“Sir.” Max was going to love that. Trailing was one of his favorite things to do.

  Ridge bladed his hand toward the building. “The sheriff is beside the door they found open, which he believes was Mrs. Haze’s exit point. He has a plastic bag with the subject’s scent source—a nightgown she wore yesterday.”

  “That’ll work.”

  “I know we’re throwing you into the unknown,” Ridge said, “but that’s why we hire special forces. Roll with it. But when you come against questions, I expect you to radio them to the team. The main thing you’re to remember is that if you spot our subject, in the civilian world, we treat every find as if it were a crime scene, so minimal trace on your part.”

  “Sir.”

  Ridge clapped his hand onto Halo’s shoulder. “Let’s hope someone makes that call and makes it soon.” Ridge looked up at the sky. To Halo, it looked like a fine day. But Ridge pulled his brow together.

  Checking his compass and grid, Ridge and Zeus took off into the woods.

  When Halo looked down, Max’s muscles were taut, his eyes expectant. He was ready. “All right, Maxi, here we go.” Though their window for a successful recovery was narrow, any anxiety for Mrs. Haze’s safety had to be set aside so stress didn’t interfere with their task as they worked the problem. “We’re going to treat this day like any day we’re out there training. Calm and steady, good focus, hey?”

  The only thing was this wasn’t a typical training day. Ridge trusted them with the trailing task, a position of high importance.

  This was Max’s first time putting his skills to the test on a mission with real-world consequences. Halo shifted his attention to the family huddled together, arms holding each other tight, the sounds of broken sobs fracturing the otherwise silent soundscape. A family was desperate for the team’s success—their loved one’s life on the line.

  2

  As Team Alpha stepped off the blacktop into the woods, Halo and Max accepted the scent source from the sheriff who then removed himself from the scene until Max got onto the trail. Halo calmed his breathing and let go of his stress, thinking of his own gramps, confused and endangered. He let go of the pictures of the granddaughter trying to recall her grandmother’s shoe as she frantically looked in the stores trying to get a tread. Other than human eyes and ears and an ability to traverse the mountain, Halo didn’t have much to offer here. It was all on Max’s keen abilities.

  Calm and steady from Halo’s leadership was important to Max’s success.

  Without any equivocation, the reason they were out here was to bring Mrs. Haze home safely.

  A distant second was to give Max a career helping others on the Iniquus search and rescue team.

  As Halo stood at the doorway with Mrs. Haze’s scent in the bag, Max knew what was coming, stomping impatiently, ready to get on the trail.

  Halo had needed to run Max through a series of tricks to calm his K9.

  When they followed Mrs. Haze’s trail, Max and Halo would adulterate the scent cone. They got the one clean shot at this task. Better to wait and get it right.

  When Max’s posture relaxed into focused control, Halo opened the bag and held it out to Max. “Ready to get at it, Maxi? Scent. Scent. Scent.”

  On cue, Max lowered his nose into the bag, chuffing the smells left on the nightgown into his olfactory chambers. A canine nose was so discriminating that a dog could detect viruses, cancers, and even how far along a woman was in her pregnancy. Outlandish studies showed time and again how primitive human scent compared to their K9 friends.

  Lifting out of the bag, Max had the imprint and was ready to go. Panting with excitement, he caught Halo’s gaze, waiting for the command. Two choices could happen here depending on the type of job they were on. “Get it,” was the combat command, the “dangerous criminal” command. “Get it,” told Max that he was to seek out the source of the scent and then bite it hard. Today, though, Halo called out the other command, “Max, seek. Seek. Seek.” Max would go about his business trailing the imprinted scent, and Halo would do his human best to keep up with the prize-winning athlete. When Max found the scent, he’d go back and find Halo and report his findings, leading Halo to the spot.

  Max’s nose went up in the air. He sniffed over the threshold. After running tight circles outside the door, Max locked in on something and lowered his nose to the ground, chuffing happily. Legs splayed wide to keep his nose skimming the pavement, Max trotted forward in a straight line from the door, into the woods, and up the gentle rise of the slope.

