Page 38 of Trapped

Chapter Eight

Cash muttered a curse.

“What?”

“The odds are pretty good they got him.”

Beside him, Sophia made a strangled sound. “How do you know?”

The question told him she didn’t have much combat experience.

“No more shooting. Either they captured him, or they shot him. And I’m not betting he’s still alive.

“Lord, no!”

He heard the horror in her voice as the reality slammed into her. It reflected his own feelings. The man was dead—because of him. He would have turned around and charged back—guns blazing. But Sophia grabbed his arm, grounding him.

“You can’t go back there.”

“Yeah.”

He might want to even the score—for Phil, a guy he hadn’t known very long. And for himself, too. But he’d end up getting himself killed. And that wasn’t an option because the men who had shot Phil would shoot her too.

Or maybe not. Maybe they’d torture her to find out who she was and why she was here. And the hell of it was that he didn’t even know the answer to that question.

He didn’t share any of that thinking with Sophia. Instead he said, “I assume you know the way out of here?”

“Yes.”

She breathed out a sigh as he hurried along beside her—away from the danger. In a few minutes, they reached a place where the tunnel opened out into blackness.

“Now what?”

“Give me a minute.”

Sophia pulled the pack off her back and fumbled inside. Bringing out two pairs of night vision goggles, she handed him one.

With no natural light in the cave, it was still almost impossible to see, but she also brought out two things that looked like flashlights. Although they didn’t give out visible light, they emitted an infrared beam—which illuminated several markings on the wall.

“Bread crumbs,” Sophia whispered.

Behind them, he could hear voices. “We’ve got to hide,” he said in a barely audible voice.

“Not to worry. This place is hide and seek heaven.”

She grabbed his free hand and led him to the left, behind an outcropping of stalagmites, then around another bend so that they were further sheltered from the tunnel. They both switched off their infrared lights.

Almost as soon as they’d ducked into hiding, three guards appeared. All of them were holding flashlights, which they swung in an arc. With the night vision goggles, the light hurt Cash’s eyes, and he took off the goggles.

“Baker and the woman went down here.”

One of them swore. “But this looks like a big mother of a cave. They could be anywhere.”

“Yeah,” one of the others answered.

“We go in there, we could get lost,” the third one said. “We’d better go back and get some more lights.”

The others agreed.

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