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  “We’re not big on publicity,” Frank said.

  “We did what we did because it was the right thing to do,” Joe added.

  Bennett nodded his understanding. “Yeah. Okay. I thought you might say something like that. If you change your minds, though, just let me know.”

  “We will,” Frank said.

  “On to other business, then,” Bennett said. “I was talking to your support crew last night, Jamal and . . .” He paused, trying to recall the name.

  “Chet,” Joe said.

  “Right, Chester,” Bennett continued. “They tell me that you’re good at spotting trouble and that you’ve worked with law enforcement in the past. Now, I don’t want to say that I’m concerned about the race, but something feels a bit funny to me. I could definitely use a few more eyes down at ground level. You’d be surprised what you can miss from a helicopter, or even from our course cameras.”

  “And you want us to do what?” Frank asked.

  “Just keep an eye on things,” Bennett said. “Give me a ring on the emergency phones if you see anything funny going on. That way my people can get right on it.”

  “We can do that,” Joe said.

  Bennett grinned. “Great. I appreciate it. Good luck in the race. And remember, play fair and stay safe.”

  “Don’t worry, we will,” Frank said.

  The brothers finished their trek to the officials’ tent and got their morning start times. Then they ate breakfast and prepared to go.

  Georges Clemenceau was first into the river that morning, followed by Kelly Hawk, and then Victoria Clemenceau and a few other top racers. Because he’d passed them the previous day, Michael Lupin started ahead of the brothers, as did Quentin Curtis. After the Hardys came Maggie Collins, Robert Frid, Roger Baldwin, and the rest of the pack.

  The morning sky shone deep blue over the racers as they navigated the treacherous white water. As midday approached, the Hardys passed several half-sunken boats with soggy racers clinging to them. No one seemed to be in any danger, though, and race officials were already on the scene.

  The brothers beached at the final river checkpoint just before noon. Chet and Jamal met them by the landing site and resupplied the Hardys with provisions for the next part of the journey. Joe and Frank completed their checkpoint rituals quickly. They changed into dry shoes, strapped packs on their backs, and hiked off into the forest.

  They’d made good time during the morning and had drawn closer to the front of the pack. Chet and Jamal told them that Hawk and the Clemenceaus were still among the race leaders, with Michael Lupin close behind. Roger Baldwin had made up time, too, and zipped through the checkpoint. He entered the woods just before the Hardys.

  “With his triathlon training, he’ll be really tough in this phase and the next,” Frank said.

  “The hiking and bike racing are strong points for the Clemenceaus, too,” Joe replied. “If we want to have any kind of decent ranking at the end, we’ll need to keep close to all of them.”

  The course cut through the forest over beautiful rolling hills. The trail was clearly marked with a good, firm dirt surface. Still, the brothers had a long trek ahead of them to the evening’s checkpoint.

  The hike claimed its share of victims, too. They passed a woman with a sprained ankle and, later, a man who’d apparently stumbled into a nest of wasps. Both contestants were talking with race officials via their emergency phones, and neither seemed to be in serious distress.

  The Hardys caught up with Quentin Curtis early in the afternoon. He was jogging fairly slowly and waved as the brothers passed him by.

  “He doesn’t look too winded,” Frank said.

  “Maybe he’s waiting for his friends,” Joe replied as he and Frank jogged over the next hill.

  “I guess the woods can be dangerous if you’re running alone,” Frank said.

  As if to prove his words, twenty minutes later the brothers topped a rise and nearly ran into a bull moose. The huge animal walked slowly beside the trail, browsing new green shoots off the branches within its reach. The animal’s dark eyes spotted the brothers and its big nostrils flared.

  Frank and Joe stopped dead in their tracks. The moose stood only a few feet from the trail, effectively blocking their path.

  “Can we leave the trail and cut around it?” Joe whispered.

  “According to the rules, yes,” Frank whispered back. “We’ll lose some time, though.”

  “I’d rather lose some time than try to face down a moose,” Joe replied. “Let’s back up and cut over to the right.”

