Chapter Five
Will
Will crouched in the brush, lowering his panoramic night vision goggles over his eyes. The world snapped into a crisp, monochromatic sea of phosphorescent green.
"Moon is down," Leo’s voice murmured in Will’s earpiece, the audio piped in so quietly it was barely a vibration against his jawbone. "Thermal shows she’s in the tent, dead center. She's tossing and turning. Probably the pain from the knee."
"Copy," Will whispered. He checked the seal on the small, olive-drab waterproof pouch in his hand.
He had spent the last hour meticulously curating it from his trauma bag: a pressurized saline flush, iodine swabs, a sheet of butterfly closures, heavy-duty waterproof bandages, and a blister pack of broad-spectrum antibiotics.
"In and out, Hammond," Trent’s deep baritone cut through the chatter, a final, stern reminder. "Do not make me come down there and drag you out."
"Understood. Moving."
Will stepped out from the cover of the spruce.
To the untrained eye, moving through dense woods in total darkness was an invitation to snap an ankle or make enough noise to wake the dead.
But Will had spent a decade operating in hostile, pitch-black environments.
His body knew how to roll from heel to toe, how to read the tension in the underbrush, how to slip through the terrain like water over stone.
He crossed the first two hundred yards in complete silence. But as he crested the slight rise overlooking her clearing, he stopped dead.
"Will?" Leo asked, noting the sudden halt on the GPS tracker.
"Hold comms," Will breathed.
Through the green haze of the NVGs, Will saw a second thermal signature down in the clearing. It wasn't in the tent. It was slinking low to the ground, moving with predatory, fluid grace near the ashes of her fire pit.
A coyote. And a massive one.
It was sniffing aggressively at the ground, tracing the exact path Abby had taken when she limped back from the creek.
It was following the scent of her blood.
Will watched as the animal's nose lifted, turning toward the unlatched plastic cooler sitting just a few feet from the thin nylon wall of Abby's tent.
Will’s jaw locked. If the coyote got into the food, it would make a racket.
Abby would wake up, panic, and in her injured state, she might do something dangerous.
Mental images of a panicked, injured Abby fighting off a wild predator or running blindly off into the forest made his heart thump painfully in his chest.
He didn't draw his sidearm. A gunshot would terrify her and blow his cover immediately. He had to do this silently.
Will unclipped a small canister of concentrated bear deterrent from his vest. He moved down the slope, his boots finding the softest patches of moss. He was a shadow detaching itself from other shadows.
When he was thirty feet away, the coyote’s ears swiveled. It sensed something, but the wind was in Will’s favor.
Will picked up a heavy, fist-sized stone from the edge of the brush. With a smooth, practiced flick of his wrist, he lobbed it hard into the dense tree line about fifty yards to the east, far away from Abby’s tent.
The stone crashed swiftly through the branches.
The coyote jumped, its head snapping toward the sound. In the split second the animal was distracted, Will closed the final gap. He stepped directly between the cooler and the coyote, rising to his full six-foot-two height.
The coyote whipped its head back around and froze, suddenly confronted with a massive, silent predator that hadn't been there a second ago. Will didn't make a sound. He simply stared it down through the glowing lenses of his night vision goggles, slowly raising the canister of deterrent.
The animal’s survival instincts kicked in. It tucked its tail, backed up two paces, and vanished silently into the eastern brush.
"Target moving away," Leo murmured in his ear. "Good flush, Will."
Will exhaled slowly, lowering the canister.
He turned his attention to the camp. He knelt quietly by the cooler, pressing the lid down and sliding the heavy plastic latch securely into place.
He sprayed a quick, silent burst of the deterrent on the ground around the cooler, masking the scent of the food and the faint metallic tang of her blood.
Then, he placed the olive-drab medical pouch gently on top of the cooler.
From inside the tent, less than three feet away, Will heard a soft, pained whimper.
He froze. Through the thin nylon, he could hear her shifting, her breathing hitched and uneven.
She wasn't awake, just trapped in a pain-filled sleep.
The urge to unzip the flap, to check on her, to tell her she didn't have to hurt alone, pulled at his chest with a gravity that genuinely shocked him.
He reached into his vest, pulled out a small, chemical glow stick, and snapped it.
It flared to life with a faint, muted blue light.
He set it gently on top of the pouch. It was just enough illumination so she would see it the moment she unzipped her tent in the morning in case she woke up before the sunrise.
Will turned and slipped back into the tree line, a ghost retreating into the shadows.
He didn't key his radio until he was back at his overwatch position under the ancient spruce, his rifle resting comfortably against his knee.
"Package delivered. Perimeter secured. Overwatch resumed," Will said quietly.
"Copy that," Trent replied. "I hope you know what you're doing, Hammond. If she connects the dots and realizes there's someone sneaking around her camp, she's going to bolt."
"She won't bolt," Will said, his eyes scanning the dark perimeter around her clearing. "She's too stubborn. And she's hurting too much to run."
"Yeah, well, you're the doc," Kyle chimed in, his voice slightly fuzzy with sleep over the comms. "But if you start sneaking her breakfast in bed, I'm calling an intervention."
Will chuckled softly, the sound swallowed by the vastness of the mountains. "Go back to sleep, Kyle."
The radio channel clicked off, leaving Will alone with the silence of the Bitterroots. He reached up and flipped his NVGs up onto his helmet, letting his eyes adjust to the dark.
Down in the valley, the faint, ghostly blue light of the glow stick illuminated the top of the cooler.
Will leaned back against the rough bark of the tree. He knew Trent was right to be cautious. But as he settled in for the long vigil until dawn, Will knew with certainty that he didn't care.
She had walked into their sanctuary looking for a place to heal. Will was going to make sure she survived long enough to do it.