Page 25

“Have a safe trip, Alex.”

Yeah. Right. “Thanks.” He hung up before more sarcasm could leak into his voice.

He looked up and spied Katie standing in the bathroom doorway. “Show time?” she asked.

An urge to lie nearly overcame him. To take her to the airport, put her on a plane and send her home. But not only had he promised never to lie to her, she could also sniff fibs a mile away. He sighed. “We’ll need to grab a bite to eat at the airport As soon as you’re ready, we’ll head out.”

Into what, he had no damned idea. But one thing he knew for sure. They were headed intosomething.

Katie watched the twin prop airplane that had been their ride lift off into the sunny blue sky, and then looked around at Great Inagua Island in dismay. She’d never seen a more barren place. It was nothing but windswept dirt and rocks. “I thought Caribbean islands were supposed to be tropical paradises.”

“Not if all the tree cover is destroyed by settlers and the ecosystem collapses and desertifies. Then they look like this,” Alex replied.

She shuddered. “It’s awful. Who lives here, anyway?”

“Workers at the local salt factory. About eight hundred of them.”

“Are they okay after the storm?” she asked in quick concern.

“They were evacuated by the salt company. We’re the only humans currently on the island.”

“Wow. We’re all alone on a desert island?”

He smiled reluctantly. “Yes. We’ll make our way to the shore on foot to catch our ride. I hope you’re up for a hike.”

Memory washed over her of the last time he’d asked her that. She’d had one-hour-old Dawn stuffed inside her coat while a war raged around them. She’d had no choice but to flee for her life, and Dawn’s, with him.

Aloud, she replied, “I’m always up for hike. Piece of cake.” She just hoped no wars were about to break out around them. She had a sneaking suspicion one might, though, before this was all said and done.

Alex took off across the pale dirt. The going was easy for about three minutes while they headed for the far end of the airstrip. Then they reached a wall of ruined vegetation, twisted and flattened by Hurricane Giselle into a nearly impassable tangle of jagged wood, sharp-leaved foliage, and hidden rocks waiting to turn the unwary ankle.

Thank God she’d been working out like a maniac since he’d left. She was panting like a dog, but so was Alex. It took them something like an hour to cover a quarter mile.

“How far do we have to go in this stuff?” she finally broke down and asked him.

“Just over the ridge.”

Awesome. They weren’t far from the crest, now. Another fifteen minutes of carefully picking their way forward, and they topped the low rise.

The ocean and a blond beach stretched away in front of them. And praise the lord, this side of the ridge was bare of vegetation until the margin of the beach below. They made their way down the hillside relatively quickly with only sharp stones and treacherous slides of gravel to avoid.

But then they got to a literal wall, at least eight feet tall, of destroyed scrub trees, bushes, and random vegetative debris.

“How on earth are we supposed to get through this?” she asked. “Even if we had a machete, it would take hours to hack through all that.”

“That, grasshopper, is why man conquered fire,” Alex answered.

“Isn’t it too wet to burn?” she asked dubiously.

“Only one way to find out,” he answered absently as he commenced laying a fire at the base of the wall. The wind was still brisk in the lee of the hurricane and the fledgling flame blew out twice before it finally caught and held.

In seconds, though, it flared from the size of her hand to waist high, and from there to over her head. The pile went up in a firestorm that swept down the beach at shocking speed. No fire department on earth could’ve put that out. She and Alex scrambled back from the intense heat as the debris burned with a roar of sound.

“What if there are houses down the beach?” she demanded, appalled.

“No house survived two-hundred mile per hour winds for fourteen hours. A stone structure might’ve survived the hurricane, but it won’t burn.” Alex shrugged, pragmatic. “Burning this stuff off is how a clean up crew will get rid of it, anyway.”

With deep misgivings, she watched the fire rip down the beach. The good news was the wind was headed out to sea. If they were lucky, they hadn’t just set the entire island on fire. And the salt factory was across the island, well upwind of this conflagration. Still, the ease with which Alex had taken radical action without concern for peripheral damage sent up warning flags in her head.