The Descent From Truth Read Online Free Page A

turned away from her, and feeling stupid about the implied vanity, he passed her a strip of dried venison jerky.
     
    “Thank you.” She chewed the dried meat and fed saliva-softened bites to the baby.
     
    He had been without a woman way too long, Alex decided as he watched her fingers slide between her lips to extract a chewed morsel and push it into the baby’s mouth. The process struck him as intensely sensual.
     
    “Have another one,” he said. Steeling himself for her reaction, he shifted so she couldn’t miss seeing the scar as he passed his last strip of jerky to her.
     
    She accepted it, stared for a moment at his scarred cheek, and winced. “Did that hurt terribly?”
     
    “Didn’t even know I was hit.” He thumbed the scar, and battle memories popped in his head like flashbulbs. With a severed tendon in his calf, Captain Faust had been unable to walk. Alex held the captain in a fireman’s carry and dogtrotted through the jungle. He felt liquid oozing onto his neck, touched it, and looked at his hand: blood. His face was numb, as if he’d received a giant Novocain shot. Exploring fingers touched bone and a sliver of shrapnel that had lodged in his jaw. The hot metal had cauterized the wound. “The pain came later.”
     
    “Does it bother you now?”
     
    “Itches in cold weather.” He mixed powdered coffee into the heated water and offered it to her. They passed it back and forth in companionable silence until the cup was empty. “Time to call the chopper.” He dipped into his backpack to retrieve his phone.
     
    It wasn’t there.
     

Chapter 3
     
    Alex dug through his backpack to see if the cell phone had slid to the bottom. No luck. Maybe he’d clipped it back on his utility belt. Not there, either. Thirty-one was too young to be forgetting where he put things.
     
    Pia and her baby were playing with the all-purpose aluminum pot Alex used as a cup and cooking utensil. Each time she handed it to the boy, he waved it, tossed it onto the sleeping bag and, laughing and babbling, waited for her to hand it back. She glanced at Alex. “Is something wrong?”
     
    “You move my phone?”
     
    “I thought you put it there.” She pointed to his backpack.
     
    “Yeah, and it’s gone.”
     
    “Gone?”
     
    Swallowing his frustration, he dumped the backpack. Together, they sorted through its contents, lining everything up on the sleeping bag.
     
    On hands and knees, the baby headed for the array. Pia diverted him with the aluminum pot. “He is an inquisitive child. He might have pulled your phone from the bag.” She sifted through loose snow where the compact unit could have fallen and gotten buried, then ran her fingers along the folds of the sleeping bag.
     
    Alex lifted the edges of the Mylar flooring to look underneath. “Damned thing couldn’t just walk off.” He didn’t want to be suspicious, didn’t want her to be anything other than a stranded young mother, dependent on him and grateful for his help. But doubt pulled at him. “You didn’t use it and forget to put it back?”
     
    “No, sir.” Her big eyes opened wider.
     
    Even if she were something other than what she claimed, what would she gain by rendering herself incommunicado? Maybe he had inadvertently pulled the phone from the backpack while getting something else. Or the baby might have gotten his hands on it as she’d suggested. “I don’t mean to sound gruff. But without that phone, we’re stranded.”
     
    The baby had crawled to where the backpack’s contents were laid out. He started scattering them. Pia scooped him up and turned back to Alex. “What are we going to do?”
     
    Without some clue, they would never find the phone in the snowdrifts. He flashed what he hoped was a reassuring grin. “Ever worn snowshoes?”
     
    “Until this trip, I’d never even seen real snow.”
     
    “There’s a weekender cabin we can reach in about three hours. If someone’s there, we’ll use their phone. If