Protecting the Flame Read online

“Walk?” Hunter straightened as far as he was able. “Wait a minute.”

  Emma ignored him. “She can walk. Mattie and I are fine.” She didn’t mention Scott. Let him drag his own sorry ass. She wished she could feel sorry or even sympathy for the guy. “But, at the risk of sounding like a racist stereotype, I truly know nothing about birthing babies.”

  Will managed a thin smile. “You’d manage. All I’m saying is that slogging through snow for umpteen miles won’t help her or the baby, if it comes.”

  “You said yourself, the baby seems fine, and she feels all right. The thing is, we know they’re coming, They have to be. It could be today, tomorrow, the day after that—”

  “Or they wait for a spring thaw.”

  She shook her head. “All that money and the drugs? I wouldn’t take that chance. People are probably still looking for us and they know it. I’m saying we strip the plane and leave. Let them have their shit.”

  “No, wait, you can’t leave me.” Hunter’s face shivered with emotion. His eyes pooled. “I’m a sitting fucking duck. If they don’t get me, the wolves will or that mountain lion or, shit, I’ll rot and die that way. You might as well put a bullet in my brain right now.”

  “Not everyone’s leaving,” she said, keeping her eyes on Will. She saw the moment the words registered.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, his eyes widening. “You can’t be serious. You?”

  “You see anyone else who can?” She ticked the items off on her fingers. “One, you’re the only doctor. Two, that means Rachel needs you. Hell, it means everyone does. Mattie could fall and break a leg or whatever. Third, Scott is…let’s just say he’s unreliable. He also happens to be Rachel’s husband and that’s his kid she’s carrying. He should be with them.” Turning her hands palms up, she finished with a shrug. “That leaves only one person to stay with Hunter.”

  “No, it doesn’t, and you know it.” He took her by the elbows, his grip steady and strong, and drew her close enough she saw the flecks of gold in his eyes and her reflection captured there.

  “Damn you,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “It means leaving two.”

  Chapter 2

  After building up the fire, they left Hunter, reasoning he’d be safe for the short time it would take for her to gather a few supplies she’d need for the long night and return. Clambering back up the cliff path took all their breath and not a little of her strength. By the time she made it to the top, she felt as rubbery as Gumby. She could understand why, in all those stories of forced marches, people sometimes fell and couldn’t make their feet again. She didn’t know what she could do about that either.

  God. If I’m running low on gas, what about you? She almost put a hand on her belly but caught herself in the nick of time. She was not going down that road. This thing growing in her wasn’t a you. It was cells. A powerful cluster of cells, yes, enough to play hell with her hormones and make her sick in the mornings and change her body. But she sure as hell wasn’t going to go all maternal here.

  “You okay?” Will asked.

  “Fine.” She kept her eyes on the well-worn path they’d carved over days of moving back and forth between the cockpit and fuselage. “How long have you known?”

  “Since the first day. When I examined you, I could feel your womb and your…” He cleared his throat. “Women’s breasts change when they’re pregnant. But I would be lying if I said I was a hundred percent sure.”

  She kept her gaze fixed on the trees straight ahead. In a few more minutes, she should be able to see the orange spark of their signal fire. “What changed?”

  “Well, there’s you being sick every morning. You can only blame the altitude and shock for so much. But then the night you stayed with Hunter, when Mattie and I lit the menorah—”

  “Oh.” The realization broke over her mind the way a shaft of sun pierces thick clouds. She’d kept the menorah and candles in her pack. “You found the pills.”

  “Actually, Mattie did. Don’t worry. I said they were some kind of medicine for headaches or something. But, yeah.” They crunched over snow for a few seconds before he asked, “By my exam, you’re further along than for the time frame the meds are designed for. They’re best by eight weeks at the latest. And you’re—?”

  “About eleven weeks.” By Christmas…God…if this was the sixth day of Hanukkah, that meant Christmas was two days away, and she would be three months along, through the first trimester. She would still have plenty of time for an abortion. The procedure would only be more involved, that was all.

