TWO
Emma hurt.
Everywhere.
Her head hurt. Her neck. Her shoulder. She shifted, and suddenly her ankle was on fire.
She blinked into the darkness. No, dimness. There was a faint gray band coming from . . . from . . .
Where the hell was she?
The realization spurted through her like ice water, and she jerked forward, only to yelp at the flash of pain in her head.
She closed her eyes and tried to breathe. In. And out. In. And out. Hoping the horror would go away, but it didn’t. She’d crashed. They’d all crashed.
She turned her head, panicking now as her eyes tried to penetrate the gloom. She groped around, attempting to make some sense out of her shadowy world. Her hands encountered armrests, something metal, and then something smooth and curved that had to be the wall of the cabin.
So she was still in the plane, whatever was left of it. It was dark but not totally. She turned toward the light, and a stunning bolt of pain in her ankle made her gasp out loud.
She closed her eyes and waited for it to subside. When the fiery darts became a dull throb, she tried again, slowly pivoting her body toward the dim glow. The plane’s windshield was cracked but intact. Beyond it was a mass of black with pale gray patches.
Leaves. Trees. They’d plunged into the jungle, and it had swallowed them up.
We crashed. I can’t believe we crashed. Her brain still resisted what every one of her senses told her. We crashed, but I’m still alive.
Emma’s eyes began to adjust, and she looked around, now making out shadows in the seats nearby. Delgado slumped forward in his chair in a limp version of the crash-landing position, presumably still strapped in by his seat belt.
Seat belt.
Emma fumbled with hers. Her hands were so clumsy it took her three tries to unlatch the buckle. She lurched forward and quickly fell back, and only then did she realize the plane was tilted sideways at a sharp angle. Gripping the armrest for support, she crawled forward on her knees.
“Juan. Juan?”
He didn’t answer. She reached for his head, and her stomach clenched as she lifted his chin to check his face. In the dimness she could see the whites of his eyes, which were open and unblinking.
“Juan.” She touched his neck, looking for a pulse.
Nothing.
He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.
The words hammered her brain as she turned to Renee, who sat crumpled against the side of her seat. Emma blinked into the dimness, not sure exactly what she was seeing. The shape of Renee’s head was all wrong. It was . . . dented. Bashed in. As if it were made of clay and someone had come along with a big mallet and whacked it.
With a trembling hand, Emma reached for Renee’s neck, hoping to get a pulse. But she couldn’t. Her body was like Delgado’s, totally inert.
How long had they been here? How long had Emma been unconscious?
Her heart pounded. She gripped Renee’s armrest, trying to get a grip on her emotions. Something hard jutted into her knee, and she looked down to see a rectangular shape.
Delgado’s computer. It had careened through the cabin, hitting God only knew what. Or whom.
Emma closed her eyes, hoping to shut out the unbearable reality, but it didn’t go away. She was stuck inside a wrecked plane, without even a light to guide her. She pressed a trembling hand to her forehead and rubbed it, trying to make herself think. She was injured. The air smelled like . . . something singed or burned. Burned rubber? That wasn’t quite right, but she didn’t have the mental capacity to analyze it right now.
She glanced at Renee again and felt another surge of panic. She turned toward the front of the aircraft, the place she somehow knew was going to be worst of all. With a heavy ball of dread in her stomach, she forced herself to feel her way between the passenger seats and lean into the cockpit.
Mick was slumped against the side of the windshield, his head in direct contact with the glass. Emma’s heart squeezed.
“Please, no,” she whispered, reaching out for him.
She touched his neck, and her heart skittered. His skin felt warm.
“Mick?”
She clambered forward, squeezing herself into the copilot’s seat, ignoring the arrows of fire shooting up her ankle as she slid into the cramped space. She gently pulled Mick’s body away from the windshield and settled him back in his seat.
He didn’t move. He didn’t flinch or resist or make a sound. But he wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be.
She clung to the thought as she felt his wrist for a pulse but didn’t find one. She bit her lip, cursing her inability to accomplish something so simple. He had to be alive. Had to be.
She checked his neck and detected a faint pulse. A rush of hope filled her. Her gaze fell on the headset in his lap, and she snatched it up and arranged it on her head. She flipped the nearest switches, but the controls remained dark and silent.
“Come on, come on,” she muttered, turning knobs and jabbing buttons. She touched everything she could get her hands on but didn’t manage to bring up even a flicker of light or a hiss of static.
