Page 77 of Rescue Me (Tempting SEALs 6.10)

“Unless you’ve got a rocket-propelled grenade launcher tucked under your shirt, yeah. You can do it. And yes, you can do it with a rock. Look. All you have to do is nick the blade, okay? Just nick it. It could crash even if you don’t make a direct hit because the impact will still throw it off balance. That’ll spook the pilot. Maybe he’ll do something stupid—like crash all by himself.”

Sweet Lord.

“Be safe,” he said suddenly. Kissed her hard and took off.

So now here she was. Hugging the sun-warmed stone from toe to chin. Seth had scrambled back down the side of the cliff five minutes ago, leaving her here to contemplate the magnitude of what she had to do.

In silence she’d watched him as he’d sprinted across the sandbar, stopped abruptly when something caught his eye. After some digging and fishing around, he dragged a long rope out of the sand.

He’d turned to give her a grinning thumb’s up before wading to the other bank then scaling the opposite cliff.

At first she thought he was going to find a hiding place and wait, like her, but instead, he climbed over to a huge boulder, fussed around with some rocks and the rope, and then threw the loose end down the cliff face.

Before he was finished, he’d planted the remainder of the rope along the ground, then hidden his handiwork with sand and dried grass.

Laying a trap, she realized. Like she’d seen her brother lay for a poor unsuspecting rabbit once. Jake and Benny may be unsuspecting. But they weren’t cute, fuzzy, harmless little forest creatures either.

If she remembered right, her brother never had gotten that trap to work on a bunny. What were the odds, she wondered, that Seth’s trap was going to work on two very ugly, very mean bottom-feeders?

About the same as her odds of taking down a chopper.

With a rock.

And with hope

… and with luck

… and a whole lot of maybe.

And to think … once her world had been so concrete.

SETH KNEW HE WAS running out of time, and just like a cat that had escaped half a dozen close calls, he was running out of lives. He hadn’t let on to Elena, but his head had started throbbing again. Double vision came and went like the sun that ducked under, then out from behind a scattering of puffy white clouds dotting a sky so brilliantly blue it hurt his eyes.

He couldn’t deal with any of that now. His gut told him the chopper would be setting in to roost soon, and that Jake and Benny wouldn’t be far behind.

He had to be ready for them when they came. He had to get the drop on them or he didn’t have a chance in hell of pulling this off.

And he had nothing but his experience to make it happen. Hands on his hips, he scanned the riverbank for something, anything that might help …

When his gaze snagged on something half-buried in the silt of the riverbed, he thought he might actually be hallucinating.

But he trotted toward it, waded knee deep into the water and reached down. And damn near collapsed with gratitude for someone else’s carelessness.

It was a rope. Probably lost by a kayaking party or a rafting crew, and it was the lifeline he needed.

“Sweet mother of God,” he muttered when he’d hauled in the full one hundred fifty-plus feet of it. He was in business.

He tugged his Leatherman out of his boot, flipped out the blade and scanned the rock walls surrounding them for a likely deadfall trap. Thought back to a time when he was ten and he and his dad were camping and he was determined to catch something wild for dinner.

He heard his dad’s voice in his head.

“Son, this is how it works. Imagine a brick, a six-inch long stick and a shoelace. Tie one end of the shoelace to one end of the stick. Point it up with the shoelace-end of the stick on the ground. Prop the brick up on the other end of the stick. When you yank the shoelace, the brick falls, trapping whatever is under it.

“Now improvise. No brick. No shoelace. But there are lots of sticks. Why don’t you see what you can come up with?”

He’d come up with a rope from the tent and a cage he’d constructed out of flexible willow twigs woven together with bark. Then he’d propped that sorry-looking sucker up, laid the rope on the forest floor, covered it with leaves and pine needles and hidden in the bushes and waited for his prey.

In his mind, he’d been Daniel fricking Boone. One of the last Mohicans. A trailblazing mountain man. And he’d waited. And waited. Only to fall asleep and wake up snug in his sleeping bag where his father had carried him into the tent several hours later.

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