Day 5 Morning

Amelia woke up, this time not feeling quite so rough, but her throat was sore, her eyelids heavy, and everything ached. As she shifted in bed, the doctor was immediately at her side. "Hey," Amelia greeted Sydney. "Did you sleep here?"

"I sleep right next door, and Mountain's been sleeping here every night to keep an eye on you," she shared, as she quickly checked over Amelia. "How are you feeling?"

"My throat's really sore," she whispered. "I'm not feeling all that bad. The pain's not terrible at the moment, but I'm not feeling good by any means."

"The feeling good part?… That'll take a while," Sydney shared. "Let's see if water helps with that throat." She moved away to get a glass and fill it. "Some of these drugs can make your throat feel quite dry."

Amelia had several large gulps and then nodded. "That feels a bit better."

"Good." Sydney eyed her closely. "You haven't had any food for a while. What do you think?"

"I don't know," she murmured. "I would love some food." She looked at the IV in her arm. "I guess that's how you've been keeping me alive, huh?"

"It is," Sydney confirmed, "but again our supplies are limited here. So the sooner I can get you off this, the better. Getting you onto food is a good step, only I don't know how your stomach will handle it."

Amelia closed her eyelids. "Something soft. Maybe soup would be good."

"I'll send Mountain to the kitchen, as soon as I tell him that you're awake."

"Do you have to tell him that I'm awake?" There was a hard note to her voice.

"I do, and it doesn't matter, since he'll be here in a heartbeat anyway because he has that inner instinct that tells him when you're awake."

"I don't have all the answers he wants from me." Amelia rolled her head to the side, careful not to move her body much.

"You give him what you can give him and nothing more," Sydney stated. "If you don't know who you can trust and if you don't know anything about it, then you tell him that."

"He won't believe me," she said.

"He'll believe you because he won't have a choice. He won't like it, and it could definitely be something that you don't know that's helpful," Sydney added, "but I think that's really important for you to understand too. The fact that you already told him what you did helps a lot."

Looking bewildered, she frowned. "How does it help anything? I don't have a name. I don't even have a face."

"Did you see him?"

"Sure, but only with all his heavy gear on."

"Right." Sydney nodded, with a quick glance around. "And that's not quite the same thing, is it?"

"No, it isn't, since I couldn't identify him."

"Don't be so sure," she corrected. "What if you heard his voice again? Are you sure that's not emblazoned into your mind?"

At that, she stared at Sydney, hearing the same snap of the voice. as it echoed in her mind. Good riddance. "Now that I might recognize," she admitted slowly. "But you've got to realize that it was outside, in the cold, and I was in this pain-altered state."

Sydney smiled. "Believe me, I do realize that, and so does Mountain. They're not trying to push or to hurt you. It's more a case of trying to get whatever information they can to keep you safe here. They're trying to figure out why somebody would have shot you in the first place. That is hard evidence that we can see. The question is, why were you shot?"

Amelia didn't know what to say to that, and then she remembered. "I might have seen something," she whispered.

"Hang on a minute." Sydney walked closer to her patient. "What do you mean, you might have seen something?"

"It was earlier that day," she began. "It was hazy out, and I wasn't even sure what I saw because of the white glare, but it's the only thing that I can think of."

"So, what did you see?"

"Several men were out that day, a long time ago, before I got shot the first time," she began, "and I saw two men separate and have a big argument, but I was quite a long distance away. I couldn't hear what the argument was. I couldn't see anything really. A storm was blowing. But, when I saw them again,… there was only one man. I only saw one man come back."

"You didn't see what happened to the other man?"

"No," she whispered. "I know I didn't see him again."

"When you say, you didn't see him again, how long ago was this?"

"Weeks, weeks, and weeks," she replied, with an expression of deep thought.

Then the clinic door opened, and Mountain walked in.

Sydney immediately called him over. "She's wondering if all this is because of something she saw."

Mountain's eyebrows shot up, and his gaze turned to Amelia. He walked over and leaned close to her. "How are you feeling?"

