Chapter 886
“Floodlights to ravine three,” K.C. snapped. “Range safety, lock the course. Medical response team to anchor seven. Rope rescue on standby. No one touches the traverse rig until evidence is photographed.”
Miles away, hidden in the darkness near the service road, Melanie Thorne watched the course through a pair of high-powered, image-intensifying binoculars. She saw the string of headlamps along the elevated traverse. And she saw one light vanish beneath the line where no light was supposed to go.
A sick, ecstatic smile spread across her face.
K.C. had checked Caroline’s equipment. Of course he had. That had always been the point. The trap had never been in the harness, the lanyards, or the lamp. It was in the course itself: a shifted route marker, a darkened warning flag, and a maintenance bypass clipped open just long enough to make one exhausted candidate step onto the wrong span.
Jarrod didn’t move from the command station. Every instinct in him screamed to go to her, to put his body between her and the ground, to tear the course apart with his ruined hands. His body betrayed him with the same brutal honesty it had given him for weeks.
He could not climb. He could not rappel. He could not carry her out.
He could command.
“Get me eyes,” he said.
A controller switched the main screen to the ravine camera just as the floodlights detonated over the terrain.
High above the ravine floor, Caroline’s mind had gone cold and quiet. The initial wave of terror was suppressed, pushed down by years of brutal, unforgiving training. Her brain was a computer, processing variables, calculating odds in milliseconds.
She had not fallen cleanly.
Her primary lanyard had caught for one hideous second, slamming her against the side of the support tower hard enough to knock the air from her lungs. Then the compromised bypass line had jerked sideways, twisting her into a violent pendulum over the ravine.
The fall-arrest system had bought her seconds, nothing more.
With numb fingers, she reached for the emergency cutting tool on her harness, then stopped herself. Cutting loose would drop her onto the rocks. Staying attached left her swinging beneath a span that might fail completely.
Her vision was starting to tunnel, the impact, the cold, and the wild swing taking their toll.
Just as a wave of black despair began to wash over her, she saw it.
Above her, a rope-rescue line shot out from the tower under the floodlights. A safety officer clipped in and came down fast, controlled, professional, not a miracle from the sky but a trained responder moving along the emergency line Jarrod had ordered activated.
Someone was coming for her.
The knowledge was a jolt of adrenaline. She stopped fighting the system. It was a waste of precious energy.
She changed her objective. She was no longer a victim trying to survive. She was now a load, trying to be retrieved.