Xander gave him a hard look. “She can do this. Her nose doesn’t work like ours. It’s better.”
Khaki vaguely remembered picking up a lot of odors when Melissa’s mom had grabbed her. There was the smell of cotton and polyester, laundry detergent, eggs and bacon, some kind of furniture polish, peanut butter cookies, even the salty scent of tears. There were so many scents to shift through. And the horrible chemical smells down here didn’t help.
She shook her head. “Xander, I don’t think I can do it.”
He put his hands on her shoulders and gave them a reassuring squeeze. “We need to find her now. We don’t have time to wander around down here searching. You can do this. I know you can.”
The confidence in those words almost brought tears to Khaki’s eyes. She thought of Melissa’s mother sobbing and begging Khaki to find her little girl. Then she thought of Melissa. Wherever she was, she was probably terrified.
“I’ll try,” Khaki told Xander.
His mouth curved. “That’s all I can ask.”
Taking a deep breath, Khaki slung her M4 across her back, dropped down to her knees, and closed her eyes. Off to her right, she sensed Cooper move closer. She knew that Xander was keeping him away.
She shut them out and began to sort through the myriad smells down there surrounding her. She forced her nose to dive down under the harsh chemical odor, to ignore it and push it to the back of her mind so she could distinguish other scents.
She smelled dirt, of course. And Xander. Cooper too.
She scrunched up her nose and dug deeper, finding Reynolds’s smell—stale sweat paired with booze and urine. Underneath that, she picked up the faint trace of moles and rats that had long since left the tunnels.
And then, when she was about to give up, she found what she was looking for—the scent of peanut butter cookies and little girl tears.
Khaki jumped to her feet and ran toward the central hub of the tunnels, letting her nose lead the way.
Behind her, Xander ordered Cooper to stick tight to her so she wouldn’t get herself blown to pieces. Cooper obeyed, running so close to her he might as well have been glued to her side as she ran through the tunnels.
Khaki was so focused on the little girl’s scent she didn’t even see the tripwire stretched across the tunnel until she heard it break. The explosion echoed in her ears and thumped her in the chest, squeezing every ounce of air out of her lungs and picking her up to throw her down the tunnel.
Surprisingly, she didn’t pass out—at least, she didn’t think so. When she got her wits back, she was lying on the floor of the tunnel, something heavy pinning her legs. She pushed herself up on an elbow to see what it was and found a muscular arm draped over her. She couldn’t tell whether it was Xander or Cooper because the rest of him was buried under a slide of sandy clay soil.Crap. The tunnel had collapsed. She looked around and saw Cooper pushing himself into a sitting position a little farther up the tunnel.
She stared wide-eyed at the arm sticking out from the dirt. It was Xander. He must have shoved her and Cooper out of the way before the explosion brought the tunnel down.
Khaki scrambled to her knees and frantically clawed at the dirt. A moment later, Cooper was at her side, grabbing Xander’s arm and pulling on it as she dug.
It probably only took thirty seconds, but it was the longest thirty seconds of her life. She couldn’t imagine how someone could be alive under that mess, but as soon as she got enough dirt out of the way, Cooper yanked a coughing, gasping Xander out from underneath.
The urge to throw herself into his arms was hard to resist, and she balled her hands into fists at her side to keep from giving in to the urge.
“Do you still have the girl’s scent?” he asked.
It took only a second to confirm that she still did. “Yeah, but I think we may have lost our only way out.”
He shook his head. “First, find the girl. Then we’ll worry about how to get out of here.”
Khaki looked over her shoulder at the collapsed tunnel behind them, not wanting to think too much about how close she’d come to killing them all, then turned and homed in on Melissa’s scent. On the upside, the collapsed tunnel had cut down on the chemical odor. It made it easier to follow the girl’s scent.
Following her nose got harder when the tunnel dead-ended beside a pile of unused four-by-fours and plywood.
“Oh no,” she breathed.
Fear gripping her, Khaki retraced her steps. Melissa’s scent stopped about ten feet back—in a pile of freshly dug-up earth.
“Oh God.” Tears blurring her vision, she looked at Xander. “The trail ends right here.”
Xander and Cooper both dropped to their knees and began digging. Khaki joined in. A moment later, her fingers scraped against metal. She dug faster, uncovering a metal box the size of a footlocker.
Khaki held her breath as Xander and Cooper dragged it out of the hole, then ripped off the hasp and opened the lid.
