Time to get to work. She visualized the muscles of her arm and shoulder. Angles, leverage, the structure of the bed.
Now her palm had turned 180 degrees, so it lay flat along the sideboard. She raised her shoulder, thrust down, and hooked her fingers on the bottom of the board.
She had to perform two separate operations. The first was gymnastic, a matter of timing. Slowly, she diagramed the physics involved. She’d brace her left hand and both feet on the sideboards, push down and vault her body up, taking pressure off the mattress and springs. During the split second her weight was in the air she would have to jerk upward with her right hand, dislodging the slotted sideboard as she heaved her head back against the headboard. She had been practicing this move and had felt the sideboard almost come free.
The test would be the second operation, which involved sheer muscle strength. When one end of the board was free, the bottom end would still be anchored in the footboard. She had to drag her right hand, which would still be tightly lashed, along and then off the free end of the detached board. Which meant exerting tremendous pressure to the side and to the rear. Again, she visualized the muscles of her right arm: triceps, the teres major, teres minor, rear delt. They were small muscles and were not structurally suited to perform this unusual movement.
Lubrication would not be a problem. In the process of rotating her wrist against the cord hooks, she had ripped her wrist to shreds. Her right hand was now bleeding freely.
On top of everything else, she had to do it quietly. She couldn’t alert Dale before her right hand was free.
Nina blinked sweat from her eyes. Took a deep breath.
Now she focused back several years, on the Russian trainer she’d met in Kosovo. He’d been on loan from the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces. He promoted a concept called “hyper-irradiation,” which argued that rigidly flexing all the muscle groups of the body simultaneously was a force multiplier.
She knew her muscles were designed with protective mechanisms-spindle cells and Golgi tendon organs. Their purpose was to prevent damage due to overload by stopping function. Getting free would involve tearing her right rotor cuff to pieces. It would also involve overriding the protective mechanisms, the lactic acid buildup, going past the breaking point.
There was fear, which she was riding like a wave.
And then there was pain.
Which was the shark inside the wave ready to bite.
Nina poised on the bed, felt her fingers, slippery with blood, hook firmly on the sideboard. She pressed down with her feet and her left hand, took a deep breath, and stopped thinking. Her body knew.
She thrust up her torso and yanked up with her right hand.
As the slots came free she extended her right arm to keep the board from tangling in the headboard. The bed slewed to the side as the sideboard thumped on the carpet.
Did he hear? No, the radio covered it.
She flexed both feet and her left hand, painfully orienting her soles and her palm against the tight cords. When she had a solid platform, she pressed down on the sideboards. Working up from this tripod, she contracted everything she had: legs and upper body fusing into core abs and glutes. She had to transform the tension into a mighty fulcrum to send more power into the rigid lever of her right arm.
Her breath rasped, panting now. She felt sweat and then veins pop up on her screaming right arm as she strained it back, back. Inch by inch the bloody bungee cord started to slide rearward, toward the open slotted end of the sideboard.
Her strength flashed, so much fire into smoke. All mind now. She visualized every man who ever told her all the things she couldn’t do. And some women, too. Every face. Every sneer. Every dirty joke.
She got two more bloody inches from the vivid memory of Johnny Majeski, who wrestled her out of her virginity when she was sixteen in the backseat of a perfectly restored ’49 Mercury. And then blamed her because it went too fast.
Good memories, too. Dad. For all the hours in the pool and on the track; for teaching her to throw and jump and climb. For giving her a dollhouse
She had two more inches to go.
Willpower gone. Muscles frozen, past spasm into total failure.
C’mon. Must be a few more muscles to call up in this act of self-destruction. She had gone past aching pain to piercing pain to red-hot burning pain to nothing.
Must be something, somewhere. Trembling. Arched up. Making the tripod. Squirting sweat. Then in one last surge…
Her whole right arm began to tremble violently, spasm, overload, maybe torn ligaments.
But the hand was free.
Tears smeared her face, mucus, spittle. Blinking through the blur, gasping, hyperventilating…then…
Immediately, she hauled her right arm in tight, tested her fingers. Christ, her shoulder was burning, feeling loose and disconnected.
The curtain swept aside; Dale swiveled his seat and stared at her. “Aw, jeez, George, lookit this. She broke the bed.”
“First things first. Let me show you something,” George said as he glanced at her, unconcerned. Nina watched him raise the satellite phone in his left hand. He held a clear plastic cup in his right hand that was half-full of water. He placed the cup carefully on the dashboard and motioned for Dale to turn around. “Now watch the water in that cup,” George said. “When I set it off we should see the water level jump, huh?”
“Cool,” Dale said, spinning to the front. George eased behind the driver’s seat, extending his left arm over Dale’s shoulder so the phone was to the left of Dale’s head. Nina, way past horror, watched George’s right hand slip into the pocket of his shorts and remove a small automatic pistol. It looked like a.32-caliber. A hideout gun. He kept the pistol low against his right thigh. “Here we go,” George said as he started thumbing in the numbers.
She heard Dale’s awed voice: “No shit. Look…”
Then she saw George sweep the pistol up smoothly, stick it pointed up under Dale’s chin, and pull the trigger. The gunshot rolled inside the confined camper, knifed her eardrums, as Dale’s shoulders and head jerked once and he slumped forward. A spray of red dotted the inside of the windshield.
Efficiently, George withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the gun down. Then he placed it in Dale’s limp fingers. For a moment he cocked his head, looking out the driver’s side window. As he listened he mopped sweat from his brow with the hanky, then put it back in his pocket.
Then he turned to Nina. She glared back at him, pulled herself up by yanking on her fastened left arm; sitting now on the slanting bed, she cocked her right hand.
George grimaced at her. “It’s done. I could hear it, you know. Just a faint bump. And the water in the glass did jump a little bit.” He bent over the passenger seat, and when he straightened up, he was holding one of Dale’s Epipens in his right hand like a dagger. He stared at her for a moment. “Look at you, you’re all covered with blood.
