thought was not strong enough to carry him was supporting him securely in her arms. His legs felt weak initially, and when he felt the blood trickling down the bridge of his nose, he realized that he had a head injury. Being upside down, he had not noticed the blood. His hand went to his head.
The woman smiled at him. “It doesn’t look bad,” she told him. “I’ll take a look at it when we get outside.”
Jake’s legs felt stronger. Believing he could walk now, he gestured toward the door with a nod of his head. “Maybe we should get out of here. We’ve been lucky so far because the plane was nearly out of fuel when we crashed, but who knows?”
“I’m ready when you are,” Mina said.
They walked slowly to the exit, and Mina helped him step out of the plane onto the forest floor. He squinted up at the sky. It had taken Mina nearly three hours to reach the crash site after she’d spied it from her perch in the pine tree.
“Somehow I thought the sun would be lower in the sky,” he said. “It feels as though I’ve been in there for hours.”
“Only three hours,” Mina assured him as they continued walking away from the plane. “It was a bit after one when I heard the crash, and I got here about three hours later.”
He looked down at her in amazement. “I can’t believe you did that. You had no idea what you could be walking into. What made you do it?”
“Let’s find you a safe place to sit down before I tell you my life story, okay?” Mina said lightly.
Chapter 2
“Easy,” Mina cautioned as she helped the stranger sit down with his back against a sugar maple tree. They were out of the copse of pines in which the plane had crashed. Mina thought it wise to put some distance between them and the plane. He’d mentioned that the fuel had been depleted before the crash, but better safe than sorry.
She saw that the scratch on his forehead was still bleeding and shrugged off her backpack to look inside for something with which to stanch the bleeding. “I wonder if there’s a first-aid kit on the plane,” she mused as she searched. She didn’t relish having to go back on board where this man’s friend was still hanging upside down with a tree branch stuck in his chest, but she would do it if she couldn’t get the blood to stop flowing.
She found a clean paper towel and pressed it firmly against the two-inch-long cut. The stranger was looking at her with a hint of humor in his gaze.
“We haven’t introduced ourselves,” he said softly. “Hello, I’m Jake, and you are?”
“You can call me Mina,” she said.
“Whenever someone introduces themselves like that, there’s usually another name that they’re trying to conceal,” he observed with a smile.
“It’s short for Amina,” she said.
“One letter short,” he joked. “Wow.”
Mina laughed. She liked his accent. He wasn’t Southern, that was for sure. He sounded like a New Yorker. “I suppose Jake’s short for Jacob?”
“No, Jason. I know it should be short for Jacob, but Jake’s what my parents started calling me and it stuck.”
“Like mine, only one letter shorter,” Mina noted.
“You’re sharp,” he said.
“You’ve been hit on the head,” she countered. “It doesn’t take much to be sharper than you are right now.”
“And beautiful,” he added.
“The head thing again,” she said.
He ignored her. “Where are we, Mina?”
“You’re near a little town called Cherokee, close to the Tennessee/North Carolina border. Where were you headed?”
“Atlanta.”
“You’re quite a few miles away,” Mina told him as she continued to press the paper towel to his forehead. “What are you, a businessman? That Piper Matrix is some sweet plane.”
“You know planes?”
“I was a helicopter pilot when I was in the army.”
“How long since you were discharged?”
“Going on two years,” she answered.
“What was your rank when you left?”
“I was a captain,” she stated simply.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “I was in the army for a couple of years but did it mainly for the educational benefits.” He looked into her eyes. “Sit, Mina. Please.”
But she wouldn’t sit. “Are you thirsty?” she asked. “There’s water in my backpack.”
“I could use a drink,” he said. But before she could retrieve the water he reached up and grasped her hand. While he had hold of it, he brought it down to eye level and said, “Your hands are so small, but extremely competent. Is that you in a nutshell, Mina, small but extremely competent?”
Mina found both his words and his touch disconcerting. She pried her hand from his and got the water bottle her grandfather had given her earlier.
He opened it and drank deeply, still looking into her eyes. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Mina. She removed the paper towel from his forehead. The cut had stopped bleeding.
“I guess I won’t have to go back into the plane, after all,” she said. “You’re not bleeding anymore.”
He smiled at her. “I’m a fast healer.”
* * *
In truth, he didn’t want her to go back inside the plane. If she hadn’t already noticed the bundles strewn all over it and begun to put two and two together—a private plane with mysterious, securely wrapped packages as the main cargo—he would consider himself lucky. His rescuer seemed to be a very intelligent woman. And he didn’t want her getting mixed up in this mess. At this point, he didn’t know what his next move was going to be. He had to contact the agency. She’d said her cell phone didn’t work up here. There was no reason to believe his would either. He didn’t have a satellite phone. No harm in trying his cell, though.
He still felt it in the back pocket of his jeans. He was surprised it hadn’t fallen out of his pocket while he was upside down. Tight jeans, he guessed.
Try as he might, Jake couldn’t get a signal. He sighed inwardly. What would he say to his boss, anyway? John Monahan was dead. And there was no bringing him back. He had failed to protect a witness. John might have worked in Betts’s organization for years, but he was trying to clean up his act for the benefit of his wife and two small children. It irked Jake that he hadn’t been able to anticipate someone tampering with the plane. But John had been a conscientious pilot. Jake had seen him examining the plane before climbing into the
