Digging with her hands, she created a little hollow and watched eagerly as it slowly filled with muddy water. If she let it sit in her bottle for a while, the worst of the sediment would settle, and she could drink through a piece of the cloth over the bottle mouth to further filter the water.

She carefully filled her bottle with water and waited impatiently for the water to clear. As soon as she could see through it, she chugged it down and filled the bottle again. She was losing precious travel time, but water was the most critical resource for her survival.

I’m coming home, Griffin. Just be patient. Although knowing him, he would be anything but patient over her disappearance. She doubted Grundy would ’fess up to dumping her in the pit, so until someone got around to coming back to fish her out, nobody would have known she was kidnapped—unless this was, in fact, part of her training. Which she seriously doubted at this point.

She was no expert on geography, but she guessed she was somewhere in the Mojave Desert. And in all the preparation she’d done for BUD/S, all the discussions Griffin had with her, never had she run across a single reference to hauling BUD/S candidates out into this bleak wasteland and dumping them.

When her belly ached from drinking water, she filled the bottle one last time, did her best to obscure her tracks in the mud and continued on. She could only pray her captors underestimated her fitness and stamina. It was one of the SEALs’ secrets to success, and she hoped it worked doubly for her as a woman.

The sun rose at her back as she wound through a series of washes and gullies. She tried to keep heading generally west, but the canyons wound all over creation. Eventually, she started the long climb up a rough rock outcropping.

As the morning began to heat up, she considered shelter. About halfway down the west face of the ridge, she spotted what she’d been looking for: a large boulder with a deep hollow carved out of the dirt at its base. Approaching the den with caution, she used her stick to clear the space from any resident snakes before crawling in. She had to evict a couple of scorpions and then built piles of rocks at each end of the opening and draped her piece of cloth over them, covering the opening.

There was just enough room for her to curl up in a loose ball. Using her arm for a pillow, she closed her eyes and dozed lightly. Her sleep was fitful, no doubt because she kept half an ear alert for anyone who might approach her hiding place.