Footprints.

Finally, Gibbs thought to himself. It seemed likely to him that he had been the first one to haul himself out of the raging waters of last night. Gibbs was under no illusion that he was the world's best tracker but he had a reasonable eye for such things here in the woods and he was motivated. He hadn't seen anything that looked like one of his agents had likewise arrived on shore in any fashion, and he'd waited until daybreak to begin his search. Also, the water last night had been powerful under the onslaught of the thunderstorm and Gibbs rather suspected that he himself was the best swimmer under the circumstances. It was a reasonable supposition and one that he would go on.

So he'd made himself a short breakfast of the blackberries that he'd found in a thicket some fifty yards away and thought longingly of the coffee he'd inhaled just before setting out last night in that ill-fated journey that ended up in the drink. Water from the creek he'd swum was good, but it just didn't have the caffeine kick that he liked. He'd seen some bark that would make a reasonable substitute, but time was lacking and there were a few soggy NCIS agents to be retrieved. Making a fire to brew something hot would have to wait.

Gibbs set out.

Ziva straightened up with a certain sense of satisfaction. After traveling most of the morning, she had finally discovered signs that one of her compatriots had preceded her and that suggested that she would eventually catch up with him. The size of the footprints made her think of Tony, and the clearly defined shape of a well-made shoe led her further in that direction. If it were Gibbs, the shoe would have been slightly larger with less distinct edges; her team leader preferred to use footwear appropriate to traipsing through trees whenever possible. She strongly doubted that the prints belonged to McGee. The stride was completely wrong for the uber-geek. No, these prints belonged to Tony DiNozzo, who at the moment was unquestionably snarling to himself about the lack of toilet facilities for the morning's ablutions.

How old were the prints? Not very. DiNozzo couldn't be very far ahead of her. Ziva cocked her head, listening for anything that might indicate that he was nearby. DiNozzo was limping, she realized from the unequal length of the prints, and recalled that her teammate only yesterday had ended up pinned underneath a large van.

This was quite an unusual way to return from a seminar. Ziva smiled crookedly to herself. Clearing a petty officer from an unwarranted murder charge, discovering a nest of terrorists, and rounding it off with a picture of the Hacksaw of Hormuz, suitable for framing and shooting on sight; should Ziva ever be permitted to write her autobiography—highly doubtful—then this would make a chapter unto itself.

Wait! There—she heard it. Someone was moving in the brush, somewhere upstream from where she stood. It was someone moving quietly, unaware that he were being heard but still accustomed to moving in the bush.

Terrorists? Possibly, although Ziva tended to doubt it. Such people preferred to live in cities, to be closer to their victims and observe the habits of those they intended to kill. Those activities did not lend themselves to learning how to move among the trees without notice, and the person in front of her was moving with extreme quiet. Still, a mistake at this time could lead to an extraordinarily disastrous outcome, an outcome to which Ziva had no intention of exposing herself. Furthermore, the noises sounded like a singleton, and terrorists preferred to work in groups—unless immediate martyrdom beckoned with explosives strapped to the waist.

No gun. Her Beretta had been lost sometime during the plunge into the cold river. She experienced a moment of regret; that weapon had served her well. It fit her hand. She would miss it.

That was less important at the moment than staying alive. Failure to continue breathing would ensure that she would never have the opportunity to grow attached to another weapon.

What she did have was her knife, a wickedly sharp three inches of finely honed steel. Advantage: Ziva. With this she had the added attraction of silence and surprise. The noises she heard sounded more like a single person, but Ziva preferred to be prepared. Should there be more than one, she could dispatch the first with a well-thrown blade and the second with her hands before he realized what had happened. Any others would have to be satisfied with long and drawn out hand to hand combat which Ziva was determined to win.

Surveillance was the next step. Ziva crouched down in the bushes, listening to the body moving quietly through the brush. Yes, it was a singleton. Once she identified the person approaching, she could either slay them with a single thrust of her knife or take them captive with that same knife offering a too close shave to the throat.

She considered her next move. The person would pass several meters away from her, ideal for an accurately thrown knife. She echo-located him, reaffirming yet again that it was indeed a singleton. There was only one set of footsteps, quiet and precise, the man placing his feet in such a way that there was no excess noise. Ziva frowned; it sounded as though this man too was hunting. A local, stalking some deer or other creature, for food? It was a bit early in the season, if Ziva understood typical American hunting behaviors. Gibbs had led her to believe that deer-hunting season began somewhat later in the year, when the immature specimens had grown to something approaching adulthood.

More investigation was in order. She stepped forward, silence uppermost, heading for the sounds. Visual inspection would be necessary.

"Don't move."

Ziva froze. The voice came from behind her. Her knife was in her hand, ready for use though no match against a handgun. But…

"Gibbs?"

