Chapter 35
Gabe lunged.
His legs were two cold dead things that wouldn't drive the way he screamed at them to, and the ten yards of black water between him and Cara might as well have been the whole width of the fjord.
He keyed the comm and his voice came apart in his mouth. "Abort. Everybody in. Get her out of the water. Forget the op, go. Go! Go! Go!"
For a second the channel was nothing but breathing. Then it broke open.
"Copy. Moving." Tom, instant.
"Keep her face up." Reagan, every word jolting with her stride as she came up out of the cave on foot. "Keep her face up if you can, Gabe—"
He couldn't. Not until he got to her. Cara!
She was face-down. Ten yards away, a wall of black water between his hands and her. His brother was saying his name out of a warm bright room three thousand miles off, helpless as all of them. And under everything, climbing, the snowcat: Wade just visible above the ice rim, but still too far away.
All of them moving. None of them close.
The bear had turned in the water and put that vast flat head down toward the dark shape that smelled of blood, and sniffed, unhurried, the way a thing that has never been afraid of anything in its life moves toward a meal.
A figure––Feld––ran closer, skidding to a stop at the very edge of the ice where Wade had dumped Cara. He raised a hand, weapon in hand.
Gabe’s strangled cry drew the man’s attention, but he quickly took aim… not at Cara or him. At the bear.
Gabe shook the water out of his eyes. The bright orange shape coalesced into something more meaningful. And less deadly. A flare gun.
Now Feld yelled, drawing the creature’s attention. The flare angled toward the beast, a hard red star, spitting fire.
The bear flinched. The enormous head jerked away, from the light. Away from Cara.
The white streaming bulk of it rolled, and the thing slid back under the black water and was gone.
Cara rose up now, arms flailing, her rebreather gone. Feld dropped to one knee at the rim of the ice, reached down into the water, and hauled her out.
Arms windmilling as hard as he could make the numb muscles work, Gabe drove toward them, but he could only watch as Feld pulled Cara up out of the water.
He rolled her over on the ice, clearing her face.
Gabe was close enough now to watch it move through the man's whole body. The hands stopping. The small backward rock of his weight. His head came up, sweeping the area, the exact thing a trained man does in the half second he understands the dead man in his arms has a woman's face.
Feld pushed the wet hair off her cheek.
A Neptune operative had Cara's face in his two hands and knew this wasn’t the target. It wasn’t Owen. The last card they had, and a stranger's mercy had just turned it face-up on the ice.
Every name in Ray's notebook. Every person the man had died to hide. All of them back on the board now.
And the man was still crouched over Cara, who couldn't lift a hand, coughing up the sea, blind with cold, finished, while a Neptune operative knelt above her with all the time in the world and every reason to use it.
He was going to kill her. Gabe knew it the way you know a thing in a nightmare, with no way to stop it and no way to look away.
Something tore loose in his chest, a rage with no floor under it.
He heaved at the ice. He screamed at his own dead legs, screamed something across the ten yards with no words in it, and the water held him and the cold held him and his ruined hands found nothing.
The weapon under his suit might as well have been a thousand miles off — too far, the angle wrong, Cara in the line of it.
He could do nothing but watch a stranger fold down over the only thing in the world that mattered to him, and brace for the hands to close.
But Feld didn't finish her. He didn't drag her toward the snowmobile. He didn't do one single thing an enemy does with a helpless enemy. He crouched over her in the sinking red light, looking down into her face.
Then Wade's snowcat came over the rise with every light blazing and the throttle wide open. Feld's head snapped toward it. He let go of Cara and came up off the ice, racing toward the snowmobile, and tore away across the flat, the engine winding higher and thinner until the wind swallowed it.
Gabe got an arm over the ice rim and tried to pull himself out, but the cold had it all now, his legs, his hands, the deep middle of him where his lungs had stopped wanting to work. He clawed anyway. He got a knee up onto the ice. It slid out from under him.
Wade's snowcat slid to a stop just beyond her in a spray of ice while Gabe knelt in the shallows shaking too hard to reach her.
She lay where Feld left her, small and dark and still in the gold light.
They had done everything right.
And the one decent thing in the whole frozen night, an enemy who wouldn't let a bear take her, had just destroyed all of it.