Page 25 of Protecting the Flame

Chapter 6

A short time later…

“Here.”She handed her travel mug to Mattie, who crouched between her mother, still in Will’s sleeping bag, and their pitiful barricade. “Drink this.”

“I’m okay,” Mattie protested.

“Oh, right, says the human windbreak. Drink it. We’ll figure out a way to keep the wind from getting in.” As the girl took the mug, she said, “How’s your mom?”

“The same.” Mattie brushed a finger along Rachel’s left cheek. The woman didn’t flinch. “I wish I knew if it was good or bad.”

“Is Will worried?”

Shaking her head, Mattie hugged her knees. “But he’s a grown-up. I don’t think he’d tell me if he was.”

“Hey.” Will looked up from the rear, where he knelt before the open cargo locker behind Emma’s seat. “I heard that.”

“Well, would you?” Mattie demanded.

“Have I been straight so far?”

Mattie gave him a look. “Answering a question with another question isn’t answering the question.”

“Give it up, Will. You’re doomed. And you,” she said to Mattie, “drink some more of that before it gets any colder.”

“It’s actually still pretty hot.” Taking a dutiful sip, Mattie pulled a face. “But it tastes like grass,” she said, handing the mug to Emma.

“That’s because it is. On the other hand, it’s better than nothing.” Depressing the mug’s auto-seal button, she tipped a swallow into her mouth. The tea was no better than it had been back in Minot, but at least it wasn’t icy cold either and she sighed as a warm finger traced its way down the middle of her chest. And it is still hot.

“What are you smiling at?” asked Mattie.

“The last line from an old kid’s book my mom used to read to me.” She made a mental note to write to the travel mug’s manufacturer if they ever got out of this. Maybe Gwyneth Paltrow, too, if she was feeling charitable. She looked toward the rear of the plane. “What’d you find?”

“Buried treasure,” Will said. “Burke wasn’t kidding about having survival gear.”

“Please tell me there’s a satellite phone in there.” While she’d been outside earlier, she’d tried her cell more out of habit than actual hope and had gotten what she expected: the equivalent of an electronic raspberry and a message in tiny capitals, NO SERVICE.

“Afraid not.” Will had strapped on a headlamp from his pack and was laying objects onto the deck: flashlights, batteries, a hand axe, a black-bladed fixed blade in a leg sheath. Hefting a rifle in his good left hand, he said, “But it’s still not half bad. Almost makes you believe in Santa Claus.”

At this point, she’d be willing to attend a Burl Ives solo concert in exchange for a seat on a rescue chopper. “Wow. Here,” she said, holding out the travel mug. “Trade you.” As he drank, she hefted the rifle, a bolt-action Savage. Slow-rolling the bolt made her smile. Burke had maintained the weapon well. Even in the freezing cold, the action was buttery-smooth, and she caught the slightest whiff of gun oil from the barrel. “I call dibs on the Savage,” she said, setting the weapon aside. “And I want that blade.”

“They’re yours. I’ve already got a knife in my luggage, and there’s no way I’ll be mucking around with a rifle anytime soon.”

“That’s a pretty big knife.” Mattie, who’d followed, watched as Emma strapped the sheath to her right thigh. “And that gun looks dangerous.”

“Only if you’re on the receiving end,” Emma said.

“My mother says guns are bad.”

“I think that depends on who you are and what you use them for.”

“Guns are only for killing.”

She was not getting into this. “Yes, they are. But if it’s a choice between going hungry and eating deer stew, I’ll take stew.” The knife was a KA-BAR BK2 and, she could already tell, sharp enough to slice paper. She usually carried a knife, a nice Ken Onion Leek Ben had bought that she could clip to a pocket when she was off-duty. The knife was a comfort thing more than anything else; it wasn’t as if she was skilled in fixed-blade fighting, and there wasn’t much call for, say, shaving tinder, splinting out kindling, skinning game, or carving out a handy-dandy hand drill to make a fire in her apartment. But Ben had always carried a knife. She had a sneaking suspicion it was a nod to NCIS—Gibbs’s Rule Number Nine—a show he’d loved and never missed, although he always made fun of it, too. Being a special investigations officer, he knew what agents could and couldn’t do. (A Mossad agent like Ziva David, he said, was a non-starter, but hey, it was fiction.) One thing Ben always said: you never knew when you’d need a knife. For this trip, she hadn’t thought to pack her Leek. Why should she? She was supposed to be only interviewing veterans and their nice dogs, not trying to figure out how to stay alive long enough for someone to rescue her ass. Besides, the airlines would only have given her hell, and she’d been traveling light, with only her pack.

“Do you know how to hunt?” Mattie asked.

“I’m from Wisconsin. Even my grandmother hunted.” Straightening, she dropped her right hand, felt her fingers brush the sheath’s release strap. No good wearing a knife you couldn’t get to in a hurry. She wondered if there was any game at this elevation. In winter, the answer was probably no. Deer, rabbits, raccoons, opossums…except for mountain goats, anything they could reasonably hunt would be at a lower elevation where food would be easier to come by. Well, they wouldn’t be here long enough to have to worry about that anyway. “What else do we have, Will?”

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