by Cindy Dees
Then came the final run. An all-night sprint to the finish carrying a rucksack. It was a race through the desert, running from point to point to check in before being sent on. She was so stupid with fatigue she didn’t know where she was half the time. She just followed the guys in front of her and prayed they knew where the hell they were going.
It was a moonless night and so cold she couldn’t feel her fingers or toes. Which was maybe a blessing. What she couldn’t feel couldn’t hurt. She was at the point of trying to catalog what didn’t hurt instead of what did.
One step at a time. One foot in front of the other.
Griffin. Think of Griffin.
As always, he was her touchstone through this nightmare. She would never be able to repay him for the gift of giving her him to aim for. Without knowing that he would be waiting at the end of this horror, she seriously didn’t know if she would have had the will to continue on. At some point, she feared she would have just lain down and died.
But this week, she’d discovered that even dying was a choice. And because of Griffin, she chose to live.
She staggered up to yet another checkpoint and gulped down the bottle of water someone shoved at her.
“Head due west for two clicks, then angle southwest at the orange pylon for three clicks to the next checkpoint. Get out of here, Tate.”
West. Right. Wherever the hell west was. She spotted the guy coming up behind her—crap, Grundy—and took off, hoping to get a little ahead of her personal harasser-in-chief.
As far as she could tell, they must be past the halfway point of the run, because now they were heading back toward the west, after spending several hours slogging east through the sand and rocks.
The rocks were the worst of it, always waiting to roll underfoot and turn an ankle or send a girl tumbling to the ground in her exhaustion and inability to catch herself anymore. She lost count of how many times she’d fallen tonight.
She dared not hope this was the end, or that when she got back to base this nightmare would be over. The disappointment if she were wrong would be too much to bear.
Instead, she concentrated on thinking about nothing at all. She put her body on autopilot and zoned out as hard as she possibly could. No pain. No cold. No fatigue. No fear. Just determination. To. Keep. Moving.
The orange cone came into sight, and the path turned slightly left, angling southwest between two tall walls of rock. A narrow canyon wound away in the darkness. She stumbled down it, relieved to be almost halfway through this leg of the night’s interminable run.
All of a sudden, a black gap loomed in front of her, some sort of deep pit in the ground. Jerking out of her half-conscious state, she just barely managed to stop her forward momentum and not pitch into the hole.
Momentarily alert, she peered down into it. It had to be at least ten feet deep, with vertical sides. It was about a dozen feet to the other side. Too far to jump in her current state and with the heavy ruck on her back. She looked left and right. The gap stretched all the way across the narrow gully.
Truth be told, it was mostly luck that she’d even spotted the pit. A sliver of moon had come out from behind a cloud just then, illuminating the shadows in just the right way for her to see the lack of stones littering the path.
Was she supposed to climb down in the hole and back out the other side? She didn’t see anything even resembling handholds in the smooth wall across from her. Maybe she was supposed to go up and around the pit.
She took a minute to examine the cliff walls on each side of the pit. Both were tall, nearly vertical, and looked dangerously unstable.
C’mon, brain. Kick in. There had to be a trick to this. She looked around on the ground for a rope or a ladder or something that would make an obvious tool for crossing the chasm.
She had to backtrack a way, but she spied a stout, long tree branch of some kind tucked along the base of the cliff on her left, barely visible.
It was too narrow to walk across if she laid it across the pit. Was she supposed to go hand-over-hand underneath the pole? It looked strong enough to hold her weight, but she dreaded the idea of trusting her arms to support her weight and that of the rucksack at this juncture.
She picked the pole up and planted one end on the ground, then hung from the other end. It bent a little, but would hold her weight.
She eyed the pit. Eyed the pole, which was a good twelve feet long and relatively straight, almost the diameter of her wrist.
If she planted it in the bottom of the pit, the top five feet or so of it would stick up out of the pit. She’d pole-vaulted in college and understood the physics of it. Instead of using the pole’s bend-and-snap to go up vertically, she could use it to fling herself forward horizontally.
Oh yeah. She could do this. And vaulting would be a whole lot easier than asking her exhausted arms to hold her body weight for several minutes.
Grabbing the pole, she backed up thirty feet or so. Gathering what little energy she had left, she held the pole out in front of her and took off running with all the speed she could muster.
It felt exceedingly weird to plant the pole in the bottom of the pit against the base of the far wall, but the principal was the same. Instead of sailing high up into the air, she sailed forward, flinging her legs out in front of her and riding the flex and snap of the pole across the chasm to the far side.
She landed on her knees and pitched forward onto her belly, grunting as the weight of the rucksack squashed her. She had the presence of mind to hang on to the pole and dragged it out of the pit beside her while she lay there for a minute, catching her breath.
“Pass me the pole!” someone called out from behind her.
Grundy. She was half-tempted not to. After all the crap he’d given her these past few months, it would be sweet revenge to leave him stranded and force him to take a long, strenuous detour up the steep gully walls to get around the pit.
Laboriously, she pushed up to her hands and knees. She didn’t have the strength to climb to her feet just yet. Man, she was tired. Simple kneeling made her light-headed.
“Throw that over here!”