  “Check.”

  Carefully edging backward the brothers soon reached the top of the ridge. The moose eyed them as they went but kept browsing the foliage.

  Keeping the animal just in sight, the brothers left the trail and followed the ridge line for several hundred yards. Then they cut back down into the small moraine, paralleling the marked path.

  Their scout training stood the Hardys in good stead as they moved through the woods. They soon cut back to the main trail, well past where they’d seen the moose.

  “Whew!” Joe sighed. “I guess we’ll have to be noisier as we go—give the local fauna plenty of warning that we’re coming.”

  “Good idea,” Frank said. “I’d rather keep to the main trail if we can. It may be legal to leave the path, but they’ve designed the course so that any deviation will cost the contestants time.”

  “Well, if the moose stays there, he’ll hold up all the other racers, too,” Joe said.

  Frank nodded as he jogged. “I wonder if anyone in front of us had to leave the trail.”

  “I was too busy watching the moose to look for other contestants,” Joe replied.

  “Me, too. We should call the moose hazard in, though.”

  “Good idea,” Joe replied. He pulled out his emergency radiophone and relayed the information about the moose to the race control center. A moment later both their radios flared to life with a warning broadcast to all contestants.

  “There we go helping the competition again,” Frank said.

  Joe laughed. “Yeah. Maybe Michael Lupin will want us kicked out because of it.”

  “That guy would be better off if he channeled more of his aggression into running,” said Frank.

  “I’d say he’s doing pretty well on that,” Joe countered. “We haven’t passed him yet.”

  “Or Baldwin, either,” Frank said. “Come on, let’s push it a bit to see if we can catch someone.”

  As the afternoon wore on, the terrain grew more difficult, turning from rolling wooded hills into rocky valleys and steep ridges. They passed several other contestants, but saw no sign of Baldwin, Lupin, or the leaders.

  “Tonight’s checkpoint can’t be far,” Frank said as the sun sank toward the western horizon.

  “Good thing, too,” Joe replied. “I’m beat. These rocky trails are murder on the knees.”

  “Just wait until the real climbing starts tomorrow,” Frank said.

  “Bring it on,” Joe said, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  Less than half an hour later they jogged into the midleg checkpoint. They visited the officials’ tent and registered their times.

  “How are we doing?” Frank asked.

  “Pretty well,” an official with the nametag Sullivan said. “Only about a dozen in front of you.”

  “Any more dropouts?” Joe asked.

  “A couple of sprained ankles in the group ahead of you,” Sullivan said, “and three more behind. Plus, one got skunked. The rest of you will want to give him a wide berth during the rest of the race. We don’t have enough water to wash him down properly.”

  “Maybe the Clemenceaus brought some tomato juice,” Joe offered with a smile.

  Sullivan and the brothers laughed.

  The Hardys quenched their thirst from the race officials’ fresh water supply and then refilled their canteens. The contestants ahead of them had already started a big campfire in a clearing, and a number of race
rs sat gathered around it. Kelly Hawk, Victoria Clemenceau, and Michael Lupin sat by the fireside. As the Hardys settled in and ate some food from their packs, Roger Baldwin jogged up from the officials’ tent. He grunted an acknowledgment to the other racers, then took a place by the fire and ate.

  “I don’t remember passing him,” Joe whispered to Frank.

  “We didn’t pass Georges Clemenceau or Quentin Curtis, either,” Frank replied, “but they’re not here. Maybe we missed them during our moose detour.”

  “Could be,” Joe said. “We weren’t in the woods that long, but I suppose they could have taken their own detours.”

  “Or maybe they’re just in some other part of the camp,” Frank said. He smiled. “Maybe Georges is the one who got skunked.”

  Joe chuckled, but both he and Frank noticed that Victoria kept glancing back toward the officials’ tent. As the sun sank, she got up and began to pace back and forth at the edge of the camp.

  Joe leaned over to Kelly Hawk. “Where’s Georges?” he asked.