"Like shit," she said, with half a smile, "but I do know that you weren't the one I saw."

"That's good news," he replied, with a light chuckle, hearing the loopy tone to Amelia's voice, due to the pain meds and all. "So, maybe if you let me off the hook and trust me a little bit," he told her, "we can get to the bottom of this. Now, tell me what you saw."

She explained about the storm, seeing two men in a verbal fight. "I don't even know that anything happened," she clarified. "There was a blur to it, and that's all I saw."

"And, when you saw the one man return alone, can you tell me anything about him?"

She shrugged. "Not really, it was too far to have a good look. I could tell he was big but not huge." She glanced at him. "Not your size."

"Nobody here is my size anyway," he replied, with a smirk and a half nod to the guy coming through the doorway. "Magnus is big, but he's not that big."

She nodded. "I don't even think he was his size, but I could be wrong." She frowned at the man who joined them. "Anyway, when I saw him again, it stuck out because I only saw one of them."

"So, the real question is, did he see you? Would they have seen you in any way?" Mountain asked, looking at her. "When two were there or even after one returned, could you be seen? You need to think about this one carefully. You saw something, but did they see you?"

She shut her eyelids, as she thought back to that fateful day, a day that she had gone over many, many times, trying to figure out if that had anything to do with the situation she was in. "I don't know," she finally said, "but I was out there, so I guess it's possible."

"It's also a very good reason behind all this," Mountain stated, with a nod.

"If you say so," she muttered. "Personally, in my world,… I don't shoot people who might have seen me have an argument with somebody."

"What if it's an argument with somebody who didn't come back?"

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"What if it's an argument with somebody, and that somebody died or was killed because of this argument?"

She stared at him. "Meaning that he killed the guy he was having a fight with?"

"It's possible, or maybe he left him out there to die," Mountain suggested, "which, in these conditions, would be exactly the same thing."

She stared at him and shook her head. "I don't know.… Anything is possible. I just don't know. I didn't see the one again. I didn't think much of it, but I did think about it from time to time."

"What about the other one, the one still remaining?" Mountain asked, immediately picking up on her wording.

"I think I saw him another time, but I don't know for sure. You've got to remember. I'm out there miles away. I don't really have any way to ascertain one of you from another, not in your winter gear," she noted in an exasperated tone. "Sometimes whole groups of you are out there. Sometimes you split up during your war games," she pointed out, with a toss of her hand. "It's hard for anybody to tell you apart. I don't know," she cried out in frustration.

Mountain immediately grasped her hand. "And that's fine. You're not allowed to get upset now. So just relax."

She glared at him. "Gee, thanks for that," she muttered. "You might be a little too late."

He gave a boisterous laugh. "In a way, what you've said makes the most sense, but we need to talk about Teegan."

She stared at him. "One of the men I helped."

"Yes, those men. Why did you not bring them in?"

"Because the one man told me that they were shot by somebody on the base here," she shared, and then she frowned. "I'm not sure he said shot, but he definitely told me that we couldn't trust anybody on the military base."

"Okay."

"So, at that point, I didn't know what to do with them."

"You didn't take them to the village?"

"I did, to the one woman anyway," she replied, "the healer. She gave me a bunch of medicine and told me that I couldn't keep them there. They didn't want anything bad to happen to one of your guys in their settlement. It would not be good for them. Understanding that, I quickly took them back to one of my hideaways." At his raised eyebrows, she shrugged. "I've been up here annually for years."

"So, you have lots of these places here?"

"Yes, pretty much. I keep these little ice caves on my GPS. I have a few hideaways out there, where I can go without people finding me easily." She turned and looked at him. "And yet I do find that various people can be helpful."

"Are you the one who shot near us to show us the location of one ice cave out in the middle of nowhere?"

She looked at him and blinked. "I'm not sure." She frowned. "I don't think so. Do you want to tell me more about it?"

He shook his head at that. "It was just a question." He looked over at Magnus, whose narrowed gaze stared back at him.

"That was you and Teegan, wasn't it?" Magnus asked.

