Page 96 of The Number of Love
“Yeah. Here, hold this.” Camden whipped off his hat, shoved it at Drake’s chest, and clapped his hands together. Then leapt up to the nearest branch.
“You don’t have to be the one to climb. I’m perfectly capable—”
“You were shot recently, Elton. Last thing we need is you pulling something open halfway up a tree. I don’t much fancy carrying you back to the airstrip.” He pulled himself up to a standing position on that branch and jumped for another. “Besides, it takes me back to our school days. I passed many a happy hour in those trees.”
“Mm. When you should have been in Latin, you mean.” Drake backed up a few paces to get a better view. “Try to angle toward me when you can. I think I see it, though I can’t tell what it is.” Not a codebook, certainly. That wouldn’t be glinting in the sunlight. But if they could place it as beingsomethingfrom the zeppelin, then they’d know they were on the right track.
“Right. Working on it.” Grunting with the effort, Camden continued to scale the limbs, coming round the tree bit by bit as the branches allowed.
“Almost there. Two more, I should think.”
Camden reached for the next branch. “You know, I’ve changed my mind about that favor. I didn’t owe you. Which means you now owe me.”
“Uh-huh.” He lifted a hand to his eyes to shield them from the midmorning sun. “Well?”
Camden made a snatch for something, and apparently he hooked it, given his laugh. “Got it!”
“What is it?”
“A canteen.”
An odd thing to find fifty feet up a tree, to be sure. Obviously dropped from above, which boded well for them. “German?”
“Well, it sure isn’t English—we have more sense than to give ours a round bottom that you can’t actually sit on a table.”
Drake was still smiling when Camden’s feet hit the forest floor again. “Seems like zeppelin debris to me.”
Camden was grinning too. “Onward.”
They walked another ten minutes before spotting a German hat on the ground. Another five and they found a mess kit. And then the mother lode, which made Drake’s pulse really kick up. Papers.
They were strewn all throughout the forest, some still caught in branches, most littering the ground. He caught up a few at first and then gave that up—they’d be here for a week if they gathered them all.
“Navigation charts.” Camden held up a book and then tossed it down. “The codebook would have been stored in the same place, I’d think.”
“Then it’s here.” It washere. Somewhere. “What do these codebooks look like?”
Camden took off for something that caught his eye to Drake’s right. “Bound, but not like a normal book. Paper binding. Soft, flexible. The ones they have in the OB already are green. Pages are tabbed, marking different sections. And you’ll certainly know it when you see it—they’ll have pages filled with charts of numbers. Zero to nine across, zero to nine down. Then pages with words.”
Drake grinned as he turned to look for something flexible and green. Though just now he rather wished they’d chosen orange or red. “You’re a codebreaker. Ever stop and think how odd that is?”
“Every blighted day, mate.” Camden strode toward a bare-limbed oak tree.
Drake chuckled. “Ready to admit that it’s better than prison?”
“No. But I haven’t punched you again, have I?” He bent down, snatched up a book, and then tossed it away again after a quick glance.
“I just assumed you were afraid of Red Holmes.” Drake aimed himself toward a patch of green that didn’t quite match the pine needles.
“Careful, Elton. I’m your ride home, you know.”
It was paper he’d seen, that much was sure. A book, he decidedas he drew closer. And it wasn’t sitting stiffly against the tree roots like a typical one would be. It bent a bit in the middle. He hurried over the last few steps and reached down for it.
The paper was damp from its days on the ground, the edges beginning to curl. But the binding had held and all the pages seemed to be intact. He flipped it open. And his heart positively sang when he saw the chart. Zero to nine across. Zero to nine down. “Cam, I found one!”
Camden jogged over to his side and looked over his shoulder. Then slapped a hand to his back. “That you did.”
“Is it the right one, though?”
