ChapterThirty-Five
“Holy shit. We have a mudslide on the east hillside,” Palmer said to the team gathered in the lodge.
Chris bolted to his feet. “How far from the route Rivera and Kendrick were taking?”
“Close. Possibly on the route.”
“Not a random act of nature, then.”
Chris felt sick. Kendrick was pregnant. And shit. Rivera… He didn’t want to think about the possibility of losing another close friend, let alone the fact that the entire team was fucked if help didn’t arrive soon.
Collins wouldn’t last much longer. He needed an IV. Blood. Surgery. And they still had three missing teammates.
“We need to send another team.” He turned to face the others. “We can’t wait for full dark. They found Rivera and Kendrick anyway. How the fuck did they do that?”
“No fucking clue.”
“Jonas and Phelps, I want you to set out within thirty minutes for the area where we’re likely to get a satellite signal. Check with Corporal Shaw”—they’d adopted George Shaw’s former rank out of respect—“to determine a route that avoids the mudslide area.”
“Yes, sir,” they said in unison.
Both men had just returned from searching the forest for missing SEALs and hiding mercenaries, and they’d been slated to head back out after eating and debriefing.
This would spread the search even thinner, but they couldn’t count on either Rivera or Kendrick to have made it past the mudslide.
Collins was running out of time.
Jae kept his binoculars on Xavier as the hillside threatened to swallow him. Twice, he lost him, but then a hand would wave or a leg flail. Hell, he hoped that was waving and flailing and not the wave action of liquified mud moving his limbs.
The mud river flowed out of Jae’s view, and he bolted to his feet, trying to see beyond the lip of the hillside.
“I don’t see him,” Luke said.
“Me neither. Let’s go. We need to move closer to get eyes on him.”
They took the slippery hillside at a dangerous pace, but every second mattered if Xavier was to have any chance at survival.
What the hell had happened? Why had there been gunfire and an explosion that triggered a mudslide? Wasn’t this a training exercise? “Are SEAL trainings always this fucked up?”
“Hell no. Never seen anything like this.”
Back in the trees, he had no perspective to look upon the glacier-carved bowl that surrounded Lake Olympus.
Finally, they came to another rock projection that offered a view and could see that the slide had stopped, forming a pool at the base of the slope just a hundred yards away.
A mere football field separated him from his childhood best friend. But he couldn’t see him. It was all shades of brown with flecks of bright green moss that had somehow escaped being fully saturated in the liquid ooze.
He scanned with his binoculars, looking for a sign.
And then he saw it. Movement.
But no. It could just be debris settling.
Except it was a hand.
Holy crap. Xavier was trying to swim through mud to get to solid ground. The man had ridden the top of the slide like a damned deity surfing the apocalypse, and now he was swimming to shore.
“Holy fuck,” Luke said with similar awe in his voice.