He crouched low and darted across the street, diving for a thicket of trees that hugged the opposite side. Audrey kept pace with him, and together, they wove through the small cluster and made their way to the back of the yurt.

He slowed as he approached the command center. He couldn’t screw up now. This wasn’t a training anymore; this was an op. He had to scope out the yurt before stepping inside.

The round house looked quiet on its perch above the lake. A light rain had begun as they trod the path, and he could see the dark mass of the lake as raindrops littered the surface. The forecast had indicated the wind would pick up after nineteen hundred hours, which was another reason they’d bumped up the time for the jump.

The team would have to deal with cold rain and cold lake, but wouldn’t face a fierce wind from the get-go.

For their part, the SEALs would be pumped, at the peak of their game. Even armed only with Simunition, they’d be hard to take down.

Xavier felt a fierce pride. He was one of them. The old man now with a bum shoulder, but still one of them.

The man he’d fought on the ledge had been trained. Well. He knew how to fight. Xavier’s loss of range of motion in his shoulder had given the tango the advantage. That didn’t bode well for his team. He had to assume they were all equally trained.

Who were they? What was their goal here?

Beyond destroying a platoon of SEALs, that is. He assumed there was a bigger objective, although the humiliation of destroying a team on American soil might be enough.

If a SEAL encountered an ambush similar to what he’d faced on the cliffside trail, he’d assume the attack was part of the training. He wouldn’t fight to the death as Xavier had—or at least hoped he had. The blood on the trail worried him.

He should have called a halt to this exercise the moment he recognized Audrey, should have gone with the instinct that told him something was off. But he’d spent the last three months working toward today.

This was a thousands-of-lives-hang-in-the-balance test run for an op. When it was time for the real mission, they’d only have one shot. This exercise was their best shot at refining the plan before they went wheels up. And after what had happened on Xavier’s last op, he was determined his team would be prepared.

He’d thrown away something special with Audrey to make this day happen. This exercise was crucial, in ways that not even the SEALs about to jump into a frigid lake in winter knew.