Mountain nodded. "Yeah, we were looking for Eric's hideaway. We found it, but the only reason we found it was because somebody in the distance was shooting at us."

"And you think that maybe they weren't shooting at you but around you?… To show you that location?"

"Right, but now I'm wondering if it wasn't to shoot us, and they accidentally shot up the location instead." He frowned, as he sat back and turned toward Amelia. "Can you tell us anything else about this same person who shot you later a second time?"

"No, not at all," she admitted, "and again I'm not even certain that he was the one who shot me both times. I just know that, when I was out there, this person looked similar. People have a way of moving that can be distinctive," she explained, "but I can't be sure because, when you're out in a training scenario such as this, if you have ten guys in a row, you might pick out one, but, when you see all ten separately, it's quite a bit harder."

"That is quite right."

"And it's not as if I get to sit there with binoculars and stare."

Mountain nodded. "That's fine, and we appreciate your telling us."

She frowned at him, a wry look on her face. "Oh, I definitely get the impression that you would prefer if I had something else to say."

"Sure, I want very much for you to say that you know exactly who did this and point him out to me," he admitted, with a hard smile. "But I don't live in a fanciful world, and people have gone to great lengths to try and shut you up. Therefore, I need to confirm that whatever you do know, we know too, even if you don't think it's important. So, every time I see you, I'll ask you if you remember anything else, anything else you can identify." He gave her a smirk. "I won't stop until we get to the bottom of it."

She sagged against the bed and whispered, "Good luck then, because I've been trying to figure it out since all this started."

"Why did you send Teegan back when you did?" he asked suddenly.

She looked at him in surprise. "Because I'd just been shot, again, and it was all I could do to look after me," she replied. "I knew that he had come to the point where I thought maybe he would survive such a move, and I needed to take the chance because I was in bad shape myself."

"So, hang on a minute. You were shot, yet you put him on a sled, and you brought him to our military base. You left Teegan on the sled outside, where Elijah could find him, or you somehow informed Elijah that Teegan was out there. Then you took off, even though you were injured?"

She looked at him and then nodded. "Yeah, that sounds about right."

"Jesus," he muttered in an astonished voice. "Teegan is fine, by the way. You did save his life, and he's been busting down the doors trying to get at you ever since."

She smiled. "He's a nice man."

"He is a nice man," Mountain stated, "and, as I told you earlier, though I'm not sure you remember, he's my brother, and I care about him a great deal."

She smiled. "In that case, you need to be nice to me, if for no other reason than because I saved your brother."

"What we don't know is, how did my brother get into trouble in the first place."

She stared at him. "Oh."

"I guess you don't know either then, do you?"

"I don't know. I came upon him and the other one, at two different times, both of them injured, unconscious, and freezing in one of the little hollows that you guys make," she said. "I was trying to raise the alarm to get help. However, Teegan told me that it wasn't safe to let anybody know, that it was somebody from the military base." Then she frowned. "Or maybe the other man told me that." She shook her head. "I don't know. As it turned out, I couldn't do anything for him," she whispered, her voice sorrowful. "I really tried all I could, and, in the end, I delivered him to the scientists' camp, where you guys kept showing up to all the time. After that, I tried hard to keep Teegan alive. And I did, until I couldn't help him anymore. At that point in time, I had no choice but to bring him here."

"I'm grateful that you did," Mountain said. "Believe me, I'm very grateful, but now we still have lots of questions, and we need help sorting it out."

She nodded. "You might, but that doesn't mean I have any answers for you."

He laughed. "You're doing fine so far." He gave her a wry smile. "So don't give up on me now."

*

Mountain stayed ather side, as Amelia napped, then woke. He asked a few more questions, and then she slept some more.

When Magnus came to the clinic at dinnertime, he asked Mountain, "How's she doing?"

"She's doing better, I think. She seems to be getting a little stronger, but she'll be a while yet."

Magnus nodded. "Anything helpful?"

"Not a lot. I keep asking her questions, for descriptions, anything that might shake loose. She remembered that her shooter moved with a lot of grace, as if somebody used to physical activity."

