Adam swore softly.

Rob said, “The good news is we know how to get his attention if we want it.” He stepped over the tripwire.

Adam followed, still looking chagrined. He drew his Glock and said curtly, “You take left. I’ll cover the right.”

Rob said, “Allow me.” He delivered a swift, hard kick to the door. The door, which turned out to be unlocked, burst open in bits of broken frame, and sagged on its hinges.

Adam dove past him, going to the right and sweeping the room with text book efficiency. Rob went left, following suit. It was a long time since he’d done anything like this—well, he’d never done anything quite like this—and his heart was thumping, his brain buzzing with adrenaline.

Adam had already moved to the next room. “Clear,” he said.

Up in his sniper’s nest, Gibbs began firing again. The good news was, he was still shooting down the mountainside, so it was unlikely he’d spotted them. The bad news was, he still had plenty of ammunition.

“He’s got a homemade grenade launcher in his bedroom,” Adam called.

“I guess it’s true about the size of a man’s gun,” Rob called back.

“No grenades.”

“That’s usually the way of it.”

The kitchen he stood in was so ordinary, it was almost disappointing. A pot of beans sat burning on the stove. Clean dishes dried in a rack on the wooden counter. It could have been any holiday rental, barring the target practice sheet of Osama Bin Laden pinned to the refrigerator. Now there was a collector’s item.

Gibbs stopped firing again.

“Haskell, you need to see this.”

Rob left the kitchen and followed Adam’s voice to what appeared to be a large pantry or stock room. Near the corner of the room was an open trap door.

Adam peered down into the room or rooms below. “It looks like he’s building a bomb shelter.”

Rob joined him. “Or a dungeon.”

They looked at each other.

Rob squatted down. “Tiffany?” he called.

There was no response. A cold, earthy draft seemed to rise through the opening.

“I’ll check it out.”

He half expected Adam to object. Adam nodded curtly. “Watch yourself.”

Rob climbed down the metal ladder and found himself in what appeared to be a very old cellar. He switched on his flashlight. The bright beam highlighted a kerosene lantern hanging on the wall and floor to ceiling shelves stocked with still more water jugs and canned goods. There was nothing particularly sinister, unless a lifetime supply of SpaghettiOs held some dark significance.

“She’s not here,” he called.

Adam replied, but Rob missed it. Something had caught his eye. A shovel leaned against one of the shelves. Rob stepped forward to investigate and realized that he had mistaken the gray sheen of a trash bag for the stone wall in the gap formed between the sides of two shelves.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I think there might be a doorway here…” He yanked the trash bag aside and sure enough there was an opening in the wall, though doorway would be an exaggeration.

“What the hell…”  He looked upward. “I think he’s digging a tunnel.” Through the dark opening he called again, “Tiffany?”

He heard a faint, indefinable noise that might have been a response—or the winter wind finding its way through the creaking timbers holding up the roof.

Rob held the flashlight high. His own shadow loomed against the uneven surface of rock and earth. “I’m going to follow this tunnel.”

Adam didn’t respond. Or maybe Rob missed his reply. His attention was on the black hole looming before him. He proceeded with caution. Good thing he wasn’t claustrophobic… At least he hadn’t thought he was claustrophobic. Maybe he would be by the time he crawled out from between damp walls of earth and stone that formed a passageway so narrow he had to turn sideways to get through parts of it.

Whose idea had this been again?

The light from the cabin faded. He kept moving.

A couple of pebbles dropped from the low ceiling and hit the ground in front of him.

Not the most stable of passageways. Whatever Gibbs was doing down here, it wasn’t meeting building code, that was for sure.

“Tiffany?”

He stopped. Without warning, he had reached the end of the tunnel. He stared in disbelief at a solid wall of rock and roots and dirt.

She was not here.

For a few minutes he had been convinced they were going to find her. He had been wrong. She wasn’t here—there was no indication she had ever been here. In fact, there was no reason to think she’d ever made it up the mountain.

So why the fuck was Sandy Gibbs sitting in his tower shooting at a search party?

He realized he couldn’t hear if Gibbs was still shooting or not. In fact, he couldn’t even hear Adam.

Rob turned around in the narrow tunnel and started back the way he’d come. He had traveled several hundred yards, but he could still see the light at the end of the tunnel pooling in the cellar, illuminating all those cans of chili and corn and baked beans.

“She’s not here,” he called. “The tunnel is only about 500 yards long. It’s a dead end.”

Again no reply from Adam.

Shit. Had Adam gone dark for a reason?

Rob had gotten so carried away by the idea that Tiffany might be a prisoner in this hole in the ground, that she might be hurt, injured, dying… He’d forgotten that Gibbs was still a real and present danger.

He pulled his phone out and silently texted, Clear?

No go. The blue bar halted halfway across the screen. Message not delivered.

Given that Rob was standing in a hole in the ground, surrounded by mountains where reception was unreliable at the best of times, that really didn’t mean much.

He reached the cellar. No sign of Adam. He listened.

Silence. That was probably a good sign. One thing for sure: taking Adam out would not be a silent process.

Rob stepped onto the ladder. One hand on the railing, one foot on the first rung, he glanced up and froze as he gazed into the barrel of an M4.

The black hole of the sniper’s carbine barrel was no emptier than the eyes watching him over the gun sight.

“It’s a dead end for you, that’s for sure,” Sandy Gibbs said.

Rob unglued his tongue and said, “That would be one hell of a mistake.”

“Why’s tha—”

Adam silently materialized behind Gibbs, placing his Glock against Gibbs’s temple. “Because I’ll blow your fucking head off.” His voice was flat and there was no question he meant every word.

Gibbs’s shock was matched by Rob’s relief. For one hellish instant he’d thought that Gibbs had somehow managed to take out Adam, despite the fact that he’d heard no shot.

“Lower your weapon,” Adam said. Gibbs complied. “Hands on your head and lace your fingers together.”

Gibbs let loose a stream of obscenities, the gist of which seemed to be the Constitution granted a man the right to protect his home and property by whatever means necessary—

“Don’t worry. You’ll have your day in court, jackass.” Adam locked a hand in his collar and dragged him back from the cellar opening.

By the time Rob scrambled the rest of the way up the ladder, Gibbs was face down on his stock room floor, hands locked behind his head, still protesting his right to bear arms.

“Since when is the national forest your private property?” Rob roughly cuffed Gibbs. “You better hope to hell nobody got hurt out there.” He resisted the temptation to bang Gibbs’s head against the floor a few times. For a couple of seconds he had been about as scared as he could remember, and it wasn’t a feeling he liked.

Sandy continued to curse everyone from Frankie to the president, his voice growing hoarser and hoarser.

“Anything?” Adam asked Rob, ignoring the ranting and frothing going on at their feet.

Rob shook his head. “No. There’s no sign she was ever down there.”

“Now we know,” Adam said, which was certainly a lot more pleasant than I told you so.