"Ziva?" Tension gone. The pair recognized each other, Ziva turning around to greet her team leader.

Still, they kept their voices down. "Have you seen DiNozzo or McGee?" Gibbs wanted to know.

"No, but I have located a set of footprints that I believe were made by DiNozzo." She jerked her thumb toward the creek. "On the bank of the river."

Gibbs stirred himself to look at what the Mossad officer had found. "I think you're right, Ziva." He peered downstream, not surprised when he couldn't see any movement suggesting that the man was close by. "These tracks look like they're a couple hours old. DiNozzo must have started out, looking for us."

"We'll catch up with him," Ziva predicted confidently. "He will not be moving swiftly."

"Yeah," Gibbs agreed, "but they will."

He pointed to a second set of tracks several yards away.

"NCIS." The man spat onto the forest floor. "Anthony DiNozzo, NCIS." He showed the picture ID in DiNozzo's wallet to the others. He put his face back into DiNozzo's, letting his morning breath do a fine job of asphyxiating his captive. "You understand that we're going to kill you."

"I know that you're going to try," DiNozzo told him. Damn, but I'm a good actor, even with my hands tied behind my back. No one would ever guess that inside I'm terrified. "Since I'm not dead yet, either you still need me for something or you're incompetent. Maybe both."

Bam! The man back-handed DiNozzo. DiNozzo stumbled back, but the two others who had hold of his arms wouldn't let him fall.

DiNozzo spat blood. "Definitely both," he said pleasantly.

Bam! Alpha Centauri went nova inside his head.

The questioner moved in. "You found a data stick in your computer equipment. Where is it?"

"Sorry. You must have me confused with some other NCIS agent."

Bam!

This was getting tiresome, not to mention painful. DiNozzo weighed his options: there were very few. Stalling seemed to be the best of the bunch. "Yeah, we found a data stick."

"Where is it?"

DiNozzo gave him a bright smile, as wide as he could make it with a split lip. "Guess I must have left it in my other pants, at the cleaners."

Bam!

Through the stars dancing in front of his eyes, DiNozzo heard one more thing from his questioner: "Soften him up. We'll see how funny he is then."

McGee tugged at the stick that had pierced his side. It hurt, and he stopped more because the darkness dancing in front of him threatened to cause him to black out than because of the pain. Blacking out: bad. That might cause him to topple over into the water and drown. Blacking out and toppling over might cause this tree root to rip its way out of him and cause him to leak all his life's blood into this damned creek that had already tried to kill him once and now was trying again. A small school of nearly invisible fish, the longest not more than two inches, investigated the human intruder in their domain, nibbling at both entrance and exit wounds. McGee glared. The fish were clearly intrigued by the high quality blood seeping into the water around them: the piscine version of bellying up to the bar.

McGee dashed his hand at them, driving them away, suddenly pulling his hand back when blackness once again threatened. He sighed, shivering, and picked up the rock that he'd been using to try to scrape through the root that had staked him. If he could somehow cut through the root, he could free himself from this spot. He might not get far, but it would be a start.

The sharp edge of the stone was almost gone, and he'd only been able to get through a quarter of the wood. He looked up at the sky, trying to estimate the time by the height of the sun. Gibbs could time it almost to the quarter hour, he thought sourly. Ziva probably could, too. Tony? McGee doubted it, although Tony DiNozzo would learn just so that he could annoy his fellow agent. McGee glanced down at the horizon, trying to gauge the angle between and the sun. Ten o'clock, maybe? Was that Eastern Standard or Daylight Savings Time?

Did it matter? No. Timothy McGee wasn't going anywhere.

Gibbs led. It didn't take long for the pair to realize that the team leader was more comfortable with tracking their errant team member than Ziva, and she had no problem with allowing Gibbs to lead. Gibbs's eyes seemed to almost magically light upon a broken twig here, the barest outline of a shoe there. Beyond those marks and further away the creek gave up on its pretensions of being a river and the excess water shuffled off downstream, returning the shore to its previously determined parameters.

Neither one dared called out. In addition to the tracks left by DiNozzo, Gibbs found several others that suggested that there was someone else here in the forest. Given what had gone on before, both Gibbs and Ziva wanted a good look at the owners of those footprints before letting anyone else know that more than one NCIS agent remained on this side of the Pearly Gates. That meant caution, and caution meant taking more time.

Even with their slow advance, it didn't take long before Gibbs held up his hand with a silent command: stop. Ziva listened, and heard it, too: a slow and steady current of thuds, suggesting several fists connecting with human flesh. There was the occasional grunt as well, forced out of his lungs whenever the poor slob collecting the beating managed to grab a breath.

Ziva strongly suspected that the poor slob was the NCIS agent whose desk was positioned very closely to hers. She looked to Gibbs for direction.