  So far, so good, but this terrain was going to present a considerable test, Halo thought as he stuffed the scent source into his pocket and followed Max into the tree line. Squirrels frisking with their playmates and other distractors filled the woods. An unfamiliar environment, the temptation of novel scents, even the feel of the ground underfoot—thick with leaves and slick with wet clay beneath—might be more than a two-year-old’s resolve.

  Would prey drive overcome pack drive, especially when his pack wasn’t in sight? That was the test.

  With a sudden jolt, Halo pitched forward. He was quick enough that he got his elbows wide and his hands on either side of his shoulders as he tried to disperse the energy to protect himself from injury.

  In the last moment, Halo twisted his head away from the ground, his ear hovering just above the dampened leaves. Halo was grateful he didn’t break his nose in a face plant. He wasn’t so sure about his leg, though. Giving himself a moment to exhale the pain, Halo pressed himself back up on his feet.

  Halo had undertaken his share of searches for people—those desperately praying for rescue and those urgently trying to evade detection—while working in the mountain ranges of the Middle East. But that landscape looked a world apart from this.

  Even back home, Halo had been stationed out of Holsworthy, near enough to the Blue Mountains, where he liked to climb the cliffs.

  The Shenandoah was part of the Blue Ridge. Those two mountain range names were about where the similarities ended.

  The devil, as they say, was in the details.

  Here, the terrain confronted the team with a boulder-studded elevation dense with trees. Leaves thickly blanketed the ground, looking like they’d make a soft bed for bivouacking, but could prove problematic when looking for their missing person, especially someone as fragile and endangered as the woman that had gone missing.

  As the team got on the trail with their dogs today, they all knew that time was the enemy. For that reason, Halo had started out keeping a steady pace, following closely behind Max. But, very quickly, Halo’s foot found the first hole hiding under the blanket of leaves. His weight dropped straight down until he was mid-shin, but his forward momentum propelled him, and he found himself stretched out on the dampened ground. The forest litter hid the dangers beneath—roots that caught the toe of his boot, and worse were the holes that swallowed his leg. Each time he went down, he’d felt the torque and tension on his knees and ankle. Surely, there was a strategy for this terrain. He had a lot to learn.

  With an exhale calibrated to reset his system, Halo pulled himself out, checked himself over, and dusted off his borrowed uniform. Made from some lab-created miracle fabric, he still looked immaculate, dry, and mud-free. No one would know how much time he’d spend rolling in the muck.

  Halo tipped back to watch angry black clouds amassing above the trees. The rainy mist on his face and the temperature noticeably dropping reminded him that their operational window was narrow. Once that rain started, the scent trail would be challenging, if not impossible, for Maxi to follow. This was their golden hour, and if he broke his ankle, Halo wouldn’t be of any help to Grammie, and he wouldn’t get the job with Iniquus either.

  A phrase that the American SEALs used came to mind: “Slow is fast, and fast is slow.” It made all the sense in the world to him under these circumstances.

  Halo stepped forward, his foot coming to rest in front of the biggest pile of scat he’d ever seen. He knelt and waved his hand over it—still warm.

  Pulling his sat comms from his pocket, he took a picture, sending it back to Cerberus with the text: Bear?

  Affirmative was the immediate response.

  Tripwire had warned him to keep his eye on Max because the bears were getting their last mouthfuls in. He thought Max would try to hold his own, but honestly, other than the movies, Halo didn’t have a trained strategy for bears. Images from The Revenant flashed through his memory, and Halo would vastly prefer that he didn’t need to face down a bear today.

  His phone pinged: Don’t dance with the bears. Get rid of any food. Make noise so you don’t startle the bear. If it’s charging, get big and loud.

  Big and loud. Halo muttered.

  Deploy bear spray if the bear is downwind. Otherwise …

  Halo was gourmet. Yeah, he remembered.

  Crouching, Halo looked for tracks to at least get a sense of the bear’s direction of travel and saw no disturbances in the leaf litter other than what he had made in his fall.

