Beyond the Limit

by Cindy Dees

  Peevy reached for his ankle knife, and Griffin slammed into full combat mode. If Ray thought there was some sort of threat, Griffin believed him without question. The guy’s instincts were legendary for a reason. Griffin eased out his own Ka-Bar knife, and they moved forward cautiously. What the hell had Sherri gotten herself tangled up in?

  Griffin admonished himself to clear his mind. Be one hundred percent in the present moment. He listened to the night sounds of the desert around him. Felt a light, cool breeze on his skin.

  Peevy held up a fist to stop.

  Ray eased forward a few more feet and then crouched in the shadow of a tumbleweed. “Perfect spot for an ambush,” he breathed into Griffin’s ear.

  True. But who would spring an ambush out here for a couple of SEAL trainees? It made no sense whatsoever. Peevy hand-signaled for Griffin to swing to the right, climb the canyon face, and parallel the arroyo, while Ray did the same to the left.

  It was a classic SEAL tactic. Ambush the ambusher.

  Griffin moved off silently to the right. At first glance, the roughly fifty-foot-tall cliff face looked vertical. But on closer inspection, he spied plentiful handholds and toeholds. He climbed to the top of the rock face quickly. Staying low to avoid presenting a profile to anyone else out here, he made his way along the canyon rim.

  From this angle, the pit was clearly visible when he drew level with it. What in the hell was going on out here? He moved over to the edge of the cliff to climb down and hopefully find Sherri unharmed in the bottom of that black hole, but then he spotted something that made his blood run cold.

  A discarded orange pylon.

  He tossed it over the edge of the cliff and climbed down after it as fast as he could without breaking his neck. He jumped the last dozen feet or so, panicked for Sherri’s safety.

  He knelt at the edge of the pit as Ray worked his way down the opposite rock face. “Tate?” Griffin called down into the hole. “Sherri? You down there? It’s Griffin Caldwell.”

  Silence.

  Ray pulled out a red-filtered flashlight and shined it down in the pit.

  Empty.

  But Ray immediately swore. Griffin asked quickly, “What do you see?”

  “Ladder marks. Lower me down. I want to take a closer look.” Ray moved to one end of the pit for Griffin to stretch out on his belly and let Ray use his arm like a climbing rope to lower himself into the hole.

  Ray’s voice floated up. “She was down here, all right. Looks like she fell. Landed on her ruck. But someone else was down here with her. Three…maybe four…men.”

  “Her classmates?”

  “These aren’t SEAL-issue boots.”

  “What?” Griffin squawked.

  “Close your eyes. I’m gonna take some pictures of these tracks,” Ray said.

  Protecting his night vision, Griffin closed his eyes against the flash of Ray’s cell phone camera.

  Then Ray said, “Someone came down here and hoisted or carried her out of here. Some of the tracks get deeper like they were carrying a heavy object.”

  “Like Tate?” Griffin asked, numb with shock.

  “Looks that way. You got radio reception?” Ray asked.

  His implication was clear. It was time to call out the cavalry. Griffin keyed his mic but got no response. “No reception. We’ll have to get out of this canyon.”

  Griffin held an arm down to Ray. While the guy climbed up to him, Griffin reported, “I found an orange pylon on top of the cliff. Same kind we mark the run course with. What if someone put out a fake pylon when she was coming, turned her into this canyon, and ran her into this pit trap?”

  “Why would someone go to all that trouble to kidnap Tate?” Ray asked reasonably. His hand slapped into Griffin’s, and Griffin heaved hard. Ray popped out of the hole and onto his belly beside Griffin.

  They rolled to their feet. “I have no idea why anyone would snatch Tate,” Griffin answered raggedly. “If her classmates wanted to get rid of her, there are a crap-ton of easier ways to do it.”

  Ray keyed his throat mic. “This is Peevy. Come in.”

  Nothing. Griffin and Ray took off running at full speed back toward the mouth of the arroyo and radio reception. They popped out of the canyon, and Ray tried again.

