A strong arm needs a stronger heart.
The two men on the ledge ahead wore camouflage whites. Any moment now, they would turn, check their back trail, and fire. When they did, bullets would start flying from three directions.
For once, Kier did not appear to have an immediate plan of action. Reaching up, she tugged at her M-16. Kier stopped to slip the carrying strap from his torso.
Something Dunfee had told Jessie came to mind. The most brilliant escapes relied on distraction. But how could these men be distracted?
Desperation hatched an idea. Crawling onto Kier's back, she whispered in his ear.
"We need them to drop on the ledge, right?"
"To shoot them without their bodies falling-yes."
Quickly she explained her idea.
Time stretched out. The passing seconds seemed like pearls dropping through honey. At any moment, they might be spotted-and her plan required time. They backtracked twenty feet to a slight bend where they would be less visible. After removing his pack, Kier donned the mountain-climbing harness he'd retrieved from under the cabin, then scampered up the rock face at the point offering the best handholds. He would have to traverse the face of the cliff above the men, using nothing but natural handholds and footholds. If no such climbing aids existed, or if he made a sound, or if the troopers happened to look up, that would be the end.
As he scaled the cliff, Jessie started to strip. There was no sexual purpose in what she did. These men would not be seduced on a rocky ledge or dissuaded from their plan by anything so pedestrian as sex. Of that she was certain. Rather her idea was to appear harmless. A naked person didn't pose danger. In the second or two that it would take for them to take stock of her, she had to convince them that she knew something important, even vital.
Her toes were three or four inches from the precipice. She held herself against the rock. After finishing the shirt buttons, she tried to shed the coats. First the outer arm. Dizzying height froze her mind and her movements. She took one hand from its solid perch, then shrugged her shoulder, slipping off the coat while rocking precariously on the balls of her feet. Her calves began to burn from the squatting.
Finally down to her bare skin from the waist up, she dangled her feet off the ledge, using it as a bench. Quickly she slithered from her pants, ending up in nothing but her panties.
Again she let her gaze go down the cliff. The drop was bad, really bad. One little teeter or slip and she would plunge. God, she had to put her mind someplace else.
Both groups on the ground had been moving continuously for an unusually long time. Surely they would stop and study the cliffs at any moment. When that happened, she would die in a hearbeat. The men in front of her appeared as only partially visible shoulders and elbows. Maybe eighty feet ahead, they moved cautiously toward the cavern.
Glancing at her watch, Jessie saw that Kier had been on the cliff for five minutes. She leaned out to see, then clung to the wall. Leaning had given her a greater sense of the abyss. He looked to be up about thirty feet and twenty feet forward. Shaking his head in disgust, he had pointed at the men with his silenced pistol and motioned her forward. Damn. He would try it from where he was, with an obscured line of sight and too far for a one-handed pistol shot. She would need to lure them a long way.
Her hands trembled. She hated her fear. With every passing moment the two men were getting farther away. Over and over she pictured herself falling-alive and bullet riddled. She stood and shivered in the freezing air. She stepped over the pack, and almost stumbled. The ledge was barely a foot wide. Around the slight corner she continued. The men still moved. Faster now, over one hundred feet away, and still looking toward the cave. She scampered fifty more feet, then squatted in the wind.
"Help me," she said in a small, terrified voice.
The men whirled. One almost lost his balance.
"What the hell?" The first squinted and leveled his M-16.
"He's after me… Please… please… he's coming.. "
"Shoot the bitch."
"He's coming." She began the tricky task of retreating from the thugs while continuing to face them. Initially, she moved more quickly than they did.
"Wait. Don't shoot. I've got Volume Six."
Now they were coming closer. At any second they could blow her off the ledge in a bloody mist. But it was working. Glancing everywhere but up, they kept coming, gawking. Dropping her arms, she exposed her breasts. It took many more breaths than she cared to count for them to pick their way along the ledge.
"Get down, get down… he's behind me." She lay flat as she spoke, praying that they would follow suit.
Thirty feet from her, the first man dropped prone, aiming past her. His partner fell to one knee, doing the same. Then, as if seized by a new thought, the second man spun around and looked toward the cavern. The first now trained his M-16 on Jessie's forehead.
The farther man finally dropped to the ledge as the first lifted a radio to his lips. Kier had to fire.
Pffft. The first man's head jerked, blood spraying from his neck. Pffft. Pffft. Pffft. Three more silenced shots jerked his comrade's body. Pffft. The last bullet went just below the second man's helmet. An arm went over the ledge. The body quivered in a spastic curl.
Already Jessie was up and running, hunkered down, trying to catch the falling dead man. He was slipping over the side. Kier dropped in front of her like a vulture landing on carrion. He grabbed the body as it fell. Twisting, turning, Kier and the man both went. She heard a snap, then the climbing line draw taut. Kier hung from the safety rope in his harness, clinging to the body of the slain soldier.
Now what?
Kier wrapped his legs around the dead man and, incredibly, began pulling himself up the line. Grabbing Kier's arm, she pulled as best she could within the limitations of her precarious position on an eighteen-inch ledge. She felt puny and weak, but her efforts seemed to help.
"Again," Kier grunted, this time getting his arms and torso on the ledge, still gripping the man between his legs. "Take the line off my harness and wrap it around him."
It would require her leaning far over the edge. Kneeling squarely on burning knees on the rough ledge, she undid the large snap on Kier's harness with relative ease. But the dead man hung three feet below her. As if reading her thoughts, Kier threw his right arm over the back of her calves, pinning her to the ledge. His left hand clung to the ledge.
"I can't do this much longer."
"Jesus," was all she said as she leaned over the side.
For a moment, vertigo paralyzed her. If Kier lost his grip on her or the rock, they would both go. She lowered the line between the mountain and the lifeless body, letting the snap dangle. She could not retrieve it except by hanging lower.
"I don't think I can do this," she heard herself say.
"We'll die if you don't."
Crying, she let herself go headlong, slithering down Kier's body, then over the dead man. Kier's fingers bit to the bone behind her knee. Life seemed so simple. The only thing between her and her maker was a single human hand.
"Lower," she said.
For a split second Kier let her leg slide through his hand until he locked his grip on her ankle. His arm shook with the strain. Sick with fright, she reached under and around the body. Stretching for the line, her muscles screamed all the way to her fingertips. She grabbed it, wrapped it once, then again around the dead man, and fastened the clip at the rope's end back onto the line.
"God, get me up," she said, almost certain he couldn't do it.
His arm quivered even more as he groaned with the effort of the one-armed pull-up. Dangling crazily, she clawed up the back of the dead body, and up Kier's thigh. Straining to reach behind herself, she felt the ledge and pulled sideways and up in a painful lunge.
Kier released the grip of his legs, allowing the body to hang from the line. He climbed the line onto the ledge and quickly hauled the dead soldier after him.
By cutting the snowsuits off the bodies, they made the dead men less visible against the cliff. The soldiers walking the mountainside below had disappeared from sight into the pines. Behind them the other group was moving through forest interspersed with meadows and at the moment were out of sight. Kier and Jessie raced along the ledge again as soon as Jessie had regained her own clothing. Now Kier carried two more radios, eight more grenades, and extra ammunition.
With any luck, their adversaries' expectations would work against them-any soldiers who saw them would assume the two white-clad figures walking the ledge were their own. Tillman would be powerless.