"But that's what we would expect out here," Magnus muttered, with a frustrated tone.

"I know. It doesn't help at all. Anybody who's out here is obviously at a certain fitness level, so that's not getting us anywhere."

"On the other hand, we can't force it, and she can only give us what she can give us, and sometimes that won't be enough." Magnus sighed.

Mountain nodded, commiserating. "I know. I know, and, at the same time, I don't know what else we're supposed to do."

"You could let your brother talk to her."

"I'm planning on it. He's coming in after dinner."

"Oh, good," Magnus said. "In that case, why don't I relieve you, so you can go get yourself some food for a change. If she wakes up again, I'll let you know."

Mountain thought about it and nodded. "Good idea," he agreed, with a hearty smile. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

Knowing that Magnus meant for him to stay and eat in the kitchen and to have a bit of a break, Mountain fully intended to grab some food and come straight back. As he walked into the kitchen, tired and yet relieved to see food, not having been privy to or even caring about the ongoing saga in the kitchen without the chef, Mountain saw Avalon working behind the counters, looking overwhelmed. He smiled. "Still you, huh?"

"Me and Chrissy," she replied, with a smile. "We're holding up okay."

"And we're all very grateful that you are," he said.

She laughed. "Everybody wants to know that meals will be cooked by somebody other than them."

"How's Chef holding up?"

The smile immediately fell from her face, and she shrugged. "I take him food, but he doesn't talk. I'm not even sure that he's eating."

Mountain nodded. "After dinner, maybe I can step in and see him too," he offered, fatigue in his voice.

Avalon looked at him and frowned.

He shrugged. "I've been spending most of my time with Amelia, trying to see if she knows anything that we can use to solve this."

"Oh, God," Avalon added, "I hope there is something because I really don't want to believe it was Elijah. He has been the one guy in this place who always had my back. Even when Ralph accused me of poisoning him, and everyone was looking sideways at me,… Chef never did, not once. You need to make damn sure that he really did this because I don't believe it for a second. I just don't see that Elijah could have done any of this."

"I know, and that's how most of us feel, but he's not helping his case at all by staying silent."

"I heard, and I don't understand that either." She shook her head. "You only do that if you're protecting somebody you love." She raised both hands in frustration. Just then somebody else came in to talk to her. She looked over at Mountain, and he quickly moved on, grabbed his food, and headed back to Amelia.

As he walked into the clinic, Magnus got up from behind the desk and announced. "She's still sleeping, honest."

Mountain snorted. "I expected her to still be sleeping. She's been waking and sleeping at fairly regular intervals, usually directly proportional to her pain meds."

"I guess I can understand that too."

"I'm sure you can. She's been to hell and back over all this," Mountain said, as he sat down and pulled a small table close to put his tray on.

Almost as soon as Magnus was gone, Amelia opened her eyes and stared at Mountain.

"Yeah, it's still me," Mountain said cheerfully, "although I do have food this time."

She looked at it with interest. "Some food might be good," she noted cautiously, "but I don't know how my stomach will hold it."

"We can ask Sydney, if you want."

"Is she around? It seems to be pain-meds o'clock to me," she quipped.

"In that case, I'm sure she'll be here any second." Mountain chuckled. "She has this great inner intuition for somebody needing pain meds. Seems she is always nearby when you need her."

Amelia smiled.

Mountain shrugged. "There are a lot worse things to have. It all comes from Sydney's heart, and she'll do everything she can to get you on the mend again. Are you sure you don't want to let anybody know you're alive?"

"I'm not worried for another day or two. I presume that the villagers already know."

"Why would you presume that?" he asked curiously.

She stared at him. "Because they seem to have a pretty good understanding of what goes on here. The locals at the settlement are good about keeping track of their own."

He pushed the table away slightly and looked at her. "Seriously? They are watching the base?"

She frowned at him. "They've talked to Elijah several times about supplies and whatnot, so, yeah. They've talked to a lot of the people here, throughout some of the different exercises you guys have been doing," she shared, with a nod. "So, nobody here is secretive by any means."

