On Thin Ice Read Online Free PDF Page A

kind of animal they’d come from. Probably Rodents of Unusual Size.
    She slipped, going down hard on her backside, but she managed to keep it to a small grunt of dismay. By the time she got to her feet again he had disappeared into the night as if he’d never been there.
    She froze, momentarily panicked. He was her only chance at escape, and she’d already lost him. She’d understood more than MacGowan had thought when Carlos and the other boy were arguing – if she made it back home it wasn’t going to be in pristine condition. The thought pushed her onward, deeper into the jungle. So she knew squat about surviving in the wilderness. At least she’d read enough Worst Case Scenario books to have a general idea of what to do in an alien abduction. She couldn’t remember whether escaping from guerilla kidnappers in the Andes was mentioned, and if it was, she’d forgotten. All she could do was keep moving and hope she’d catch up with MacGowan before he went to ground completely.
    In the distance she could hear the sound of a stream. That was a start – water had to flow downhill, and her only chance at survival, if MacGowan proved elusive, was to get as far down the mountain as she could. If nothing else, she could follow the stream.
    Someone with MacGowan’s training wouldn’t need to rely on something as simple as that. He was clearly well-versed in dealing with these kinds of things. The closest she had come was reading a book on worst-case scenarios.
    She was simply going to have to hope for the best, expect the worst, and just keep moving . . .
    An arm came around her waist, a hand clamped over her mouth to keep her from screaming, and a moment later she was pulled back into the thick foliage, held against a strong male body. “Keep still,” he whispered in her ear, barely a ghost of a sound.
    She had the sense not to fight him. A moment later someone walked by, one of the guerillas on nightly rounds. He was smoking something dubious and his rifle was slung carelessly over one shoulder, and as he moved past she let out her pent-up breath.
    It wasn’t even a noise, lighter than the wind through the greenery, but MacGowan tightened his hand over her mouth, hard, and the stoned soldier spun around, the rifle at chest level.
    And suddenly she was alone. MacGowan had released her, disappeared back into the jungle, leaving her at the mercy of the creep in front of her.
    “Who’s there?” he demanded in Spanish. He speared the brush aside with the barrel of his gun, and Beth sank lower into the dirt.
    She felt like a terrified rabbit, small and quivering in the dirt, and she crouched there, frozen, waiting for rough hands, pawing at her, waiting for a bullet, waiting for God knew what.
    She heard a noise, a rustle, a thud, a crunching sound, and she lifted her head just a little. The gun had disappeared, as well as the man behind it. She sat up a little higher, then almost screamed as someone looked out of the darkness.
    MacGowan. It was MacGowan’s rough hands on her, pulling her to her feet. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in a breath of sound.
    “You can’t leave me behind!”
    “I can and I will, if I have to break your neck to keep you from following me.”
    “I’d like to see you try.”
    “No, you wouldn’t.” His voice was flat, unemotional, but even in the darkness she could see the faint flicker in his eyes. She looked behind her, at the crumpled body of the pot smoking soldier, his head at an odd angle, his eyes open and staring.
    “Oh, God,” she whispered, horrified. What had seemed a strange kind of nightmare was suddenly, terribly real. “Did you kill him?”
    “No, the tooth fairy came along and took care of him.” He stared down at her for a long moment, and she wondered whether he was thinking about how easy it would be to break her neck. He wasn’t the kind of man who was troubled by moral qualms.
    And then he turned. “Come on,” he said. “Keep