Aces High Part 11

He forced patience into his voice. "I told you-I'll move faster alone. I've tracked Adrian before, and I know how his mind works." He bent his head and kissed her firmly, then pulled her hands loose from his jacket and stepped back.

"Don't," she said.

Skye turned away from her, surprised at the effort It took. And it wasn't, he realized, just because he could hardly stand to be out of her presence these days. It was something else, something on a deeper level-a wrenching tug Inside him, as if some vital part of himself were irrevocably connected to her and resisted his leaving her. He had never felt anything like that before, and it disturbed him. "I'll be back," he muttered, and knew his promise was unvarnished truth.

He'd always return to her, no matter what stood in his way.

Katrina dressed in desperate haste, softly cursing her trembling fingers, trying to make her mind work. Dane, of course. He knew his brother best, he knew what she had only just seen clearly for herself. He had tried to warn her, but she hadn't listened, hadn't believed that a man with Skye's strength could ever need anyone else for any reason.

He needs someone to care about him, so he'll stop to think before risking his neck.

She had seen it for the first time, that unconscious, heedless inability in him to recognize the fact that he was made of flesh and blood. It had shocked her, because until then she hadn't known what Dane's warning had meant. But she knew now. She knew that Skye's very strength, the burning life force inside him, made him completely, unconsciously, reckless when it came to his own survival.

Katrina had fought for her survival, grimly and with all the will she could command. She had stoically endured Interrogation techniques expressly designed to break the human mind and spirit, and had refused to be broken. She had faced her childhood terror of small rooms and close places, rejecting the mind-shattering horror of a nightmare come to life as she had stared at four bare gray walls in a three-by-five-foot cell. And she had emerged with a sure grip on her sanity to rebuild her life.

She knew how precious life was, and how vulnerable that life was to the vagaries of fate.

But Skye ... He didn't know. Nature had given him a natural Impatience and recklessness, and then had added both an unusual physical strength and an inner fire that burned with all the invincible heat of a crucible.

What had he said about Dane finding him months after he had left Germany? I probably would have managed to get myself killed. G.o.d knows I was trying hard enough.

His own life didn't matter very much to him. And it wasn't a defeatest thing, but simply a careless one; he never thought about it. He would always be largely indifferent to his own fate, she knew now. But his great strength and Incredible life force had provided a kind of aura, a rare cloak of sheer luck, and he had survived despite his own h.e.l.l-bent recklessness.

But luck was a capricious thing.

What Skye needed was, as Dane had warned, someone who cared about him. He needed someone to love him so utterly that he became a part of that other life and, so, linked to it. Careless with his own existence, he would never be careless with another's, particularly if he loved as well.

Dane had been his balance, Katrina realized, remembering the truth in what he had so lightly said. He had been Skye's center, his anchor. The more patient and cautious brother had held firmly to the bond between them, refusing to allow Skye to fling his life away without a thought. But Dane was married, his own heart claimed by the woman he loved, and though there wasn't less between the brothers, there was a difference. Skye was more alone, less connected.

And, as she raced from the hotel and through the park, Katrina promised herself fiercely that she would forge the bond he needed. She had been afraid to offer her love, but there was no room in her now for such insecurity. Skye's life meant more to her than her own, and she was prepared to fight with all the relentless will she could command to make certain he knew it.

He might not be able to love her, but he would never again be able to doubt that he was loved.

She drew up, breathless, a few yards from the docked riverboat. Dane was there, along with a lovely blonde who had to be his wife, as well as two other men, Derek and Kelsey, whom Katrina had met earlier while this operation was in the planning stages. All four were in casual clothes, having obviously changed from their costumes at the end of their s.h.i.+ft.

And before she could even find the breath to speak, Dane was alert and aware. For the first time, she felt the force that he shared with his brother, saw it leaping at her out of his eyes as he instinctively probed.

She found her voice. "Adrian's escaped. Skye's gone after him."

"When?" Dane rapped out.

"Just as few minutes ago. Daniel Stuart called. One of the agents was badly hurt and the other one took him to the hospital. Adrian doesn't have a car; he's on foot somewhere in the hills. Skye wouldn't let Daniel bring in marshals; he said that all of you could recapture Adrian. But he meant to go alone, and he did."

Softly Derek said. "We have a chopper on the roof of the hotel. Would Skye-?"

Dane shook his head. "A skill neither of us has. He must have taken his car."

"Derek's a pilot," Kelsey offered, his pleasant face grim. "With a little luck Skye won't be more than a few minutes ahead of us."