"No, of course not." Mountain pondered that. "I wasn't expecting them to be fully aware of what goes on."

"I don't think they are fully aware," she clarified. "However, I think that they're quite comfortable with all of you. Maybe too comfortable to let you know all the details they may have gained," she suggested a bit bitterly, "because it seems as if, in some instances, they don't want anything to do with you guys because they understand better than most what is going on here."

He winced at that. "I'm not sure anybody understands what is going on, if we're being totally honest."

"Being totally honest would be good," she declared, "because I don't know who I can trust. I don't really know what I saw, and all your questions make me doubt even that."

"That isn't an issue," he replied. "I just want your impressions, anything you know or even your ideas, to the best of your ability."

"And yet I could be putting a nail in somebody's coffin, when I don't really know anything. Not to mention that it could lead to someone who doesn't even deserve that coffin."

"Somebody shot you two different times," he pointed out. "Therefore, somebody out here did this."

"What if it was one of my own scientists? I did have peers here, and it could be professional jealousy or dozens of other things." Frustrated, she felt compelled to share a counterargument. "Did you consider that?"

He sat back, looked at her, and nodded slowly. "I did consider that, but I presumed," he admitted, feeling foolish for a moment, "that you would have recognized if it was one of them."

She pondered that and then shook her head. "I've asked myself that a dozen times, and yet it always comes back to the same thing. I'm not sure. I don't know who it was for sure, and, even bundled up like that, there's really no way to guarantee who it was or who it was not."

"Interesting. So, back to the beginning then. Are you sure it was someone male?"

She pondered that and then nodded. "Yes."

"Okay. Height?"

She looked at him and shook her head.

"You can't tell?"

"Don't know. Didn't have a landmark to compare him to."

"Why don't you answer this," he proposed, a bit carefully. "How did your dogs react to him?"

"They were fine. They were happy to meet whoever it was," she replied. "And that confused me too."

"Are your dogs usually aggressive?"

"No, not at all." She shook her head. "We can't have aggressive dogs in sleds or even out on military games and training. Then taking a moment, she added, "Protective, yes, but never aggressive."

"And they didn't seem to get a negative vibe off him at all?"

"No." She shrugged. "However, I've seen lots of people, been around lots of people, and we haven't exactly had any arguments, or raised voices, or any reason for my dogs to be defensive."

"Even after you were shot?"

"I think they were more confused than anything, and, once he let them loose, they were even more confused, but then he took off."

"They didn't follow?"

"No, they didn't follow, but I'm very close to my dogs."

"But they're still animals," he pointed out.

She gave him a ghost of a smile. "Still animals, but they would have stayed with me no matter what," she declared, and he nodded, understanding that loyalty.

"After this trip, will you come back?" he asked.

"I don't know," she replied lightly. "I want to think that having it all screwed up like this doesn't ruin the joy of being up here." She took a moment, and a smile lit up her exhausted features. "I've been coming for years, and I have a good relationship with the villagers because of it," she shared, with a shrug.

"I understood you have family members here."

"Cousins," she clarified, "distant cousins. Funny enough, I didn't even know about them, until we'd been coming here for a while." She smiled again. "It gives me another reason to come back, not that I need one." She turned toward him. "I love being outdoors, and I love being up here."

"No family?"

One eyebrow raised, she asked in a defiant tone, "What do you mean by family?"

"It's just a question."

His response calmed her down somewhat. "I have sisters."

"And yet you haven't told them that you're alive."

"Honestly, I don't think I even told them that I came up here. So being alive versus not being alive isn't anything they would be worried about."

"What about text messages and all that?"

"We don't communicate very often. It's usually about birthdays and holidays and that sort of thing," she replied. "They've got three, four kids apiece," she shared, with an affectionate smile, "and they're all very busy with their families."

No rancor was found in her voice, and she sounded perfectly okay with it all. "And you get along with everybody? Is that right? Nobody with any reason to try and kill you?"

She stared at him. "No," she declared, with quiet emphasis. "Nobody there would have any reason to kill me. "Good God, you're a fine one to talk."

