Page 32 of Close Pursuit

He stuck the main burr on a small piece of wood and sent it floating down the only tiny rivulet they came across after they crossed the head of the valley and started down into the next one. The second burr he’d thrown down a deep vertical shaft in the back of their little cave. The hole had been maybe eight feet across and it had taken the rock he’d stuck the burr to many long seconds of falling before it clattered faintly below.

“Can we drink this water?” Katie murmured as she stared down at the trickle of water.

“Not unless you want dysentery and trichinosis.”

“Never mind,” she laughed under her breath.

He filled the water bottles from the stream, popped in water purification tablets, and gave the bottles a good shake. “In a little while, we’ll have drinkable water. It’ll taste like iodine, but it’ll be safe.”

She nodded, and they continued on.

A vast, sloping plane angled away from them on this side of the pass, and he mentally echoed Katie’s sigh of relief when he murmured, “We’re headed across that.”

But the plain was deceptive, crisscrossed by gullies and littered with boulders and dried bushes with vicious thorns as long as his finger. How anyone survived out here defied comprehension.

They’d been hiking for maybe two hours and were making decent time when he heard a noise that made his blood run cold. A motor.

“Get down,” he bit out. They happened to be crossing a small ditch maybe five feet deep in total, and Katie crouched down quickly, looking around nervously. She’d heard it, too.

He passed her the satellite radio and breathed, “If I’m not back in two hours, use the emergency frequency on that to call for a rescue.”

“I’m not leaving you out here,” she whispered back angrily.

“Thanks for the sentiment, but I’ll be dead.”

On impulse, he leaned over and kissed her hard and fast on the mouth. And then he was up and out of the hole. He took a quick fix on a few landmarks so he could find her again and then took off running low and fast, zigzagging across the broken landscape.

The engine cut off abruptly. It sounded like a four-wheel ATV. Someone wassofollowing them. He swore under his breath slid his wicked field knife out of its belt sheath, and crept forward, hunting the hunter.

The bastard was in for a nasty surprise if the thought the do-gooder doctor was an easy mark. His father hadn’t been a top Russian field operative for nothing. Alex, Mikhail, and Sergei had been groomed their entire youths to follow in their father’s footsteps. And that included hand-to-hand combat training from the best—their old man.

It took him only a few minutes to spot the stalker. The guy was good. Excellent, in fact. Moved like a U.S. Special Forces operator but wore native clothing and sported a beard. Trying to blend in, was he? This was a covert mission, then.

Alex picked his spot, perched high on a boulder, and settled in to ambush the bastard as he crept past. Alex had the patience of a panther and waited for the perfect moment to leap. It took almost ten minutes for the guy to draw even with his position.

Plenty of time for Alex to consider the fact that, even if he took out this guy, ten more just like him would swarm out here after him and Katie and the baby. What the hell was he supposed to do out here at the end of the world? Kill them all? Katie and Dawn were depending on him.

He might have been trained by a spy to be a spy, but that didn’t mean he’d ever done this cloak and dagger stuff for real. A moment’s doubt that he could pull this off passed through him.

But then he remembered how thorough his father’s training had been. He shrugged off the doubt, closing it tightly in a little drawer inside his mind. This moment called for calm. Focus. Fear and doubt were counterproductive, therefore, unnecessary.

He weighed all the possible options he could think of to get Katie and the baby out of here alive, rank ordering them in decreasing probability of success. One plan emerged as the clear victor. A plan he hated with every fiber of his being.

He’d spent his whole adult life trying to cut the ties with his father, dammit. He’d even gone to jail to avoid the man’s grasping control.

First things first. He had to take care of this guy on their tail. It was a risk to confront the tracker, but riskier not to. Leaving this guy alive to ambush them at a time and place of his choosing would be the death of all three of them.

While he wasn’t particularly concerned for his own survival, Katie was young and had most of her life ahead of her. And Dawn…she literally had her whole life in front of her. It was weird how deep in his gut the urge to protect an infant ran. Must be some survival of the species instinct.

His target approached, and Alex focused all his senses on the man, his own body coiled to spring. Thought ceased. Breath ceased.Timeceased.

Now.

Alex leaped.

The guy was strong. Fast. As skilled as Alex anticipated he would be. Although Alex had the element of surprise on his side, the stalker twisted violently in his arms and got in a hard elbow to his nose that had Alex seeing stars and hanging on for dear life. He didn’t want to kill the guy. At least not before he forced the attacker to tell him who he was working for.

But crap, this guy was strong! Alex lost his grip and the guy spun, a wicked blade in his right hand. There was no time for elegance. He lunged before the guy could get his bearings and slammed his own knife into the guy’s gut, ramming the tip of his blade up and under the ribs.

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