Her gaze flew to his and then to the others, who were nodding. “He’s your teammate?” Now she could see it. Same bulky, muscled man with enough confidence to try to stand on a broken ankle not once but several times.
“He is, and he’s grateful for your help as well.”
“How is he doing?”
“Ticked off to be laid up for six to eight weeks. But we’ve received permission to utilize a cabin set aside for park rangers.”
She nodded. “I know of it.” Actually, she’d holed up there the previous winter after a freak storm caught her by surprise. Thank God she’d managed to reach the cabin and hunker there for several days until the roads opened again.
“Special Operative Lipton will be staying there while we search the park. He’ll be investigating behind the scenes and providing us with technical assistance.”
“So what do you need from me?” She was eager to get going. The mere idea of more explosives out there, possibly ready to detonate and injure more park visitors, had her bouncing on her toes.
“We need you to take us to the sites where hikers were injured by falling limbs in the past year.”
She froze. “You believe those incidents could be from explosives? The injuries were recorded as accidents.”
“It’s possible, but we can’t rule out anything yet.”
“Tree limbs snap under high winds and heavy snow,” she told him. But something else had happened to the man with the broken ankle. She had to admit in her line of work, she wasn’t searching for hidden dangers such as explosives.
“We’d prefer to make that determination ourselves. We’ll follow your lead.”
“Some of the places can only be reached by trails. We’ll need ATVs.”
“We have ours at the ready.” He waved toward a truck with a long trailer.
Impressed by their preparedness, she nodded. “I’m ready when you are, Captain.”
Watching the men unload the ATVs, she realized she was pretty far out of her element with these alpha men, and a bit intimidated too. She was more of a backpack through the wilderness and live out of a van type. Her colleagues had a passion for the outdoors equal to hers, and often they got together and took road trips to other state parks throughout Alaska.
As they jumped into side-by-side recreational vehicles and onto four-wheelers, all bulked-out muscle and official business, she inwardly groaned. The captain waved to her to ride with him. Jenna drew in a deep breath and hurried to join him.
They returned to the place where the treetop fell earlier that day. While the guys tracked all over the area, searching ground, treetops and everything in between, she explained what she’d seen and heard to Captain Sullivan.
“I heard a crack and hurried to find out what happened.”
“How far away were you?”
“I was hiking what we rangers call the B trail. You see, there aren’t any marked trails in the park, but we make up our own to call out locations easier. That trail follows the road we use for accessing other parts of the park, but a lot of hikers take this trail, and we monitor it regularly.”
“What do you check it for?”
She turned her attention from the wooded area to the big, mean-looking man who wore the most serious expression she’d ever seen—no, check that. The most serious expression she’d ever seen had been on Lieutenant Lipton’s face after he realized he couldn’t bear weight on that ankle.
“Hikers get lost easily. Or they get heatstroke and need hydration. Occasionally they come across a bear with cubs…” Those times didn’t always end well, but she didn’t convey this to Captain Sullivan.
“You heard the crack and came across Lipton. Where was he lying?”
She moved forward toward the fallen branches of a treetop that should have, in retrospect, killed the man. He’d obviously twisted and flattened himself to the ground at the moment he heard the branches cracking, which saved his life. After explaining all this to the team, Sullivan gestured for the guys to roll out again.
She gave directions to the site of the last injured hiker. But on the way, the guys stopped their ATVs.
“Stay here,” Sullivan ordered in a low tone.
Goosebumps broke out on her forearms underneath her forest green thermal top she wore as a base layer before she put on her ranger uniform. She remained seated, watching as the guys carefully scouted a plot of heavily wooded land spanning an acre or so.
She saw one point upward, and her heart stalled out.
What she saw clinging to the branches of yet another big old tree made her blood ice over.
At that moment, Sullivan returned, his jaw clenched into a more grim expression than she’d seen from him so far.
“Is it an explosive?” She managed to keep her voice from wobbling. Give her a territorial grizzly any day. But this? Not in her wheelhouse, within her training or her paygrade.
Sullivan nodded.
“What are we going to do?” She searched around frantically, wondering who held the trigger.
“Disarm it. Come with me where I know you’re safe.”
When she climbed out of the side-by-side, she found her legs weren’t so eager to follow the special operative toward a dangerous bomb wired to the treetop. Somehow, she forced her legs to support her.
One of the men only spared her a glance as Sullivan told her to sit by him. In seconds, the man had a phone on speaker. “Lip, this is Broshears.”
“What the hell’s happening? I’m going crazy just sitting here.”
Jenna drew a quick intake of air at the growly tone of Special Operative Lipton’s voice projecting through the speakers.
“We got something you gotta see.” Broshears held up his phone, which zoomed in far closer than any normal civilian cell phone could. She stared at the screen, heart thundering at the up-close-and-personal view of wires and a metal canister rigged to the side of the tree trunk.
“Is that—” she burst out, but stopped when Broshears leveled his stare on her. She snapped her mouth shut and listened to the exchange.
A low whistle projected through the device from Lipton. “Exactly like the one that took me out of commission.”
“We need to disarm it. Besides you, Hep’s our bomb expert.”
“I can direct you over the phone. I just need you to get into position for me to get a good look.”
Jenna felt in the way and so far removed from this incident taking place on her stomping ground. The biggest threat she encountered besides wildlife, was the occasional belligerent hiker or a fisherman being fined. Nothing at all like this.
Broshears walked left and right and in a circle, shooting video of the explosive from the ground.
“Hell.” Lipton’s curse snapped her back to attention.
“Fuck. Yeah, I see it too.” With a flick of his fingers, Broshears motioned to two of the men. They rushed over to him, along with Sullivan. The four team members put their heads together over the screen and replayed a part of the video several times.
She couldn’t see over their shoulders, being much shorter than they were, but she managed to peek through a crack between their thick, bulging biceps. When they drew apart, Lipton’s voice came out loud and clear and with all the confidence in the world.
“Here’s what you’re gonna do.”