"Hey, that's how my mind works," he stated.

"I don't think I like the way your mind works."

He stared at her. "My mind"—he took a moment to orient himself, as if looking for a way to not offend her—"is very aware of humanity and all its weaknesses. Greed is often the biggest." He had to try to soften the blow by some margin. "So, just because somebody tried to kill you up here doesn't mean that the request for that death didn't originate from somebody who may have been in a position to receive more inheritance, if you weren't around to receive it."

She blanched at that. "That's not a nice thought either.… As far as I know, there is no inheritance for me to receive, no money for anybody else to get, and nobody who would profit from my death."

"And yet there was talk about some issues between you and Myles. I heard Dr. Morrison was a huge name. Then Anna killed Myles—and John too."

She winced. "As for Myles, he was the kind of guy to write his name on my research papers and not give credit where credit was due," she stated, with a bitter tone. "We've had arguments over it in the past, but it wasn't an issue this time because he isn't on any of my paperwork anyway," she pointed out, with a knowing smile. "Therefore, any problems he might have had with me would be because of my reputation and not so much because of anything that I was doing at this time. Same goes for Anna. John was a bit of wildcard, but he was always fair. So, all this seems to be an exaggeration, if nothing else."

"Since John died a while ago, could Myles have hired somebody to take you out, but then maybe he died before the plan had been executed? Or maybe he heard the plan had been executed," he suggested on second thought, "and then proceeded with the rest of his nightmare, more of a group suicide attempt."

"And yet it was his nightmare, not everyone's."

"No, but that doesn't mean everybody else didn't know about it."

"True," she muttered. "God, that makes all of it sound as if we're some murdering bunch of scientists, doesn't it?"

"Yeah, it sure does," he teased, with a big grin. She stared at him in disbelief. He cracked a smile. "Hey, I'm making sure I cover all avenues."

"Jesus," she muttered, as she settled back, letting her eyelids drift closed. "You wanted to know the truth, and I will give it to you. Myles was a moron, but he didn't hate me that much."

"Did he hate you at all?"

"I think professional jealousy might have been an issue, and he always wanted to have that reputation, but he just didn't have it and couldn't get it."

"Any particular reason why not?"

"Yeah, he wasn't that good," she stated. "You should know lots of people in your own field, who, in your world, seem to be good soldiers, but you know they aren't that good. They aren't good enough."

"Right," he agreed, "and we have people here to rival your story. Some we had to dig, to find only recently."

"Such as?"

"Our colonel's in trouble."

She looked at him in surprise. "What do you mean?"

"He was tasked to babysit this training session of international teams, after he was disgraced when a rescue mission went sideways. After that, incidents of inappropriate actions were filed, followed by a few more investigations on complaints of inappropriate behavior," he shared. "The colonel came under fire for the charges filed against him, and, though nothing was ever proven, he got some bad marks against him. Thus he was appointed CO here, maybe as a punishment. Since then, things have continued on a downhill slide. So we're wondering if someone has it in for him, making this his last stop in his military career and a humiliating end."

She winced at that. "I would never consider being sent up here a punishment, but, I guess, for other people, maybe it is."

"I can't speak about anyone else. In his case, he's just trying to finish out his career, until he can get his retirement. I'm not even sure how long he's got. For all I know, he could be retiring at the end of this mission. But whenever it is, he's trying to lay low and to get out with his pension and some degree of dignity, then retire in peace and quiet."

"I'm certainly not against that," she said, "as long as he's doing all he can to end whatever nightmare is happening here."

"So, you never felt as if you should come in and say anything to anybody here? Certainly you knew some of the people here."

"Sure, I'd met a few others over time. I finally realized I'd known Magnus a bit from his work on the generator at the scientists' camp. Still, I didn't understand what was going on down here, and it's not as if I wanted to know," she admitted. "I talked to your chef a few times. I kept quiet, and presumably so did he. Honestly it was probably a win-win."

"Not if people were getting hurt," Mountain argued, watching her carefully.

"You mean, dying," she snapped.