  “Well, I don’t know if the pills would work, but I’m not an obstetrician. They might, if you wanted to try. Do you?”

  “I don’t know. I know I didn’t want to do it now, here. I was thinking when we’re back in civilization would be nice. I do know that if there’s something wrong with the fetus, I will. I won’t even hesitate. I know other people make different choices about what to do if they’ve got a fetus with Down’s or some other congenital problem. But I know me.”

  “I’m a doctor. You don’t have to justify anything to me. I respect whatever choice you make. But I’m not the one who’s pregnant. It’s why I didn’t say anything until today. This is none of my business. I figured you would tell me yourself if and when you were ready.”

  “Yeah.” She didn’t know how she felt that he knew. She ought to be ashamed. She’d gotten herself into this mess and still wasn’t sure how to fix it. “That’s why you kept after me to eat. It’s why you gave me your energy bars.”

  “At least you kept them down. Look, I’m sorry I sprang it on you this way. I wasn’t going to say anything, but you didn’t give me much choice.” He stopped walking and turned to face her. “I can’t let you risk this. You can’t stay by yourself.”

  “I’m pregnant, Will, not sick.” It hit her that she hadn’t been queasy at all this morning. “Women have been pregnant for centuries in harsher conditions than this. If I were back on base, I’d still be doing PT or whatever. I think the only thing I’d get out of is standing at parade rest for longer than fifteen minutes and riding in a vehicle on unpaved roads. Apparently, they worry about the vibrations.”

  He let out a silent dog’s laugh. “I would suspect there’s nothing in regs about airplane crashes.”

  She smiled back up at him. “Apparently not, although they might have had something to say about all that turbulence.”

  “What about the father?”

  “What about him?”

  “Does he—”

  She cut him off. “Yes. He wants nothing to do with it or me. In fact, he told me to get rid of it. He’s married, got kids. It was a mistake. I was stupid. He—”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation.”

  “But I want to tell you. He was Ben’s CO.” Saying that made her face flame. “At first, it was him making condolence calls, you know? An invite to come to his office, go for a walk, and then it was a drink and then meeting for more drinks and then…” She slicked her lips. “I…we ended up in bed. More than once. It was…I was…it went on a while. Three, four months.”

  “Hey.” He still wore a sling to rest his shoulder, and now he circled the fingers of his good hand around her left wrist. “It’s okay. I understand. I told you.” His thumb found her naked, scarred skin. “I know grief when I touch it.”

  “Yeah. It was a way for me to remember Ben, I guess. He would talk about what a good investigator Ben was, but how the pressure must’ve gotten to him, that kind of thing. Then, one night, he asked me how much Ben had told me about what he was working on because it was highly classified and blah, blah.” She blew out a shaky breath. “That’s when I knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “That Ben hadn’t killed himself. I gave Ben the idea, not the other way around. I was the one who’d heard about a smuggling ring from a sergeant I knew and passed it to Ben. He was working this strictly off the books. He didn’t tell anyone in his command, not even his partner.”

 
She watched as Will sorted through this information. “You’re saying the CO was involved? In the smuggling ring?”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. A Special Forces guy was arrested down at Elgin in Florida for the same thing. This was back in October. They got him with ninety pounds of cocaine. You’re talking a street value of several million, and they think this is only the tip of the iceberg because the Special Forces guy was part of a unit involved in counter-drug operations in Mexico and South America.”

  “Where did your source think this smuggling ring operated out of?”

  “Idaho, mostly. Big ring in Boise, but Wyoming, too, like Burke’s people. Both are perfect because you’ve got all this land and no people to speak of.”

  “And you think Ben’s CO had your husband murdered because he got too close?”

  She nodded. “He told me the higher-ups had investigated and found there was nothing there. Ben killed himself, and I needed to accept that.”

  “But you obviously don’t.”

  “I…I think it’s hard to know. Undercover work is…”

  He interrupted. “Is that why you tried to kill yourself?” When she nodded, he said, “Not because of the baby?”

