Holy crap. Xavier was trying to swim through mud to get to solid ground. The man had ridden the top of the slide like a damned deity surfing the apocalypse, and now he was swimming to shore.

“Holy fuck,” Luke said with similar awe in his voice.

They ran together toward the clearing created by the slide, facing the massive mud pool.

They stopped as close as they dared to the unstable earth, and Jae dropped his pack and pulled out a rope. “I’m going in for him.”

“You a good swimmer?” Luke asked.

“Good enough.”

“Let me, then. I’m more than good enough, and I’ve swum in water almost this thick.”

Jae wanted to argue, but he wasn’t a dumbass. Their best shot at saving Xavier was the former SEAL and current NOAA lieutenant commander whose entire life revolved around swimming and scuba.

Luke quickly rigged a rope harness, which they wrapped around a tree, then hooked to Jae as anchor. He’d pull both men in once Luke reached Xavier and tied him on.

Audrey forced her sobs away as she continued upward. Focus on the mission and forget everything else.

The mission. As if she were one of the team. She didn’t begin to know how to cope with all that had happened. On his last op, Xavier had been shot and lost two team members, but he hadn’t given up. He’d instead focused on what he could do to prepare the teams for nightmares like the one he faced. And Flyte had been on the same mission and was still fighting the fight.

All she wanted to do was curl into a ball and give up, but she wouldn’t shame Xavier’s faith in her that way. She wouldn’t fail the team.

She would complete her mission.

With the aid of a walking stick she’d picked up a half mile back, she reached the tree-covered ridgeline that was the upper boundary of the Lake Olympus drainage. She planted the stick with each step, using a piece of the wilderness she loved to pull her forward. She crested the ridge and began the descent into the new drainage. Here the air would be free of signal-jamming frequencies, protected by ridgeline and trees.

It was well past noon and darker on the east-facing slope. There were no gaps in the thick vegetation of the thriving forest.

This drainage transitioned from temperate rainforest to montane forest. Here she would find an abundance of silver fir trees that thrived in the moist, higher elevation. The shrubs were salal, Oregon grape, and devil’s club and not the epiphyte and understory ferns and mosses of the rainforest.

She descended into the well of this new woodland, the ground slightly less saturated as the ridgeline deflected some of the rain clouds. The rain, which had reduced to a sprinkle before she crossed the ridge, was now just a vapory mist passing by.