Mountain Hostage. Hope White

      Like today’s mission.

      “It’ll be dark soon,” Leslie said.

      Her words hung in the cold air between them. Although the team was skilled at making camp overnight, the woman who’d fallen and was potentially injured would be ill-prepared for the drop in temperature.

      Romeo started a zigzag pattern, then abruptly stopped. His ears pricked.

      Jack took a deep breath. Suspected what was coming.

      Romeo took off into a full sprint, and Jack followed, frigid air filling his lungs. It was senseless to tell Romeo to slow down. Once the dog caught scent, nothing would stop him. It made him an excellent search-and-rescue dog, but sometimes his enthusiasm made Jack nervous. He feared the hardworking dog might lose his footing and slide off the edge.

      Jack pushed harder to catch up to Romeo. The dog was trained to return to Jack’s side and pull on his toggle if he found something. Back and forth, back and forth, until Romeo united his handler with the missing hiker. Instead of exhibiting his trained indication, Romeo frantically paced at the edge of the trail up ahead. Jack interpreted this as him being in scent, but unable to make physical contact with the subject. Cooper ran up to Romeo and exhibited similar behavior.

      Jack approached the dogs and glanced at what sparked their excitement.

      A person in a royal blue jacket lay on a plateau.

      “Good boy, good.” Jack played a quick game of tug-of-war with Romeo as his reward as he radioed Command. “I think we found her, over.”

      “Status?”

      He peered over the edge, sensing Bea and Leslie come up on either side of him. “Miss?” Jack called down to the prone hiker. “We’re with Mt. Stevens Search and Rescue!”

      Silence.

      “Unresponsive, over,” he said into his radio.

      “Location?”

      Jack opened his tracker app, took a screenshot and texted it to Command.

      “We’ll send a medical team,” the command chief responded.

      “Roger, out.”

      The search-and-rescue K9 team hovered on the trail in stoic silence.

      “You think she’s alive?” Bea asked.

      Leslie glanced up at the mountain. “Depends on how far she fell. If she hit anything...” she hesitated “...critical.”

      More silence.

      “I’m thinking this is a recovery, not a rescue,” Bea said.

      “Miss? Miss, can you hear me?” Jack shouted, not liking the direction of the conversation.

      Romeo barked as if he was also trying to get her attention.

      Jack hated this, hated feeling...out of control of a situation.

      Romeo must have felt the same way, because his barking grew more insistent as if he were saying, Open your eyes already!

      “Romeo, stop,” Jack commanded. The dog quieted and flopped down beside him.

      Jack glanced at the horizon, realizing they had less than ninety minutes before they lost natural light. Rescuing the woman in the dark would present its own set of challenges.

      “Wait, I think she’s moving,” Leslie said.

      He snapped his gaze to the plateau. The victim started to get up.

      Jack whipped out his binoculars. Peered below. He had to try to get a read on her expression even though that wasn’t his particular strength.

      A bruise formed across her right cheek and blood seeped from her lip. Her eyes rounded with fear as if she suddenly realized she was in a vulnerable, dangerous spot.

      “Don’t move!” he called. “I’m with Mt. Stevens Search and Rescue!”

      She acted as if she didn’t hear him, as if she were disoriented beyond rational thought, which meant she could accidentally fall even farther...

      To her death.

      “Medics are on the way!” he tried.

      Ignoring him, she dropped to her knees and glanced over the edge of the plateau. What on earth was she doing? It seemed like she was trying to figure out how to climb down. A decision that was both unrealistic and potentially deadly.

      Then again, she could be dazed from a concussion and not know what she was doing.

      “I’m going down,” Jack said.

      “Wait, shouldn’t you—”

      “He’s right,” Leslie interrupted Bea’s protest. “Who knows what she’ll do? Besides, Jack’s done this before.”

      He had done it before, although not with favorable results.

      Pulling rope off his pack, he anchored it to a nearby tree root jutting out from the mountain. Romeo shot him a look, like, Don’t go without me.

      “Stay,” Jack said, in case the dog got any crazy ideas. He shouldered his pack, gripped the rope with gloved hands and let himself drift so he’d land gently on the plateau, about a hundred feet down.

      He wouldn’t be too late this time, wouldn’t let any harm come to the woman in the blue ski jacket.

      A few moments later he landed on the small ledge. Her back was to him and she acted as if she hadn’t heard his landing. “Miss?”

      Startled, she turned quickly, her eyes wide with fear. “Don’t touch me!” She stepped back, precariously close to the edge.

      He instinctively reached out to grab her arm.

      “No, don’t—” She stumbled backward over the edge of the cliff.

       TWO

      Jack dove and caught the woman’s arm. It wasn’t too hard, considering she waved both of them like a helicopter trying to take off, or in her case, a woman trying to stop the momentum that would catapult her down a mountainside.

      He landed on his chest, and air rushed from his lungs, but he didn’t let go. He grabbed her arm with his other hand, as well. Considering his size versus the petite victim’s, he calculated a more than 50 percent chance of hoisting her safely up.

      “Don’t! Don’t hurt me!” she cried, thrashing about.

      If she kept squirming, his chances dropped way below 50 percent. “Stop moving or I won’t be able to pull you up.”

      “Why, so you can kill me?”

      Kill her? At this point he had to assume she’d hit her head and was suffering from delirium. At the very least she was irrational, which meant she was unpredictable and potentially dangerous. Especially if she kept shifting and broke free of Jack’s grip, or even pulled him over the edge with her.

      Jack scanned his brain for information on overly excited people and how to manage them. Something he’d read in a psychology book surfaced: An irrational person’s meaning of a situation is different than ours.

      For some reason the woman in the blue jacket thought Jack wanted to harm her. She was stuck in that reality and he needed to yank her out of it. He decided to go completely random.

      “My dog needs me!” he shouted.

      She stopped squirming and looked up. Her wide brown eyes sparkled with unshed tears of fear. “What?” she said.

      “My dog needs me.”

      “Your dog?”

      “If you fall, chances are I’ll go with