Free Kidnapped and a Daring Escape by Gian Bordin Page B

For a split second he fears that
Bianca has imitated him, but then realizes that the scream comes from a
male. This fleeting inattention almost makes him lose control. He is
descending too fast and risks being carried past the spot he was aiming
for. He must have misjudged the leap. The momentum takes him beyond
the bend in the cliff. Putting all his skills into play, he once more adjusts
his limbs and is driven back toward the cliff face where the updraft seems
stronger. Fortunately, the ledge slopes down steeply for a considerable
length and even doubles in width before breaking off. The scream stops
as abruptly as it started. A fraction of a second before he crashes into tall
bushes, he covers his face with both arms. The force of the impact bends
and breaks several branches, and then the bushes dump him to the
ground. The whole jump lasted barely four seconds, but felt like an
eternity. He remains motionless, his heart beat slowing, the adrenalin
rush fading.
         Loud shouts and swearing reach him from above. Its echoes return two
second later from across the valley. He glances up to the cliff top, but the
spot from where he jumped off is too far around the bend. This means
that he is not visible from there either. Nevertheless, he decides to hide
under a portion of denser canopy a few meters farther down. Only then
does he become aware of a sore spot on his chest. Any deep breath and
pain shoot into his right side. Did I break a rib? he wonders. Gingerly,
he touches the spot. There is a small rip in his rain jacket. He reaches
under his shirt. It feels sore, but the hand comes out dry. No blood. If a
sprained rib is all the damage I suffered, I got away lightly, he muses to
himself.
         After resting for five minutes, he crawls to the edge of the ledge.
Some twenty meters below him and a bit to the left, he spots two oddly
bent legs and part of a twisted torso stick out from between rocks near
the river. He recognizes the color of the pants. It is ‘ le second ’. The man
must have lost his footing when he tried to stop me from jumping, he
reckons. He tries to push away the feeling of guilt for having caused this
death. It hadn’t been part of his plan. It was an accident. If the guy hadn’t
foolishly tried to intervene, he would still be alive. He reminds himself
that, if ordered, this man would have killed him without even blinking
twice. But this does not soothe his conscience.
         Will ‘ le vilain ’ send the other guy down to check on their comrade?
Although he doubts this, he remains watching the scene below for what
he guesses is about half an hour, the time he judges it would take
someone to get from the top of the switchbacks down to the river. At the
same time he carefully studies the cliff for a route down. Just below him,
the wall is pretty vertical, offering no hand and footholds. There may be
better places elsewhere. When he figures that nobody is coming down,
he goes to the lower end of the ledge. He almost cries out in joy when he
sees scant remains of where the ledge must have broken off. The
remnants are slanting almost down to the river. From there he should be
able to lower himself to the rocks at the river’s edge.
         He takes it carefully and slowly. It would be silly to have an accident,
now that he successfully escaped. There are some tricky bits where the
ledge has sheered off completely. But he makes it down safely. Ten
minutes later, he is standing next to the twisted body of ‘ le second ’. The
man lost his backpack and weapon in the fall. André scans to rocks
higher up, but cannot spot them. He doubts though that they fell into the
river. It would be useful, if not essential for his survival in this harsh
environment, to have at least the pack. Before searching higher up, he
quickly rifles through the pockets of the man’s badly torn clothes and
finds a number of handy items: a crushed box of matches, an imitation
Swiss army knife, a comb, a thin wallet