DiNozzo didn't remember the sedan hitting the water with all the grace of a belly flop, but he did remember the water pouring in through the bullet-ridden windows—it was damn cold! This was the kind of water that people paid good money for, once it was bottled and packaged into pristine little six-packs. They could have it, DiNozzo thought wildly. They could have it all.

Time to get out. The doors opened easily since there was no external pressure to work against, and the car would turn into his coffin if he didn't get out. The water outside was worse. Not only was it cold and wet, but it was rushing by him at a speed that he would later swear that NASCAR racers would kill to achieve. He stumbled, caught himself against a huge boulder that had already dented the front fender of the sedan, and hauled himself back to the vehicle. He still had three teammates inside, teammates that he didn't particularly relish the thought of delivering eulogies for.

"Move, DiNozzo!" Gibbs had already tried to open his own car door and found it wedged tight. The front air bag was deflated in front of him, looking limp and drooping with the air released. Gibbs, finding that the seat belt lock refused to give way, had pulled out his pocket knife and sliced through the belt itself and was now crawling across the seat toward DiNozzo. "Get the others!"

More trouble there. Ziva had apparently removed her seatbelt much earlier in order to take better aim at their attackers. Worked well then, DiNozzo thought wildly, but the woman had gotten thrown against the hard back windshield during the fall into the raging river. There was a large bruise on her forehead. Cold water's keeping the swelling down, DiNozzo grumbled to himself. Good for one thing. McGee was trying to pull himself up from the floor, coughing and spitting out river water that was flooding the vehicle.

DiNozzo yanked on the back car door, had to put his foot against the side to wrench it open. Gibbs freed himself from the front seat, coming around to help.

"They're up there!" he yelled to DiNozzo. No need to say who 'they' were. A bullet, way off target in the dark spray, whizzed past them to continue its journey downstream. "Keep your head down!"

"Got another one," a female voice shrieked in the distance. DiNozzo recognized it as Gloria's. The locals were keeping up with their task, firing back at the terrorists even as the terrorists sought to remove several NCIS agents from the land of the living.

The door to the sedan opened with a metallic protest, and DiNozzo was amazed that the handle hadn't come off in his hands. Ziva flopped out against him, and DiNozzo had to hurry to catch her. "Ziva!"

"She's out cold." Gibbs reached inside the car, muscling both DiNozzo and Ziva out of his path. "McGee!"

"Here, boss!" McGee extended his hand, accepting the help that Gibbs was offering. "Boss, there's at least four of them—"

"I don't care if there's an entire squadron, McGee. Get moving!"

DiNozzo couldn't see if McGee was following the boss's orders, but he did see something else: a surge of water, and it was rushing down the mountain straight at them. "Hold on!" he yelled frantically.

He tightened his grip on the unconscious woman. This is gonna be a big one…

Water.

Cold, wet water.

Water under his feet, over his head, trying to get into his lungs to drown him.

A brief moment of air—gasp for it—then pulled back under by swiftly charging rapids.

Damn alarm clock didn't go off again, and he was gonna be late, and Gibbs was gonna be pissed. Daylight was swarming around him, telling him that he'd overslept—again. DiNozzo groaned, wondering if he had time to take a shower before dashing into the office. If he was lucky, Gibbs would have some sort of meeting and wouldn't notice that Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo was missing in action—

Crap. Not in his bed. Not even at home. No alarm clock, because the sunlight that had awoken him was the sun coming up over the horizon. And a shower was currently the furthest thing from his mind, because he was already soaked to the skin, and that included his torn shirt that was currently hanging from his chest in shreds.

"Damn," he said aloud. "That was my favorite shirt." The sound echoed in the greenery of the forest, the leaves seeming to have taken advantage of the rain last night to add to their vibrant luster. Grimacing, he pulled off the tattered fabric, letting it drop to the ground. In its present condition it was worse than useless. Better to go shirtless for the time being. Birds around here are going to have high quality Egyptian linen for their nests this year…

DiNozzo cast around, trying to figure out where he was. 'Downstream' was the best he could do, with not one of his team within eyeball distance. All around him was trees, trees with leaves, trees with pine needles, punctuated by a few boulders, one of which DiNozzo had clearly bounced off of, as his ribs hurt like—DiNozzo decided not to quantify the pain. It would only discourage him. Likewise, he chose not to look at the dark and purpling bruise that was emerging over those ribs. There would be time enough for that later—assuming he could get himself out of this mess.

This wasn't getting him anywhere—literally. DiNozzo decided that he needed to come up with a plan of action. His brains were too soaked to be of much use, but making them function might dry them out. DiNozzo thought.

Priority one: get that portrait of the Hacksaw of Hormuz into the appropriate intelligence hands, which meant getting Probie himself into their hands. That meant finding McGeek, preferably in a breathing condition. No, make that definite: breathing. Lifeless would interfere with data retrieval. Hear that, Probie? Finding you dead will only get one of us whacked upside the head, and I don't have to tell you which one of us it will be.

He hauled himself to his feet and stood there, swaying, refusing to catalog all of his various bumps and bruises. That little exercise could wait.