"Yeah, that too, but we did manage to save a couple."

"I still don't understand what all this is about," she said.

It brought a gentle smile to his face. "I can fill you in on some of it." Then he explained about the scientists, and Anna's attempt to kill them all with the exhaust from the generator. He told her about Anna killing Myles and John, but that was about love gone wrong. Mountain also briefly filled in Amelia on his visits to the village and Teegan's informal investigation, or some of it. Mountain deliberately kept her in the dark about the issues of drugs, sex, and other scandals within these walls. Joy, Yegorahn, Jerry, and Scott were not her headache. He did explain some about Nikolai and about his father being murdered years ago.

"You think it's related?" Amelia asked.

"We're wondering if it's related," he shared, surprised at how easy she was to talk to and at how natural it felt to be around her. "When you think about it, an awful lot of shit is going on around this place, but it had to come from somewhere. People don't usually start spreading animosity and killing their coworkers."

"Unless they're serial killers," she pointed out. "In which case they can do whatever the hell they want, and nobody will say anything about it."

He stopped and stared. "Surely, you're not suggesting that."

"No, of course not," she said. "Yet, when you think about a scenario that would keep people from complaining or that would allow the killer to do these things unchecked, having nobody watching over them is a big one."

"It is, but it's still not that easy in a military base, with all these people as potential witnesses."

"Yet," Amelia pointed out, "what a perfectly isolated spot with a pool of thirtysomething victims to kill off, left, right, and center, without any reservations."

"But we're not some drunk on the street, we've all got exceptional skills."

"Maybe your killer does too. Maybe, if this is his selected playground, it is that easy. Maybe he likes the competition of it all," she countered. "And maybe that's what this person does all the time. Maybe he came up here, hoping to fulfill a fantasy, or maybe hoping that some other idiot would be here, and he could get payback, and maybe that payback involved killing someone and blaming someone else."

Mountain stared at Amelia, as new theories swirled around in his head. "Hadn't considered a few of those ideas," he muttered, with a light chuckle, "but some of them are out there a bit."

"Well, yeah…" She snorted. "Anybody who's doing these things is already pretty far out there, in case you hadn't noticed," she stated, her tone wry.

"Very true," he murmured, "very true."

"And, if you think about it," she added, "whoever is doing this intended to kill up here and planned it ahead of time."

"The trouble is, we did cross-reference a lot of people and their pasts. This is a training base, with participants from various countries. However, this isn't the only survival training base in the world or the only survival session held here either. So, the same people show up at other military bases they have been in, at other missions they have been on, and the like. Everybody really, except for some of the foreign teams here or the newbies, has spent time at the same places as someone else who is also here. The American teams have cross-country mountaineering and survival programs all the time, and that brought on far too many cross-matches to do us any good in singling out a suspect. People at this level are crossing paths all the time, and several of them had met up on other training missions abroad as well, some in Germany, the middle East and even some in Switzerland," he shared. "So, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that some history exists between a lot of people here that is now coming into play."

"There's a history all right," Amelia declared. "Just consider Nikolai's father's death and all the years in between. Maybe Nikolai saw somebody here who might have been related to that scenario."

"We wondered about that. Eric went missing, for several weeks, then returned to the base to kill someone but died himself. Nikolai knew Eric the best of everyone here. Yet Nikolai still couldn't tell us much. Eric wasn't well liked and had his secrets. We were thinking that Eric might have been trying to blackmail someone, but we don't have anybody to point a finger at."

She nodded, as she settled back in her bed. "I'm sure you will," she muttered, with an odd expression. "You have to keep digging deep enough."

"We thought you would have the answers," he stated abruptly.

She widened her eyes and looked at him in surprise. "Me? Why would you assume that? I'm not even part of this base."

"No, but somebody apparently hates you enough to shoot you, intending to kill you,… someone from this base."

"I don't think that they hate me enough to shoot me," she clarified. "I think they're scared of me, of what I may have seen, and of what I can do to stop them."

And, with that, she drifted off to sleep, leaving him sitting here, considering all she said.