He gave it to her. Hand signals: circle around and survey. They needed to know how many they were up against, and bursting into camp waving rocks and Ziva's knife was likely to get the wrong people killed. Taking a couple of the enemy by surprise was a much better plan. The pair separated and eased themselves around to observe from the woodland cover.

Not good. There were four men, three of whom were taking turns to see who could do the best job of making chopped liver a la DiNozzo. The NCIS agent's face was barely recognizable under bruises that had already been inflicted, and Ziva winced as one of the men, while DiNozzo was on the ground, landed a kick that she was certain cracked more than one rib. Her anger growing, she forced herself to coldly assess the rest of the scene: trees all around, protecting the attackers from being seen by a casual hitchhiker. She also spotted not only the handgun in the fourth man's hand, but three long-barreled rifles sitting in the corner of the camp, make and model to be determined at a later time. Her fingers tightened on her knife, waiting for Gibbs's signal.

The man with the gun stood up and spoke in Arabic. "That's enough," he told the other three. "Let's see if the lesson has loosened his tongue."

Two of the men grabbed DiNozzo under the arms, hoisting him onto legs that wouldn't support him. DiNozzo hung limply in their grasp; breathing was the extent of his voluntary movement and even that was regretted as the ribs grated against each other.

Gibbs acted. His bullets were wet and useless but Gibbs without a gun was not a powerless man. The baseball-sized rock flew with unerring aim toward the man who was grabbing DiNozzo by the chin, trying to see if the NCIS agent was truly unconscious or merely shamming. The rock did more than connect with the man's skull. It cracked the bone, and the man dropped, blood oozing from the sudden concavity.

That was Ziva's signal. Her knife left her hand, spinning over and over, and buried itself in the most dangerous opponent: the man with the handgun. That handgun could be used against them in these close quarters, and she couldn't allow that. The knife buried itself in the man's back, sliding through the ribs. Blood bubbled out in a wet cough from the man's lips, and he fell forward, the gun slipping from suddenly dead fingers.

Ziva selected her next opponent from the remaining two. Both dropped their victim, and DiNozzo flopped to the earth and sprawled among the dead leaves on the ground. Ziva aimed for the larger of the two, wanting to take out her anger, and was chagrinned to find that Gibbs beat her out. Gibbs grabbed the target by the arm, spun him around, and landed a pile-driver that all but crushed the man's eye.

No time to scold her boss for taking her target. Ziva blocked the blow that the last man aimed at her, glorying in his culture shock that a mere woman would think to oppose him. Palm-strike to the nose, too far off center to kill him, but it rattled his brains nonetheless.

"Whore," he hissed at her in Arabic, staggering back. "Jew bitch! I will rape you and teach you your place among your betters!"

Ziva laughed at him. "A eunuch cannot rape anyone," she sneered back at him, pleased at the astonishment on his face that she understood his words. She blocked the wild punch that he aimed at her face, and returned it with a better-aimed blow. His eyes rolled up in his head, and he toppled over backwards to land beside his previous victim.

Ziva uttered a non-verbal expression of disgust. She had wanted a better fight. This had done little to dispose of her anger. At least the man could have thrown up his arm in defense of himself, she thought.

He hadn't, and it was time to clean up. Ziva forced herself to calm down and move on to the next important issue: her fellow NCIS agent.

Once again Gibbs was ahead of her. "DiNozzo," he scolded, although he kept his voice free from its usual annoyance, "anybody ever tell you not to get caught?" He hooked his hands underneath DiNozzo's arms and dragged him into a more comfortable sitting position against a convenient tree.

DiNozzo coughed, laying his head limply against the boll of the tree. Ziva winced as much as her team mate in sympathy; what was on the outside of that finely-muscled torso was only a fraction of the damage that had been inflicted. He struggled to find the words that he wanted. "Sorry, boss. Wasn't thinking."

"Damn right you weren't," Gibbs grumbled. Ziva wasn't fooled. Gibbs never admitted to caring about his team. It wasn't in their team leader's nature. "Don't expect me to tote you out of here."

"No, boss." Another cough, another wince.

Ziva pulled out a shirt from one of the backpacks that the enemy had carried with them, tearing the cloth into two and wetting it down from the creek. It seemed right; the terrorists had caused the damage, and she could use their supplies to clean up their mess. She gently dabbed at DiNozzo's face, wiping away blood both dried and fresh.

"Ow," he complained. "Be careful."

"I am being careful," she returned. "Does this hurt?"

"Ow! Yes, Ziva, that hurts!"

"Good," she told him unrepentantly. "That means that you are alive and likely to stay that way unless you again do something stupid like get yourself caught by people who want to kill you."

Gibbs hunkered down beside them. "Two dead," he reported, not bothering to keep his voice down. There was no longer any need for quiet. "Going to have to tie up the other two. You see any rope around here, DiNozzo?"

