They moved downhill through timber and rock, using ravines and outcroppings for cover. Jack let old muscle memory take over, guiding them along paths he hadn’t walked in decades but still felt etched into bone. He knew where the shale ran loose. He knew where fallen pines created natural barricades. He knew where sound traveled.
“There,” Annie whispered.
Lights glimmered through the trees. Two vehicles. A dark SUV and a pickup beside the cracked concrete slab where logging trucks once loaded timber. Cigarette embers glowed as sentries moved slow circuits around them.
Jack crouched, studying the layout, marking distances, angles, blind spots. Not ideal. The approach was exposed, the retreat thin. But the guards’ posture told him something important—they were alert, but not expecting a threat from below.
“See that drainage cut?” he murmured. “It runs into the culvert under the pad. I can use it to get close without being seen.”
“What about me?”
“You create noise uphill. Not much. Just enough to draw them off the vehicles for half a minute.”
He explained the plan carefully, in whispered detail. It was dangerous. There was no dressing that up. But the alternative—waiting to be cornered in caves—was worse.
They synchronized watches, a habit from their detective years, and separated.
Jack remained submerged in the drainage cut as the guards returned to the vehicles, keeping his body pressed into the mud and shadows while their flashlights sliced through the darkness only yards away. He listened as one of them circled the SUV, the beam pausing too long on the ruined tires, then shifting abruptly to the pickup.
“What is that?” a man demanded.
A second voice answered, tighter now. “The tires are destroyed. Both vehicles. Base, we’ve got a serious problem.”
The radio crackled to life almost immediately. “Repeat. What’s your status?”
“Staging area’s compromised. Vehicles disabled. Unknown contact. Possible hostile presence.”
Jack closed his eyes briefly, steadying his breathing as the significance of those words spread through their network. Radios began activating across the mountain, voices overlapping, their once-measured coordination now sharpened by urgency. Their operation was no longer contained. Their control was breaking. He should have felt satisfaction, even triumph.
Instead, unease threaded through him.
Annie should have been back by now.
She should have been signaling from the tree line. She should have been moving toward him, keeping low, following the route they had planned. When another minute passed with no sign of her, tension tightened between his shoulders, every instinct he possessed shifting away from strategy and toward something far more primal.
Then her voice tore through the forest.
“Jack!”
It came from his left, higher on the slope, and it carried a terror so raw it went straight through him.
He surged out of the drainage cut, weapon already in his hand, heart hammering as he pivoted toward the sound. “Annie!”
Silence answered him.
The forest closed in, branches whipping his arms as he ran. His flashlight carved frantic arcs through the undergrowth, illuminating broken twigs, displaced stones, a dropped flashlight lying dark against the leaves. He followed the terrain as much as her voice, reading slope and spacing the way he had learned to do years ago, letting training override panic.
He found the disturbance almost immediately. Scuffed earth. A torn strip of cloth caught on thorns. Then the unmistakable evidence that drove the air from his lungs.
Drag marks.
Fresh. Uneven. Leading downslope into denser timber.
“No,” he breathed, the word tearing from him before he could stop it.
He crouched, fingers brushing the ground, cataloging what the forest had already told him. Multiple sets of boots. Purposeful movement. Someone had taken her quickly and efficiently, cutting off the chance for a second call. His chest burned with the force of what he felt, grief and fury colliding so violently he had to still himself or risk losing the precision he needed.
He lifted his head slowly, filtering the night. Somewhere ahead, branches cracked softly. A murmur of voices carried faintly through the trees.