  A voice answered immediately, “Go ahead, Peevy.”

  “We’ve got a problem. Looks like a trainee was lured off the course and kidnapped. We need a search-and-rescue helicopter launched ASAP.”

  “Say again?” the voice squawked.

  “Launch a damned search-and-rescue helicopter right effing now,” Peevy snarled.

  “Who’s lost and say last known location,” a deep, stern voice cut into the channel.

  Griffin lurched. If he wasn’t mistaken, that was Admiral Duquesne’s voice. The old man was a SEAL and had a reputation for being a top-notch operator back in the day. He must’ve been monitoring the wrap-up of Hell Week from his office.

  Ray answered, “Missing trainee is Tate. We tracked her to a pit trap two klicks west of checkpoint six. She was taken out of the pit by several men on foot. I’m heading back there now to see if I can find vehicle tracks and give you more to go on.”

  “I’ll make the phone call to launch a chopper,” Duquesne said tersely.

  Thank goodness nobody was questioning Griffin’s and Ray’s sanity. About a hundred yards beyond the pit trap, the canyon petered out, its high walls fading back down into the desert floor.

  Ray hopped out and swung his flashlight back and forth in front of the Jeep. In a matter of seconds, he muttered, “Gotcha, jerkwads.”

  In an agony of impatience, Griffin waited while Ray crouched beside whatever track he’d found and took pictures. Then Ray jogged back to the Jeep. “They drove her out of here in a heavy-duty truck. Dual rear wheels.”

  “Can you tell what color it was?” Griffin asked half in jest.

  “Nah, but I can tell you it went north and then peeled back to the east.”

  Ray swung into the Jeep, and Griffin stared at him. “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Look that way. You can see a line of dust hanging in the air from where the truck kicked it up.”

  Griffin looked to the north and saw nothing but desert and darkness. “I’ll take your word for it. I swear, you have bionic eyes.”

  The moment of levity helped Griffin focus on what had to happen next. “Can you follow the truck’s trail?” he asked Ray.

  “Head that way. I’ll call the turn.”

  The suspended dust trail ended at a paved highway several miles beyond the pit trap where Sherri had been taken. And even Ray couldn’t tell any more about where the truck had gone once it hit dry pavement.

  Sherri was gone.

  Chapter 21

  Sherri woke up slowly, so groggy she could hardly string thoughts together.

  Small room. Dark. Only the faint sound of wind rustled around her. She felt alone. Horizontal strips of faint light gave her the vague impression of a decrepit cabin.

  No surprise, her ankles were tied to the legs of a chair, and her arms were tied behind her and secured to the chair back. It was uncomfortable, but she was blessed with flexible shoulders and the position wasn’t unbearable.

  She ached from head to foot. Although calling it an ache didn’t quite do justice to the screaming agony shooting through her body. Nonetheless, it felt so damned good just to sit down in this hard, uncomfortable chair and rest that she had no desire to complain.

  Whatever kind of head game this was by the BUD/S instructors, she didn’t much care. She closed her eyes once more to grab whatever nap she could get before the torture began again.

  Sunlight blazing through the window woke her up the next time. That and nigh intolerable heat. She’d gotten accustomed to the pounding sun of the California desert in BUD/S, but being trapped i
nside a small, enclosed space like this was like sitting in a broiler.

  What was this all about? No one had ever mentioned anything about prisoner-of-war training being part of Hell Week. Surely, Griffin would have told her about it and not thrown her into this cold.

  Maybe it was some secret SEAL rite of passage.

  She assessed her overall health quickly. Sore as hell from the past five days and nights of hell. Hungry. Thirsty, but not dangerously dehydrated…yet. If she kept sweating at this rate, she was going to need water bad in a few more hours. As it was, she felt the first ticklings of a headache, a sure sign she was dehydrated.

  She tested the ropes binding her to what turned out to be a sturdy metal chair. They were solid. She was effectively unable to move for now. Might as well go back to sleep. She had a whole lot of that to make up.

