Xavier nodded. “There’s only one road to the mansion. It’s in the mountains about thirty miles from the sea, and about a hundred and fifty miles northeast of Vladivostok in the heart of Primorsky Krai. Very isolated, as there are only small villages along the coast. There’s absolutely no communication in or out. Signal blockers have dampened all communications from the mansion. There is no landline or cable. No internet. Nothing.”
“So how does she do her work? How does the Kremlin keep track of her progress?”
“Twice a week, an armored SUV drives from Vladivostok or one of the villages on the coast to the lake. We believe the purpose is to deliver hard drives for data transfer. There’s another vehicle that delivers food once a week. We initially hoped to be able to infiltrate the food delivery, but intelligence suggests we’d never get past the guard at the gate without the proper password, which changes daily.”
“So shoot the guard,” one of the SEALs said.
“It’s believed there’s a helicopter at the ready to remove the chemist if there’s any indication the guard has been incapacitated. The chemist has been warned that if they were forced to do another emergency extraction, this time they would leave her son behind with a chemical bomb that would explode when SEALs breached the building.”
“Okay. So we leave the guard alone.”
“And here I thought you were just fucking with us with the no-comms shit,” Flyte said.
“I wish.”
“So we were going to run scenarios here to plan the op,” Phelps said. “Figure out how to do the impossible.”
Audrey rose from her seat next to George and stretched. They used small red lanterns to light the room, making it impossible to see the red marks on her neck, but he knew they were there. Her voice had a slight rasp as she said, “I don’t understand. What you’ve described is part of military operations—not a training exercise. Why didn’t you just submit your plan to the park under that regulation? Ops don’t fall under environmental review. You could have left me out of it and the lodge would have been yours to use.”
“Inholding property owners couldn’t be here, so we had to have a public notice period. We couldn’t go out with a public notice saying the Navy is going to run an op in Olympic National Park, so we called it a training exercise, which left it open for review.”
It wasn’t lost on him that every man in this room had learned tonight that she was pregnant with his child, but only Cohen and the other trainers knew what he’d done to her to get them here. He’d never expected to have the opportunity to justify his actions, but here it was. He’d be a fool to let it go by, even if this wasn’t the most opportune moment. “When the training was denied, I would have walked away and come up with a different plan, except then there was the chemical attack in Prague at the beginning of December.”
Audrey’s gaze whipped to his. “That was a gas attack?”
He nodded. “Intelligence gathered indicates upwards of eighty-two people died. Of course, this is all highly classified, but at this point, you all have the right to know what brought us here.” His gaze met Audrey’s. “And why I did what I did to you.”
He’d never expected to be able to tell her, but now that he had, a weight lifted from his chest. At least there was a chance she would understand. Would know that it truly had nothing to do with her and everything to do with hundreds, even thousands of lives hanging in the balance.
She gave him a small nod, and he moved on. They still had a lot of ground to cover. Like how the hell they were going to end this nightmare once and for all.
“So if everything hadn’t gone to hell before we even splashed down,” Williams said, “we would have taken the lodge the first night, and then what?”
“Then we would have run different scenarios for how to extract the hostages. As we’ve learned, it’s one thing to get in, and another entirely to get out.”
“As far as I can tell,” Flyte said, “the only way out without being seen, without being able to call for a helicopter, is hiking overland.”
Xavier nodded. “Yes. I believe that would have ended up being the only scenario that would work. That’s why the dummies representing the hostages are the right height and weight of both hostages, although the boy will have grown in the months since he was last seen, so his dummy is based on averages.”
“And that’s what we need to do now,” Smith said. “Hike beyond the signal blocker and make the call with a satellite phone.”
“The best way to do that is to go deeper into the forest,” Audrey said, “toward Mount Olympus. Get high, above the tree line, to have the best chance to get a signal.”
“We could try to find the signal blockers the mercs set up,” Cohen suggested.
“I’ve considered that,” Flyte said. “But from the coverage, I’m guessing there are several. We could waste days searching. In the meantime, we’ve got a critically injured SEAL and three missing team members.”
All at once, Audrey jolted. He knew her body language. She had an idea.
“What is it, Aud?”
“Remember the night we met?”
He couldn’t help but smile, his gaze landing on her belly. “Uh. Yeah.”
Cohen snickered.
She rolled her eyes. “I mean what I was doing. The project I was working on.”