Stina’s eyes flared wider when she saw him. She rushed forward and threw her arms around him.
When he folded her close, she was shaking.
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing to worry about. Short in and out. Stay here with Jolie. Rivers is your guard.”
Her gold and green eyes glimmered with emotions neither of them had time for. But he lowered his head and stole that kiss he hoped for.
As he released her and stepped back, he saw her chest heave.
He twisted and took off running to meet the rest of his brothers-in-arms. On the way, Monk pushed past him, on his way for a brief moment with Jolie.
With every step Rome took away from Stina, his mind shifted to the op. They weren’t responsible for search and rescues, but occasionally they were called on for help. The same way the FBI intercepted threats and handed them off tolocal authorities who could reach the people in time, Blackout received SOS calls.
The mountain was dark and brutal, and beautiful in the way that things were when they were capable of killing them. They pushed the limits of the snowmobiles, the wind cutting sideways across the north face. Visibility dropped with every quarter mile they went.
Rome kept his eyes on the terrain and his mind on the task ahead and tried not to think about the woman he’d left standing in the hallway in the middle of the night with her hand pressed to her chest.
They reached the coordinates in eighteen minutes.
Nobody was there.
Rome rolled to a stop and cut the engine. The north face stretched out in every direction. Snow. Rock. The skeletal outline of old lift equipment half-buried in deep snow that never melted, tilted and broken.
No hikers. No gear.
No sign anyone had been here recently at all.
“Check the perimeter,” came Cannon’s order in their comms.
They spread out to search. Rome moved along the ridge line, aware that one wrong placement of his boot would send him shooting off the steep side. Monk was on his six, using just as much caution.
“Where the hell are they?” Monk muttered.
The snow was also unbroken. Not a footstep marred the inky blue snow that reflected the moonlight.
“No evidence of hikers,” he reported.
His ear filled with the same reports from the rest of the team.
Cannon broke in. “Keep looking. They may have moved. Disoriented hikers don’t always stay put.”
Rome and Monk exchanged a look.
Monk shook his head. “I saw a lot in mountain warfare training, but disoriented hikers still leave tracks.”
They gave it another twenty minutes, widening the search to a different grid. He called out into the darkness but got nothing back but the howl of wind.
Rome activated his comms. “Sierra Two to Sierra One. There’s no sign of anyone. Command had to give us faulty intel,” he said to Cannon.
“Command says keep looking. They have to be in this sector.”
He stood on the ridge, gazing out over the mountain, and tried not to feel it.
The wrongness of a situation that didn’t add up. The math that refused to work, no matter how many times he ran it.
Seven hikers would leave tracks, even ones covered over by blowing snow.