"He's probably there already." Dane muttered, because one trait the brothers shared was a love of fast cars. He looked down at his wife, seeing her pallor and worried eyes. "Jenny- "

"I know," she said quickly, managing a rea.s.suring smile. "Just be careful." She looked at Derek and said, "I'll tell Shannon and the others."

He nodded his thanks. All of them were conscious of the pa.s.sing moments, and there was no time to stop and. plan. No more than a couple of minutes after Katrina had found them, she was hurrying back across the park with the three men.

"I'm coming with you," she told them fiercely.

Kelsey opened his mouth, but Dane shook his head slightly at the other man and said, "Good" to her.

"There are a few guns stowed inside the chopper," Kelsey said instead. "Enough for us."

Katrina was still coldly afraid for Skye, but the three men she was with solidly inspired confidence. They were all big men, and though each would be formidable alone, in a group they were Impressive as h.e.l.l, she thought. She trusted Dane simply because he loved Skye, too, and because he shared with his brother that rare, enormous strength. Derek, blond and with serenely expressionless dark eyes in a hard, handsome face, was so calm and casually graceful that Katrina didn't doubt he knew his own strength to the last ounce. And then there was Kelsey, whose pleasant face and gray eyes concealed, she thought, the kind of danger that came from a very rough life.

She trusted them all, and they inspired confidence. But Skye was out there alone, trailing a soulless killer, and he didn't know that another heart was inextricably connected to his own.

Buckling her seat belt in the helicopter, she leaned forward to speak to Dane while Derek was checking over the craft's Instruments. "You tried to warn me," she said jerkily, "but I didn't understand. If I had, maybe I could have stopped him. I'm sorry."

Dane half turned in the front seat to look back at her, and though his face was drawn, he was smiling faintly. "Don't blame yourself, Katrina. I certainly don't. And you probably couldn't have stopped him anyway. It may take a little practice before you're able to do that."

"Can you?" she asked him.

"No. I can't stop him. But you will be able to."

The roar of the helicopter as Derek started it put an end to the conversation, and Katrina sat back, conscious of hope surging Inside her. Had Dane meant what she thought? She half closed her eyes as the helicopter lifted from the roof of the hotel, praying she'd get a chance to find out.

Skye left his car in the woods near the sprawling farmhouse and approached on foot, swift but with the instinctive caution of a wild animal. He doubted that Adrian had returned to the house once he'd escaped, but he had hunted the killer before and knew he was capable of just about anything.

No more than a minute served to convince him the house was deserted, and he slipped inside to take a quick look around. The place was peaceful and silent, but overturned and smashed furniture and a patch of blood drying on the living room carpet told of recent violence. Skye was about to leave, when he caught sight of a crumpled map on the floor beside the couch, and he bent to pick it up. A map of the area, he realized; he had seen a similar map when he and Daniel had decided on this place as the best available spot in which to hold Adrian captive.

Had the killer seen the map? Skye had to a.s.sume he had. And that Adrian had cannily spent his two weeks of incarceration trying to find out all he could about the area. Daniel's agents weren't stupid men, of course, but Skye knew only too well the boredom that inevitably led to guards relaxing after an uneventful pa.s.sage of time.

Spreading the map out on the kitchen table, Skye studied it carefully, still holding his gun. Ten miles of wilderness all around the house, but . . . There was a long-abandoned coal mine nearby, clearly marked on the map. It had been a prosperous shaft in the past, but when explosives had broken into a natural artesian well, waters under pressure had flooded half the shaft. And, Skye remembered suddenly, that property had recently been surveyed again. Daniel had mentioned it while they had gone over the maps.

Skye marked the location of the mine in his memory and left the house, moving swiftly. He returned to his car briefly to get a flashlight from the glove compartment. Then he set out in the direction of the mine, and within fifty yards found signs that another man had also chosen this way. And Skye knew why.

Adrian was hoping to find explosives, either left there when the shaft was abandoned or brought more recently because the mine was due to be worked again. Even if armed-and Skye had to a.s.sume he was-the international terrorist and a.s.sa.s.sin felt naked without explosives. It was his single weakness. tactically speaking, and Skye had exploited that once before.

He would again.

Less than ten minutes later Derek came out of the farmhouse holding a large map. "This was on the kitchen table," he explained to the others. "Someone was looking at it."

Dane was frowning slightly, and then he turned suddenly and stared off to the west. "The mine. Daniel said there was a mine nearby."

