TRAPPED by Beverly Long - The Men from Crow Hollow 03 - TRAPPED Page B

appeared. “What?” she asked, her tone anxious.
    Relief flooded his body. And that irritated the hell out of him. “I couldn’t see you,” he said, sounding very much like a petulant six-year-old. “I don’t want to have to go chasing after you in the jungle.”
    “I wanted a better view,” she said. “I didn’t go far. I just walked up that hill,” she said, pointing to a rise about two hundred yards out. “I would not expect you to chase after me, Brody.”
    Oh, really? He should just let her die in the jungle? “I tried that once,” he said. “You know, the chasing, and it didn’t work out so well for me.”
    Her heard her quick inhale and knew that his verbal punch had landed. Maybe not a knockout, but it had been a solid left hook. It should have made him happier.
    Unfortunately, it made him feel like scum.
    And it made him feel even worse when she didn’t come back with something but rather just took the punch. As if she deserved it.
    “Well?” he asked, after a very awkward moment of silence. “Were you able to see anything?”
    To her credit, she didn’t march off and refuse to talk to him. Instead, she stood her ground. “Not really,” she said. “It’s not high enough. We probably need to get at least that high,” she said, pointing to her right. Off in the distance, he couldn’t tell how far, was higher ground. Having grown up in the Colorado mountains, in Crow Hollow, Brody couldn’t call it a mountain. At best, a small foothill. But she was right. It would probably give them a good view in every direction.
    Getting there would be a bitch. Walking in the jungle wasn’t like walking on the treadmill at the gym.
    “What do you think?” she asked.
    “About what?”
    “About next steps,” she pushed.
    Even though he’d known better than to hope for a rescue plane last night, he’d still spent the night listening for engine sounds. He’d been doing the same this morning. Unfortunately, he’d heard nothing like that. He was just about to give her some glib reassurance, but he saw the look in her eyes. The message in them was clear. Be real, Brody.
    “I don’t know what to think,” he said. “If Angus’s distress call went through, somebody should be out looking for us. I know the Amazon is huge, but they don’t have to search all of it. How tough is it to identify the potential area where the plane crashed? They hear the call, they look at their radar, and somebody ought to be smart enough to figure out where our particular blip fell off the screen.”
    “Maybe the distress call never went through?”
    “Even so, air-traffic control should have been tracking us. I assume there is some regular communication between them and a pilot. When Captain Ramano didn’t answer, that should have made somebody sit up straighter in their chair. Even if that didn’t happen, somebody surely noticed when our plane didn’t land as expected. It’s been light for several hours. What’s taking them so long?”
    “I guess that gets back to the sheer magnitude of the jungle. Even with some idea of where we are, it’s probably like looking for the needle in the proverbial haystack.”
    He nodded. “Then we have to hope for the best.”
    “So we wait?” she asked.
    “For now,” he said. “But I think we should start to gather and boil water. Just in case.”
    “What are we going to boil it in?”
    “I think we can use the first-aid kit. It’s probably twelve inches by eight inches and several inches deep. I’m going to build a grate to go over the open fire.”
    “I’ll gather up things that we can use to collect the water in,” she said.
    He nodded. It was good to have someone else in the group to count on. Pamela didn’t seem all that steady. Mr. and Mrs. Hardy were too elderly and Angus was out of the race. Captain Ramano was the unknown. So far, he’d been distant, not even intellectually curious about their predicament. The one good thing was that he wasn’t complaining