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where her head had just been.
    Blubbering, she rolled and scrambled back up, then ran for her life as Lee and Brisbane bolted across the clearing and plunged into the forest after her. The alarms cut out abruptly. She heard the men’s curses and their heavy, crashing footsteps. They were close. Too close!
    She didn’t dare loop around to the vehicles at thefront of the cabin; she couldn’t trust that the keys would be in plain sight or that her captors hadn’t created some sort of roadblock farther down the lane. So she ran the other way, deeper into the forest, limping on her badly abraded feet, but unable to slow down for her injuries. Her breath sobbed in her lungs, burning with each inhalation, and wetness streamed down her face, a mix of tears, sweat and panic.
    “There!” Brisbane shouted from her right. “Over there! For crap’s sake, get her!”
    Brush crashed, the noises closer now and gaining on her. Mariah kept going, but her body was weak; her legs had gone to jelly and her feet and calves screamed in pain. She stumbled, dragged herself up and stumbled again. This time she went down and hit the ground hard. For a second, she lay there, stunned.
    Before she could recover, rough hands grabbed her.
    Panic assailed her and she started to struggle, inhaled to scream, but someone clapped a hand across her mouth and hissed, “Quiet!”
    Then the world lurched and he was dragging her, lifting her and wrestling her into what looked like a solid wall of thorny brush from a distance, but up close proved to be scrub covering a deep depression, where a tree had fallen and the root ball had popped up, forming an earthen cave of sorts.
    Excitement speared through Mariah alongside confusion. She looked back and got an impression of a square-jawed soldier wearing a thick woolen cap, heavy, insulated camouflage clothing and no insignia. He wasn’t Lee or Brisbane. He was…rescuing her?
    He shoved her into the hiding spot and crowded in behind her.
    “Down,” he whispered tersely, pressing her into the cold, moist earth and following her, rolling partway on top of her so she was beneath him and they were pressed back-to-front, with his heavy weight all but squeezing the breath from her lungs.
    The fallen tree had rotted over time, providing nourishment for the profusion of vines and scrub plants that had sprung from it, forming an almost impenetrable thicket. But would it be enough to conceal them fully?
    Her rescuer’s arms tightened around her, and he breathed in her ear, “Be very still. They’ll see us if you move.”
    Coming from nearby, she heard the sound of footsteps in the undergrowth, and a man’s muttered curse. Freezing, Mariah pressed herself flat beneath the soldier, and held her breath, praying they wouldn’t be discovered.
    The noises stopped ten, maybe fifteen feet away. After a moment, Lee’s voice called, “Are you sure you saw her? There’s nothing here.”
    “She was there a second ago. Keep looking.” Brisbane’s answer came from the other side of the woods, back toward the cabin. After a moment, Lee moved off.
    Mariah counted her heartbeats, trying to stay calm as she exhaled slowly, then risked inhaling a breath. Another. The sounds of the search diminished slightly, suggesting that the men had moved to the other side of the cabin.
    Hoping that Lee and Brisbane were walking intoone hell of an ambush, she rolled her eyes back, trying to get a look at her rescuer as she mouthed, “Where are the others hiding?”
    He must be part of a coordinated attack, right? Somehow, someone had learned that she was in trouble and had sent help.
    Most likely, the FBI agents—particularly the cold, gray-eyed bastard who’d kept questioning her father even after he’d started complaining of chest pains—had been keeping watch on the cabin. They’d probably identified Lee days ago and were just now moving in, knowing al-Jihad was on his way. The thought that they’d known she was in there and