She dialed the first number on her list, and it was answered immediately. She uttered the emergency password and issued her first mayday call. It took only moments for her to be on speakerphone with the top NSWC brass as she tearfully told them of the mercenary attack on Lake Olympus Lodge and the toll it had taken on a platoon of SEALs and their trainers.

Chapter Thirty-Six

Luke stripped down to his base layer, wishing he had a wet suit for this, but at least the compression shirt and long johns were skintight and wouldn’t drag him down. He waded into the pool of mud. Cold, thick, and sometimes viscous. It was a rude, icy awakening for a body that hadn’t expected to swim in mud today.

The cold was good for his hip, though, which had been burning from the long hike with endless elevation changes that crossed through lowland and montane forests before ending in temperate rainforest.

He used his arms to propel himself forward as he waded through the mud toward Rivera, who had given up on swimming and now desperately gripped a floating log with one arm thirty feet away.

There was a cracking sound from the hillside, and Luke held his breath. If the hillside hadn’t finished collapsing, he was fucked.

The rope tied to his harness went taut, Jae ready to reel him in at the first sign.

On the far side of the slide, a tree tumbled down the slope and landed in the pool.

He waited, and there was no further earth movement. Thank you, Gaia.

He moved farther into the mud, fully swimming now as the pool deepened. Stroke by cautious stroke, he drew closer to Rivera, still a bit in awe that the man was alive and alert enough to cling to the log.

He would become a legend in the SEAL community. The guy who surfed a mudslide.

He reached the Laird Hamilton of mud and saw why the man held on to the log with only one arm. His left arm hung slack, dislocated.

Damn. Fucking legend.

“You still breathing, Rivera?”

The man’s mud-coated eyes opened a slit. “Barely.” He wheezed out the word.

“I’m going to hook this rope to you. You’re going to need to let go of the log so Jae can pull you in.”

“Can’t…can’t move my arm. Doubt I’ll be able to keep my head up.”

The guy probably sported a few broken bones too.

“That’s okay. I’ll be your float. But you’ll have to let go of the log for me to get into position. Just like BUD/S.”

Rivera nodded.

None of his military or even NOAA water rescue and survival trainings had ever offered a landslide mud rescue challenge, but this was a basic lifeguarding technique, upgraded for degree of danger and difficulty with the thick, frigid mud pool and ever-present threat of another slide.