She looked at Mick again. Lines of red crisscrossed his face like countless paper cuts. She reached out and touched a gash on his cheek. The blood felt sticky.
Sticky was good. He’d survived the impact, and his body was responding. He was unconscious, though, probably with a concussion.
She hoped.
She replaced the headset in his lap and glanced around for a first-aid kit, then chided herself. First aid. Right. They were way beyond anything that could be fixed with some ointment and an ACE bandage. But a kit might have some sort of other emergency supplies, maybe an extra radio.
She climbed from the seat and bumped her ankle against something hard, sending pain shooting up her leg.
Something was wrong with her ankle. She’d sprained or fractured it, but she couldn’t think about that right now. She felt around the cabin, searching for the few interior compartments where supplies were stored—juice boxes, water bottles, and she’d even seen Mick pull a flask of whiskey from a cabinet once.
Some of the doors were blocked by twisted metal that hung down from the ceiling. Emma got her fingers under a latch and managed to jerk one of the upper doors open. The contents clattered to the floor. She picked up something firm but lightweight. A life jacket? Her hand bumped against something hard and rectangular, and she prayed it was a first-aid kit. She tried to pick it up, but it was heavy. She’d been lucky it hadn’t fallen on her foot. She lifted the box and dumped it onto the empty copilot seat, where the light was slightly better than in the cabin.
She stared down at the object until her overloaded brain identified it: a satellite phone. Emma’s heart lurched. She’d never used one before, but she’d seen Mick do it. The more remote islands didn’t have cell towers. She unlatched the box and flipped a few switches but failed to bring the thing to life.
She bit her lip again until she tasted blood. It had to work. Had to. Mick was gravely injured, and she had to get help.
She looked at him, still slumped and lifeless. Then she looked at the door. She crawled over to it and tried the latch. It didn’t budge. She tried it again. And again. On the fourth attempt, it opened, and a sliver of light pierced the darkness. She pushed the door open.
Green.
They’d crashed into a thicket, but at least they were on land. She could hike out of here and maybe get a call out.
Stay with the plane.
The thought popped into her head out of nowhere. Where had it come from? Maybe a movie or a television show? She didn’t know. It seemed like sound advice, but just the thought of following it made her chest squeeze. She couldn’t stay here. What little light she had was fading. It had to be nearing dusk. And she couldn’t just sit here with two dead bodies and a man who might be sliding into a coma. Mick needed medical attention now, and she had a means of getting it.
She made her decision and felt oddly calmed by it.
Emma closed up the satellite phone case. She hefted it over the seat and slid it beside the door, then glanced around.
Daylight was fading. She needed to move. Her gaze fell on a water bottle that had rolled against the side of the cabin. She unscrewed the top and took a long gulp. The liquid soothed her throat and made her feel somewhat human again. Like an actual person, not a character in some B-grade horror movie. She crawled over to Mick and nestled the water bottle beside his leg, where he’d be able to reach it when he woke up.
When, not if.
She spotted the leather holster at his side where he kept the pistol he always carried.
She stared at the gun. She didn’t know anything about weapons. And what would she use it for? Besides, it seemed wrong to take an injured man’s gun.
She eyed his sand-colored cargo pants and noticed a bulge in one of the side pockets. She dug out a key ring with several keys attached, including one to a Jeep. Also on the ring was a small pocketknife. Emma slipped the key ring into the front pocket of her capri pants and pulled herself to her feet.
She touched the top of Mick’s head. “I’ll be back,” she whispered. “I promise.”
Then she moved toward the door and used her good foot to give it a strong push.
Emma held onto the side of the plane as she looked around outside. Leaves and branches blocked her view. But she spied a patch of dirt, maybe five feet down. Before she could second-guess her decision, she grabbed the satellite phone and swung her legs over the side. She jumped, careful to land on her uninjured foot, but her leg didn’t hold her, and she crumpled to her knees in the dirt.
Air.
Warm and humid, all around her. The freshness of it came as an immense relief . . . until she tipped her head back and looked up.
Emma’s heart sank.
The plane had plummeted nose-first into the trees, knocking several over but hardly making a dent in the dense jungle. One of the wings was entirely gone, and the other tilted up from the fuselage at a sharp angle. Only the tail remained intact.
Emma turned around and found herself surrounded on all sides by tall trees and leafy vines. She was alone out here. Through a gap in the canopy, she glimpsed the fading light of day. Panic bubbled up inside her as her situation sank in.
Who on earth could ever find her in this wilderness?
