Death is Forever (20 page)

Cole waited, neither moving nor breathing, listening with every nerve ending. He caught the faintest suggestion of cloth against spinifex, a bare hint of boot against soil, a blurred shadow retreating. He threw himself to one side, rolled over several times, and fired again. Then he rolled back in the other direction and waited.

Silence.

Cole eased three more fat shells into the magazine of the shotgun before he moved silently in the direction of the roadtrain. He felt a sudden flash of sensory memory—a night thick with heat and humidity and the silent jungle all around, too silent, telling of predators on the move.

Kill or be killed.

Live or die.

Nothing new.

But this time it was different, more difficult, for he was protecting more than his own life. He cocked his head, listening to make sure Erin had not betrayed her hiding place. He heard only silence.

Motionless, Erin lay and listened to the silence, fighting the urge to call out Cole’s name. She’d stalked animals in the wilderness with her camera, she’d watched wolves hamstring and bring down moose, but never before had she been facedown in cover while she waited for men to kill or die. She wished she had something more deadly at her command than her own clenched fists and fraying patience, but she didn’t.

A door slammed. The roadtrain’s diesel growled and revved. Gears clashed violently as the train began to retreat, picking up speed with every second. The spotlight and headlights were out, as though the fleeing assassin was afraid of drawing any more fire.

Warily Cole retreated in the direction of the Rover. When he was close to where he had left Erin, he whispered her name.

“Over here,” she whispered.

A moment later he slid down beside her, pulling her into his arms, holding her until she stopped shaking, being held in return. Long after the first rush of adrenaline-induced trembling passed, he continued to hold her, stroking her as he listened to the night. Slowly the small sounds of insects and nocturnal life returned, telling him that no one had been left behind on the road to sneak closer to the Rover and wait in ambush.

“You’ve been itching to drive all day,” he said quietly. “Feel up to it now?”

She nodded.

“Stay here while I take a look around. If it’s clear, try getting the Rover off the mound.”

“Why wait around?” she demanded. “He could be setting up another ambush down the road.”

“He was heading toward Fitzroy Crossing. We’re not.”

“What if there were two of them and one took off and the other one stayed behind?”

“He’s not that stupid.”

Her breath came in quickly. “You sound disappointed.”

Cole’s teeth glinted coldly in the moonlight. “There’s nothing I’d like better than to put that bastard in the ground.” His smile vanished. “They weren’t after just me this time. You came too damn close to buying it under that roadtrain’s wheels. As far as I’m concerned, it’s open season from here on out.”

Before she could say anything, her mouth was claimed in a swift, fierce kiss that ended as suddenly as it had begun.

“Five minutes,” he said. “If I’m not back and you haven’t heard anything, try to get the Rover off that hump. I’ll catch up before you get to the road.”

She waited until she decided five minutes had passed, then made her way to the Rover. She had to climb in at an awkward angle, but once she scrambled behind the wheel, she started the engine easily. The gear box had been designed for a man. A strong one. She wrestled the shifter into reverse gear and fed gas. The Rover dragged a few inches off its high point. She shifted into first, inched forward, then quickly went into reverse. This time the front wheels caught and held traction.

No sooner did the Rover groan and thump free of the mound than loose soil threatened to bog the wheels. She shifted into low range and tried again. The Rover eased forward. She made a very slow turn without lights, heading back toward the road.

Cole materialized from the shadows beside her door.

“I’ll drive,” she said quickly, stopping. “You ride shotgun.”

He went around to the other side and climbed in. “You drive to the station turnoff. I’ll take it from there.”

“No camping out on picnic tables?”

“Not tonight. We’re going to ground in the bush until I stop seeing double.”

“Wouldn’t we be safer at the station?”

“Safer?” He laughed, but there was no humor in the sound. He turned and looked at her with eyes that glittered like ice in the reflected light of the dashboard. “Sorry to break the news, honey. The station isn’t safer—it’s the hunting ground of the diamond tiger.”

