Page 28 of Her Honorable Hero

Griff nodded.

“Which teams are in-country?” Josiah asked.

Griff watched the older man squint as he listened. “Have Mason and Gray get their men here, stat. Also see about help from Camp Pendleton. If I don’t answer,” he finally said, “text me.” Then he hung up.

Griff felt a hell of a lot better knowing that Lieutenant Commander Liam McAllister was on point to gather up his SEAL team and another one. He knew that the men on his team could work miracles.

As one unit, Griff and Josiah turned and surveyed the interior of the café car. There were five people other than themselves inside. One commuter was already helping a woman. They looked like they were going to be fine. The older Vietnamese gentleman who ran the diner was currently trying to apply pressure to another man’s arm to stop the river of bleeding coming from his deltoid. The last passenger in the car was a woman lying against the wall. She didn’t look injured. Josiah veered off to the bleeding man, Griff crouched down next to the woman.

“Are you okay, Ma’am?”

“Did we crash?” she asked softly. Her brown eyes were wet with tears.

“Yes, are you okay?”

“Can you get me off the train? I want to get off the train.” She gripped Griff’s arm.

“Ma’am, I need you to remain calm. Help is on the way.” He’d already called nine-one-one, as had many others, according to the operator.

“Ma’am, do you have your phone?”

She grabbed her purse and pulled out her phone, then she nodded.

“Why don’t you call your family and tell them that you’re all right?” he suggested. “My friend and I are going to go look for other people who are injured, okay?”

She wasn’t paying him any attention, she was already dialing. He looked over his shoulder at Josiah. It looked like things were under control. Good. They needed to get to the car where the women were. There was no exit on the bottom level of the dining car like there had been on the one the women were on. If they wanted to get to the women, they would need to go upstairs and go through the passageway. But when he checked the electrical, it wasn’t working.

“We need to climb out the window,” Griff said to Josiah. He pointed to the big window that overlooked the ocean. It was severely cracked, and even though it was made of safety glass, there was a hole in the bottom left hand corner where a piece had broken out.

“People, I need you to move away from the window,” Josiah yelled as he strode over to the jumbled mess that had once been the café. He picked up the sturdy steel microwave off the floor and yanked the plug out of the wall socket. He took aim, and hurled it close to the hole in the window. It crashed through, bringing in the fresh ocean air.

The woman who had been talking on her phone screamed. “What are you doing?”

“Ma’am, we need to get out to help the people in the other car,” Josiah calmly answered.

Without being asked, the man who ran the diner was beside Griff with a handful of towels. “Here, put these down over the glass so you don’t cut yourselves when you climb out.”

“No need,” Griff said. “This is safety glass.” He pushed the entire remaining piece out of its moorings in one big chunk. He climbed out first and was surprised to see two lanky young men in wet suits making their way up over the rise of the cliff. It took a brief second for it to register with him that they had probably been surfing when they had heard or seen the crash.

“Hey, are you okay?” The first kid was a blond who couldn’t be more than fifteen or sixteen.

“Yeah,” Josiah answered. “We’re headed over to that car.”

Griff stared at where the captain was pointing and really took his first good look.

His stomach dropped.

“There was definitely an explosion,” Josiah said. Griff saw smoke coming from the two cars farther up the track, but the one that he was interested in was on its side. Part of it had been sheared off like someone had taken a gigantic can opener to it, but the thing that scared the shit out of him was that it was literally teetering on the edge of the cliff. It was easily a hundred-foot drop, and if it fell to the sand below, there probably wouldn’t be any survivors.

Griff and Josiah started toward the railroad car.

“Mister, don’t you want to wait for the emergency workers? They should be here soon, we called them,” one of the kids yelled after them.

Griff knew that it was going to be complicated for the first responders to get to this area because it was not accessible by road. Josiah had done the exact right thing by calling in the SEAL teams.

“My wife is on that train,” Josiah said, never breaking stride.

As they got closer, Griff perused the metal wreckage.