“You know you’re an asshole, right?” she called, reaching for the pole.
“Don’t you dare,” he snarled.
“Thing is, I’m a team player at the end of the day, Grundy. And I have a modicum of human decency that you lack. You’re never going to be a SEAL because you only think of yourself, and everyone knows it.”
“I take care of my team.”
“You only take care of them so they’ll take care of you. You’re selfish. The instructors know it. And you’ll ultimately fail.”
“Shut the fuck up, and hand me the damned pole.”
“You’re missing the point, Grundy.”
“Which is?”
“Now would be an excellent time to apologize for all the garbage you’ve pulled on me since INDOC.”
He stared at her across the gap, and she stared back, pointedly not passing him the end of the pole. He looked away first.
So. He did have a soul. And he did know he’d been a shithead to her. That was something, at least.
“Why are you doing this?” he finally asked.
“Consider it one last chance to get your act together before you wash out of BUD/S,” she said firmly.
“Fine. I’m sorry. Now give me the pole.”
He didn’t mean it for a second, but an insincere apology was better than nothing. And just because he was a jerk didn’t mean she ought to be one, too. She passed the long pole over the pit, and he grabbed the end of it.
“This is too flimsy to hold me and my pack,” he complained.
“Fine. Climb the arroyo walls. It’s no skin off my nose,” she retorted.
Mostly because her hamstrings were cramping like big dogs after her sprint to vault the pit, she leaned forward a
nd planted her hands on the ground to stretch while he made his way across the obstacle.
Hanging underneath the pole by his hands and feet, Grundy crossed the pit. He flopped to the ground beside her and rested for a few seconds before pushing up to his knees. They knelt side-by-side, panting for a minute, at the edge of the pit.
“Tate?”
“Yes?”
“You’ll never be a fucking SEAL.” He gave her a hard shove, and she toppled over the edge of the pit, screaming.
Thankfully, the weight of her ruck made her do a half somersault on the way down, and she landed on her back, the ruck cushioning her fall. Still, it hurt like hell. Laughter drifted down to her as she passed out from a combination of exhaustion and impact. And then there was only blackness and silence.
Chapter 20
Griffin’s earpiece crackled, and Vidmeyer’s voice transmitted into it, “Grif, you on freq?”
He keyed his microphone. “I’m on. What’s up?”
“Tate has missed the check-in at checkpoint six.”
“By how much?”
“She’s about fifteen minutes overdue. It was a short leg. She could’ve crawled it by now and been here. We tried to ping her GPS locator, but the signal’s not working.”
Worried, but trying to keep it out of his voice, Griffin radioed back, “On my way.” As he drove from the finish line out to the far point of the land course, he had to ask himself an equally disturbing question. Why had Vidmeyer felt obliged to let him personally know that Tate was in trouble?
Had he sucked that bad at hiding his feelings for her these past weeks? Goodness knew, it was hard to keep his eyes off her. But then, all the instructors were prone to watching her. Not only was her physical performance fascinating to all of them, but she was stunningly beautiful, even when sunburned, exhausted, and covered in sand or muck.
He jumped out of the Jeep at the checkpoint and jogged over to Vidmeyer as yet another bedraggled trainee staggered across the line, was force-fed a bottle of water, and sent on his miserable way.
Griffin asked tersely, “Any sign of her?”
“Nope. She’s almost a half hour late. She’s gotten lost or passed out somewhere out there.”
Griffin frowned. Neither of those felt right to him. She was smart as hell and had always had an excellent sense of direction at Camp Jarvis. Even in total darkness with no landmarks at all, she’d always known which way was which. As for passing out, it was possible, but not likely. Any trainees who made it to this last challenge had what it took to finish the run and to finish Hell Week.
“She’s a strong runner,” he commented. In fact, it was her greatest strength, and she’d never struggled to finish run-based evolutions.
“True. She’s tough over land,” Peevy replied, strolling over and jumping into the conversation. “There are still a number of guys on the course behind her.” He glanced at the checkpoint supervisor. “Have any of the trainees reported seeing her down out there?”
“Nope. Nada. No one said a word.”
Peevy asked the guy soberly, “What are the odds her classmates saw her down and aren’t telling us?”
All the instructors clustered around the checkpoint traded grim looks with each other. Had the instructors’ head games pushing the other trainees to turn on Sherri come home to roost in the worst possible way?
Peevy broke the loaded silence. “The Smurfs liked her. And most of the other tadpoles didn’t seem to give a crap about her one way or the other as long as she didn’t drag them down.”
Griffin could only think of one other possibility. “She could’ve hurt herself.”
“The trainees have flare guns in their rucks. She’d have shot hers off by now,” Vidmeyer responded.
“If she’s conscious,” Griffin snapped.
“C’mon,” Ray said briskly. “I’ll drive. You hunt for her.”
Griffin climbed in the passenger seat of the Jeep, a pair of infrared binoculars in hand. Peevy drove along the run route, and Griffin scanned either side of the course for the telltale white blob of a human heat signature.
They made it all the way to the previous checkpoint without any sign of her.