Cole came awake before the first stars began fading from the crowded southern sky. The air was humid, fragrant, filled with the subtle rush of awakening life. Erin stirred sleepily and snuggled closer to him, sharing the heat of his body in the cool of pre-dawn. He shifted until he could put both arms around her.

The headache that had plagued him last night didn’t return with his movement. Nor did it return with the sudden quickening of his body when he felt the softness of the woman pressed against him. He was tempted to awaken her as he had yesterday morning, bringing her from sleep to abandoned sensuality, bypassing inhibition and fear, touching the intense passion that had been buried for years within her.

Even as he told himself all the reasons why he shouldn’t, his hands were moving over her, pushing away the frail barrier of clothes, seeking the sleek center of her, finding it. He caressed her slowly, felt her body’s sultry response, and wondered what her dreams were like.

Her breath broke and her eyes opened, gleaming mysteriously in the star-filled night.

“This is becoming a habit,” she murmured, smiling and stretching languidly against him.

“I’ll stop.”

“Really?” Her hands slid down his body, finding and caressing the hard male flesh that rose eagerly to meet her. “When?”

“Whenever you want.”

She looked up into the pale blaze of his eyes and knew that he meant it. He would stop right now if that was what she wanted. But she didn’t. Barely awake, operating at the level of deepest instinct, she wanted him.

His hand moved and heat burst in the pit of her stomach, shaking her. His touch slid deeply inside her until the heel of his palm grazed the exquisitely sensitive nub concealed between hot folds of skin. Her lashes half lowered and her breath unraveled. Splinters of pleasure shivered through her, melting her in his hand. She looked into his eyes and knew only the truth of her love for this man.

He made a thick sound of pleasure as she urged him over on top of her and he joined their bodies as completely as he could, moving in slow counterpoint to her until pleasure overwhelmed both of them. At the last instant he covered her mouth with his own, drinking her wild cries even as he poured himself into her. Then he held her until their breathing evened out, their heartbeats slowed, and he felt the boneless relaxation of her body as she drifted into sleep once more.

“No, you don’t,” he said. “It’s time to get up.”

She murmured and separated herself from him with a slow reluctance that sent currents of passion surging through him once more. Ignoring the delicate talons of desire, he dressed quickly, rolled sleeping bags and tarp, and stuffed them in the Rover. Then he scrambled up a steep slope and stood in the moon shadow of a hilltop outcropping.

The track leading to Abe’s station was below and to the right. The vague road was barely visible in moonlight. In some places, it vanished in the thin bush cover. Only someone who was familiar with the track would have been able to follow it—or someone like Cole, whose memory was remarkable.

The dusty, rutted track was deserted. The pre-dawn darkness was silent.

“I guess the bastard finally had enough,” Cole said as Erin climbed up and stood beside him.

“Thank God.”

His smile flashed whitely. “God had nothing to do with that one.”

“How’s your head?”

“Still there.”

“Hold still.”

He stood motionless while her fingertips searched lightly through his hair just above his right temple. His scalp prickled in elemental response as his whole body tightened.

“The bump is almost gone,” she said after a moment.

His fingertip traced her cheekbone. “Come on. Back to the Rover before I do something foolish again.” His voice had an unmistakable roughness to it as he added under his breath, “Woman, you have the damnedest effect on my self-control.”

She followed him, picking her way carefully in the tricky light. The first few steps down the slope were steep and crumbly. She slid, caught herself, then slid again until her walking shoes found better purchase. All around her spinifex gleamed in lines of silver that shifted and rippled with the hot breeze. Somewhere in the distance an animal gave an odd, resonant cry.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“Cow talking to the moon.”

Another urgent cry came on the wind.

“Moon talking back to the cow?” she asked dryly.

He grinned. “You learn fast.”