  * * *

  The next time she woke up, the heat of the day felt like it might be starting to break. Red sunlight came in low through cracks in the siding, and she quickly oriented herself. Off to her left was west. Duly noted.

  The noise that had woken her up—an approaching vehicle engine—cut off. She listened with interest to the rattling of locks on the door, and then three men stomped into the tiny cabin, filling it with their big bodies. They all had bandannas tied over their faces and were dressed in black cargo pants and T-shirts in shades of brown, gray, and green.

  Sherri examined their physiques closely and didn’t recognize them as any of her BUD/S instructors. But that made sense if this was some sort of prisoner training. They would be a different cadre of instructors from the regular BUD/S guys.

  She waited quietly, interested to see what would happen next. The good news was she’d had hours’ worth of badly needed sleep and felt like a new woman. But a woman who had to pee.

  One of the men moved behind her and went to work on the knots holding her wrists behind her back. She tried to envision the knot being untied based on the tugs at her hands. Felt like a handcuff hitch. No way out of that once it was cinched down. Well, fudge.

  The knot untier moved around in front of her and squatted to untie her feet. He straightened and gestured for her to get up.

  She stood and promptly fell to the floor as her legs collapsed out from under her. The combination of Hell Week and lack of circulation from sitting so long had won out over her will to stand.

  Rough hands grabbed her upper arms and hoisted her upright. She was shoved into a tiny bathroom that hadn’t seen a sponge and scrubbing powder in decades. The sink and toilet were rusted, the bathtub filthy.

  One of the instructors parked in front of the bathroom door but did not close it. Grimacing, Sherri used the facilities. At least the guy had turned his back. It could be worse.

  She turned on the faucet to wash her hands, and a sluggish stream of rusty water emerged. Nope. She wasn’t that desperate to splash her face or rinse her hands.

  Feeling a thousand times better, although a dehydration headache throbbed steadily now, she took a quick look around the bathroom. The window was nailed shut, and she suspected an attempt to pull out the nails would result in a god-awful screech that would give away any effort to escape.

  Ceiling looked made of solid wooden planks. Floor, the same. No escape was happening from in here without a crow bar or something similar.

  She stepped out into the main room. Immediately, two of the masked men—Red Bandanna One and Blue Bandanna—grabbed her by the arms and hauled her back to the chair. Pictures were taken of her with a newspaper held under her chin.

  Once she was trussed up again, Blue poured a bottle of water down her throat, which she drank eagerly.

  Then, without having uttered a single word, the three men left the cabin. Locks were locked. The engine started, and silence settled around her again.

  That was weird. If this was some sort of POW training, wouldn’t they have left guards nearby?

  Experimentally, she rocked the chair, thumping the chair legs loudly. She waited for a response. Nothing. She was definitely alone.

  She leaned forward, balancing awkwardly on her toes and turning to see what was behind her. A rusted-metal cot frame leaned vertically in one corner. An old recliner with a ruined seat filled the other corner.

  Sherri searched for any sharp objects she could use to saw through the ropes. Nothing obvious. But maybe if she could get to the bed frame, the rusted metal would be rough enough to act as a file. The ropes were thick, and it would take forever to saw through them. It appeared, though, that she had nothing but time on her hands.

  She started the slow process of inching her chair backward toward the corner.

  What the hell was going on? Griffin had made it clear that the minute Hell Week ended, he would be waiting for her and take her to his boat.

  Was this something else? Some special hazing designed to drive her out of the SEALs? Some breakaway group of instructors who had it in for a woman who dared try for the teams?

  Where was she, anyway? She tried to peer through the filthy windows and didn’t see much beyond beige smudges. On her painstaking path to the bed, she angled close to a wall and bent at the waist to peer through a crack in the cabin’s wrecked siding. She saw the double track of what barely constituted a road snaking away into desert as far as the eye could see. The terrain was flat. Featureless. It looked nothing like Coronado or the surrounding area.

  Where the hell was she?

