The group broke up, people finding their search partners and heading out of the lodge. Everyone had received their assignment, and most seemed to understand the drill. Mac and Kimberly were probably the biggest rookies of the bunch and Mac had done his fair share of search-and-rescue work by now. Kimberly, he could tell, was more uncomfortable. She had the gear, she had the fitness. But by her own admission, she’d never spent much time in the woods.

If what Kathy Levine had said was correct, this was going to be quite an adventure.

“What do you think she meant by the hornets?” Kimberly said now as they trudged out of the wonderfully air-conditioned lodge into the searing heat. “If the hornets build their nests in the ground and we’re walking on the ground, how are we supposed to avoid them?”

“Look where you step,” Mac said. He stopped, held up the map they’d been given, and worked on orienting it to their surroundings. They were officially Search Team D, assigned to search the three square miles of, logically enough, Search Area D.

“But if I’m looking at the ground, how am I supposed to look for a lost woman or broken branches or whatever?”

“It’s just like driving. You look ahead ten feet to know what’s coming, then gaze around all you want, then scope out the next ten feet. Look, glance, look, glance, look, glance. Okay, according to the map, we enter the trailhead there.”

“I thought we weren’t on a trail. Levine said we were in the ‘rough country’-whatever the hell that means.”

“We are,” Mac said patiently. “But the first quarter of a mile is on a trail. Then we veer off into the wild underbelly of the beast.”

“How will we know which way to go?”

“We chart and map usin’ compass points. It’ll be slow, but thorough.”

Kimberly barely nodded. She was gazing nervously at the dark forest before them, carpeted in nine shades of green. Mac saw beauty. Kimberly, however, obviously saw something worse.

“Tell me again how often you’ve done this,” she whispered.

“I assisted with two of the search operations in Georgia.”

“You said people got hurt.”

“Yep.”

“You said he sets up scenarios like this, just to torture us.”

“Yep.”

“He’s a real son of a bitch, isn’t he?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Kimberly nodded. She squared her shoulders, her chin coming up in that set he already knew so well. “All right,” she said stiffly. “We’re going to find this girl, we’re going to save the day, and then we’re going to walk out of this park so we can nail the bastard. Deal?”

“You are a woman after my own heart,” Mac said soberly.

They pushed ahead into the thick, dark woods.

Footing was easy on the dirt trail. Steep, but manageable, with rocky ledges and worn tree roots forming a natural cascade of stairs. Shady, with the dense canopy of trees blocking out the sun. The heat and humidity, however, were harder to escape. Mac was already short of breath, his lungs laboring as they headed down the path. Within minutes, his face was drenched in sweat, and he could feel moisture beading uncomfortably between his shoulder blades, where his backpack pressed against his shirt. The sun was bad, but the humidity was their true enemy. It turned the high mountain woods from a shady reprieve to a steaming jungle where each footstep required hard physical effort and four hours of intense hiking would be about three hours too much.

Both Mac and Kimberly had changed clothes for the operation. Kimberly now wore khaki shorts and a short-sleeved cotton T-shirt, the casual outfit of an amateur day hiker. More experienced, Mac had donned nylon shorts and a quick-drying nylon top. As he began to sweat, the synthetic material wicked the moisture away from his body, allowing him a small degree of comfort. Kimberly’s cotton T-shirt, on the other hand, was already plastered against her body. Soon, the shirt, as well as her shorts, would start to chafe her skin painfully. He wondered if she would complain, but already figured she wouldn’t.

“Do you think she’s still alive?” Kimberly asked tersely. Her breath also came out in short pants, but she was matching stride with stride. When called upon to perform, the lady didn’t disappoint.

“I read a study once of search-and-rescue operations,” Mac replied. “Of the fatalities, seventy-five percent died in the first forty-eight hours. Assuming this girl was abandoned yesterday, that gives us another twenty-four hours to find her.”

“What,” pant, pant, “generally kills” pant, pant, “lost people?”

“Hypothermia. Or on a day like this, heatstroke. Basically, it’s exposure that does a person in. Here’s a fact for you: Did you know that children under the age of six have the highest survival rate when lost in the woods?”

Kimberly shook her head.

“Kids are better at listening to their instincts,” Mac explained. “When they’re tired, they sleep. When they’re frightened, they seek shelter. Adults, on the other hand, are always convinced they can regain control. So rather than get out of the rain or the cold or the sun, they keep walking, determined that safety is just around the corner. It’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Your odds are much better if you remain calm and stay in one place. After all, the average person can last up to five days with no water and up to a month without food. Wear yourself out walking, however, and you’ll succumb to exposure, fall off a cliff, stumble into a bear’s den, etc., etc. Next thing you know, the lost hiker’s dead in forty-eight hours, when any old schmuck should be able to last a week.”

Mac stopped abruptly. He looked at the map again, then his compass. “Hang on. Yep. We head off here.”

Kimberly came to a halt beside him and he could feel her uneasiness immediately increase tenfold. There was no clearly marked trail in front of them. Instead, the earth opened up, then plummeted down, a tumbling mass of boulders, bushes, and grass. Fallen trees lay directly in their way, overgrown with shaggy moss and brilliant ferns. Jagged branches stuck out dangerously low, while some kind of thick green vine covered half the trees in sight.

The woods were dense, dark. Kathy Levine was right: they held secrets that were both beautiful and deadly.

“If we get separated,” Mac said quietly, “just stay in one place and blow your whistle. I’ll find you.”

All the search-and-rescue operatives had been given shrill plastic whistles. One blow was to communicate between partners. Two blows meant a team had found the girl. Three shrills was the international call for distress.

Kimberly’s gaze had gone to the ground. Mac could practically see her eyes scouring each rock and thicket for signs of rattlesnakes or hornets. Her hand now rested on the top of her left thigh. Where she had the knife strapped, he guessed, and immediately felt his gut tighten with a shot of good, old-fashioned male lust. He did not know why an armed woman should be so arousing, but man oh man, this one was.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said.

Kimberly finally looked at him. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” she said. Then she stepped off the path into the wild underbrush.

Footing quickly grew rough. Twice Kimberly slipped and tumbled halfway down a steep slope. Long, thick grass offered little traction, even for her hiking boots, and rocks and tree roots stuck up in the damnedest places. If she looked down for obstacles, then a stray tree limb would catch her up high. If she looked up high, she risked taking a fallen log in the shin. If she tried looking everywhere at once, she fell, a lot, regularly, and with generally painful, bloody results.

Within two hours, her legs wore a crisscross of scratches to match the ones still healing on her face. She avoided hornets, but blundered into a patch of poison ivy. She stopped running into dead logs, but twice twisted her ankles on slippery rocks.