ChapterThirteen
Chris let out a birdcall, even knowing it wouldn’t carry far over the tapping of the rain. The never-ending downpour cloaked them from the tangos in the forest, but it also made it difficult to find the other Fire Teams.
Four hundred hours and they were in the rendezvous area. All four teams should be here. He was certain the others had come across signs of trouble as his team had. They hadn’t taken the lodge. They hadn’t reached a single objective as it had been laid out for them on Whidbey Island.
Where was Rivera? Where were Cohen and the other trainers? Were they all in the lodge—real hostages and not the fake ones they’d been promised yesterday?
Surely someone was free if the guy with the snapped neck was any indication. The body had no weapons, which meant the trainer who’d taken the guy down had a gun that fired real bullets.
Good for him. It meant the platoon had an armed ally. Now they all just needed to find each other.
Chris made the call again. He waited several minutes, then tried again. When that failed, they changed positions and repeated the process. Finally, after thirty minutes, an answering call came.
Ten minutes after that, a third team checked in.
Three Fire Teams gathered deep in the woods. With no small amount of relief, Chris counted twelve uninjured men, including himself.
They just needed the fourth Fire Team to show up.
As the minutes ticked by, they shared the intel they’d gathered. Chris and his men learned of downed trees blocking the road—something that was strictly forbidden as part of this training. The trees here were old growth, the forest protected by state and federal law.
More disturbing was the news of another body, this one an older man with a Vietnam vet tattoo on his forearm. He’d been found by the back door of a yurt. The man had his throat cut wide—leaving his head barely attached.
“Sounds like a local,” Chief Petty Officer Williams said. “NSWC said they hadn’t employed any actors to play hostages in this exercise. We were assured there wouldn’t be any civilians in the vicinity.”
“That’s our assumption too,” Mock, the leader of the Fire Team that found the body, said. “Given the situation, we entered the yurt. The smashed electronics inside indicated it was the command center for the trainers. There was a lot of blood on one table, but otherwise, no evidence of the training team.”
Blood in the command center.
Rivera? Cohen? Both?
Chris knew Cohen, but not as well as he knew Rivera. But then, he and Rivera had been longtime teammates and good friends before they shared the worst day of their lives.
Rivera was the only other person on their four-man Fire Team who’d lived to share the memory. Was he gone now too?
No. No. Dammit all to hell. Fuck no.
After an hour passed with no sign of the last Fire Team, led by Commander Odent, another terrifying truth sank in: they were missing an entire Fire Team.
Six missing trainers. Four missing SEALs.
With resignation, Chris took control. Without Odent, he was the ranking officer and in command of the mission. “Mock, I want your team on reconnaissance. We have more than two hours left before daylight, and we need to know if everyone is being held in the lodge, or if the prisoners have been divided amongst the buildings in the lodge complex. We need a count of how many tangos we’re dealing with.” He turned to Williams. “I want your team to check out the inholding cabins closest to the yurt. Power and phones are down but the inholdings will have generators and fuel. We can use the fuel for improvised weapons. The cabins could have guns and ammo. We’ve got two dead bodies—one of whom is probably a resident of the area—and we’re missing six trainers and four SEALs. We’ll do whatever it takes to rescue our team, even if it means breaking and entering areas that were restricted from the training.”
Everyone nodded.
“It’s possible there could be more locals hiding in their cabins,” he added. “Be on the lookout for civilians and mercs.”
“Maybe the blood inside the yurt was another local, like the one outside,” someone suggested.
Was it wrong for Chris to hope that was the case?
Rivera lying in that hospital bed was far too fresh in his mind. Could the blood in the yurt be his?
He remembered Rivera’s steely calm when he woke in the hospital—he’d finally returned stateside after surgery in the US military’s hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. In Germany, he’d been delirious and asking for Lynn. But when he woke up in San Diego at last, Chris had been the one to tell him Lynn had been and gone while he was sleeping.
She’d dumped him without so much as a goodbye.
He’d lain in agony, pretending the woman hadn’t just cut his heart out. This after the organ had thankfully remained intact when the bullet aiming for it landed just above and to the left.