———
It was jungle and more jungle as far as the eye could see. Lieutenant Ryan Owen gazed from the Black Hawk at the vast wilderness below. Everything looked silver in the moonlight. He saw no sign of a wreckage, but it was down there somewhere. He and his team just had to find it.
Ryan glanced across the helo at Jake Heath. The roar of the rotor blades made it impossible to talk, but he and Jake had been together since BUD/S training, and he knew what his teammate was thinking. It was the same thing they’d all been thinking since the briefing when they’d learned that an American ambassador’s plane had gone down in the southern Philippines: Had anyone survived the crash?
Because of a last-minute schedule change, the ambassador himself hadn’t been on the flight. But his wife had, along with her personal assistant and a Dr. Juan Delgado. The fourth person on board was retired Marine pilot Walter McInerny, a man with twenty thousand flying hours under his belt, not to mention survival training. McInerny’s last Mayday call had been followed by seven minutes of silence. And then a brief garbled message had gone out. Since then, nothing.
Seven minutes. Plenty of time for the plane to crash, and yet there had been one last transmission, which likely meant someone had lived through the impact. The question was who.
“My money’s on the jarhead,” Jake had said after the briefing.
Ryan’s brother was a former Marine, and that had been his first thought, too. But now his money was on the girl, Emma Wright.
They’d been shown the passengers’ photos at the briefing, and Emma had caught Ryan’s attention immediately, along with that of every other man on the team. Emma Wright was young—only twenty-six—with pretty dark eyes and shiny brown hair that looked like it belonged in a shampoo ad. And then there was that lush mouth . . . Damn. Ryan knew he wasn’t the only man who’d taken a glance at that mouth and had to fend off some extremely distracting thoughts.
But what really stuck with him? Her eyes. Emma’s eyes showed spirit. There was a glint in them that seemed to say, Don’t you dare underestimate me. It was that look, even more than her mouth, that had come back to Ryan as they geared up for the mission. It was that look that made him wonder if it was Emma and not the Marine who’d been responsible for the last radio transmission. It was that look that gave Ryan a gut-deep feeling that maybe she stood a chance.
Which meant exactly nothing.
Ryan’s gut-deep feeling was worth shit, because no amount of spirit or determination could alter the laws of physics. In all probability, Emma’s survival depended on the plane’s speed of descent and its angle of impact.
But who the hell knew?
It wasn’t always about probability, or Ryan never would have made it through BUD/S training. There were guys who’d started out stronger and faster than he was, guys he’d felt sure would make it, but they’d rung out. And meanwhile Ryan had hung in there as his muscles seized and his joints burned and his brain was so scrambled he didn’t even know his own name. Sometimes what mattered most was tenacity, and Ryan had a deep well of it. It had seen him through SEAL training and every harrowing mission since.
“Three minutes,” came the crew chief’s voice over the radio. Ryan watched his CO, Matt Hewitt, as he skimmed his gaze over his men to make sure everyone was ready.
The crew chief kicked out the rope. Ryan removed his headset and edged closer to the door. He made eye contact with Jake, who gave him a look that said, Fuckin’ tear it up, bro.
It was go time. Time to focus. Time to put Emma Wright’s pretty brown eyes and her luscious mouth out of his mind so he could think about his mission, which was to find four missing Americans and get them home.
The helo’s rotors thundered as Ryan stared out at the rain forest, a place he knew from personal experience was teeming with deadly reptiles and plants and insects—not to mention people, the most lethal threat of all. The ambassador’s plane had gone down over an island that was rumored to be controlled by a ragtag group of heavily armed militants who may or may not have had anything to do with the crash. This was no run-of-the-mill search-and-rescue mission—not by a long shot. Depending on what the SEALs found, the mission could have widespread repercussions.
Hewitt made the signal: two minutes.
Ryan snugged his gloves on his hands. His fingers tingled with anticipation as he grabbed the rope. They were going in light and quiet, only a four-man element, with Ryan leading the way. It was a balls-out operation over unknown terrain put together on too-short notice, and Ryan felt lucky to be a part of it. Every man on Alpha Crew lived and breathed for moments like these, and whatever fear Ryan felt at all the unknowns awaiting him he kept locked away, deep inside him.
Another signal from Hewitt: one minute.
A cool calm settled over him. Time to get it done. One more glance at his teammates before the CO gave him the nod.
Ryan gripped the rope. His palms burned and smoked as he jumped into the void.