Page 38 of Into the Storm

“No. I won’t leave your side again. So we need to find shelter to dry out and sleep when daylight comes. It’ll be too dangerous to be out and about during the day. We need shelter with thermal pads. Sleeping bags. A heat source would be good too, but that’s risky. The mercs might have thermal cameras.”

“Mercs. You think these guys are mercenaries?”

“I do. They for sure aren’t a formal military, but they’re well equipped. Some are trained better than others. I don’t think they’re terrorists and here for a cause. They’re moving through the woods like it’s a job. Guns for hire.”

“How many do you think are out here?”

“No idea, really, but my gut says more than eight, fewer than sixteen.”

“Why?”

“The size of the storage pit, for one. But also, except for the two men who went after you in the Jamison cabin, the other ones we’ve encountered are alone. They should be working in teams. The SEALs are in four-man Fire Teams. These guys are working alone. Either they don’t know how to work together, or they need to spread out to cover more ground because there’s only about a dozen of them.”

“So your guess is a dozen, then?”

“Ten or eleven now.”

“You killed one of them.” She’d known it when she realized he had a rifle and NVGs.

“I did. I hope the team finds his body so they’ll know this is no longer a training exercise.”

“What will they do if that happens?”

“The Fire Teams will have a rendezvous point they selected ahead of time. They’ll gather. Share intel. Storm the lodge. Save my team of trainers.”

“We need to get to the rendezvous point, then.”

“I don’t know where or when it is.”

“Damn.”

“So, got any ideas of where we can hole up when daylight comes?”

She racked her brain for a safe refuge. Obviously, all the lakeside cabins were out. “George’s cabin? It’s not on the lake.”

“Too close to the storage pit. They could be all over that part of the forest.”

“Right.” She considered their options. Finally, she said, “I get why cornering ourselves in another cabin is a bad idea, but we can break into one and get supplies. Jeb repeatedly complained that one family—the Baldwins—rented out their place as an Airbnb. His evidence of this was always seeing tents pitched in the yard to accommodate extra guests. Park administrators looked into his complaints, and the cabin wasn’t listed on any public site they could find, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t have an arrangement with a property manager to direct clients their way for a nonpublic rental. But what matters to us is, if Jeb’s complaints were accurate, the cabin probably has a stockpile of supplies we could borrow—tents and sleeping bags at the minimum.”

“Which one is the Baldwin cabin?”

“Southeast side of the lake—along the sole of the boot, a quarter mile from where the main road comes to a T at the lake.” Lake Olympus Road didn’t circumnavigate the lake—the cliff and falls being the one section that lacked road access—but the main road intersected with the lake at the south end, right at the boot heel, and a short gravel stretch ran up the ankle and back of the calf before dead-ending at a park service campground with an historic shelter built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s, before the park had been established.

The main paved road was in the other direction from the T, winding around the foot, along the shin with all its knobs, ending at the lodge below the knee, with another gravel road that continued north—the one Xavier had driven like a madman hours ago to get them to the blacksmith shop in record time.

“That’s not far from the Kalahwamish cabin where our vehicles are parked. We’ll need to be careful, in case there’s someone planted there, waiting for us to show up.”

She nodded. “Makes sense. I have a feeling they’ll have slashed your tires too anyway.”

“Yeah. And there was a tree down on the road near the culvert we crossed under when we left the Jamisons. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve cut off the main road at the fork too.”

She hadn’t seen the tree down, but she didn’t have NVGs. It made her wonder what else she’d missed.

“These guys are really organized,” she whispered.

He nodded. “They’ve been planning this since before they buried their equipment in the site.”

Mid-November.