Several hours away, at the other end of the lowland, he could see the pass through which they must go to eventually reach Tooth and the fortress — if there was a fortress. If the Alliance had been too sure of itself to send more Sherlocks along with those police, then he and Leah might make that pass and, perhaps, even Tooth Mountain. If the government was, on the other hand, hedging all corners of their bet, this was the place in which both of them would die…
He found a stream, a seven-foot-wide span of water which was mostly frozen over by a thin crust of ice. It was almost certain that the stream ran down the center of the valley, from one end to another, following a fairly straight line, and it would therefore provide the shortest route to the pass. He paralleled it religiously, walking on its banks most of the time, except for one stretch where it cut deeper into the land and formed small cliffs to either side where thick, thorny brambles grew — their bite unsoothed by the white garb of winter they wore.
They were more than halfway across the depression, within an hour or so of the pass, when Leah grabbed his arm and yanked on it for him to stop. When he turned, she held a finger to her lips and said: “Listen.”
At first, all he could hear was the rush of air in and out of his own lungs and the roar of blood through his temples. Then the thing she wanted him to hear impressed itself above these sounds: a chattering — like copter blades. He tilted his head, searched the air for another piece of the noise, caught it again, closer this time. It was coming fast…
“Quick!” he gasped, grabbing her and pulling her backwards, off the bare earth along the banks of the stream, into the trees and brush.
“The suitcase!” she said.
He had set it down when she stopped him and had forgotten to bring it into concealment with them. It stood on the bank, looking a dozen times larger than it really was, a monument to his stupidity.
He looked anxiously at the gray sky, the falling snow, back the way they had come. There was no sign of the copter, though the noise of its engines and the roar of its blades grew closer and closer. He stood, took a step toward the suitcase, and caught sight of the aircraft coming across the tops of the trees five hundred yards away!
He fell, crashing into the brush, pressing desperately down into the shadows there. He felt thorns prick through his gloves, gouge his cheeks. There was a warm flush on his face, and he knew that he was bleeding a little. That didn't bother him as it once would have. He was no longer thinking about the handsome image he must present to fans. He was thinking, instead, about winning this hard-played game to salvage his life. And hers. His survival instinct had always worked well on an intellectual level, for he had been able to save his sanity from his parents even as a child. But now, in this last day, that instinct was functioning on a physical plane as well; and he was pleased enough of that development to feel a surge of pride and delight as the Alliance copter swept overhead without slowing, without spotting the suitcase.
“Are you all right?” Leah asked.
He got to his knees, pulled a thorn from the edge of his lip, wiped his face, looked at his blood-smeared hand. “It looks worse than it is. I was just lucky not to collect one in the eye.”
“What are they doing?”
He looked to the pass, saw the Alliance copter taking up position at the way between the mountains. Directly beneath the place where it hovered, the ribbon of this stream tumbled down over gray rocks.
“They know we're in the valley,” he said. “They're waiting for us to come out.”
“Then they must have police coming in at the other end.”
He looked back the way they had come, listened. He thought he detected the sound of a second copter, somewhere back along the stream. “Let's go.”
“Where?”
“Through the pass. Maybe we can find some way to sneak past the copter.”
“They'll have men on the ground at that end, won't they?”
“Maybe. But we can't just sit here and wait. And it's easier to go ahead than to double back and try to slip through the search line. They're bound to have hand tracking units, heat sensors. Maybe not anything nearly as sophisticated as Sherlocks, but something good enough to keep us from passing them unnoticed.”
“I'll take the suitcase a while,” she said, pushing past him, through the brush, and grabbing the supplies.
“Maybe we should leave it here.”
“And let them find it so they know we're running scared.”
“They must know that already.”
“And so they're certain we haven't left the valley yet?”
“And they must know that too.”
“I'll carry it anyway,” she said. “Break a trail.”
He moved off, staying beneath the trees now, though maintaining their proximity to the stream so that there was no danger of their getting lost. He kept them out of sight of the copter dancing on the air at the end of the valley, though they caught glimpses of it now and then when they were forced to dash across an open stretch of land where they felt painfully unprotected in the white spotlessness of the virgin snow.
The light was slowly beginning to leave the sky when they were near to the end of the valley. For the last half hour, the land had sloped upward, growing steeper and steeper, and their spirits had lifted with it. There had been no encounter with the searchers and, except for the area of the stream itself, the pass was thickly treed, providing heavy cover for them to slip through the net of their captors, A thousand feet from the brink of the valley and a reprieve from the from the pressure the Alliance had put on them, Davis called a halt so that they might gather energies for the last leg of the assault and so that he could reconnoiter to see if things were going to be as simple as they seemed.
They were not.
He had left Leah and gone only a third of the way up the slope, slipping quietly from tree to tree, when he saw the sentries stationed only a dozen feet down from the top of the ridge. They were stooped so that they could not be silhouetted against the sky, and each of them cradled a rifle across his knees. They peered intently downward, and he realized that, if the valley had not been slightly darker than the top of the ridge in these last minutes of daylight, they would be able to see him as he now saw them. They were no more than five feet apart. If that spacing had been maintained across the entire width of the pass, there must be a hundred and fifty men in the line. Which meant there had been other helicopters involved in the operation and that the men had been brought up from the other side of the pass. It seemed as if the entire mountain range had been blanketed by the Alliance. It pleased him to know that they considered the two of them important game. But he supposed any totalitarian government must go to great extremes to punish each and every violator of its dictums, lest one man who escapes their wrath becomes a symbol of rebellion for the masses.
Carefully, so as to make not the slightest sound or present even the slightest movement to the sentries, he worked his way back through the brush and the snow to Leah. He noticed, as he moved, that the wind had picked up, even though the snow had stopped, and that the disturbances he caused in the landscape were fairly swiftly eradicated by the brisk air.
“Well?” she said when he returned.
“We can't get through.”
“I have bad news too,” she said.
“What?”
“See that clearing half a mile down in the valley?”
He nodded.
“A moment ago, a line of searchers moved through it, each only a few feet away from the other. They must have been in the woods to either side of the clearing with the same distance between them. Every other man carried a short-range heat sensor and was fanning it in front of him.”
He looked at the now empty clearing in the fading light below. “They'll be here in half an hour.”
“Less. They were walking rather fast.”
IX
