At the Edge

by Laura Griffin

  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.

  THREE

  * * *

  Night came swiftly in the jungle.

  One moment she’d been looking at scraps of daylight peeking through the treetops, and then everything had taken on a purplish hue. Minutes later, the world around her had gone ink-black, and every phobia in her deepest, darkest subconscious had come to life.

  Emma had gone to her knees and crawled to a tree, where she’d huddled against the massive trunk and stared into the night, wide-eyed and terrified, sure her heart would pound right out of her chest. In the ensuing hours, every bloodcurdling possibil
ity invaded her mind. She could be stung by a deadly insect or bitten by a rat. Or she might fall asleep and a tree boa would wind its way around her neck and slowly squeeze the life out of her.

  After what seemed like an eternity, she’d managed to quell her imagination. Maybe it was exhaustion or the adrenaline of the crash wearing off, but gradually her thoughts and her heart had calmed, and the shrieking panic in her mind had become a soft whimper.

  She’d started playing games in her head, a sort of mental Scrabble in which she’d create intricate crossword puzzles and give herself points. It was probably an odd way to pass the time, but she’d never been in the wilderness at night. She hadn’t grown up camping. By age twelve, it had been just her and her dad, and he spent half the year in Washington, D.C. Emma had been on a few adventure trips with her boarding school, but those had been day trips—hiking or rafting or rock climbing. She’d never even built a campfire.

  Gradually, her mind had tired, and she’d settled into less strenuous pursuits. She’d turned inward, focusing on her gnawing hunger and imagining herself in the produce section of her Seattle grocery store, surrounded by apples and bananas and juicy oranges.

  But then the howler monkeys had started up, piercing the night with their shrill screams, leaping and swinging in the trees above her, and the strangling anxiety returned, stealing her breath until she felt light-headed with fear.

  Nothing in her life had prepared her for being on her own in the rain forest. And she’d realized for the first time that darkness was a tangible thing. It was thick and pungent and inky. And it pulsed with the lifeblood of a million watchful animals, creatures that surely viewed her as prey—she had the insect bites on her arms and legs to prove it. Sometime deep in the night she’d dug her fingers into the loamy soil and covered every inch of skin she could reach with a protective layer of mud.

  When the forest lightened at last, Emma hadn’t slept a moment. She hadn’t even dozed.

  Now the sunlight beamed down through holes in the canopy, and Emma’s limbs felt heavy with fatigue. Even heavier was the burden on her heart.

  She’d failed to get the satellite phone working on the ridge. Now she was hobbling back down the hillside to the wreckage, and she feared she’d discover that Mick hadn’t awakened during the night.

  She also feared she was lost.

  She’d tried to take a straight route up and down the slope, but the trees and plants around her seemed different today. She was headed down, yes, but nothing at all looked familiar. Maybe she’d gotten turned around.

  Stay positive.

  She plowed through the leafy branches, determinedly pulling her shoes out of the sucking mud. She had to keep going, both mentally and physically.

  She focused her attention on Mick. If he showed any sign of consciousness, she’d try to get some water into him, then some food. It was a modest goal, and she felt sure she could accomplish it. She had to. There was no choice. Dr. Delgado had given her some rudimentary medical training, and she’d just been accepted into nursing school, for heaven’s sake. She should be able to feed and hydrate an injured man.

  Emma had a granola bar in her backpack—the one she’d stupidly left on the plane yesterday when she hadn’t been thinking clearly. She’d craved it all through the night, but now she was glad she hadn’t taken it with her, because she surely would have eaten it. If she could get Mick to take just a few bites and wake up a little, if he could just get a few words out and tell her how to operate the radio . . .

  Assuming it wasn’t fried. She’d been thinking about the singed smell from yesterday. Maybe the plane’s electrical system had shorted out after the crash. Even if it had, she still had the satellite phone.

  She adjusted it on her shoulder now, trying to keep it from digging into her skin. She’d pulled the leather belt from her pants and used it as a strap for the phone, which made it easier to carry, but now her pants kept slipping down her hips, and she kept having to tug them up.

  Emma picked her way down the slope, favoring her bad foot and taking care to avoid vines and tree roots. It was slow going. Besides being hungry and tired and having a throbbing ankle, she now felt frustrated, too. She hadn’t found a way to get the satellite phone working, and it was possible the fall from the upper cabinet had broken it.

  Positive thoughts.

  Mick wasn’t dead. He would show her how to call for help.

  He wasn’t dead.

  Wasn’t wasn’t wasn’t.

  But what if he was?

  Tears burned her eyes.

  “Stop it!” she hissed.