  Kelly shrugged. “Victoria came in by herself,” she said. “I haven’t seen Georges. I guess they got separated in the woods.”

  Many other racers straggled in as the evening drew on. Quentin Curtis, Maggie Collins, and Robert Frid arrived within a short distance of each other. Still, there was no sign of Georges Clemenceau.

  “If he was in trouble,” Lupin said, “he’d use the radio.”

  “Unless he couldn’t,” Maggie Collins added.

  As darkness covered the small camp, Victoria’s pacing became more frantic. The stars peeked out in the clear, black sky overhead and nocturnal animals began their ritual songs. All the other contestants had been accounted for, and even the race officials seemed a bit worried.

  Suddenly, without warning, Victoria Clemenceau sprinted off into the darkened woods. Her cries echoed through the night-shrouded trees.

  “Georges! Georges! Where are you?”

  7 A Rock and a Hard Place

  * * *

  “That’s a stupid thing to do,” Michael Lupin said, watching Victoria run into the woods. “There’s no way she can find her brother without a light. She’ll be lucky if she doesn’t get totally lost.”

  As Victoria disappeared into the darkness, Frank and Joe grabbed the flashlights out of their backpacks and dashed after her. It didn’t take them long to find her. She’d tripped over a tree limb near the edge of the woods and lay sprawled on a carpet of leaves.

  Joe helped her to her feet. “Take it easy,” he said. “It won’t help your brother for you to go running into the woods.”

  “We’ll get on the camp radio,” Frank said. “Start a systematic search for him.”

  “I never should have gone ahead of him,” Victoria said, rubbing her ankle. “We should have stuck together, even if it reduced our chances of winning.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” Joe said. “We’ll find your brother.”

  Victoria leaned on the brothers and limped a bit as they returned to camp. “Do not worry,” she said. “I have only twisted it. It will be fine.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “But maybe you should leave the searching to other people.”

  “But Georges is my brother,” Victoria said.

  “We’ll look for him as though he were our own brother,” Joe assured her.

  The camp was already organizing a search by the time they got back. Checkpoint official Sullivan was on the phone to race HQ, requesting assistance.

  “They say they’ll send a couple of choppers,” Sullivan said. “We’re checking with the event photographers, too—to see if they can give us a clue where Mr. Clemenceau might have disappeared to. It would help, Ms. Clemenceau, if you’d stay with us and give us some more information.”

  Victoria Clemenceau nodded. “Of course,” she said, rubbing her twisted ankle.

  “We’ll organize some other racers,” Frank said. “Trace back along the route to see if we can find him.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend that,” Sullivan said. “We don’t want anyone else lost. Our people should be able to cover it.”

  “What if he’s hurt?” Joe said. “Time could be essential. Don’t worry about Frank and me. We’re experienced.”

  “So am I,” Kelly Hawk said, approaching the group. “I’ll go with you. Three people can cover more ground than two.”

  “Great,” said Frank. “Find another person and we can form two teams. Maybe Michael Lupin—he has the outdoor survival experience.”

  Kelly frowned but said, “Okay. I guess we can’t be too choosy at this point.” She sprinted off and quickly returned with Lupin in tow. Lupin didn’t look too pleased at being drafted, but he didn’t complain.

  “The official search team will be taking the main trail,” Frank said, having coordinated his plan with Sullivan while Kelly was gone. “If we stick to the woods on either side of the path, we should be able to hit the ground they’re not covering. If any of us find him, we’ll get on the horn and contact HQ.”

  “What if we don’t find him?” Lupin asked.

  Frank and Joe glanced toward Victoria Clemenceau, talking with the race team a short distance away.

  “We’ll find him,” Joe said.

  “Even though I’m helping out here,” Lupin said, “I still want to win this race. I’ll need time to rest before tomorrow’s leg. I’m not staying out here all night.”

  “Did it occur to you that they may cancel the race if Georges isn’t found?” Kelly said angrily.

  Lupin frowned. “Well, no,” he said sheepishly.

