Page 54 of Hot Zone

The Persians.He sent the message silently.

We’re trapped!she sent back.

Not yet. Follow me.He moved off, easing up the slope before them, making his way mostly below the broken profiles of the plentiful boulders littering the slope.

The barren, rocky terrain and incredible heat reminded her of summer in Afghanistan. She’d pulled a tour there a while back and had done her share of patrols in the hills around their base camp. It was hard enough scrambling up and down mountainsides like this but to do it quietly and without being seen was ten times as hard.

Rustam was indomitable. He never wavered, never became fatigued. When she flagged, he offered her a hand and half dragged her up the next slope. But he never stopped.

In a perfect world, they’d have moved off perpendicular to the path of the Greek patrol ahead and the Persian patrol behind. But the terrain was horrendous as they traversed the face of Mount Oeta. They were lucky to have even one direction of possible travel. For better or worse, they were all making their way inexorably east. Tessa might get to see Thermopylae after all, as all three parties were stuck following the exact same course.

The shadows lengthened around them. The two patrols were evenly matched and moving at approximately the same speed. Whether each knew of the other’s existence was anyone’s guess, but both groups were advancing at a brisk pace. It was grueling work trying to maintain a reasonably equal distance between the two. But the alternative—being caught by either patrol—was unacceptable.

With sunset, she hoped the teams would stop or at least slow down. But neither did. Exhausted, Tessa dragged herself up yet another near vertical cliff, blindly placing her hands and feet in the holds Rustam sent her mentally. As long as they stayed within a foot or two of one another, they could send each other their thoughts telepathically. But as the trek dragged on and her fatigue deepened, she had to be practically brushing against him to hear him.

The moon rose. And then the unthinkable happened. The Greeks in front of them stopped…and the Persians behind them kept on coming. Rustam and she were about to be trapped between the warring parties.

The two of them looked around frantically for somewhere to hide. They stood on a relatively flat stretch of the narrow trail. The Greeks were less than a hundred yards ahead now, just over the crest of the plateau.

“The West Gate,” Rustam breathed.

Her breath hitched. In her study of this period prior to time-jumping, she’d learned that the pass at Thermopylae was a narrow path with three choke points along its length. The Spartans had made their famous stand at the middle one. The West Gate was the first of the three, when approached from the northwest. If Rustam was right, that meant there’d be a vertical rock face climbing to one side of them—yes, there it was, just yonder. And on the other side…

She gulped. There should be a sheer drop-off to rocks hundreds of feet below.

As if sensing something amiss, the Persians behind them slowed, easing cautiously up the slope toward this open area.

Rustam grabbed her hand and sprinted for the only cover along the path, a few knee-high boulders with a little scrub beside them. They dived behind the bushes, plastering themselves against the ground just as the first Persian poked his head up over the north lip of the plateau.

She watched for the rest of the patrol to join him, but surprisingly, they didn’t materialize.

And then Rustam stiffened beside her.

She reached out to touch him. Her fingertips encountered his forearm, but it was enough. The contact and shared auras were all it took. An image flooded her brain that made her blood run cold.

At least fifty more Persians were closing in behind their advance patrol. Fast.

Panicked, she cast her mind to the south. Of course. More Greeks were streaming in this direction. Great. This might not be a rock and a hard place but it was just as bad. They were caught between a cliff and a death plunge with two war parties closing in on them. It appeared that she was going to witness the first skirmish in the battle of Thermopylae.

Tessa felt Rustam’s frantic thoughts sifting through and discarding various options. He, too, understood the seriousness of their predicament.

The night took on a tense, waiting quality as the two forces massed on either side of that plateau. No creatures disturbed the silence—no chirping insects or nocturnal birds, not even a breeze ruffled the stillness. She and Rustam dared not move. Each faction had lookouts posted just below the ridgelines, and any movement whatsoever would be spotted in a second.

The fifty soldiers from each side massed, weapons bristling. Tension grew until the air crackled with it.

If she and Rustam were lucky, this skirmish would happen at the far side of the plateau, and no one would stumble across their hiding place. Ideally, the Greeks and Persians would kill a few of each other’s men, and then retreat to lick their wounds and let their superiors know where the enemy was.

If they weren’t lucky, Tessa’s mission might end tonight.

Careful not to touch Rustam as she did it, she fingered her belt pouch and the all-important cuff inside. Worst case, she would use the armband and bug out before she got killed.

But what about Rustam? If he was touching her when she used the cuff, would he come back to the future, too?

Problem was, she didn’t know for sure. Would his powers mess up the time jump for both of them?

She would give anything to save them both, but she knew what his take on her dilemma would be—he would insist that she save herself and not risk killing them both to make a try at saving him. But the idea was a bitter one.

She hated to abandon Rustam to die alone, and she hated to admit defeat. But she wasn’t stupid enough to die for no reason. If nothing else, she had important information about the current location of the Karanovo stamp fragment that she could relay to the next time traveler who came back here to try to find it.

---