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.”