  Internal alarm bells fired hard. This was not ops normal, and whoever those guys in bandannas were, they were not supposed to be holding her prisoner like this.

  A moment’s terror pierced her train of thought, but she suppressed it fiercely. Fear was not helpful. She was on her way to being a Navy SEAL, dammit. She could bloody well act like one.

  Her hands bumped into rough metal, and she angled her wrists painfully to bring her ropes against the bed frame. She started to saw.

  * * *

  Griffin was beyond frantic. The helicopter search turned up nothing. Sherri definitely wasn’t wandering around in the desert somewhere off course. Daylight brought an expanded search, NCIS was consulted, a police BOLO issued, and Cal Kettering arrived on a military jet at noon. Grundy was questioned again, but stuck to his story that she’d fallen in a pit trap and he had no idea what happened to her after that.

  “Anything?” Cal asked Griffin, who met him at the plane.

  “Nothing. A daylight examination of the pit trap confirms what Ray Peevy saw last night. She was lifted out of the pit, put in a truck, and driven away to parts unknown.”

  “GPS in her ruck?”

  “Disabled before she left the pit.”

  Kettering’s gaze snapped to his. “Professionals?” Cal bit out.

  “Who else would know to look for a GPS in her gear, let alone take it out?”

  Kettering cursed quietly. “Are all SEAL instructors and trainees present and accounted for?”

  Griffin swore in a hush. “You don’t think our own guys took her out, do you?”

  Cal replied grimly, “I don’t know what to think at this point.”

  Griffin drove Kettering over to the SEAL training building and took him into the operations center. As exhausted as the instructors were coming off Hell Week, Griffin was privately gratified to see all of Sherri’s BUD/S instructors clustered in the operations center.

  Even more gratifying was the fact that they all looked worried. As he listened to muted conversations flowing around him, it was clear to Griffin that they weren’t concerned as a function of covering their own asses. They were legitimately worried about Sherri’s well-being.

  Son of a gun. She had quietly managed to win over these die-hard skeptics.

  Someone brought in food, and Griffin ate out of habit and knowledge that bodies need fuel to operate at peak efficiency.

  Around midnight, Cal came over to where Griff
in stared bleakly into space. “When’s the last time you slept, Grif?”

  “I don’t know. Thursday, maybe.”

  “You’re pushing forty-eight hours on your feet, brother. Go down for a nap. You won’t do her any good if you’re too whipped to function. I’ll wake you up if we hear anything.”

  Not only was Cal right, but his words had the ring of an order from a superior officer.

  Griffin slid down a wall and collapsed in the corner to close his eyes for a few minutes, reluctantly allowing that even he had his limits. If and when they got a lead on Sherri, he needed to be sharp.

  In his exhaustion, he started dreaming almost immediately. He wasn’t the least bit surprised that he dreamed of her.

  Sherri laughing. Sherri cuddling in his arms. Sherri staring up at him in the throes of pleasure. Her courage, her determination, her dry sense of humor—they all swirled around him in a Technicolor montage of joy.

  And then the scene shifted. Darkened. He dreamed of her imprisoned in a small, dark space, afraid and alone. Tortured. Brutalized. Convinced he wasn’t going to come for her.

  He lurched, banging his head against the wall as he jolted awake. Where the hell was he…

  Right. Ops center. The FBI and police in California and several nearby states were on high alert for her. As manhunts went, it was turning into a big one.

  Griffin closed his eyes, fighting back the agony trying to claw its way out of his chest. Where are you, Sherri? Who took you, and where did they take you? Talk to me, baby.

  But no matter how hard he mentally tried to communicate with her, all he got back was silence. Frightening, maddening silence.

  * * *

  Sherri had no idea how soon her captors would be back to give her water and let her use the toilet again. As the hours ticked past and darkness fell, she sawed nonstop at her ropes. Fear began to creep in past the pain in her shoulders. She had to hurry. They would come to care for her eventually. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have bothered to give her that first bottle of water.