"Little busy at the time, boss." DiNozzo stifled the groan that threatened to emerge as Ziva continued to work.

"Learn to multi-task, DiNozzo. What did these bozos want from you?" Gibbs grabbed some rope that he found next to the camp's supplies and went to work on the two enemy combatants still left alive, making certain that neither one would be able to walk out without a lot of rope cutting from around their wrists and ankles.

DiNozzo forced the answer out through swollen lips. "They wanted the data stick that McGee found."

"So this bunch is connected with the ones across the river in Starksville," Gibbs confirmed. "No surprise there. Any chance that they know for certain that McGee hacked into the damn thing?"

"I don't think so, boss." Another wince. "They seemed to think that we couldn't crack it but were going on the assumption that we all knew the contents, to be on the safe side. They were going to finish me once they found out what they wanted to know."

"They know that the data stick was destroyed in the fire?"

It was hard to produce a smile, but DiNozzo managed a grim parody. "Nope. They think that we still have it."

"Lucky us," Gibbs grunted. "They report in?"

"Yeah. Not good reception, but they got through eventually."

"Figures." Gibbs stood, making command decisions. "That means that more are on the way, looking to kill us." Then a grim smile crossed his face. "That also means that they have a working cell phone. Right?"

"Right, Gibbs." Ziva latched onto the idea and dove into one of the attacker's backpacks, upending it and dumping the contents onto the dirt. The pair of terrorists still alive glared at her. One muttered something vile under his breath; she ignored him. He was no longer of any consequence.

Ziva snatched up the silver-coated device, brandishing it in the air. "Got it. It's even fully charged, Gibbs."

Gibbs nodded in satisfaction. "Give it to DiNozzo." He turned to his other team member. "Get hold of Ducky. Have him get a squadron of Marines out here ASAP; it'll be faster talking to him than trying to go through direct channels on an unsecured line. DiNozzo, can you keep a gun on these geniuses, tied up, until we can get some relief?"

DiNozzo held out his hand for Gibbs to deposit the weapon in it along with the purloined cell phone. It was the sole handgun around, previously owned by the terrorist who now boasted a knife through his ribs. There was a small dollop of blood on it, and DiNozzo wiped his hand on his grimy and torn pants before aiming it loosely at his captors. "I'll manage. You, boss?"

Another grim frown. "Ziva and I are going to go look for McGee."

Shivering. Cold and shivering and wet and hurting and…McGee gave up trying to categorize how he felt. It wouldn't make any difference. There wasn't anyone around to complain to, and the minnows had already made it clear that they didn't care.

Stay positive. Focus. Look on the bright side. Never give up. Keep a stiff upper lip—McGee got bored with listing all the various clichés that he could think of and went back to scraping at the root that still pinned him in place. He was making progress, McGee decided. If he was lucky, he'd be able to cut through it with this rock sometime in the next three days, assuming he lived that long.

Of course he'd live that long, McGee scolded himself. Under the circumstances, dehydration wasn't about to happen. He was in water up to his waist.

Food was another story. How long could he last without it? Thirty days, was what he'd heard. He didn't want to test it. Test to destruction, that's what it would be. McGee blinked, and almost giggled. His mind was wandering, he realized unhappily. Something was making him dizzy with thoughts worthy of an amoeba, and whatever it was seemed likely to kill him. He hoped it wouldn't take too long. If it was going to kill him, then he'd rather go without the painful part that he was enduring right now.

He sighed. It probably would. Take a long time, he meant. Whenever McGee got what he wanted, there turned out to be a fly in the ointment. Look at this, his dream job; it came with DiNozzo to make his life miserable and now it came with the likelihood of ending his life altogether.

Another long sigh, and he turned back to his task. The stone was almost worn to a nubbin. It would take twice as long to scrape his way through the root in order to separate himself from the mass of tree roots that pinned and imprisoned him.

Have at it, McGee, he told himself. Think of it as a problem in C plus plus. That sort of problem required infinite patience to debug it, going through the code line by line until he found the error and corrected it. Many was the time that he and his fellow geeks at MIT had pulled all-nighters, trying to make whatever program work that had tickled their fancy.

Wouldn't the other grad students be laughing at him now? They were all employed by major software corporations, pulling down salaries at least three times his with benefits that would allow them to retire by age forty to their own tropical island. He could have had that, too. Why hadn't he? What was wrong with him, that he'd chosen to go into this sort of work, luckless and thankless and poorly paid for his expertise?

Well, Timothy McGee would be damned if he was going to let this silly little tree root get the better of him! He repositioned the stone in his hand, ready to attack the offending tree root once more—and lost his footing on the slippery river bed.

He fell.

The tree root tore out of his side, taking a healthy chunk of flesh along with it.

Water crashed over him.