He’d told no one on the team about Pam’s affair, and apart from the SEALs, he had no other friends. No family. No life beyond his marriage and his work. He’d been alone in his miserable thoughts as he prepped for the training.

Betrayed by his wife and a man he’d considered a brother.

Shit.

Focus. Swim. Kick. Breathe.

Before the jump, he’d thought this exercise would be good for him. He’d be forced to get out of his head. Solve problems. Lead his team. How could he think about betrayal when swimming in thirty-five-degree water?

He turned his mind to the cold. Leaned into the pain of it as he swam, fast and hard, carrying a watertight bag filled with the gear he’d need to survive the coming days. He focused on that.

Old friend or not, Rivera wouldn’t let mistakes slide. If he failed this training, Rivera would be right to flag him as unfit for ops. He could be a danger to his team.

Now that his marriage was ending, if he lost his spot on the team, he’d have nothing. No one.

The thought added power to his stroke as he swam toward shore. For this first exercise, they’d divided the sixteen-man platoon into four Fire Teams. Each team knew their extraction point from the lake and mission once they were on land. If they didn’t free the hostages in the first few hours, they’d rendezvous in the forest to the northeast of the lodge at oh four hundred and hatch a new plan.

Chris’s team had selected an extraction point near a campground on the west side of the lake. They’d have to hike a fair distance around the north end to get around Kaxo Falls, but they’d be able to approach the lodge complex from an unexpected angle, taking the tangos from behind. Two Fire Teams would have the direct approach, flanking the lodge compound from the north and south, while the fourth would extract from the water directly opposite the lake from Chris’s team.

If he knew Rivera and Cohen, they’d have set up some nasty surprises in the woods for all four teams—but the trainers didn’t know where each Fire Team had chosen to extract from the water. They were as in the dark as to the planning done by the platoon this afternoon on Whidbey as the team was clueless as to what was in store for them.

Rivera was a big fan of expecting the unexpected and could be diabolical when coming up with ways a mission could go FUBAR. But then, he and Rivera had survived some messed-up operations together, and they both understood the need to put the team through extreme tests.

Rivera had barely survived the last op. Memories of that night, hauling his wounded teammate from the building, would haunt Chris for the rest of his days.