For what seemed like forever, Kate did not know if she was alive or dead. Her senses were pummeled by the astoundingly loud, blazing gunfire that made her body tremble and her mind tumble. Is this what dying was like? Paxton had broken from cover. Han had shouted an order at his men. Then the gunfire, the racket intensified by the closeness of towering trees.
She was not dying. She smelled the gunpowder. She heard the screams of those dying, and other, strangely magnified, smaller sounds like the clinking of spent brass cartridge casings striking the ground.
The gunfire ceased. She was alive. She opened her eyes, raised her head and observed her surroundings, struggling to regain her senses.
Scott was beside her, doing much the same. Han Ling stood in the center of the path, reloading an ammo clip into his rifle. Then Kate saw the tangled cluster of fallen bodies sprawled across the trail ahead, dead arms and legs askew.
Paxton emerged from the side of the trail, looking completely disoriented. His blond hair was matted with dirt, his face streaked with sweat. He took one look at the remains of the army patrol and stumbled back, emitting a frightened, child-like yip. Han's outlaws were prying amid the corpses, relieving the dead of weapons, ammunitions, wallets and watches. Paxton turned unsteadily to face Han, his eyes glazed with panic.
The instant Kate saw Paxton, she was consumed with a blinding rage. As if catapulted, she charged at Paxton, both of her hands held up like claws. "You bastard! What the hell did you think you were doing? He said he was going to kill me!"
Paxton held up his bloodied arms to ward her off. But her onslaught was interrupted when Han threw back his head, blustering out an alcoholic sound that must have been laughter. The bandit placed his stolid body in the center of the path, blocking her trajectory. She caught herself, halting her momentum and pulling back, trying to acknowledge the sliver of sanity that was screaming for recognition within her. She drew another deep breath, held it and, when she exhaled, her rage was vanquished, her emotions again under control.
When he was through laughing, Han spoke to Scott, who was hobbling more noticeably than before, favoring his splinted, broken leg. Though Scott's eyes were clear, Kate clearly saw that he was far worse for the wear. His shoulders sagged. Their commander was growing weaker by the minute. Haltingly, he translated what Han Ling had just said. "We're only alive because he was told by his leader to find us and bring us back alive."
Kate concentrated on keeping her eyes and her thoughts away from Paxton. "Then it was just luck-our bad luck and their good luck-that they found us?"
"Seems that way." Scott turned his attention to Paxton, glaring his displeasure. "That was a goddamn bonehead move, Specialist, almost getting us all killed. When we do get home, you're going to be in it real deep, mister."
Paxton cowered, eyes looking toward the ground. "I was only trying to help."
Before Paxton could say anything further, Scott's knees buckled. The commander's eyes rolled back in his head. He started to collapse.
Kate moved forward, placing her shoulder under one of his. She was able to prop Scott up, but not without effort.
She snarled at Paxton, "Get your ass over here and help."
Paxton scampered forward to prop up Scott from the other side. "Kate, I'm sorry. I thought I'd get those soldiers to help us. I knew that bandit wouldn't kill you."
"like hell you did."
Scott's drooping head hung between them like an eavesdropping presence.
Paxton was slowly regaining some of his trained, professional steadiness, as well as a vaguely defensive tone. "So why didn't he shoot you?"
"You didn't know what he was going to do or what he wasn't going to do." She eyed Paxton with pure loathing. "You put my life on the line, you chickenshit. Now stop talking to me. You make me sick."
Han ling may not have understood English, but he understood the substance of their exchange, and found this amusing. He threw his head back for more unsavory hoots into the air.
The march continued. They worked their way up and around the mountain. Gray fingers of dawn slanted through the forest. The climb became more difficult. There was no further conversation between Kate and Bob Paxton. Scott remained unconscious, a dead weight balanced between them, his feet dragging. It was a torturous trek, prodded by the guns of the bandits who were emboldened and celebratory after having wiped out an army patrol.
Lost in a nightmare, thought Kate. There was no trail that she could see. And yet they were being shoved along one rocky slope after another. The here and now was inescapable, and yet in ways was incomprehensible. Did anyone know where she was? She was adapting, she was improvising, as Trev had taught her. Paxton was right about that much, at least. This was never covered in astronaut training. Where were they being taken? What would happen next? The weight of Commander Scott, being dragged between her and Paxton uphill, was beginning to take its toll. She fought a numbness that wanted to weaken her, sapping her strength with every struggling step, causing her to falter.
She wanted this madness to end. She wanted to return to the "real world," where once upon a time… once upon a time…
Once upon a time, a child named Kathryn sat with her mom and dad in front of a television set in their suburban home when she was only five-one of the clearest memories of her childhood-watching a man in a spacesuit walking on the moon. This had led her to a lifelong dual fascination with flying and outer space. As soon as she was old enough, she enrolled in a flying class for seven dollars an hour, and each Saturday for six months she had flown in the front seat of an old gray and maroon single-engine, dual-control Aeronca Champion. Working nights and weekends to pay for her college had not curtailed her flight time. By her senior year, she had become known as Kate, and had enlisted in an ROTC program that paid some of the expenses toward a doctorate in engineering, in exchange for four years of military service after graduation. She had applied for, and, after rigorous screening and testing, been accepted into the space program. Following her honorable discharge, the initial whirlwind of training-rides in T-38 jets and weightless training rides in the KC-135 "vomit comet"-settled down to classroom lectures on engineering and computer science: charts, manuals and diagrams about every inch of a space shuttle. After a year of classroom training had come the yearlong apprenticeship to veteran astronauts, who had taught her those engineering tasks that would be her responsibility on a shuttle flight. For months her schedule was a blur of fifteen-hour days, of grueling, round-the-clock sessions in shuttle simulators, interspersed with visits to contractors' factories to see equipment, technical briefings and the endless task of studying stacks of manuals that outlined every minute of a flight.
The workaholic grind took its toll. During her time at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, eleven astronauts dropped out, every one of them citing the pressure on their family life. Her own marriage had not gone unaffected, but the troubles with Trev had been there from almost the start. They had been separated for over a year now, but she did not blame the space program for that. Her work had only sped up what seemed to be the inevitable.
Three days earlier, when she and the crew had flown from Houston to the Cape in a NASA jet and she'd seen Liberty for the first time, she had known that it was all worth it. Not just the tradeoff from her troubled marriage but all those years of dreams and struggles leading up to her first view of the shuttle, mounted to its 154-foot rust-colored external fuel tank and twin 149-foot white-colored solid-rocket boosters. Of course, all of that had occurred in the normal, "real world"… not upon a desolate, wooded mountainside, on the other side of the world, herded along by rifle-carrying bandits.
I will survive, she assured herself. But inside, she felt as bleak as their surroundings. Could Houston possibly have any clue as to where we are? She didn't think so. Plodding along, she realized that allowing her mind to drift into the past had served to distract her from her aches and exhaustion. But she was pushing the limits of her endurance.
The huffing, puffing and lagging Bob Paxton wasn't doing any better. Even the bandits had grown quiet and surly as the arduous trek continued uphill.
Her nostrils twitched, her senses perked, at a first awareness of the scent of cooking food. Something unidentifiable, but definitely edible… a hallucination born of fatigue? She smelled it again, carried on an errant, nippy morning breeze… definitely the aroma of something cooking! Granite ledges rose above them to either side of a narrowing cut in the land.
Then they rounded a bend and left the heavy timber, and there before them was what she could only think of as a fortress.