Which way to go? Upstream, downstream, or even cross country? Downstream, DiNozzo decided. There was a decent chance that he'd join up with one or more of his teammates, thus improving his chances of survival and avoiding that whack upside the head.

The best part of this was that he'd lost his cell phone. Gibbs allowed himself a moment of grim satisfaction. Since the thing had gotten itself doused with creek water, the likelihood of its ever working again hovered between 'slim' and 'none'. If he lost the damn thing in the creek, the agency couldn't holler at him for needing a replacement, and he wouldn't be put to the trouble of lugging the thing in his back pocket when chances were he'd be needing every ounce of strength toward hauling his team out of this mess. Didn't like to use that ridiculous piece of plastic and tinfoil, anyway. Nuisance, good only for the electronic location of perps—and he used McGee to do that—and DiNozzo when the man wandered off in search of whatever woman had taken his fancy. Couldn't even do any team-hauling right now, because both McGee and DiNozzo were nowhere to be found. Ziva he could trust to show up eventually. The boys would be boys.

Gibbs sighed. He enjoyed being outside in the forest, but he generally preferred to do it when he had a bit more control over the timing and the amenities. He surveyed his handgun sadly, grateful that it had stayed in his hand through the wild ride down the white water rapids but doubting that the bullets would be of any use, wet as they were. He stuffed it back into his holster—another item that had stayed with him during his impromptu bath—and scanned the rising sun.

Downstream. Gibbs made his decision. He had seen one or more bodies being carried off downstream after he'd gotten his own feet under him and crawled out onto the bank. There was always a possibility that someone had been stranded upstream, but Gibbs doubted it. Besides, those idiots shooting at them were upstream and Gibbs wasn't about to bet the farm that they weren't hiking it down after the NCIS quartet with murder in mind. It was what he himself would do if he had their mindset.

He pulled off his shirt, tying the arms around his waist after wringing out as much of the moisture as he could. He was soaked to the skin, and keeping the wet shirt on would only sap heat. Better to let it dry while Gibbs hiked out, then he could put it back on when night fell and brought back cool mountain air. That was assuming that he hadn't gotten them all out of this mess, and Gibbs fully expected to resolve this matter sooner rather than later. Still, there was always a chance that he'd need to spend another night in the open, and Gibbs believed in being prepared.

Step one: re-assemble the team. Step two: get that portrait in McGee's head out of McGee's head and into the hands of the CIA and Interpol. Step three: take out those terrorists. Gibbs didn't particularly appreciate having them on American soil.

Of course, if those steps didn't happen in rank order, Gibbs wouldn't be especially displeased. After all, here in the back woods one took what Nature handed out with good grace or not at all.

McGee shut his mouth. There were terrorists somewhere around, and calling out to his teammates would be a good way to advertise to the opposite side that there was a sitting duck in the vicinity.

No, better to pretend to be a dead body, a fact that wasn't far from the truth. It was only the water rising under his chin that had awakened Timothy McGee.

The previous few hours were a merciful blur in his memory: getting shot at again. Jumping the bridge; McGee was never going to question DiNozzo's driving ability ever ever again. Another memory: getting pushed over the bank and into the river by person or persons unknown. McGee couldn't help the chuckle; bet DiNozzo would be upset over that. All that work, and look who showed up to ruin it…

He recalled shoving Ziva out of the back seat and into Gibbs's arms. The woman had been unconscious; McGee remembered her pulling off her seat belt and leaning over into his lap in order to take aim at their attackers. That had worked well—McGee would swear that he saw at least one body flop limply onto the mud—but had backfired when the attackers' vehicle slammed into their own. Ziva went flying into the back windshield and hit her head. Was she safe? McGee hadn't a clue. There wasn't anyone around that he could see.

He should be able to see someone if they were nearby. The sun was rising, and there were small gnat-sized insects rising from the still eddies of the creek. He could see small to medium-sized fish gulping at those gnats, earning their breakfast before settling down to shelter in the mud to wait out the day. This would be a great fishing spot, he realized, from his vast experience of going out exactly once with his father to 'bond'. It was then that young Timothy had realized with startling clarity that for him, at least, 'phishing' was far more enjoyable than 'fishing', and that working with computers in some capacity was going to be his life's work.

Water gurgled around him, creating its own symphony. The white water rapids of last night had given way to a meandering stream of water still making its way downhill surrounded by the wide pond that McGee had found himself in. Tree roots stretched into the water, seeking moisture and affording those fish a multitude of crevices in which to hide from predators. One such predator soared on wide stretched wings above him, casting a swiftly moving shadow. McGee tried to look up, but the sun was in his eyes—and something tugged at his skin. Something tugged at his skin that hurt.

McGee looked down. McGee himself was tangled in a covey of roots, with long brown strands dipping ends into the water. The roots provided a canopy of cover as well as arresting any further downstream progress, and unless someone looked very carefully, would not expose him to any of the enemy that McGee was certain was still hunting him.

That was the good news. The bad was that the surge of water that had shoved him here had also encouraged one particularly sharp and jagged piece of wood to pierce through his side. There was an entrance wound near his rib cage, and he could feel with his fingers the exit wound some six inches around closer to his spine, which meant that Timothy McGee was staked neatly as a vampire by this tree root.

