8. Banks #2
I push into her and the sound that leaves me is something I have never made. Not in thirty-three years. Not once. Her back arches and her legs lock around my hips and she pulls me deeper and I am lost. Completely. Irrevocably.
She falls asleep with her face pressed into the hollow of my throat.
One breath she's tracing lazy circles on me with her fingertip, mumbling something about how her followers would never believe this, and the next she's gone. Out cold. The transition is instant, the way only total exhaustion delivers unconsciousness. No gradual drift. Just a switch flipping off.
I don't move.
Her breath comes slow and even against my neck.
Warm and damp. Each exhale lands on the same patch of skin until it feels like a brand.
Her leg is thrown across my hips, her arm draped over my bandaged ribs, and her weight is nothing.
A hundred and thirty pounds, maybe less.
I've carried packs heavier than her up Denali's West Buttress.
The woodstove ticks and pops. Embers shift behind the iron grate. The cabin holds its warmth like a fist, but I can feel the temperature dropping outside. The wind has shifted. Northwest now, coming down off the glacier, and the change in pressure makes the old roof timbers creak and groan.
I gaze at the ceiling and begin the work of staying alive.
Inventory first. Always inventory first.
My SAR pack sits against the far wall where Hadley dropped it when we breached the door.
Contents I've already used: the medkit, half depleted.
Thermal blanket, currently balled up on the floor.
Two chemical heat packs, spent. Fifty feet of eight-millimeter rope, most of it still coiled.
Ice axe, leaning against the doorframe. Three protein bars.
Water purification tabs. Signal mirror. Dead radio. Sixty rounds of .308 for the rifle.
Sixty rounds.
The scout I dropped carried a Heckler and Koch MP5. Suppressed. Night optics on a rail mount. That is not backcountry militia hardware. That is government-contractor-grade equipment, the kind of gear that comes with a logistics chain and a handler and a budget that has too many zeros.
I run the math. Three men at the falls. One she saw executed.
Two shooters. I neutralized one. That leaves a minimum of one confirmed hostile on the far side of that ravine.
But a team running suppressed MP5s with night optics doesn't operate in pairs.
Standard private military contractor fire team runs four to six operators.
So I subtract the dead man. Subtract the one I put down.
That leaves two to four men who have observed me destroying their only crossing point over a hundred-foot chasm.
Two to four professional killers who now know exactly what direction we went.
The bridge is gone. I made sure of that.
But the ravine isn't infinite. It runs northeast for roughly six miles before it narrows enough to cross on foot, and southwest another four before it meets the river fork.
A fit operator in cold-weather gear could cover that distance in five to seven hours, even in this storm.
I glance at the window. The shutters hold, but thin blades of snow whistle through the gaps in the wood. The blizzard is still dumping, visibility still zero. That's our only advantage. The storm is a wall between us and them, but walls come down.
I look at the cabin. One door, solid pine, no deadbolt.
I wedged a chair under the handle when we came in, but that buys thirty seconds against a boot or a breaching charge.
Two windows, both shuttered. The shutters are old growth timber, thick, but a rifle round will punch through them without slowing down. No back exit. No cellar. No tunnel.
A box. We're sleeping in a box.
Hadley shifts against me. A small sound in her sleep, something between a sigh and a whimper. Her fingers curl against me, gripping skin, and even in unconsciousness she holds on like she's afraid I'll disappear. I press my mouth to the top of her head. Reflex. Not a decision.
The pink streak in her hair tickles my nose. She smells like woodsmoke and the cheap soap from the cabin's supply shelf and something underneath both of those things that is just her. Warm skin and sleep.
I shut my eyes. Open them. The ceiling hasn't changed. The math hasn't changed.
We cannot stay here.
The trapper's cabin is a known location. It appears on USGS topographic maps. Any operator worth his kit will have those maps loaded on a GPS unit, and any competent tracker will check every structure within a ten-mile radius of last contact. This cabin isn't shelter anymore. It's a target.
I need to move us before the storm breaks.
Southeast toward the Kahiltna drainage, where the terrain gets thick enough with old-growth spruce to break line of sight and scatter thermal signatures.
Twelve miles to the ranger station at Mile 118.
Twelve miles through deep snow with a wounded side and a woman whose boots have three-inch heels.
No. Defense won't work. Not with sixty rounds against an unknown number of operators carrying hardware that outclasses mine. Not with a civilian to protect. Not with a wound that's already seeping through the fresh bandage.
I need to hunt them before they hunt us.
The thought settles into my bones with familiar weight. I spent four years doing exactly this before SAR. Different mountains. Different continent. The same calculation. When you can't outrun a superior force, you don't run. You become the thing in the dark that they're afraid of.
Offense. Ambush. Eliminate.
But that means leaving her. Even for an hour. Even for twenty minutes.
I flex my hand. The one that was in her hair an hour ago. The one that pulled a trigger twelve hours before that. Same hand. Two purposes. I have to reconcile them or we both die here.
A plan forms. Ugly and simple. I set the snare lines from my pack across the two approach corridors. Tripwires with the last chemical flares to light up anyone approaching in the dark. Position myself in the forest with the .308 and wait. Let them come to the cabin. Let them think they've found us.
Then take them apart.
I'm still building the shot sequences in my head, calculating distances and angles and wind compensation, when the sound changes.
Not gradually. All at once.
The wind dies.
The howling that has been our constant companion for nine hours just stops, like someone reached up and turned off the world.
The silence that replaces it is so complete, so absolute, that my ears ring with the sudden absence of noise.
The cabin timbers stop groaning. The snow stops hissing through the shutter gaps.
The fire in the woodstove becomes the loudest thing in existence.
I sit up. Hadley slides off me and lands on the mattress with a soft sound but doesn't wake.
Gray light bleeds through the cracks in the shutters.
Dawn. The storm has broken at dawn and the timing is wrong.
The front was supposed to hold for another eighteen hours.
I checked the barometric pressure six hours ago. It should still be dumping.
The gray light brightens.
Then it turns white.
Not sunlight. Too focused. Too directional. The light slices through the shutter gaps in hard, defined beams that sweep across the cabin interior like prison searchlights. It moves in a pattern. Systematic. Searching.
The sound follows a half-second later. Deep, percussive, shaking the dust from the rafters. Rotor wash. The unmistakable thud of a helicopter at low altitude, the downdraft rattles the shutters against their bolts.
I'm on my feet before the second pass. Rifle in my hand. Pain screaming through my bandaged side. Hadley's eyes fly open, wild and confused in the blinding white light that cuts across her face.
The spotlight sweeps back over the cabin and holds.