About a mile away," Kelsey said, studying the map. "But why in G.o.d's name would Adrian go for it? If he heads cross-country, he'll hit a town sooner or later, even if he doesn't know the area. He could get some wheels and pretty much disappear. If he heads for the mine, he's got a lot of h.e.l.lish terrain and no chance at all of making any time."

"Explosives," Dane said flatly.

"But he must be armed," Katrina objected in a voice she tried hard to hold steady. "And if he heard the helicopter, wouldn't he just run?"

Derek looked at her, his hard eyes softening as they took in her pale, taut features. "I doubt either of them heard the bird," he told her quietly. "We came in from the east, and between the dense forest and all these hills, the sound was probably m.u.f.fled."

"And Adrian has a weakness when it comes to explosives," Dane said. "He's never long without them. If he knows about the mine, he might have decided to take the chance."

She gazed at him blindly, then took a firmer grip on the automatic in her hand and said evenly, "Then we'd better try the mine. Anybody bring a flashlight?"

Kelsey was already striding toward the silent h.e.l.l-copter they had set down near the house. He caught up with them when they were about twenty yards from the house, carrying a big five-cell flashlight. He said, "If we have to go into that mine, we'll have to be careful with the light; anybody holding one is a target."

No one offered a comment.

Dane found the tracks left by his brother and Adrian about thirty yards farther along, and with their guess confirmed they were able to move faster. None of them was dressed for hiking, but although the area was thickly forested, the underbrush was spa.r.s.e and the footing was fair. As Kelsey had observed, the terrain was h.e.l.lish, but they all managed to move very swiftly.

It took almost half an hour for them to reach the dark, timber-sh.o.r.ed opening in the side of a deceptively small hill. Katrina would have instantly gone forward and into the earthly maw without a thought, but Dane caught her hand firmly and looked at the other two men.

"What do you think?" he asked softly.

They had approached the mine obliquely, and now stood a few yards away behind the cover of a riotous clump of bushes.

Eyeing a trickle of water that escaped a narrow ventilation shaft low on the side of the hill and had worn a deep trench, Kelsey said with a sigh, "All I think is that if we go in there, we're going to get our feet wet."

"They went in," Derek observed. "You can see prints near the entrance. Any idea how deep the shaft is?" he asked Dane.

"No, but it was worked for years. My guess is that there are dozens of separate tunnels, at least half of them flooded."

After a moment Derek said, "I noticed something back in the house. There was a big hurricane lantern on the mantel in the living room, filled with kerosene. Most of these remote houses keep that kind of thing around in case the power goes."

"Makes sense," Dane said, and then, his eyes sharpening, added, "There should have been two of them?"

Derek nodded. "I checked, because the mantel looked unbalanced. The place was a bit dusty, but there was a clear circle at the other end of the mantel, and it matched the base of the lamp."

Kelsey was staring toward the mine. "So whichever of them has the lamp has the edge... or just may present a nice, clear target."

"We have to go in," Katrina said impatiently.

"Easy," Dane said to soothe her. "We will. But we have to be careful how we do it. Skye might still be looking for Adrian somewhere in one of those tunnels."

"He might be hurt." She choked.

"He isn't." Dane's voice was calm and certain. "Not yet, anyway."

Kelsey eyed him. "It's like that with you two?"

"Yes. A blessing at the moment, but remind me to tell you about the time Skye dropped everything and flew two thousand miles to get home because I'd broken a finger." Before anyone could comment, he said, "We'll have to stay together and take care with the light. Once we're in there, we may hear something. We don't even know if Adrian's aware he's been followed, so we can't make any noise to alert him."

They moved forward cautiously, slipping around the splintering timbers bracing the opening and remaining close to the wall. They went a good twenty feet into the tunnel before Kelsey turned on the flashlight and narrowed the beam with his fingers, directing it downward so that it provided only enough faint light to prevent them from tripping over fallen timbers and rubble.

And the dark, musty earth swallowed them.

Katrina was only vaguely aware that Dane still held her hand firmly, and she didn't think much about the darkness or close walls. She didn't feel smothered or panicked. She wouldn't realize until much later that the most powerful and paralyzing fear of her life was gone, driven out forever by a greater fear.

All her senses were reaching, probing the darkness in an intense, desperate need. She could hear only the hollow, incessant dripping of water; she was aware of the clammy, chilly sensation of damp; and the dark, musky smell of the buried earth filled her nose. Like the others except for Derek, who was apparently unarmed, she held her gun ready.

They found the first branching in the shaft about fifty feet inside, but their silent exploration ended quickly when the tunnel led into a pool of black water. They retraced their steps and went on. The second offshoot curved gently for thirty feet and ended back in the main shaft. A third and fourth tunnel were each blocked, one by a cave-in and the other by water.

