He laid the phone upright on his counter so he’d see when someone from his team sent him a thumbs up.
What he wanted was someone to text back—we got the agent.
Instead, what he saw was that Cathy had texted.
Cath:Daniel was bored lying on the couch, so he taught Whiskey to sing opera. If I was going to haunt your ass, that’s how I’d pull it off. It’s a lot more clever than the trite blinking lights, slamming doors, and pockets of cold air.
A few minutes later, a second text had come through.
Cath:That’s so nice. If Daniel can pull a prank, he must be okay. I think I’ll be able to sleep now. Thank you for that. XOXO Sweet dreams.
Gabriel looked down at Whiskey. “No. We’re not doing that. You arenota means for my brother to stay in touch. Are we straight on that?”
The answer was the sound of a vehicle pulling quietly into his drive.
Gabriel shoved four meal replacement bars into his cargo pocket, slung his pack onto his shoulders, poured out the coffees to drink on the road, and locked the door behind him.
Reaper unfolded from behind his steering wheel and met Gabriel halfway, taking the coffees.
“Black is how I remember you take yours?”
“Black. Thanks for doing this, Gabriel.” Reaper had dressed similarly to Gabriel, but his jacket was the acidic lemon-lime high-vis with reflective tape.
Gabe didn’t have anything like that. “No problem. I was lying there staring at the ceiling. Might as well get out there and be helpful to someone.”
Reaper took Whiskey’s lead and rounded to the back of the SUV to load Whiskey into the dog crate. “I see you’ve got your kit,” he said as Gabriel dropped the straps of his pack off his shoulders. “How about you sit in the back seat. I know you’re used to your own gear, but I brought our standard K9 search pack for you. Why don’t you go through it, ask questions, move the items that you don’t already have with you over to your pack, so you have everything you need,” he said as he opened the door and climbed in.
“Sounds good.” Gabriel rounded to the passenger side so that when he was talking to Reaper, they’d be at a diagonal.
Reaper tapped his map app, backed out of the drive, and headed toward the highway.
“How far?”
“Sweet Gum. Only an hour.”
“You said they already have a team out?”
“Charlie and the first recruits for our newest Team Delta. Charlie was formed up about a year ago. We like them to be out in real-world scenarios when we can. They lend their special ops skill set to operations and build their team at the same time. It’s good for the dogs to work alongside other rescue professionalsso they can practice focus and polite behavior. Good for us, good for the community.”
“Win-win.” Gabriel opened the pack, and the first thing to come out was a sizeable first-aid kit. He held it up, so Reaper would see it in the rearview mirror.
Reaper was looking at him through the rearview mirror. “With all your antics around the world that Daniel told me about, I know you have practice as a field medic beyond what you learned in Ranger School. On callouts like these, we’re tasked with finding, stabilizing, and communicating.”
“Got it.” Gabriel unzipped the case and found it was set up like a binder with tabs on each section: Bleeds. Airway. Breaks. Illness. They organized it in survival order. If the patient was spurting blood, CPR wasn’t going to keep them alive. Gabriel liked that. He’d have to get hold of a kit like this for his own field adventures.
“The communicating is sometimes the hardest part of the search,” Reaper said. “On this callout, we’re not going to have cell connectivity. Because of the mountains and tree canopy, getting line of sight for radio or satellite is often a hurdle. I have an extendable antenna in my pack. But it only goes up so far.” He glanced back. “You’ll find a sat phone in there.”
“I have a satellite communicator in my pack. It makes calls, sends texts, puts up a beacon.”
“Good enough, but go ahead and take the one from that pack I handed you as a backup,” Reaper said. “It goes right to our headquarters. They can patch us through to the emergency manager’s command tent. The bonus is Iniquus has a doctor on standby who can come in and talk us through anything.”
“All right.”
“Team Charlie is reporting fog pooling around the trees. That makes any kind of connection piss poor. Often whathappens is someone stays and tends, and someone else hikes to a clearing.”
“It’ll be just the two of us?”
“Three counting Whiskey,” Reaper said. “Whiskey works best when she doesn’t have a whole team at her heels.”
