Aaron nodded thoughtfully and took a pull on his beer. If he was about to ask a follow up, it was interrupted by the now-familiar sound of his ringtone. “Hold on.”
He pulled the phone out of the pocket of his jacket and my heart jumped into my throat at the look on his face as he read the display. Without a word, he answered the phone, got up from his seat, and stalked out the side door.
Rachel wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
“God, I can’t take this anymore,” I said, my voice hardly audible in the loud bar setting.
“I know, honey.”
I tapped my heels on the floor, counting out some rhythmic beat in my head to distract myself from the dark, despairing “what if” scenarios that flashed through my thoughts. My eyes were trained on the side door, waiting for Aaron to reappear. Rachel kept an arm around me but didn’t offer up any further words of comfort.
There were none.
Aaron finally came back through, his phone still in hand, and his expression hard, and unreadable. He dropped back into his chair, put his elbows on the table, and leaned in so as to not be overheard. “A team of SEALs just made it to the crash site and confirmed Boomer ejected before the crash. They have drones scanning the mountainside for sight of him, while the SEALs search the ground.”
A strangled sob choked me as I nodded that I’d heard him. “What happens if—” I stopped to suck in a deep, rattling breath. “—if they can’t find him? How long will they keep looking?”
“There’s not really a hard timeline. With the drones on the hunt, it shouldn’t take too long to find his drop site. There’s only so far he could have landed, and then, on foot, he won’t be able to make it too far. Not with that kind of terrain, and he’s smart enough to stay hidden. He’ll use the mountains to his advantage. If I had to guess, he’s hunkered down in some cave, waiting it out, and counting down his rescue.”
I nodded, gripping onto his words for dear life.
“How long can he survive out there? I mean, assuming…” Rachel paused, cutting a glance in my direction before continuing, “…no one else does first.”
“He’ll have his emergency pack. It deploys with the parachute. It has four days rationed.”
I cemented that tidbit of information in my mind.
Four days.
The SEALs had four days to find him and get him out.
Otherwise…I squeezed my eyes shut and dismissed the rest of the thought. There was no room for otherwise. Jack had to make it home.
34
Jack
I spent my second night in a cave, just as I had the first night. I figured I’d made it a good five miles from my original landing site and was content to stay put, knowing a rescue team would be looking for me. By now, they’d have found whatever was left of my plane, and they would know that my broken body wasn’t lying in the wreckage. It wouldn’t take them long to find me, and despite my worry, I hadn’t encountered any signs of life in the mountains during my trek. I didn’t want to press on much further because it would only be a matter of time before I found rebels or refugees hiding out and that was something I couldn’t afford.
On the second day, I woke with the sunlight that filtered into my rocky hostel and after taking a leak and refueling with an energy bar that I’d found in my pack, I ducked out of my cave to do a search and make sure that I was still undiscovered. I kept my 9mm cocked and ready, as I crept out into the daylight.
A huge explosion rocked me in my place as I rounded a corner of stone, and I whipped around, weapon at the ready, to see the smoke and fire in the distance. “What the fuck was that?” I whispered to myself. I slung my pack from my shoulders and squat down to find the pair of binoculars that were contained inside. I put them to my face and scanned the area around the explosion. It was impossible to see through the thick smoke and I had no way of knowing what had happened.
When the reverberations of the explosion cleared, one sound remained.
A plane was overhead.
The outline of the machine became clear as the smoke cleared and I realized with a shudder of horror that it was responsible for bombing the site below. It wasn’t an American plane, and it didn’t have any insignia that would mark it as being from an allied force.
No, that was the enemy.
I followed the descent of the plane, mentally calculating where it was trying to land. I wasn’t as familiar with the area as I would’ve been if I’d spent the past months on a base, and not on the aircraft carrier. As it was, all the information I had was fed to me on an “as needed” basis. But, even with my somewhat limited familiarity, I found it hard to believe that there was an airport anywhere nearby. Which meant, whoever was flying the plane that had just dropped a bomb, was planning on landing in the middle of the desert.