  Halo looked at the tracking readout on his GPS unit, aligning himself with the red dot that represented Max, sniffing his way through the woods. It had been a fairly straight line, so Halo thought Max was still on task and not chasing squirrels. With an adjustment to his pack, Halo paced forward, singing the kind of made-up song he sang to entertain his nieces and nephews. “Hey, fuzzy bear, I mean you no harm. I’m singing out so you won’t feel alarmed.” Yeah, kids were easily amused. Hopefully, the bear would be, too.

  A few paces out, Halo noticed that Max’s red dot stopped moving. He didn’t know how to interpret that.

  As a matter of Iniquus protocol, Max wore a communications collar with a two-way radio system so Halo could command his dog from a distance, and they would have a means for communicating with a lost person. His collar also held a sat camera that was monitored at Headquarters back in D.C. Max was also a moving point on the mission board in the Cerberus operations room as well as a red dot in the tracking app in Halo’s handheld GPS unit. It was fumbly to need those three pieces of equipment—a sat phone with video feed for Headquarters, a radio to contact the team and his dog, and the GPS tracking unit with its off-grid memory system—better, though, to have to juggle than to go without the information. As with any mountainous wilderness area, cell tower connectivity was a luxury. And the sat phones were only as good as the weather was clear and the tree canopy was thin.

  As he and Max were thrown into today’s mission, they at least had the comms part down pat.

  Max trained from the get-go in responding to disembodied vocal commands from Halo. It had been an essential skill for the Commandos’ dogs to have. When a team sent the K9s in with a camera to give live feed information on the interior of a target location, the handler could direct their dog through the building with “turn left, turn right, hold” commands. This also facilitated recall. A simple “to me” brought Max racing back, twirling to flank Halo, looking up with sharp concentration, waiting for his next command.

  Why had Max stopped? Was he off task?

  Halo stepped carefully over a fallen log. Ryder had warned him not to step on tree trunks because they often rolled, trapping the hiker underneath. Also, a snake called a copperhead liked to hide out in the space beneath the log. “Copperhead?”

  “One of the venomous snakes out here, mate. Not as bad as what you find out woop-woop at home, but it’ll make for a hell of a day.”

  And just as that thought passed through Halo’s mind, his comms broke squelch.

  “Bob for Halo.”

  He pressed the communications tab taped to his chest. “Go for Halo.”

  “Max has a snake in his mouth, and our AI system is cautioning that it is possibly a rattlesnake.”

  Rattlesnake. That was out west in the desert where they had cactuses, wasn’t it? Cowboys and settlers kind of danger? Cactus and horses kind of danger?

  “He’s trapped it in his teeth just below the head from what we can see from his collar camera,” Bob said. “The head can’t reach the skin to sink a bite in that position.”

  Rattlesnake.

  Fear was an ice-blue pulse in Halo’s system.

  “Command Max to freeze,” Bob said.

  Halo tapped his radio to access the comms system on Max’s collar. “Max, freeze. Max, hold.” This was a command they’d been working hard on, though the scenario Halo had considered was landmines. They had built up time that Max could stand there unmoving, both with Halo in the picture and with distant comms commands.

  This present scenario could well have the same devastating effect.

  Death was death.

  “You’re fifty yards away. Straight line,” Bob said. “We’ll talk you forward.”

  “Is he holding?” Halo’s lungs had tightened down, and he switched to combat breathing, count of four in, hold, count of four out.

  “He’s doing as asked. We’ll let you know if anything changes.”

  Which was a shite way to deal. Bob would have to perceive, speak, and then Halo would have to, sight unseen, respond with his commands.

  “Good boy, Maxi. Freeze. Freeze.” Halo kept his tone as light as possible. He wondered if that were the correct command. If Halo gave the chomp command, instead, Max could possibly bite the snake in two.

  Halo raced full tilt over the terrain. If he went into another bloody hole, it was a broken leg. Didn’t matter. He’d drag himself to Max’s side.

  “Hold tight, Maxi. Good boy.” There had to be an antivenom. But surely the team didn’t have it with them, Halo calculated. They were an hour up the mountain. Venom usually worked on weight. Muscle mass might give Halo some advantage if he were bitten, but Malinois were medium-sized dogs. A bite might well prove lethal no matter how fast Halo darted back down the mountain to the Iniquus vans.

