few times, got slammed in the head with a rifle butt, got shot, and then dived off a cliff. And lying here in the cold earth with a gentle mist coming down wasn’t helping his recovery time.

On the positive side, he wasn’t afraid of heights, and that was very good because when he looked down and saw nothing beneath him but the tumbling shine of the river and the swaying treetops, he felt a little…tired.

After all, technically he was still convalescent.

And while that bullet hadn’t penetrated anything more vital than Will’s flask, the impact had left bruises and contusions down the left side of his chest. The pain was draining, especially once the adrenaline that had numbed him to the worst of it faded away during the long, long minutes while he waited for the bandits to leave.

Even once he was sure it was safe to move, it was difficult to force himself to action. If he hadn’t been afraid he’d fall off the mountainside he’d have closed his eyes for a few moments. As it was, he began to inch his way up, groping for handholds, feeling for something to brace his feet on.

The recent rains made it worse, causing the soft ground to slide out from under him, for plants to pull out by their roots when he tugged on them. It was slow — and nerve-wracking — going.

It took him forty-five minutes to crawl six yards, and by then Taylor was beginning to panic about Will. He was not going to be able to track these assholes through the woods; he couldn’t afford to let them get too far ahead of him. He wasn’t sure how long they planned on keeping Will alive. He wasn’t sure why they felt they might need a hostage.

There was no guarantee that his worst nightmare wasn’t waiting for him at the top — but he couldn’t let himself think like that or he might as well let go and drop into the river.

He continued on his wet and muddy way, clambering up a few inches at a time, refusing to look down — and eventually refusing to look beyond his next handhold because his progress was too demoralizing. But then, finally, he was dragging himself over the embankment, lungs burning, muscles screaming, body soaked in sweat. He crawled away from the edge, scanning the now empty campsite, verifying — and re-verifying — that Will was not lying there dead. He let himself collapse, resting his head on his forearms, closing his eyes.

His heart was racketing around his chest like it was trying to find an escape route.

He only allowed himself a few minutes before he pushed up and began trying to figure which way Orrin and his pals had taken Will. It would have been nice if Will had left some sign or some clue, but Will, of course, believed Taylor was dead.

At first studying the ground seemed hopeless. As far as Taylor was concerned a herd of wildebeests could have been milling around the clearing, but after a time the moon rose above the trees and he began to discern the mess of footprints into separate tracks.

They were using the trail heading back toward the meadow and lake, retracing the path that Will and Taylor had taken that afternoon. Obviously they weren’t worried about being followed — or even running into other hikers or park rangers.

Every so often Taylor got a faraway glimpse of light through the trees — the stray beam of a flashlight. And once he heard the sharp clatter of rock on rock — miles ahead and outdistancing him fast.

He didn’t allow himself to think about anything but getting to Will in time. If he stopped to consider his own situation…well, forgetting about his various aches and pains for a moment — which wasn’t all that easy to do the longer the night wore on — he’d never felt quite this isolated or lost. Not in any of his foreign postings, but then he’d never been so far out of his own element.

Not even in an Afghan embassy compound surrounded by a desert full of hostiles.

He wasn’t sure how long he followed Orrin and the others, but he was headed back through one of the meadows he and Will had crossed earlier that day when he saw motion in the darkness ahead.

Not far enough ahead, unfortunately — as an indescribable heavy oily scent of wet fur, fish, and grass resolved itself into an enormous black bulk that suddenly rose up on its hind legs.

A bear.

Taylor stopped dead, hand reaching automatically for his shoulder holster — which was not there.

The bear, a weaving shadow in the darkness, made a heavy blowing out sound and then a strange wooden clicking noise.

Jesus. What was he supposed to do — besides not run? That much he knew. You didn’t run from a bear. And you didn’t try to climb a tree. What the hell had Will said about this? Play dead with grizzlies and fight back with black bears. And there were no grizzlies in the High Sierras so…yell, make noise, clap hands — and if he started yelling and screaming he was liable to alert Orrin and his pals that he was alive and on their trail.

Taylor took a careful sliding step backward. The bear was still blowing and making those clacking sounds. It had to be six feet tall and about three hundred pounds. It looked like it was all claws and teeth to Taylor.

Funny. They looked so cute in the zoo.

“Get the hell out of here, you sonofabitch,” Taylor growled, trying to look and sound aggressive. He bent down, hands skittering over pine cones, rejecting them — he didn’t want to merely annoy the thing — and caught up a stone, pelting it hard at the bear. It bounced off its head. The bear made more exhalations and chomping sounds, and Taylor, scrabbling for more stones, wasn’t sure if he was merely pissing it off. He pitched another

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