  “God, no.” Despair washed through her veins. “I thought that maybe Ben’s CO might be right. That kind of work can swallow you up.” In the month leading to his death, Ben had become moodier and more withdrawn. “So, there are days when I think, yeah, he took his service weapon and blew his brains out all over our bathroom. Then, there are others when I think whoever was pulling the strings on this operation, whether it was his CO or someone else, caught up with him because there are my parents, too, dying in that car crash. You can say coincidence, sure. But that happened when I started making noise. Except I can’t prove anything. My tip is only a tip, that sergeant is sure as hell not going to talk to me anymore, and everything Ben did was classified. Anything I know is in my head. There’s my sister and her children, too. I can’t risk it. I have to let it go.” Not to mention the fact that she was now responsible for yet another life, a child Ben and she had talked of having, eventually. She thought of Mattie and her rage at her mother for carrying a baby Mattie’s father had wanted. Emma wasn’t all that different from Rachel.

  “So, what are you going to do? Leave the military?”

  “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that, but to do what? I’m a journalist. Newspapers are dying. Eking out a living as a stringer isn’t appealing. Besides, do you know how hard it is for a single mother, in general? The world’s a pretty messed up place, Will, and right now, with climate change and right-wing governments, and all the rest, it feels as if it’s only getting worse. Who in their right mind brings a baby into a world like this?”

  “I suspect people have been asking that question for generations.”

  “Doesn’t mean it’s not true.” She debated then said, “My grandmother had a sister, Klara. She went back to Poland in the early thirties.”

  “That sounds like incredibly bad timing.”

  “How about the worst? She met a man named Robert. They got married and settled down.”

  “Where?”

  “Warsaw.”

  She heard his intake of breath. “Oh, Jesus,” he said. “They were in the ghetto?”

  She nodded. “He ran a newspaper. She liked books and wanted to be a writer. They joined up with this secret underground research organization, the Oyneg Shabes.”

  “Joy of the Sabbath. Interesting name.”

  “The group used to meet after Shabbos services to talk about that week’s work, but Sarah once said it was because, on Shabbos, you’ve lit candles, you’ve welcomed the Sabbath Queen, and, if you’re really orthodox, you believe the lights to the gates of the Torah are open and you’re that much closer to God. She thought they ought to have called themselves ‘Protectors of the Flame.’” That made her think of Earl and what he’d said about Inuit women.

  “Did they call themselves that?”

  “No. They said they were ‘The Librarians.’ They made it their mission to document everything about life in the ghetto, so we’re talking gathering and publishing books, memoirs, letters, poetry. They even kept train tickets and candy wrappers. They wanted to make sure people knew who they’d been, but they were also worried of being discovered so a lot of it was done piecemeal, like in cells? That way, if anyone was caught, they couldn’t give up the whole show. My grandmother’s sister ran a soup kitchen, a folkskikh. It was the real deal, but it was also a good cover for passing documents back and forth. When things got really bad, right before the ghetto uprising in 1943, they buried it all. No one found any of the materials until 1946, but the archive still exists. It’s in New York now.”

  “What happened to them? To Klara and Robert?”

  This was something she’d only told Ben. “The Uprising and then Treblinka happened. Well, that is, Treblinka happened to Robert. After the Uprising, Klara got sent to a labor camp. She knew she was pregnant when the Nazis emptied the ghetto. She’d been this close to having an abortion, but either she dithered too long or there was no time…I don’t really know. All I do know is if she’d been showing, they’d probably have killed her right there and then. There were doctors in some camps—most of them were doing abortions, of course—but there were also a couple of midwives. For whatever reason, some women were allowed to come to term, which was pretty cruel because they would kill the babies right away. But my bubbe said, my grandmother Sarah?”

  “I know what a bubbe is.” He showed a faint smile. “My grandfather always said, Oyb di bobe volt gehat a bord, volt zi geven a zeyde.”

  “Oooh.” She knew what that meant. If Grandma had a beard, she’d be Grandpa. “Nice guy.”

  He gave his silent dog’s laugh. “He had his moments. Great accent, though.”