The two doors to the Rover closed as one, sounding loud in the stillness. He started up and eased the Rover back onto the rough, rutted track, using only moonlight until they were down on flat land again. As the Rover bumped forward, Cole could see signs where a larger vehicle had taken the track, leaving behind crushed spinifex and broken brush. There were other signs of recent traffic as well, tire tracks not yet blurred by the wind.

“Lots of traffic,” Erin said.

“You have good eyes.”

“Nervous eyes, after yesterday.”

“So far I haven’t seen anything unexpected,” Cole said. “Just the sort of tracks you’d see on Abe’s driveway.”

“Some driveway. Must be sixty kilometers long.”

“As the crow flies—or the cockatoo, since we’re in the Kimberley. The narrower tread marks belong to something with a wheel base smaller than the Rover’s. Probably one of the old jeeps that Abe kept around. He had three of the damn things the last time I was here. He just kept cannibalizing to keep one of them going.”

“Then you don’t think anyone’s at the station right now?”

“Some people from BlackWing will be there. At least they damn well better be, or our prospecting won’t get off the ground before the wet. Sarah might be there. Maybe some of her kids and grandkids. The men probably went walkabout after Abe died.”

“Who’s Sarah?”

Cole smiled strangely. “Nobody knows. She was a child when Abe and his brother first pegged out their pastoral lease. Her tribe had either been wiped out by disease and war, or they’d just gone walkabout and left her. She stayed with Abe.”

The Rover lurched and wallowed. Erin braced herself on the dashboard while Cole downshifted into low gear and crawled over the deeply rutted, concrete-hard remains of a dried-out bog.

“Do you think Sarah knows about the mine?” Erin asked.

“I doubt it. If she did, she wouldn’t care. Diamonds are a modern passion. The Aborigines have no use for modern things.”

“Surely life changed after the English came?”

“The English haven’t been here very long. The first Australians drove cattle to the Kimberley from Queensland a little more than a hundred years ago. The trek took two years. They started out with ten thousand head and lost more than half, so nobody was in a bloody great hurry to do it twice. There’s been more settlement out here in the last twenty years than there was in the first hundred.”

The Rover staggered and slithered over what could only have been a muddy patch of ground.

“A seep,” he said when Erin made a startled sound.

“Water?”

“It happens, you know.”

“You could have fooled me. That’s the first free fresh water I’ve seen since I got to Australia.”

He swerved the Rover as an animal the size of a small dog flashed across the track.

“What was that?” she asked.

“A wallaby.”

She stared into the night. She couldn’t see anything. She sighed and settled back again. “Did Abe ever talk about his brother?”

“Not to me. Not directly. According to local legend, after your grandfather left with Bridget McQueen, Abe went native for a time. He learned the language, lived the life, and became a kind of god or devil to the Aborigines who migrated through the station. He sat at their fires, they pledged young women to him, and saved him the choice parts of lizard and croc.”

The Rover groaned and bumped along the track, taking Cole’s full attention.

“Did you like Abe?” she asked when the road was less rough.

“I respected his toughness. I admired his knowledge of the land. But like him?” Cole shrugged. “No one liked Abe, least of all the people who knew him best—the Aborigines. You don’t like your gods or devils. You just live with them the best way you can. He was obsessed with sex, but he hated women more than any man I’ve ever known.”

“Then why did he leave me the station? He could have willed it to Dad or Phil.”

Cole’s sideways glance was a pale glitter against the dark planes of his face. “Maybe Abe didn’t hate them enough.”

“What do you mean?”

Softly Cole began to quote from “Chunder.” “‘I’m going down alone/Where the black swan floats/O’er a dead sea’s bones./Stone woman giving me hope,/Secrets blacker than-death/And truth it’s death to speak./ But I will speak to you./Listen to me, child of rue./You will curse the day/As I cursed my queen lady.’”

The words spoken in a man’s deep voice beneath the vast Australian night sounded very different than those same words read mockingly in an expensive Los Angeles hotel. A shiver of unease rippled through Erin.

“What had women ever done to him?” she asked.

