact that he'll have some sort of radio with him for reporting back in to his bosses."

  She nodded, listening intently.

  "You're going to sit in the back of the cave where he can see you if he points a flashlight through the entrance. You're going to act scared and indicate that I've left you here and climbed on up the cliff. You're alone."

  Kimberly frowned.

  "You've got to make it look convincing. Play the helpless female to the hilt. Make him think all he has to do is waltz in here and tie you up. Do you think you can do that?"

  "Yes," she answered crisply, all business.

  Thank God, she apparently wasn't one of those women who fell apart in stressful situations. Snakes excepted, of course.

  He continued. "I'm going to hide over here by the entrance. When the scout comes in, I'm going to jump him and take him down. I'll search him for his radio. When I find it, I'll toss it to you. In a minute I'm going to give you a series of radio frequencies to memorize. Whichever one works on his radio, you dial it up and start shouting for help to whoever answers you. With me so far?"

  She nodded.

  "Once we've got a radio, I'm going to take the gun back from you and hold the doorway. I'll pick off whoever pokes their head up over that ledge with the AK-47."

  "Until when?" Kimberly asked innocently.

  "Until I either run out of ammo or somebody answers your radio call and comes to rescue us."

  "What if—" she started to ask.

  He cut her off. "Let's cross that bridge when we get to it." She frowned in consternation and he added, "I'm trained in hand-to-hand combat and I've got a knife. Any guy topping that granite face is going to be easy to push off the cliff. We can hold out here for a good, long while."

  She nodded, her expression uncertain.

  He rattled off a series of emergency radio frequencies, all monitored by satellite around the world, all fed directly into Charlie Squad's headquarters. He made Kimberly repeat them back to him until he was sure she had them down cold.

  He gave her the final instructions. "If I go down before I find a radio, fire the gun at anyone who steps through that opening. Work your way over to the corpse and search for a radio. Got it?"

  She stared at him, her eyes wide as he shoved the AK-47 into her hands. "Don't go down, Tex," she murmured.

  He moved into position by the door and grinned back at her briefly. "I'm not planning on it, darlin'."

  She took her place on the floor directly across from the door. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see her seated there bravely, the rifle hidden out of sight beside her.

  He took his place on top of a boulder just inside the entrance. From there he could jump down on top of anybody who stepped through that opening.

  "Kimberly," he called low across the space.

  She looked up nervously.

  "In case I don't get another chance…well, just in case, I wanted to tell you how well you've done the last couple days. Not too many women could've rolled with the punches the way you have. You did good."

  Her smile warmed him all the way across the cave.

  "Thanks," she replied simply. "I couldn't have made it without you. I owe you my life."

  The sound of voices drifted up from below. It sounded like an argument of some kind, but the acoustics of the cave distorted the sound so much he couldn't make out what they were saying. He glanced at his watch. About two minutes and somebody'd be climbing through that opening.

  Four minutes passed. He strained to hear the telltale scrabbling sounds of people scaling the cliff.

  Nothing yet.

  His watch hit the six-minute mark.

  Still nothing.

  He glanced over at Kimberly, who was alternating between staring at the door and glancing fearfully at him. He saw her lips moving periodically, reciting the radio frequencies to herself. Or maybe she was praying, too.

  He didn't have the time for prayer on most missions, and he preferred to put his stock in being better prepared and trained than the other guy. But as long minutes of waiting ticked by, he found himself offering up a plea for their safety to whatever higher powers that were.

  Ten minutes passed. Still nothing. What the hell was going on? He didn't hear any voices at all now.

  He waited another five minutes. No army was dead silent for that long. Kimberly was starting to fidget on her side of the cave. He gestured her to stay put and risked moving into the opening to see if he could hear something from there.

  Silence.

  In fact, a few birds were starting to call out again.

  What the…

  He moved over to Kimberly's side. "Give me the gun," he murmured.

  She handed the weapon to him.

  He gritted his teeth and faced the cave opening again. He really hated tight spaces. He steeled himself and squeezed out through the narrow gap. He felt like dough squeezed through a pasta maker. An angel hair spaghetti-maker. He dropped flat and inched over toward the edge of the cliff.

  Very carefully he peered over the drop-off.

  The soldiers were gone. All of them. Except the one he'd shot, who still lay sprawled where he'd fallen.

  Cold bastards. Didn't take their dead with them. Charlie Squad never left one of its own behind, dead or alive.

  He scanned the jungle below. There wasn't a single glimpse of a soldier anywhere at all.

  That was completely bizarre. Why would they just give up and go away all of a sudden? They had their quarry trapped. All they had to do was come up and get her. It made no sense whatsoever.

  He stared down at the dead guy speculatively. Was this another trap of some kind?

  And then something struck him.

  Something that made him sick to his stomach.

  He scanned the ground around the base of the cliff quickly, not finding what he was looking for. He searched again, slowly and with careful thoroughness.

  He pushed back from the edge of the cliff in complete and utter disgust.

  Sonofabitch.

  Chapter 10

  Kimberly waited in an agony of suspense in the dark cave. What in the world was going on out there? She had visions of a sniper picking Tex off as he peeked over the edge, stranding them both up here with no chance at all of getting down that cliff alive.

  He'd die horribly from his injuries, suffering greatly as he gave up life inch by inch. She couldn't bear the idea of not being ab
le to help him if, God forbid, he got hurt. Not to mention she'd die of dehydration and starvation and her corpse would wither away into a dried-out mummy long before anybody found her in this remote spot.

  Tex's voice interrupted her morbid thoughts. He sounded totally disgusted. "You can come out now."

  She frowned confused. The soldiers were gone? Why would they walk away at the very moment they had her trapped and within their reach?

  She wiggled out through the narrow cave opening. It was a tight fit for her. How Tex mashed through that gap with his size and muscle was a mystery to her.

  She crawled over to Tex on her hands and knees and stretched out on her stomach beside him to look down. Her insides lurched at how high up in the air they were.

  He was staring at the ground below in utter chagrin.

  "Where'd everybody go?" she asked in confusion.

  "They left. They got what they were after," he bit out.

  "I don't understand…"

  He turned his head to stare grimly at her. "They weren't after you at all. They never cared about kidnapping you. They were after me when they landed that helicopter at Quantico. Me and the RITA rifle."

  She frowned. They weren't after her? She wasn't the target? Confusion swirled in her head until she was almost dizzy. She pressed herself flat against the solid rock until the sickening feeling that she was about to fall over the edge passed. "The sniper rifle? Why would they go to all this trouble over a gun?"

  He snorted. "Weren't you paying attention to the briefing I gave you and all your reporter flunkies?"

  She answered him honestly. "Not really."

  He laughed shortly, without humor. "Figures."

  He rolled on his side to face her. "The RITA rifle has a smart targeting system that locks on to a target and then tracks the target all by itself. RITA's computer makes corrections hundreds of times a second for movement of both the target and the gun, weather conditions, the wind, you name it."

  She gave him a blank look.