  “Where did your family come from?”

  “England, believe or not. My great-grandfather had a tea shop, the first in Whitechapel and then a second, much bigger and swankier place in Hampstead. The family apocrypha’s that he met Freud.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Scout’s honor. This happened a couple months after Freud escaped from Germany. So the story goes that Freud invited Virginia and Leonard Woolf for tea, but they needed cakes because their baker fell through at the last second or something and everyone knows that tea is about the cakes and sandwiches. Is it true?” He shrugged. “Virginia Woolf noted the tea in her diary. So, it’s not impossible. But we’re not talking about me. What happened with Klara?”

  “Sarah thought Klara was allowed to come to term because she didn’t fit the stereotype of a Jew. She was this gorgeous blue-eyed, blond-haired, very Aryan-looking woman. Right around that time, some camps would take Jewish babies from mothers who could easily pass and gave them to Nazis to raise as their own. The program was called Lebensborn. That’s what happened with Klara’s little girl. They took the baby and, even though Klara survived, she never saw that child again. She looked, too. For years.”

  She fell silent. For a few heartbeats, they simply stood together, hand in hand, and there was nothing but the hollow moan of wind through trees, a whump as heavy snow slid from a bough. Then, Will said, quietly, “Why did you tell me that?”

  “Because.” She breathed out, watching as the wind carried the word away. “I think of Klara, despite everything, having that baby in the worst possible conditions, and yet she still came out the other side, and I can’t figure out what the bigger miracle: that she lived or her baby did. And then here I am, and I’ve made a mess of things.”

  “No, you haven’t,” Will said. “You’ve helped make a life.”

  Chapter 3

  Will and the others left before noon. The last she heard from them, she’d been down at the cockpit and they were two miles distant from the crash site and at the very edge of their walkie-talkies’ range.

  “You could follow,” Will said. “Mattie’s leaving blazes the whole way, and you should b
e able to follow our tracks.”

  The temptation to do that pricked at her neck. “You know I can’t. We decided. Someone has to stay with Hunter and that’s me. So,” she changed the topic, “how’s it look?”

  A long, static-filled silence followed, and she was about to repeat the question when he said, “I don’t know. We’re headed downhill, so that’s good, but all I see are mountains and more mountains. Best we can hope for is we come on a game trail or maybe an old fire road. If we’re really lucky, we find an old hunting cabin or something. Like that movie with Anthony Hopkins.”

  “Oh, uh…” She knew which one he meant. “Plane crash, happens in Alaska, they get stalked by a grizzly.”

  “That’s it. I remember I thought Alec Baldwin’s teeth were too white for a guy who’d been out in the wilderness for a week or something. But they found a cabin and a boat.”

  “It was a movie.”

  “And this is reality, Greg.”

  “E.T.”

  “I was always partial to Close Encounters myself.”

  “Why?” Then she laughed. “Right. Because you wanted to be an astronaut.” She’d have pulled a Roy Neary, too, and gone off with the aliens. Man, if she got out of this, she was making a massive amount of popcorn and hunkering down with Netflix and Amazon Prime for a solid month. “Everyone else okay?”

  “Well, considering that we only left you two hours ago, we’re fine. Mattie’s pissed, but she’ll get over it. She wanted me to tell you not to light the menorah again until we’re all together. Oh, and she said that if you eat the Almond Joy without her, you’re a dead man.”

  “Deal.” Though she wasn’t sure she could honor that promise. “Is she there?”

  “No, I moved off into the woods a good ways, you know, in case Hunter had…”

  “Sure.” She listened to the air fizz and thought of all the things they’d left unsaid. “We better stop talking then. Save your batteries.”

  “Right. Listen, turn on your unit about every six hours starting now, okay? Leave it on this band and when you come on, do three quick breaks. That’ll take less energy, but that will tell someone you’re there. I’m betting that if we find help or someone stumbles on us, they’ll probably have better handsets. Once they figure out you’re on, they can talk to you, let you know they’re on their way, probably even triangulate on your signal, okay?”