Cole’s mouth turned down in a hard smile. “Oh, probably the usual thing.”

“Which is?”

“Screwed him over.”

“From what you’ve said about Abe, being screwed was his idea of a good time.”

“There’s a world of difference between screwing and being screwed.”

“I know,” she said bleakly.

Cole remembered Hans. “Sorry, honey. I wasn’t thinking.” He smiled bitterly. “It’s a pity Hans didn’t meet Wing’s sister. They were made for each other. But Justice is blind and Mercy is an unpredictable whore.”

Erin wasn’t about to argue that.

“I don’t know what happened to sour Abe on women,” Cole said. “He never talked about it. Looking at those pictures of yours, it’s probably as simple as two brothers wanting the same woman and only one of them getting her.”

“Grandmother?”

He nodded. “After Bridget left, one of Abe’s white neighbors asked him why his brother Nate Windsor had gone to America. Abe worked the man over with a stockman’s whip. If Abe hadn’t been so drunk at the time, he probably would have flayed the poor bastard alive. The same thing happened every time your grandfather was mentioned. Abe went into a murderous rage. After a while, people stopped talking about Nate Windsor’s sudden decision to go to America and started talking about Crazy Abe.”

The track disintegrated into braided ruts climbing a hill. Cole killed the headlights before they could show over the rise. Bucking, sliding, shuddering, the Rover crabbed uphill. As soon as they were just below the top, he turned off the engine and got out. A few steps brought his head above the rise.

Down below in a windswept hollow, lights gleamed in the darkness.

Erin got out and went to stand beside him. “What is it?” she asked softly.

“The station house.”

“It looks pretty busy for this early.”

“During buildup, you get up before dawn if you want to get anything done. It’s too damn hot otherwise.”

He went back to the Rover, pulled a box of shotgun shells from his kit and dropped a dozen of them into his pocket.

She watched without a word.

“I’m going to make sure there aren’t any surprises,” he said softly. “If it’s all right for you to come in, the house lights will flash twice. Give me an hour. If I haven’t signaled by then, get back to Fitzroy Crossing, call your father, and camp with the local police until he arrives.”

“What about you?”

“That’s my problem. Staying alive is yours. Whatever happens,
don’t come in after me
. Once I leave the Rover, I’m assuming that everything that moves out there is an enemy.”

“Cole—” she began.

“Promise me you’ll stay here,” he interrupted urgently, leaning toward her. “I could get killed worrying about you.”

She felt the heat of his breath and the gentle caress of his mouth.

“Promise me,” he whispered.

She shivered as the taste of him spread like wine across her tongue. “Yes.”

The sound was as much a sigh as a word, but he understood. The kiss changed for an instant, becoming less gentle, more consuming. Then he was gone.

Cole moved silently over the rise and down the slope, using natural cover to conceal his outline. It took him more than half an hour to reach the compound. When he was within ten yards of the house, he crouched near a slender gum and waited.

Nothing moved. Even the wind was still. From behind the house came the hum of a large generator. On the roof a satellite dish stood ready to receive invisible messages. Another array of electronic gear was nearby, ready to send messages.

He circled the house at a distance. Two new one-ton pickup trucks were parked in back, gleaming among the rusted carcasses of old Jeeps. Nothing stirred in the darkness except the slow expansion of cigarette smoke giving away the position of a hidden guard. Bypassing the man, Cole eased toward the kitchen window. He’d nearly reached it when the back door opened an arm’s length away.

His night vision was ruined by the sudden outpouring of light. Too close to do anything except attack, he stepped forward soundlessly. As the door closed he snaked his arm around the person’s throat.

“Don’t talk,” he said very softly. “Don’t move.”

Even as the words left his mouth, an exotic perfume bathed his senses. The scent was as familiar as the delicate perfection of the bones and flesh lying helplessly within his grasp.

“Hello, Lai,” he said softly. “Long time no see. But not long enough.”