Thomas laughed. “Always and forever,” he said, and picked up his pace.
The prince had left his car exactly where Dave had guessed he would. It was the smartest place to stop on the little back road, to hike up the mountain to the ski lodge. It wasn’t the closest as birds could fly, but it avoided several impassably deep ravines and unscalable cliffs.
It was next to the ski lodge’s perimeter fence, too—a chain link structure they could see from the road, clearly marked with both Do Not Enter and Private Property signs.
“Looks like Prince Ted’s not a total idiot,” Rio said.
His Royal Hiney had even maneuvered his vehicle into a getaway position—heading back down the mountain—as if he’d realized that after finding Tasha they’d need to make a quick escape.
Dave had gotten out of their SUV before Rio’d even fully hit the brakes, and he now reported, “Engine’s not icy cold,” his hand on the little car’s hood.
Rio popped the hatch, giving Dave access to the weapons locker that was right there in the back. “Grab and go,” he told the younger SEAL as he prepared to wrestle the SUV into a similar heading-down-the-mountain parking job. “I’ll be right behind you.”
“I’ve got the good map,” Dave answered as he included ammo and a heavier winter jacket in his grab.
“Don’t kill him,” Rio reminded him, but Dave was already over the fence and gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
It was cold and getting colder.
The afternoon sun was low in the sky and going down fast. In Boston, at this time of year, the sun set shortly after four o’clock. Here in this part of Maine, any extra minutes of daylight’s relative warmth that they gained by being slightly farther west was lost by being significantly farther north.
Tasha sat with Thomas’s pack and bundle in the hide that they’d quickly thrown together—not too far, but far enough, Thomas’s words—from the pod’s backdoor.
Thomas had been right in his guess that the hostiles hadn’t yet discovered the location—or possibly even the existence—of the escape tunnel. But at the same time, he’d been eager to move her quickly out of the immediate area—hence the hide—while he climbed to the top of a ridge for a quick “sneak and peek,” to find out which way was up. Or, north, as it were.
Thomas possessed what Tasha called the map in his head. He always—even back when they were kids—knew exactly where he was at all times. It was a useful skill to bring to his career as a SEAL. So it wasn’t a surprise that he’d learned precisely where the pod was in relation to the destroyed ski lodge. And that he knew where that was in relation to the airfield and the nearby little town at the bottom of these mountain peaks. But their hike through the tunnel had been disorienting. And although the sinking sun certainly helped, the surrounding mountainsides and thick growth of forest turned west into west-ish, which wasn’t good enough for Thomas.
So Tasha sat and tried not to think about anything but their current Plan A while she waited for him to return.
Back in the tunnel, he’d laid out a series of his classic Plan Bs along with a crash course in how to survive in the wilderness. He’d covered everything from navigating from the North Star (find the Big Dipper in the sky first), to building a fire pit (only in the daylight; use dry, brittle wood, and keep it as small and smokeless as possible), to how to catch the attention of a circling helo (build the exact opposite of a tiny pit fire; in fact burn greenery from pine trees to make extra smoke to signal the search team).
And before Thomas had left, he’d given her one last instruction. “If I don’t come back—”
She’d interrupted. “Please don’t say that.”
He’d kissed her, an apology in his eyes, but kept going. “Head downhill from here. One thing we know is that the main entrance to the shelter is higher up the mountainside than where we are right now, and you’ll want to stay far away from that and the hostiles who are guarding it.”
She shook her head no, because she did not want to hear this, but he kept going.
“And I think—I’m not sure—but if we’re where I think we are, there’s a road somewhere back here, further down the hillside. You’ll probably have to climb the perimeter fence. It’s chain link. It shouldn’t be that hard to get a