“Inholding property owners couldn’t be here, so we had to have a public notice period. We couldn’t go out with a public notice saying the Navy is going to run an op in Olympic National Park, so we called it a training exercise, which left it open for review.”

It wasn’t lost on him that every man in this room had learned tonight that she was pregnant with his child, but only Cohen and the other trainers knew what he’d done to her to get them here. He’d never expected to have the opportunity to justify his actions, but here it was. He’d be a fool to let it go by, even if this wasn’t the most opportune moment. “When the training was denied, I would have walked away and come up with a different plan, except then there was the chemical attack in Prague at the beginning of December.”

Audrey’s gaze whipped to his. “That was a gas attack?”

He nodded. “Intelligence gathered indicates upwards of eighty-two people died. Of course, this is all highly classified, but at this point, you all have the right to know what brought us here.” His gaze met Audrey’s. “And why I did what I did to you.”

He’d never expected to be able to tell her, but now that he had, a weight lifted from his chest. At least there was a chance she would understand. Would know that it truly had nothing to do with her and everything to do with hundreds, even thousands of lives hanging in the balance.

She gave him a small nod, and he moved on. They still had a lot of ground to cover. Like how the hell they were going to end this nightmare once and for all.

“So if everything hadn’t gone to hell before we even splashed down,” Williams said, “we would have taken the lodge the first night, and then what?”

“Then we would have run different scenarios for how to extract the hostages. As we’ve learned, it’s one thing to get in, and another entirely to get out.”

“As far as I can tell,” Flyte said, “the only way out without being seen, without being able to call for a helicopter, is hiking overland.”

Xavier nodded. “Yes. I believe that would have ended up being the only scenario that would work. That’s why the dummies representing the hostages are the right height and weight of both hostages, although the boy will have grown in the months since he was last seen, so his dummy is based on averages.”

“And that’s what we need to do now,” Smith said. “Hike beyond the signal blocker and make the call with a satellite phone.”

“The best way to do that is to go deeper into the forest,” Audrey said, “toward Mount Olympus. Get high, above the tree line, to have the best chance to get a signal.”