Death is Forever

expression. With a hand that trembled she touched his mouth.
    “Not your fault,” she whispered.
    His hand closed around hers, holding it close. They fell into a sleep that was restless, disturbed by thirst, hunger, and the dry groan of distant thunder.
    Erin awoke in a rush, wondering what was wrong. A glance told her that she was alone. Where Cole had slept next to her there was only the shotgun and a handful of shells resting on a folded sheet of plastic. A few drops of water gleamed on the plastic, proof that it very recently had been one of the solar stills. He must have emptied a still before he left.
    Heat poured down through the broken, seething lid of clouds. Sunset was hours away.
    She sat up and waited for the dizziness to pass. When her eyes focused, she saw what Cole had written in the dirt just beyond the shotgun.
    Gone hunting.
    The other solar stills hadn’t been touched. They were taking advantage of every bit of sun to draw water vapor from thin leaves.
    She picked up the shotgun, checked that it was loaded, and put it down within easy reach. Then she stretched out again and wondered what was so urgent that Cole had drunk the contents of one still and gone out into the vicious afternoon. Dozing, waking, dozing again, she waited.
    Just before sunset she heard a rustling from the dry scrub to the left of the shelter. She grabbed the shotgun, snapped off the safety, and waited.
    “It’s just me, honey.”
    The voice came from her right, not her left.
    She spun around and saw Cole standing no more than ten feet away. With a shiver of fear, she realized all over again what a lethal enemy a man like Cole would make. She snapped the safety back into place and stood up slowly.
    “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you,” she said.
    “That’s why I threw a rock into the scrub. If you were the trigger-happy type, you’d shoot the rock instead of me.”
    She looked at his empty hands and the sheath knife strapped to his wrist. “Find what you were hunting for?”
    Absently Cole brushed dry leaves and powdery grit from his hands. “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “An Aborigine. He’s about four hundred yards in back of us.”
    “Right now?”
    Cole nodded. “This isn’t some tough young black boy who’s gone walkabout for the hell of it. We’ve been followed since we left the Rover. I tried to catch him once before, while you slept, but he’s too good.”
    She shook her head, trying to understand. “Why are we being followed. Is he going to kill us?”
    “No. He’s a Kimberley kite hanging back and waiting until we die. Then he’ll call in the helicopter and our bodies will be ‘found’ the same way Abe’s was.”
    Her breath came in hard.
    “Too bad, how sad,” Cole said sardonically, “the two Yanks died in the outback when their Rover packed it in. No bullets. No signs of violence on the bodies. Nothing but dehydration, starvation, heat prostration, and death. No unhappy questions, no international inquiries, no nasty little investigations by your father and the CIA.”
    “No one will believe we just wandered off and died. That Rover was sabotaged!”
    Cole’s smile was as bleak as his eyes. “Was it? Or did we just run out of drinking water, drain and purify what was in the radiator, and set off on foot?”
    He nodded as he saw comprehension draw Erin’s face into grim lines.
    “They’ll replace hoses,” he said, “put the radio back in with a few loose connections to explain our silence, and then they’ll wring their hands for the press. Everything is going as they planned except for one minor detail. They didn’t know that when I’m in dry country, I always carry the means to make a solar still in my rucksack. We’ve lasted twice as long as they expected. That cat-footed little Aborigine they sicced on us has finally run out of water. The bastard has to hunt for it just like us. That’s what he’s doing now. Hunting water.”
    “What are we going to do?”
    “Pray to God he finds it.”

41
Kimberley Plateau Late afternoon
    After sunset Cole pulled down the canopy and spread it for a groundcloth.
    “Too dark to track him,” Cole said simply.
    Erin nodded. As had become her habit despite the heat, she curled up against him and slipped into a state that was neither sleeping nor waking.
    The night passed in a torment of thirst that was barely touched by the aromatic water they’d drunk from the solar stills. But unlike other nights, the clouds didn’t thin and dry up as