Not yet, but I want authorization to call an early consolidation if I see conditions deteriorating faster than current projection. Rachel looked at him. You have it. She left. Rebecca picked up her radio and made a quiet call to the relay personnel, giving them a weather update and telling them to report immediately if they lost contact with any team.
10:47 in the morning. The second scenario was underway, a wilderness search and rescue simulation involving a mock missing person event and a terrain navigation component. Four teams were deployed across the eastern quadrant of the site. Two teams were working the canyon approach. One team, including a volunteer paramedic named Maya Vance Derek's younger sister, 27 years old there, with a first responder group from Los Angeles, was assigned the Southern Ridge route.
Rebecca knew Maya was on site. Derek had mentioned it the previous week with the kind of careful casualness that meant he was monitoring it and didn't want to appear to be monitoring it. Rebecca had noted it the way she noted everything. She had not made it a priority because Maya's group had an experienced team lead and the southern ridge route was one of the simpler terrain assignments. She would remember that assessment later.
She would remember it with the specific clarity of a mistake made in good faith that caused something real. 11:23 in the morning, the weather changed, not gradually. The system that had been forecast to arrive at 4:00 had encountered warmer air coming off the inland valleys and accelerated dramatically. The leading edge hit the ridge line at 11:23 with the abruptness of a door slamming wind. first, then cloud cover dropping, then temperature falling 8Β° in 12 minutes. Rebecca was on the radio before the temperature gauge finished its drop.
All teams, this is operations. Weather is accelerating significantly ahead of forecast. Current conditions are degrading. All teams confirm position and status. The responses came in, most of them, not all of them.
Team seven deployed in the northern sector reported in 30 seconds late because their relay personnel had needed to reposition when the wind hit. Team 4 working the canyon approach reported static on the channel before their message came through. Team 9 Maya's group on the southern ridge did not respond. Rebecca waited 15 seconds. Called again.
Waited nothing. She picked up the direct channel to the southern ridge relay position. Southern relay. This is operation. Do you have contact with team 9?
A pause. Then operations. Southern relay. Negative contact with team 9. Last known position was the lower marker junction.
That was a pause. 18 minutes ago. Rebecca looked at the topographic map. The lower marker junction on the southern ridge route was exactly where four of the relocated evacuation markers had been before he corrected them. She had confirmed the correction herself.
She had walked that route personally and verified the new marker placement with her own eyes, but the markers had been corrected based on the original documentation, and the original documentation had last been verified 18 months ago. Operations, do you want us to move toward Team 9's last known? the relay operator asked. Negative, Rebecca said. Hold position. Maintain your relay function.
She pulled the topographic map closer and looked at the canyon section south of the lower marker junction at the geological survey notation she had seen in the site documentation and flagged as a concern in her audit at the section of terrain marked with a stability advisory that had been classified as low risk based on dry season assessment. It was not the dry season. Two weeks of late fall rain had soaked the eastern slope. She had noted it. She had assessed it as manageable.
She had been wrong about what manageable meant when a fast-moving weather system added wind load to already saturated terrain. She picked up the radio. All teams, all teams, this is operations. We are transitioning from exercise to real-world emergency response. I repeat, this is not a simulation.
All teams consolidate to primary assembly point via safest available route. Do not use canyon approaches. Southern ridge teams confirm position immediately. The radio traffic changed immediately. The controlled professional chatter of a simulation gave way to the different sharper energy of people recalibrating from exercise to actual emergency.
11:31 in the morning. Derek came through the operations room door 40 seconds after the announcement. He had been running from the northern assembly point and his face said he already knew. Maya's team is not responding. He said correct.
Where are they? Last confirmed position puts them south of the lower junction. Somewhere in the approach to the secondary canyon section. Rebecca was already pulling gear from the storage cabinet radio first aid pack. Emergency signaling kit.
I'm going out. I'm coming. Derek, she's my sister. His voice was completely flat. The performance, the ego, the constructed confidence, all of it gone.
What remained was just a man and the specific terror of someone he loved being somewhere unknown in deteriorating conditions. I'm coming. Rebecca looked at her for exactly 2 seconds. Then keep up, he said. They went out the door at 11:33.
The wind hit them immediately. Not the San Diego coastal wind that Derek knew from mornings on the beach, but mountain wind in November with rain behind it. The kind that leans into you with a physical weight and makes every exposed surface feel wrong. Derek had trained for physical hardship in gyms and on competition mats. This was a different register of hardship.
The terrain did not respond to athletic conditioning the way a mat did. It had its own logic. Rebecca moved through it like she was familiar with that logic. Not fast, not recklessly. She moved with a deliberate grounding efficiency that covered distance without wasting energy.
Picking lines through the terrain with the practiced eye of someone for whom terrain navigation was not a sport discipline, but a survival skill built over years in places that were less forgiving than this. Derek stayed close. He didn't try to push the pace. Something about the way Rebecca moved told her that pushing the pace here would be a mistake. "What happened to the markers? " Derek asked as they moved.