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.”