“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
DAVIS FINISHED digging the snug cave into the drift and said, “Hand me the blanket.” When she passed the coverlet to him, he pushed it to the back of the snow-walled chamber without unfolding it, examined his handiwork once again, then turned around, smiling. “It’s all done and looks like it won’t cave in on us. We ought to have even a few minutes to spare to give the wind a chance to erase our tracks.”