There was more good news: he could barely feel it. His wound ought to be hurting but wasn't, and McGee realized that the cold creek water had some benefit after all. Most of him was rapidly becoming more and more numb.

A contest, he decided bitterly. A contest as to which would kill him first: hypothermia from the cold water, infection from the bacteria crawling along the tree root—or the terrorists.

Ziva allowed her surroundings to come into focus before even attempting to move. Hearing was the first to return: songbirds twittered overhead, with the occasional droning of a honey bee in search of nectar. A squirrel rustled in the leaves above her, dropping a loose twig onto the ground beside her. No doubt it had been aiming for her and missed, she thought triumphantly.

Touch was the next sense: there was cold ground beneath her, and her feet were bobbing in cold water. Cold mountain spring water, she clarified, and that brought back the memories of what had brought her here. She remembered Tony's magnificent jump over the broken bridge, the unexpected additional faction of terrorists on the other side—she scolded herself for not anticipating that situation. Was she getting soft, here in America? Losing her touch? This might be her wake-up call—if she lived through it.

After that, everything was blank. No, wait—she remembered the sedan being hit broadside by the enemy SUV. Then everything went blank.

No help for it. She needed to quickly re-orient herself and come up with a plan. She allowed the scents of her surroundings to add additional information on her whereabouts, smelling the fresh green of growing things, the odor of dark dirt, even the whisper of a rotting tree trunk somewhere further on.

What she didn't hear, feel, or smell, was another body, and that both encouraged and discouraged her. She would need to catch up with her teammates, but staying out of the grasp of the terrorists was equally as important. Ziva took a chance, and slowly opened her eyes.

She was correct; no one was in the vicinity. She drew herself up, running through a short series of stretches to remove the worst of the aches from her impromptu journey downstream, and reviewed her plan.

Retrieve McGee. That was of vital importance. Re-acquiring her teammates would help her in that goal, but getting the picture of the Hacksaw of Hormuz into the hands of international intelligence would be worth any price. Ziva David wasn't about to say what American agencies would do with the information but she knew exactly what the Mossad would do.

Ziva looked around, oriented herself as best as she could. Downstream, she decided. She would look for footprints, and bodies both living and dead, and she would especially look for McGee.

It was slow going. DiNozzo found it easiest to travel several yards to one side of the creek and avoid the thick bushes and trees that insisted on lining the banks. He found a thicket that already had a healthy bushel of red and yellow berries on it and chose to go hungry; no telling what that bush was. It could just as easily kill him, and DiNozzo could afford to miss a meal.

He also needed to push his way back to the river every so often to scan for missing teammates. If Gibbs or Ziva or McGee had clambered up on the bank, DiNozzo needed to see where those footprints led so that he could follow and catch up. He also needed to check for any floating bodies, not something he really wanted to find but there were a lot of things he didn't like about his job. This was just one more. Delivering the dead body to Ducky's morgue would be another, but he would do it. And then he would promise revenge to those nameless terrorists who had done the deed.

So far there had been no sign of anyone, not any NCIS agents or terrorists. Had he made a mistake, going downstream? Was he the one who had drifted the furthest? No way to tell.

DiNozzo chose to keep going. The various aches and bruises were keeping him from making good time, and if he was the frontrunner of the pack then the others would catch up with him eventually and they would all make their way out of the woods and back to civilization.

Coffee. DiNozzo's mouth watered at the mere thought. Not one of Abby's cold and over-sized Caf-Pows, but a Gibbs-sized mug of steaming hot and caffeine-laced black java, fierce enough to burn his taste buds to mere cinders. It would warm his insides, take away the cold of the river that still lingered on his pants while they dried. DiNozzo made the effort to walk through the patches of sunlight that were permitted by the leaves to trickle to the ground, trying to warm his chilled and naked chest. Never mind McGee; DiNozzo himself would be lucky not to get pneumonia if he had to spend another night out here.

Crap, what was that? DiNozzo came to a sudden halt, hearing but not seeing something up ahead. He stayed frozen, all bodily discomforts forgotten in the need for silence. He listened.

Arabic. He was all but certain of that. Couldn't tell what dialect it was, what version, but the lyric line of the language was unmistakable. There was more than one of them, probably two, talking to each other and looking for something. No, not some thing but some one. They crashed through the bushes and jabbered at each other, sounding as exasperated with the situation as DiNozzo himself.

What to do? There was just one DiNozzo and two terrorists, and they probably had guns. Working guns, too; DiNozzo's had taken a ride in the water and was going to need a thorough cleaning and new bullets before it was up to his standards of performance.

He made his decision. He didn't like it, but his other options seemed likely to get him killed and that would interfere with the rest of his long term career goals. He decided to let them go. They were ahead of him and hadn't seen him. He would wait until they were out of earshot, and then follow at a safe distance. If they came across one of DiNozzo's fellows, he could re-evaluate his decision but for the moment he would—

Cold metal poked him in the ribs—the sore ones. DiNozzo froze.

"Don't move," a guttural voice said, a voice with an accent. "We have much to discuss before you die."