Page 46 of Threat of Danger
He cleared out the dining room in no time. The dolly did most of the work. Burning off some energy made him feel better. Maybe he just needed more exercise.
He stashed the last load in the garage, and then he popped his head back into the kitchen. “I’ll go take my walk.”
After that, he was going to track down Mark Maxwell and warn him away from Jess. Nobody was going to mess with her on Derek’s watch.
“Would you like to take a thermos of coffee?”
“I’m good. Thanks.”
He found Jess and Eliot at the cliffs. Not that he was looking for them.Fine.He was. He’d been curious about what they were doing. They were on top of Tall Stack, checking their equipment.
“You were right,” Eliot was telling Jess as Derek walked out of the woods. “This side is a whole other level of difficulty.”
They looked like a matching pair, in high-tech climbing suits and nearly identical harnesses, while Derek suspected he looked like a country yokel in his Timberland boots, jeans, and quilted flannel jacket.
After he moved back home, he began to dress to fit in. Some guys, fresh out of the military, kept wearing their army fatigues, but Derek didn’t want to wear BDUs—battle dress uniforms—ever again. He wanted no reminders of the last six months of bloody torture and his friends dying around him. He needed a clear indication that that nightmare was over, and that he was starting new, starting fresh.
“How’s it going?”
The two turned toward him with nearly identical startled expressions. They hadn’t seen him, hadn’t heard him coming.Civilians.
“We started on the north side, then moved over here. It’s a better climb.” Jess’s mouth curved into a grin. She was clearly in her element.
The north side of the cliffs, Short Stack, faced the river, the pretty side that people liked to photograph. This spot, the east side of the half circle of rocks, stood surrounded by white pine, some a hundred feet tall.
“We’re about to go back down,” Eliot said, eyes shining with excitement. He turned to Jess. “I can definitely see a high fall with airbags.”
They were like two kids at the candy store.
“They design the airbags now so you don’t fall off the edge,” Jess explained to Derek over her shoulder.
Eliot peered down the sheer cliff face. “If you walk around, you can meet us down there. Tricky, isn’t it? You done anything like this in the service?”
“Once or twice.”
That had the man’s full attention. “How would you do it?”
“Depends on the objective. Am I carrying a load? Do I need to stay invisible? Am I creeping up on an enemy camp?”
Eliot thought for a second. “If you needed to go fast. To save a friend. If somebody’s life depended on it.”
Instead of explaining, Derek got a running start and leaped over the edge.
The last thing he heard was a faint scream from Jess. Then he hit the tip of the tallest pine he was aiming at, his head turned to the side so the thin branches on top wouldn’t poke out his eyes. The treetop bent under his weight, enough so that when he let go, he could vault over to a shorter tree.
That bent too, and he leaped again, the trees handing him down as if from hand to hand, like swinging from monkey bars. He jumped the last fifteen or so feet to the rocky ground and landed on his feet.
When he looked back up, he saw two small figures on top of the cliffs, staring. Jess had Eliot’s arm in a death grip.
“In an emergency, I guess I’d do something like that,” Derek called up and grinned at them. He filled his lungs and enjoyed the adrenaline rush. He hadn’t done anything this reckless and this physical in a good long while. He hadn’t realized he missed the feeling.
Up on top of the cliffs, Jess let Eliot go, anger clear in her jerky movements. A couple of minutes later, the two of them rapid-rappelled down the cliff face.
“That was the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen.” Eliot’s tone held nothing but admiration. “I wish I’d recorded it. It was fantastic.” He glanced at Jess. “You think we could do it with wires in place? Without getting them tangled in the trees?”
Jess stared at them in murderous silence, as if she’d just as soon beat them over the head with her bag of climbing chalk than answer.
Which was fine. Suddenly Derek was angry at himself too. “It was stupid.”
