She felt Adams stir next to her, his eyes opening, groggy and disorientated. ‘Lynn?’ he said weakly.
‘It’s OK,’ she replied, holding him closer. ‘It’s OK. It’s just a fever.’
She saw him close his eyes again, felt him breathing deeply. Then he reopened his eyes, staring directly into her own. ‘No,’ he said sadly, ‘it’s not.’
He still longed for sleep, just a few hours of real, honest sleep. He could have continued to pretend he had a fever but he owed it to Lynn to tell her the truth.
‘I’ve not been sleeping,’ he said plainly, registering the surprise on her face as he spoke. ‘I have bad dreams.’
‘But… You? Why?’ Lynn just could not understand it. The Matt Adams she’d known had never had any problem sleeping. He had been full of life, full of optimism and hope, and when the time had come for sleep, he had drifted off with no cares in the world.
‘After we broke up,’ he began, glad to finally get it off his chest, to share his problems with someone, especially this someone, ‘I was recruited by the government.’
‘What?’ Lynn was surprised once more. He hadn’t shown any interest in working for the government when they had been together, that was sure. He had been the best tracker on the reservation, she knew that much, and he had often helped the local police with tricky cases, but government work was something else altogether.
‘US Immigration and Customs Enforcement,’ Adams clarified. ‘They had a group set up called the Shadow Wolves, responsible for tracking smugglers through the border territories between Mexico and the US. All trackers like me, from nine different tribes. They’d heard about me, and wanted me to join.’
‘And you agreed?’ Lynn asked, again finding it hard to reconcile with the Matt Adams she had known.
‘What else was there for me to do?’ he asked in return. ‘We’d just been divorced, you’d told me I needed direction in life — like you had with your own work — and the opportunity came up, so I took it.’
Lynn nodded her head, sorry she had been in part responsible for his decision. ‘Go on,’ she encouraged gently.
‘Well, I worked with the Shadow Wolves for years, became the top man in the unit — my success record was off the chart. And then one day everything changed.’
Lynn saw the look in his eye — harrowed, guilty, tortured. She didn’t say anything, knowing he would go on when he was ready.
‘A call came in about a truck driven by a gang of child smugglers. We’d heard of the group before, they’d been bringing kids across the border for the past few months, but we’d never been able to get a handle on them. This time we had the make and model of the truck they were using, so we knew we had them.’ His eyes wandered, lost in the past. ‘We tracked the truck across sixty miles of Tohono O’odham territory, and we finally found it, just ten miles from the border.
‘It was abandoned, just left out in the desert sun. We approached it carefully, ready for the smugglers to run, but when we got to the driver’s cab, there wasn’t anyone there. Marks in the sand indicated that the drivers had left the night before, maybe even the day before. The truck had been there twenty-four, maybe thirty-six hours.’ Adams paused, taking a deep breath before continuing. ‘We went round the back to open the doors and check inside, but already we could smell what it was. Dead bodies.’
He closed his eyes, trying to shut out the memories. ‘We opened those doors to a nightmare. Sixty-seven children, some as young as three years old, crammed together in the back of the truck, unable to move, and then left there for dead in the middle of the desert. It was the height of summer, temperatures inside must have reached over a hundred and fifty degrees. And there was no ventilation in the truck. They never had a chance.’
Tears started to roll down Adams’ cheeks as he remembered the horror of what he had seen as the truck doors opened. ‘They were all dead — all of them. Died from the heat, and from asphyxiation. Can you imagine how they must have felt? Trapped in that oven, unable to get out, people dying next to you, above you, under you. There was vomit and diarrhoea everywhere, scratches on the inside of the truck as they struggled to get out.’
Adams wiped away his tears, and looked at Lynn. ‘And you know why the smugglers left them there, why they ran away?’ Lynn shook her head. ‘It was because they’d heard that the Shadow Wolves were chasing them. They thought they didn’t have a chance, so they took off, escaped on foot, leaving the truck behind. Because of us.’ He looked down, too upset to continue.
Lynn held him close, their bodies warm, reassuring. ‘There’s nothing you could have done,’ she said softly, knowing it made no difference but saying it anyway.
‘I could have found that truck quicker,’ Adams answered immediately. ‘I was supposed to be the best, and I failed. I failed badly, and they all died because I wasn’t quick enough, wasn’t good enough.
‘I tried to carry on working afterwards, but pretty soon I started having nightmares about it. They began to get worse and worse, more like night terrors really, and pretty soon I was scared to go to sleep. After a while, I was completely incapable of work. I was broken. They finally let me go, and I went back to the reservation, where I’ve been struggling to just get by ever since.’ Adams held Lynn’s hands, looking into her deep, lustrous, opaline eyes. ‘You might not think it, but you’ve given me something to live for,’ he said finally. ‘Thank you.’
Lynn’s heart jumped in her chest. She had endangered his life, and he was thanking her? Tears began to stream down her own cheeks, as she realized something she had been unwilling to admit. She still loved him, even as she was sure he still loved her.
Close, their bodies still naked, intertwined, Adams wiped her tears away and then moved his head even closer, his lips brushing hers. At first the kiss was exploratory, checking for her reaction, and then she responded, pulling in tightly, kissing him back with unexpected passion.
Relieved that the desire was mutual, both Adams and Lynn let go completely, moving in perfect synchrony as the build-up of stress and adrenalin that had filled them for the past few days transformed itself into frenetic, frenzied passion, their bodies fitting into a rhythm they had thought long forgotten, until Lynn buried her face in Adams’ neck and they both felt the tension escape them in a flow of sweet, wonderful relief.
20
Two days later Adams and Lynn finally made it into the small town of Nazca.
They had walked most of the way to Arequipa during the second night, then had to hole up again during the day, finally getting there the following night. It didn’t take long to organize transport on to Nazca — they had simply walked around the town until they made it on to Highway 1 heading north, and then hitched a lift.
The driver of the big truck, on his way to Lima, had dropped them off in the small, dusty town just as dawn was rising. The town itself was unprepossessing, consisting of a grid-like formation of one-storey houses and shops on a section of the desert pampa that lay in the shadow of towering mountains beyond.
Although the town itself was nothing to write home about, Lynn squeezed Adams’ hand tight as they watched the sun rise slowly, majestically, above the snow-capped peaks in the distance, its muted pink-red glow spreading warmth down through the valley.
They just watched it together, hand in hand, in silence for several long, wonderful minutes, all worries temporarily forgotten as they admired the imperial beauty of the natural world.