  She had to stay positive. If she let negativity seep into her thoughts, she was done for. She’d be swallowed by the jungle, and no one would even find her remains. She hadn’t stayed with the plane, despite her inner warning to herself. And now she was lost and hungry and—

  Something glinted in the sunlight. Was that—?

  She plowed forward, swiping the branches away. A wing!

  The big silver wing that had been shorn off the airplane was lodged at an angle between two trees. It wasn’t the fuselage, but that had to be close. She plunged through the branches, heart racing as she studied the thick trees for any sign of metal.

  She spotted the wreck, and relief washed over her. She moved faster, as fast as she could on her sprained ankle.

  A noise from the trees. Emma halted and listened. She turned to look but didn’t see anything moving in the dense forest. She waited a few moments, but nothing made a sound. A butterfly flitted through a sunbeam and alighted on a purple orchid.

  Emma trudged toward the fuselage. It looked smaller than she remembered, and the door was still open, but now she had to climb up, which would require arm strength.

  Arm strength wasn’t her thing. Neither was exercise, as her too-curvy body clearly showed. She did yoga occasionally, but her upper-body strength was a joke. Her calf muscles were good, but given her ankle injury, jumping up to hoist herself into the plane probably wasn’t a smart idea. She neared the door and reached up to shove the satellite phone into the plane, then grabbed hold of the strut and managed to kick her good leg up. She grabbed the doorframe and used her foot for leverage as she pushed herself up and into the plane.

  She ended up on the littered floor of the cabin, panting and sweating and holding her nose against the stench. She averted her gaze from the grisly scene in back and pushed to her knees.

  “Mick?”

  He wasn’t moving, but he seemed to be in a different position from before.

  “Mick? Sorry I was gone so long, but I’m going to get you some water.” She peered into the cockpit.

  Emma’s heart stuttered. Her mouth dropped open, and out came a primal scream.

  ———

  A thorough recon of the area yielded plenty of intel, none of it good.

  Ryan and his teammates found the plane—no surprise there. They’d had a fairly good idea of the location based on radio transmissions. And Jake had brought a metal detector, which had enabled them to quickly locate the debris field, which in turn led them straight to the aircraft.

  Straight, as in the debris was scattered along a fairly straight line. But the trek had been far from easy—four solid hours of humping gear up and down hills, through gorges and canyons, until the plane came into view. It was pretty intact, too, with the one wing bent but attached and the tail unscathed.

  The aircraft’s interior wasn’t at all what they’d expected. A quick check of it had left them alarmed and then rushing to form a new plan. The logistical details were still coming together as Ryan stared at the wreckage with a thousand grim thoughts whirring through his head.

  Jake emerged from the trees, followed by Lucas Ortiz.

  “Anything?” Jake asked Ryan.

  “No.”

  For the past three hours, they’d been searching for Emma Wrig
ht. She wasn’t in the plane or the surrounding woods. But woman-sized shoeprints in the dirt around the aircraft—in particular, the door—indicated she’d left on her own two feet.

  “Any sign of anyone else?” Lucas asked.

  “No.”

  The bodies of Renee Conner and Juan Delgado were still inside the plane, along with that of Walter McInerny, who was strapped into the cockpit with a bullet hole between his eyes. From the looks of it, he’d been shot with his own gun.

  They had yet to find that gun, though—only an empty holster. Just like they had yet to find the crash’s only possible survivor.

  Jake took out his canteen and swilled water. “What kind of sick fuck would shoot an injured man with his own pistol?”

  “Same sick fuck who’d drag a woman off into the jungle to rape and torture her,” Lucas said.

  Ryan clenched his teeth and looked into the forest as Ethan Dunn stepped from the shadows. With his greasepaint and jungle cammies, he blended right in with the trees.

  “What’s the word?” Ryan asked him. Ethan had been up on the ridge for a radio transmission.

  “Extract is at 0200, with or without survivors. And that comes from the top.”

  “I’m not leaving without her,” Ryan said.

  “A weather system’s in the works.” Ethan wiped his forehead with the back of his arm. “They want us out beforehand so we can regroup, maybe come back with a larger team.”

  Jake sneered. “What kind of shitty-ass plan is that?”

  Not Hewitt’s, Ryan could be sure of that. No way his CO would support a plan to end the mission before they’d accomplished their primary object, which was to locate and rescue the fucking passengers.

  This plan had probably come from the head shed—the central planners, who sat off in some air-conditioned conference room in Washington or Langley, dreaming up battle plans with more regard for politics than for tactical considerations. They had been concerned about an international incident from the get-go, and they’d probably already whipped up some story to feed the media to explain how a plane carrying an American ambassador’s wife had gone missing without any foul play involved whatsoever.