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?”