He took inventory. The rifle held six, and he had nine extra rounds. Steph had used the entire canister of bear spray on Todd, dropping the container before going at him with the limb. She’d cut him loose with a pocketknife, which he assumed she still had, and she wore her backpack. Maybe it held something they could use. He could only hope the beacon was transmitting their updated position clearly.
They needed something different than what they were doing.
Running worked when you had somewhere to run to. They didn’t. Not yet. The poachers were keeping them pinned in the heavy timber, but how long until the cover ran out?
He didn’t know these woods like Steph did, but he knew enough to understand there were open areas atregular intervals, either meadows or fire roads. Every direction they moved, the men on those machines could cover more ground faster.
“Hold up,” he said.
Steph stopped, breathing hard. She looked at him, her expression guarded in the way it had been ever since he’d said the wrong things in the wrong order, and definitely in the wrong tone, after she freed him.
“The trees will eventually end.”
She nodded once. “I know.” She scanned the trees around them as she took several deep breaths. “The rescue team is coming. They have to be getting close. They’ve had the time they said they needed, and the GPS should be transmitting. We need to stay alive long enough for them to get here. That means not giving them a shot at us by getting out in the open. We have to...to...”
“Evade?” he suggested.
“Yeah, evade.” She paused and checked her watch. “While we can. The dark helps. We’ve still got about two hours until it’ll start getting light enough to see. After that...” She shook her head. “The rescue team should’ve been here by now.”
Her voice held little hope.
“What do you need from me?”
Something crossed her face, brief and not quite readable. “Don’t get captured again.”
He almost said something but stopped himself. “I won’t,” he said instead.
She gave a nod. “Ready?”
They set out again. He should’ve asked her what the plan was, but he didn’t want the question to suggest he didn’t trust her. He wanted to trust her and wanted her to know he did.
The ground leveled off, and the trees thinned at the edge of a long, narrow depression in the terrain, shallow enough to cross but wide enough to matter. Steph picked the crossing point without hesitating, finding the section where the snow was wind-packed hard. He followed, and they crossed without breaking through.
On the far side, she paused, listening.
The engines were loud. He could track them both, the positions clear in the timber, and the positions were not good. One was running almost parallel with them. Every once in a while, he got a glimpse of the snowmobile through the trees.
He thought the younger one, Graham, was operating it. The main reason was that there had been no shooting. Somehow, he believed if Rick was near them, he’d take potshots whenever he thought he had an opportunity. Not so much to hit them as to scare them.
Rick’s machine was somewhere ahead, no doubt to get in front of them and find the spot where the timber ended and Steph and Jack would be in the open. They needed to not play into his hand.
Where was Todd? Was he still on the ground where Steph had left him? He’d looked pretty rough. Jack held a minor worry that Todd might somehow pull himself together and fire up the third machine, coming after them for revenge if nothing else. But an obviously broken leg and broken wrist made that unlikely.
Steph was still running at a steady pace but searching for something. Her head angled in the direction of the road. Was she thinking of crossing? The bank was steep in this area, at least thirty feet from where they were in the woods up to the road. It was the kind of section that looked as ifthey’d need to be part mountain goat to even make the climb.
As they moved, his feet screamed. He put his weight on the outer edges where the cold was marginally less.
The machine running parallel sounded louder than it had thirty seconds ago.
He turned to look through the trees.
The timber here was dense but not impenetrable. Between the trunks, fifty yards out, the snow was open enough to travel, and he could see movement. Dark shape, headlight throwing pale light through the trees, moving in a line that was going to intersect with their position in less than a minute.
He could see the driver clearly enough, definitely Graham, rifle on a sling across his back. Graham had looked like a man in over his head earlier. Like murdering people was not something he signed up for. Yet here he was, willing to, at the very least, funnel Steph and Jack into Rick’s trap.
Rick wouldn’t hesitate to kill them.
And as much as Jack hated to admit it, he was counting on Steph to keep them alive.