The footing beneath them was increasingly damp, but it was obvious that the water that had once flooded the main shaft had washed away the rubble that littered the floor closer to the entrance. They had less worry of falling over something, but it became more and more difficult to walk without slipping, and the walls sweated.

An occasional creaking groan shattered the quiet from time to time as the earth settled on the shoulders of ancient timbers. The hollow plunk of dripping water was louder now, and they gradually became conscious of a rus.h.i.+ng sound, almost beneath the level of awareness at first. It was like the sound heard when one holds a big seash.e.l.l to the ear: the ghostly echoes of a phantom ocean trapped for eons.

Dane, who was leading the way, stopped suddenly and stiffened. Instinctively Katrina tried to penetrate the darkness and see his face, because she had heard nothing that might have alerted him and she was terrified that he had felt something. His hand tightened around hers briefly, and then he was moving swiftly forward again, sacrificing caution for speed.

They hadn't gone a half dozen steps before the sharp reports of gunfire bounced off the walls. Almost as quickly, the sounds stopped with chilling abruptness.

Katrina caught the sound of a curse from Kelsey, no louder than a breath, and then Dane was slowing, moving cautiously once again. The mine shaft curved to the left, and as they went another few feet they could see a dim glow ahead of them; it brightened slightly until Kelsey could turn off the flashlight he carried. Dane slowed even more, moving with absolute silence. Then he stopped.

The others all eased toward him, peering around him to see what had stopped him.

It was a cavern fully fifty feet across and possibly more; the light from a hurricane lantern perched precariously on a boulder reached only that far. This was without a doubt the source of the mine's failure. It was obvious that water had been in this place a long time, and it still moved sluggishly with whispering sounds, perhaps still fed by an underground river.

There were a number of boulders, possibly freed by the explosion that had ripped an opening into the cavern, and the water level had receded at least thirty feet from the doorway. Between the doorway and the water the floor glistened wetly, and it was clear to each of the four that is was very slippery.

The two men struggling twenty feet away could hardly keep to their feet.

Katrina wanted to race forward, to do something, anything except stand there with her heart in her throat and fear for Skye clawing her mind. But Dane's whisper, inaudible from a foot away, held her motionless.

"Are you a good enough shot?" he asked her. "I'm not." He looked at Kelsey, who instantly shook his head even though the big automatic in his hand was leveled and ready; he wasn't willing to try it either, as long as he had a choice.

In the flickering light of the lamp they could see the violence of the struggle, both men twisting and striving to overpower the other. There was no clear target, no chance of getting Adrian without hitting Skye as well. And Katrina knew why they couldn't just rush in to help Skye. His face was taut with utter concentration, and if he were distracted by anything at all, it was likely that Adrian would be able to stab him with the long, wicked knife that was poised just inches from Skye's chest.

Neither man was making a sound, and their total silence was more horrifying than any curses they could have voiced. It was a grim, deadly struggle, a battle of sheer brute strength, and It was obvious that the two were evenly matched.

The knife had blood on it. Katrina saw the blood, and she choked back a cry of pain and fear when she saw more blood on Skye. He had taken off his jacket at some point, and she could see that somewhere beneath his concealing black T-s.h.i.+rt he was wounded, because there was blood on his left arm, too much blood.

And that, she realized numbly, was why the big men were evenly matched. Skye had lost a great deal of blood, somehow Adrian had wounded him, and his strength was draining away, his luck deserting him. Adrian, uninjured and as icily soulless as Skye was fierily alive, focused all his madman's strength in the implacable intention of destroying his enemy.

But Skye's luck hadn't entirely deserted him. Adrian, trying to brace his feet to get more leverage for his straining arms, was just unbalanced enough so that when his shoe came down on an especially slippery place he began falling. And Skye instantly fell, with him, landing on him hard.

With the knife between them.

That was when Dane released Katrina's hand and ran forward into the cavern. All of them ran because the two men had fallen behind a boulder, and they couldn't see what had happened....

Skye didn't feel any pain. He had at first, when the knife had gone into him, a hot agony that had taken his breath. But then the struggle with Adrian had demanded all his concentration, and he hadn't had time to feel the pain. Some distant, detached part of his mind had warned that he was losing blood fast, and the easy strength that had never been a conscious thing had gradually required his fierce will to hold steady. His muscles had quivered and the breath had rasped in his throat, and exhaustion had battered at him as relentlessly as his enemy did.