Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,66
the slope and away from the explosion. Thank God for that. Very gently, she lifted a comma of hair off his forehead and could see he was bleeding from a slight cut where a piece of flying rock had obviously nicked the skin. Her tender touch must have done the trick because Emiliano opened his eyes.
“Jacqueline,” he said simply and smiled up at her. To Jackie, it was the best smile she had ever seen, and she could feel her heart expanding inside her chest, knowing that Emiliano was alive.
“Are you okay?”
He nodded at her and gave her a small smile to show that he was all right.
“Piece of pie,” Emiliano said.
“Piece of cake,” Jackie said, smiling down at him.
Ever mindful of the jeep that could catch up with them at any minute, she asked, “Can you get up?”
“I think so.”
With Jackie’s help, he levered himself to a sitting position, then slowly rose to his feet.
He and Jackie both looked ahead. To their immense relief, their plan had worked. The scree from above had rolled down the slope after the explosion had obliterated the shelf of rock and had neatly filled up the crater in the roadway, enough at least for the truck to drive over.
“We did it!” exclaimed Emiliano.
“We did it!” echoed Jackie.
“We make quite a team, don’t we?”
“We certainly do.” Jackie beamed.
Letting him use her body as support, Jackie led Emiliano back to the truck. It was good feeling his weight against her, good to support him as she now knew he would support her in any crisis to come. At the same time, she knew that she had to hurry because that damned jeep could arrive at any second.
She opened the passenger door and helped him inside. “I guess I better drive for a while,” she said, and was happy to see that Emiliano didn’t try to challenge her. They looked back and saw the jeep in the near distance and coming up fast. Obviously, they were driving quickly now to investigate the source of the explosion.
“Emiliano, what are we going to do?”
Instead of answering, Emiliano reached into the messenger bag, pulled out another dynamite stick, and lit its fuse with the still hot cigarette lighter. Then, hissing dynamite stick in hand, he jumped down from the truck cab to the ground.
“Wait here,” he shouted back to Jackie. I’ll be right back.”
As she watched, Emiliano ran forward and jammed the dynamite stick in the narrow stretch of ground between the edge of the crater and the outer edge of the roadway. He then came running back to the truck, got in, slammed the door shut and shouted, “Let’s go.”
In the rearview mirror, Jackie could see the jeep swiftly rounding the last bend and gaining on them. She put the truck in gear and jammed her foot down on the accelerator. Instantly, she could feel the loose stones that had filled up the hole in the roadway crunch beneath the weight of the truck’s heavy-duty tires. She passed the dynamite stick wedged in the ground and saw its fuse sputtering away.
Seconds after the rear end of the truck passed over the crater, the dynamite stick blew. Through the side-view mirror, Jackie could see that the explosion had blown away that narrow stretch of ground and created a V-shaped crack at the outer edge of the roadway, a downward-sloping channel that allowed all of the rocks to come pouring out of the crater and down the lower side of the mountain, like water draining out of a burst dam.
Still looking in the side-view mirror, she watched as the jeep came to a screeching halt on the far side of the crater, which, empty of the scree, was now as big a hole as it had been before the first explosion. Unfortunately, the driver put on his brakes much too late and, as Jackie looked on openmouthed, the jeep skidded forward and drove right into the crater, disappearing from sight like a tasty morsel swallowed up by a giant stone maw.
“Emiliano, you’re a genius,” Jackie told him as she continued to put distance between them and the now vanished jeep.
“And you are an incredible driver, like Juan Manuel Fangio at the 1951 Spanish Grand Prix.”
She wanted to lean over and kiss him but thought it was more prudent to keep her eyes forward and on the road. Despite the long and potentially dangerous journey still ahead, it felt like nothing could stop them now.