A quick check with the guys there showed she’d checked in over an hour before, and had been coherent and in as good a physical condition as could be expected of anyone in the last few hours of Hell Week. She’d apparently drunk her water and had been last seen headed in the right direction.
“Who went out just behind her?” Griffin asked.
The instructor checked his clipboard. “Grundy.”
Even Peevy joined him in groaning aloud. Griffin and Peevy piled back into the Jeep and headed out in search of Grundy and any information Sherri’s nemesis might have to add to the mystery of what had happened to her.
They found him two checkpoints ahead, getting ready to head out.
“Grundy! Hold up!” Griffin called out to him.
The guy turned around. His eyes were dull and glazed. Dude was in the final phases of exhaustion. Which was normal a few hours from the end of Hell Week.
Peevy walked up to Grundy and spoke slowly and clearly. “Have you seen Miss Tate tonight?”
“Nuh-uhh,” Grundy mumbled.
“Think hard,” Peevy said. “You left checkpoint six about thirty seconds behind her. Did you pass her on the trail?”
“Don’ know.”
Griffin frowned. The guy sounded a little too surly, which sent his internal antennae wiggling wildly. “You’re not in trouble, Grundy. We just need to know what happened to her. She disappeared.” It was a lie that the guy wasn’t in trouble if he’d seen that Sherri was in distress and hadn’t reported it. But Griffin was happy to hand the jerk rope to hang himself with.
Grundy frowned back. If Griffin was reading the guy right, he was wavering for some reason. Bastard definitely knows something.
He leaned in even closer, lowering his voice to an ice-cold promise of more pain than Grundy could imagine, even in the final throes of Hell Week. “If you know something and don’t tell us, and something bad happens to her, I’ll personally see you bounced out of BUD/S so fast your head spins. Do you understand me?”
Griffin never broke stares with Grundy, even though he felt Peevy’s quizzical gaze on him. Shit. Ray knew him too well. He was giving away too much about how he felt about Sherri. But it wasn’t like he had any choice. She was missing. And there just weren’t that many places between checkpoint six and checkpoint seven where she could’ve gotten lost.
Grundy mumbled, “Last I saw her, she fell in that pit.”
Peevy got to the question first. “What pit?”
There was no pit anywhere along the course of the run the trainees made.
“The one in the canyon.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Griffin burst out.
“The pit. You know. With the pole. Had to cross it on that pole…” Grundy looked back and forth between him and Peevy in confusion.
A string of curses erupted inside Griffin’s head. He squelched it forcibly. He had to keep his head in the game, panic or no panic eating a hole in his gut. “Where exactly was this pit you’re talking about?”
“After checkpoint six. Two clicks west to the orange pylon and then turn southwest for three clicks. The pit was right after the turn at the pylon.”
“Describe the pit,” Griffin ordered.
“It went from one side of the canyon to the other. Fifteen or twenty feet wide, maybe twelve feet deep. It wasn’t marked for squat. Had Tate not been kneeling beside it, I’d have never seen it coming. It was a fricking safety hazard, man.”
Griffin frowned. “If she was kneeling beside it, how did she fall into it?”
Grundy’s eyes popped open wide. “Uhh, hell if I know. I climbed across it, and when I looked back, she was nowhere to
be seen.”
Liar.
Peevy said sharply, “And it didn’t occur to you to go back and check on your classmate?”
Grundy squirmed a little. Shuffled his feet. “It’s a timed evolution. Every man for himself, right?”
“You’re a sorry son of a bitch—” Griffin started.
Peevy cut him off. “Later, Grif. Clock’s ticking. We have no time for this now.”
Griffin pivoted away from the trainee a millisecond before he ripped the guy’s face off. Good thing Peevy had distracted him, or there’d have been blood in the dirt. And body parts.
“Get out of here, Grundy,” Peevy growled.
It was back to the Jeep for Peevy and Griffin, back to checkpoint six. They traced the route of the course carefully, heading west. The trail the trainees were supposed to follow was clear in the faint moonlight, a white ribbon of dirt among the rocks and brush.
A little shy of two kilometers out, Peevy stopped the Jeep abruptly, practically throwing Griffin against the dashboard. “What the hell, Ray?”
The older man was already out of the Jeep, kneeling a few yards in front of the vehicle and off to the left. “Look at this.”
Griffin came around the Jeep and knelt beside Ray, asking, “Whatcha got?”
“Boot prints. Couple sets of ’em. Recent. One big set, one smaller set.”
“Tate and Grundy, maybe? Did she go off course? Maybe he followed her by accident?” Griffin asked.
“Let’s see where the tracks go. We’re almost two klicks from the checkpoint. This pit of Grundy’s has to be close.” Peevy took off jogging, and Griffin fell in behind him.
The tracks led about two hundred feet off the main trail and into a narrow arroyo. Peevy stopped, looking back. “Somebody cleaned off a trail. Made it look like this was where the tadpoles were supposed to go. See how those rocks are moved back and the gravel’s been scraped off the ground?”
Griffin was a decent tracker, but nothing like Ray. However, now that Ray pointed it out, he could see where someone had gone to pains to convince exhausted SEAL trainees this was the direction they were supposed to be running.
