rose into the air over Fool’s Cove. And he tried to keep his head productively blank, the way he always did before a mission. Free of his personal thoughts, open to focus on what cropped up.
But all he could see was her face. Caradine’s face.
He had to grit his teeth to make himself stop. And all told, twenty minutes elapsed between Griffin’s initial call and Isaac’s arrival in Grizzly Harbor, but to Isaac every minute was a lifetime.
Rory set down near the docks, where there was a stretch of even ground when the tide was low. Isaac knew he’d jumped out when his boots hit the ground, but his focus was already up the hill, into the cluster of buildings that made up the village, and the knot of people and smoke where Caradine’s café was supposed to be.
Then he was moving automatically, trying to assess the damage as he went. The fire looked to be contained to the lower part of the building where the café was. Not the living quarters up above, which was something. Then again, he couldn’t see what had happened around back.
He had a flash of her, dark eyebrows raised and that belligerent I dare you look on her face—
But he couldn’t.
He couldn’t go there until he knew, one way or the other.
And he was trained for this. He was trained to gather information first, then react.
No matter the circumstances.
Isaac realized he’d been running when he stopped. He’d reached the semicircle of villagers and Alaska Force members who’d formed a perimeter around the fire. All were engaged in fighting what looked like the last of it, some of them half-dressed or in their pajamas, because this really was the middle of nowhere. If they didn’t put the fire out, it could sweep through the whole town.
That was when he realized he’d showed up in nothing but the T-shirt and cargo pants he’d been wearing while not sleeping back in his cabin. Not exactly his tactical best.
Isaac nodded at the Grizzly Harbor residents he knew, which was most of them. His brain filed away the rest into a mental file marked SUMMER TOURISTS. But when his gaze found Griffin, it stayed on him. Hard.
He didn’t ask the question.
“It’s a garden-variety Molotov cocktail,” Griffin told Isaac immediately when he came over to him, sounding cold and assessing again. Which was precisely how Isaac wanted his favorite sniper. “It went through the front window of the café. And it was a weak one, because all it did was blow out the windows and make a mess of the front room. The structure appears sound, and the living quarters upstairs are undamaged.”
“Undamaged,” Isaac repeated, while everything in him that had stopped still clicked over, an engine starting up again. His heart, maybe.
“But empty.”
“Empty?” There was a thud inside him, like a mortar shell hitting its target, but he refused to acknowledge it. “Signs of a struggle?”
“None.” Isaac recognized the voice before he glanced to the side to find Jonas Crow had materialized from the ether, or the night itself. Because Isaac hadn’t seen him in his initial sweep of the area. As one of the few men still alive who knew exactly what Jonas had done in the service, Isaac shouldn’t have been surprised that the man still managed to make like a ghost. Yet he always was. “If I had to guess, my take would be that there was an attempt to flush her out, but she didn’t go down the back stairs. There are tracks leading away from that side window, but they disappear at the hot springs. One set of tracks, moving fast.”
Isaac tried to take the information in, and everything it meant, but he was stuck on the most critical part. She was alive.
She was alive.
“This is good news, right?” Rory asked, on Isaac’s six.
Former SEAL Blue Hendricks, who had caught the helicopter with Isaac, was closer to the fire perimeter. He shook his head. “Caradine in the woods? I don’t see it. She doesn’t even like the hot springs.”
“She likes them fine,” Isaac retorted without thinking.
It was a measure of how completely he’d lost his cool tonight. Since when did he show his hand? Since when did he fail to think everything through and strategize before speaking? He needed to pull himself together.
Meanwhile, he thanked whatever deities still bothered to check in on a man like him that Templeton Cross—his best friend and brother since they’d survived the six-month hellscape called the Operator Qualification