Survivalist - 24 - Blood Assassins by Ahern Jerry

Author:Ahern, Jerry [Ahern, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Forty

Her father had always told her she was reckless, and she could almost hear Tim Shaw’s voice in her ear telling her, “Watch out you don’t break your damn fool neck, kid—excuse my language.” And the thought of her father just then brought a smile to Emma Shaw’s hps as she angled her way into a little defile, wedged herself there for a moment and rested. The little campfire was closer now, but it didn’t seem much larger. Whoever had set it wasn’t building it up for the night, perhaps was letting it go out.

The fire was her beacon and, just in case the fire was about to extinguish itself, Emma Shaw started moving downward again, trying to quicken her pace as much as she dared.

She heard the sound of a horse again, the clicking of hooves on rock and soft whinnying in the night. As Emma Shaw worked her way downward, picking her way with great care because the rocks were sharp and unevenly spaced, she felt warmer. And, it was more than her own exertion. Her father had always kidded

that girls never sweated, only glistened. She’d kept the joke going with him over the years. Now, she was “glistening” quite heavily. She kept moving.

In addition to the sight of the fire, there were now two other sensual keys, both its smell—good, actually— and its crackle, almost friendly in the night. Soon, there was still another smell, one which was unmistakable. It was the smell of freshly made coffee.

Soon, Emma was able to discern shapes just at the boundary of the firelight, one of them very large, the horse. The other seemed to be a man. This latter moved about, as if tending to chores in some regular pattern. The smell of the coffee was stronger.

A small stone dislodged under her left foot, then started a cascade of stones down into the gorge and Emma Shaw froze, realizing that she might have alerted whoever it was beside the fire. And she was relatively certain that it was only one person. But the person’s movement pattern seemed uninterrupted.

She waited, crouching there uncomfortably amid the rocks, her eyes focused intently on the fire. The man shape seemed to settle in, back toward her, she realized, because the figure’s outline was silhouetted by the flame. She could make out no detail, only blackness.

By the face of her wristwatch, she ticked off the minutes, seven going by before she felt that it might be safe to move again. Then, move she did, but more slowly and cautiously now, feeling each step out lest she cause more sounds in the night. She reasoned that perhaps the rolling of the river—there were small rapids all along its length in either direction as far as she had been able to see before dark—had obscured the noise, thus leaving whoever it was beside the fire

unalerted to her presence. Emma Shaw hoped.

At last, she was nearly to the bottom of the gorge, her improvised backpack made from the parachute pack weighing heavily on her, her right hand sweating inside the insulated glove.

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