“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?”