  “Let’s get going,” Frank said. “The sooner we find Georges, the sooner we get back.”

  The official search crew set off down the trail, moving quickly but cautiously. Hawk and Lupin took the woods on the left-hand side, while the Hardys took the forest on the right.

  Moving in the dark, they all quickly lost sight of the camp. Joe had a compass and a map of the route and used them to keep the Hardys on track. Frank kept the main trail and the search crew in sight as the brothers swept the woods for signs of Georges Clemenceau.

  “Where could he be?” Joe asked after forty-five minutes of fruitless searching. “And why would he leave the path?”

  “He might have run into an animal, like we did,” Frank said. “Or he might have been trying for a shortcut.” Radio checks told him the other searchers hadn’t found anything, either. “We just have to keep looking.”

  As they trudged through the brush, the night grew darker and the foliage thicker. Animal eyes shone in the beams of their flashlights, but the creatures quickly flitted away into the darkness.

  The brothers found several small game trails and, each time they did, tracked the trail back to the main path before resuming their original course. In the distance, they heard Hawk, Lupin, and the other searchers calling Georges’s name.

  Two hours into the search, Joe noticed some broken foliage at the edge of a game trail as they backtracked from the main path. Shining his flashlight through the brush, he saw a flash of red in the woods.

  “Frank!” he called. “I see something.”

  The older Hardy looked where Joe indicated. “Too red to be leaves at this time of year,” Frank said. “And it looks as though someone left the path here.”

  The brothers quickly followed the tracks toward the red object. “Georges and Victoria wear red uniforms,” Frank noted.

  “Oh, man! That looks like a body!” Joe said.

  They sprinted the last few yards, ignoring the brush that scratched their arms and legs.

  Georges Clemenceau lay on his face in a pile of leaves in the middle of the small trail. Frank knelt to check on him. “He’s still breathing,” Frank said, “but it looks like he’s had a nasty crack on the head.”

  “What do you think hit him?” Joe asked. Looking around, he saw no low-lying branches or any other obvious obstacles.

  “It doesn’t matter. Get on the horn while I see what I can do for him.” The brothers�
�� first-aid and EMT training had served them well during their previous cases.

  Joe pulled out his radio and called the other searchers. “We’ve found him,” Joe said. “He’s alive, but he’s had a bad crack on his head.” He checked the Global Positioning System display on the emergency phone and read off the coordinates to the searchers. Then he stowed the radio and shone his flashlight toward the main trail so the others could locate them. “They’re sending a chopper,” he said.

  “The woods are too thick to land here,” Frank replied. “We’ll have to move him to the main trail.”

  “Let’s wait,” Joe said. “The main team has a portable stretcher. How’s he doing?”

  “I think he’s got a concussion,” Frank said, “but I can’t tell how bad it is. He doesn’t seem to have any broken bones, and his breathing is regular. That’s good, anyway. Why do you think Georges left the main path?”

  “He might have tried to use this trail as a shortcut,” Joe said. “It fits the directions on the map.”

  “If he did, it was a bad choice,” Frank replied.

  The main rescue team arrived within fifteen minutes.

  “We sent Hawk and Lupin back already,” one of the rescuers said. “You boys should head back, too, if you’re going to continue racing.” She and her colleague quickly assembled the portable stretcher they’d been carrying in their backpacks.

  “We’ll stick with you until the helicopter comes,” Frank said.

  “After all,” Joe added, “who needs sleep?”

  The four of them put Georges on the stretcher, carried him back to the main trail, and then found a spot where the chopper could pick him up. They used their flashlights to signal the chopper pilot, and soon Georges was on his way to a local hospital.

  One of the rescue teams went with Clemenceau. The other hiked back to camp with the Hardys. Even moving quickly, it still took them an hour and a half to get back.

  “Not much shuteye tonight,” Joe groaned.

  “Suck it up, Hardy,” Frank joked. “This is a race, not a vacation.”

  The brothers fell asleep almost as soon as they rolled themselves into their blankets.