  Powering up the hill, he could see Max in front of him.

  Max widened his field of perception to take in Halo. “Max, freeze,” Halo called out, shoving the unit into his pocket to free his hands.

  When Max caught Halo’s gaze, his tail wagged excitedly.

  Now, Halo could hear the rattle of the snake’s tail. It sent another burst of blue-colored adrenaline through his veins.

  That sound, the wriggling movement, Max must think this was a toy.

  Now that he was closer, Halo moved forward crouched and steady, testing the ground in front of himself to make sure he could advance without falling and startling Max into letting go of the snake. The triangular shape of the head chomping at the air with sharp fangs dripping venom just outside of Max’s jaw was clearly life-threatening to Max. How could he get the snake safely from Max’s mouth?

  “Good, boy, Maxi. Freeze.” Halo’s mind was madly calculating. “Freeze, Max.”

  Killing the snake, Halo well knew, would not stop the mouth from biting or reduce the lethality of the venom. He had to separate dog from snake.

  He couldn’t just grab the snake and tell Max to release. That release might not be fast enough, and the snake might turn and get a bite in. It would require split-second timing. But Halo had Max’s reward ball in his pocket. And nothing made Max move faster than getting his mouth on that ball.

  Would it work here?

  Halo slowly drew the ball from his pocket. And Max stomped the ground with excitement. “Max, freeze!”

  Sweat slicked Halo’s skin. Heart racing, he bent and got his hand around the tail. The vibration of the rattle twitched just below his fist. Twisting his body until his arm was fully extended, Halo prayed that Max would do as commanded the instant the command left his mouth, and Max wasn’t going to pull one of his stubborn teenaged tantrums, unwilling to let go of his new-found wriggle toy.

  Halo’s head was turned to focus unblinkingly on Max.

  Here we go.

  Halo tossed the ball into the air, calling, “Max, release.” And as the S hissed between his teeth, Max opened his mouth and jumped for the ball. In the same instant, Halo whipped the snake through the air.

  The snake flew into the distance.

  “Bob. Good job, Halo. I have Dani Williams here. She’s Team Charlie’s assigned vet. She’ll talk you through next steps.”

  Halo looked behind him to make sure the ground was clear, then dropped his ass to the ground next to where Max was aggressively chewing on his ball.

  In that moment, Halo realized his mistake. Sure, he got the instant release he needed to save Max’s life. But he’d used Max’s reward ball—his “high-dollar” reward—to do it. Halo had just rewarded Max for having a snake in his mouth, reinforcing the very thing that Halo did not want his dog to do. That meant Max would look for opportunities to grab up a snake—venomous or not. Halo made a mental note that he needed to undo that training, or Max would be at high risk.

  “Dani for Halo. Careful. We don’t want to get Max’s heart rate up until you’ve checked him over. Call him into your lap and give him scritches and praise while I give you more information.”

  Halo held out his arms. “Here, Maxi.”

  Dani’s voice was professionally steady. “We’ve got this. Rattlesnakes have a low death rate, about twenty percent in dogs. This isn’t like some of the snakes in your part of the world. The biggest danger is if Max was bitten in the tongue or eye. Let’s check those out first. You’ve had plenty of K9 first aid classes, and you know the drill. As you move slowly and thoroughly over the entire surface of Max’s body, you’re going to palpate—I know it’s tough for a dog dad to do. Lots of emotion. I want you to remove his collar and hold it between your chest and chin. As you move around his body, I’m going to use the camera feed to be a second set of eyes.”

  Max was happily chewing his ball, and Halo thought that was for the best. He pulled his headlamp from the ruck, tugged it over his head, and tightened down the elastic strap. He then unclasped Max’s tracking collar, lengthened the strap, and wrapped that around his head. “Can you see?”

  “Affirmative. Okay, he wouldn’t be chewing the ball like that if he’d been bitten on the tongue. As you palpate, you’re looking for anything red or swollen. Move the hair out of the way to see if you can find puncture marks from the fangs. Most likely, you would see blood, sometimes quite a lot of blood. You’re looking for any signs of pain. These working dogs are stoic, so watch for him to stop chewing and look around at you.”