12. Banks
BANKS
The radio keeps talking. Keeps saying my name in that flat dispatcher's tone like I'm a case file instead of a man standing in a frozen gorge with a gunshot graze leaking through his bandage and a woman who weighs a hundred and thirty pounds soaking wet looking up at me like I have answers.
I don't have answers. I have a dead mercenary at my feet, a stolen combat knife, two pistols with a combined seventeen rounds, and a BOLO broadcast on every law enforcement frequency in southcentral Alaska telling the world I'm a killer.
The math is ugly.
My SAR team operates out of Palmer Station.
Twelve-man rotation. I've worked with every single one of them.
Bled with most. Cory Diggs pulled me out of a crevasse on Denali three years ago.
Martinez talked me through the worst night of my career when we lost that family on the Matanuska. These are men I trust with my life.
But they follow protocol. Every one of them. That's what makes them good.
Protocol says when a BOLO drops, you report contact. You don't freelance. You don't make judgment calls about whether your buddy actually committed a triple homicide. You call it in, you stand down, you let the investigation sort it out.
Which means if I radio Palmer Station right now, Cory picks up.
Cory hears me. Cory's relief lasts about four seconds before training kicks in and he patches the call through to Alaska State Troopers dispatch.
Troopers scramble a bird. They land in force.
They cuff me facedown while Hadley screams that they've got it wrong.
Then they separate us.
That's the part that locks my jaw so tight my molars grind.
They put her in the back of a trooper's SUV. They drive her to Anchorage. Some detective in a fluorescent-lit room asks her to recount her statement. She tells them everything. The waterfall. The execution. The men with rifles. The mercenaries who hunted her through a blizzard.
And every word she says gets filtered through the frame these people have already built.
Because whoever is running this operation has money. Real money. The kind that buys a private helicopter and a four-man kill team and enough pull to poison a law enforcement bulletin within hours of a botched cleanup. The kind that doesn't leave witnesses.
Hadley becomes a witness in state custody with no protection detail and a target on her back as massive as Anchorage.
And I become a suspect in a holding cell sixty miles away, unable to reach her.
No.
The word isn't a thought. It's a physical reaction. Involuntary. Like a reflex hammer hitting the spot below my kneecap. Every muscle in my body contracts around a single, non-negotiable truth.
They don't get her.
Not the mercenaries. Not local law enforcement. Not state troopers following a poisoned bulletin they don't know is poison. Nobody gets her. Nobody touches her. Nobody puts her in a room without me standing between her and the door.
I look down at the dead man. Mid-thirties.
Clean-shaven. No unit patches, no branch insignia, nothing traceable.
His boots are Salomon. Top-shelf. His base layer is Arc'teryx, same as mine.
The pistol I pulled off him is a SIG P320 with the serial filed smooth.
His radio is Harris multiband, the kind SOCOM uses.
These aren't poachers. These aren't local guns-for-hire. This is a professional sanitization team, and someone paid a fortune to put them here.
Which means the men Hadley saw at the falls weren't just committing a murder.
They were conducting an operation. The duffel bag they threw into the crevasse is the key.
Whatever is in that bag is worth killing for, worth framing a federal SAR operative for, worth deploying air assets in a storm window.
I remember what I know. Prioritize. Discard.
The helicopter is still out there. It pulled east when the gorge walls blocked its sight line, but it will circle back. The pilot has thermals. Dense tree canopy helps. Open ground kills us.
The ground team lost one close to the cave.
One here. That leaves at minimum two, plus the pilot and whoever is calling shots from wherever this operation is being coordinated.
The dogs I heard earlier have gone quiet, which means either the handlers pulled them back to regroup or the storm remnants killed the scent trail at the ravine where I dropped the bridge.
I have maybe an hour before they reconsolidate and push into this gorge from both ends.
I need to move.
I strip the dead man's pack. Find a half-liter of water, two protein bars, a signal mirror, fifty feet of paracord, and a small waterproof map case. Inside the case is a topographic overlay of the Chugach Range with three points marked in red grease pencil. Rally points. Extraction coordinates.
One of them is twelve miles northwest. Right at the old mining road that connects to the Glenn Highway.
That's their exit.
I fold the map and tuck it into my front pocket. Check my bandage. Blood has soaked through, but the bleeding has slowed to a seep. Manageable.
I turn back to Hadley. She's still wedged into the crevice where I put her, clutching my backup sidearm with both hands, her bright brown eyes enormous in her wind-raw face. The pink streak in her hair is matted with ice. Her lips are cracked. Her knee is swelling visibly through her leggings.
She's looking at me like I'm the only solid thing left in the world.
"We move. Now."
I kill the radio. Snap the battery out and pocket it separately. The handset goes into a snowbank. If they're tracking their own frequencies, a live radio is a homing beacon.
Hadley observes while I work without asking questions. She's learning. Adapting. City girl figured out real fast that silence keeps you alive.
"Can you put weight on that knee?"
She tests it. Winces hard enough to bare her teeth. Nods anyway.
Stubborn. Good.
I set the dead man's tactical belt free and rig a compression wrap around her joint, cinching it tight over her leggings. Not a brace. Better than nothing. She sucks in a breath through her nose but doesn't make a sound.
"We need to cover ground. Three miles. Uphill. Terrain gets ugly."
Her eyes flicker but hold steady on mine.
"I'll make it."
She says it like a promise. Not to me. To herself.
I hand her one of the protein bars. She tears it open with her teeth and eats while walking. I set the pace. Slower than I want. Faster than her knee can sustain.
We move northeast. Away from the marked rally points on their map, away from every trail and fire road in the Chugach.
I'm heading into country that doesn't show up on civilian topo sheets because there's no reason for civilians to go there.
No trails, no cabins, no cell towers. Just ice and granite and sky so big it swallows you whole.
I trained here. Eight years ago. Winter warfare selection with the 11th Airborne out of Fort Wainwright.
They dropped twelve of us above the snow line with minimal kit and told us to survive for nine days.
Three guys tapped out before sunset. The rest of us found shelter in a network of ice caves carved into the northeast face of a ridge the instructors called the Spine.
No GPS coordinates for the Spine exist in any system I know of. The instructors navigated by landmark and compass bearing. I memorized every step because that's what I do. I record terrain the way other people record faces. The mountain stays in my head long after the names fade.
The climb is brutal. Hadley's breathing goes ragged within the first half mile.
I take her pack weight, which is nothing because she doesn't have a pack.
Just my backup sidearm tucked into her waistband and the emergency thermal blanket wadded under her arm.
I'm carrying everything else and bleeding through my bandage and it doesn't matter.
None of it matters. The only metric that registers is the sound of her footsteps behind me, crunching snow in uneven rhythm, still moving, still following.
The tree line drops away at twenty-three hundred feet. Bare granite and wind-packed ice. I put her on my windward side to block the crosswind that would knock her flat. She grabs the back of my pack strap without being told. Holds on.
The cave entrance looks like nothing. A shadow between two slabs of granite, narrow enough that I have to turn sideways to pass through.
Inside, the passage opens into a chamber roughly fifteen feet deep and eight feet wide, with a ceiling high enough for me to stand.
The walls are solid ice over rock, blue-white and ancient.
The temperature inside sits around twenty-eight degrees.
Brutal by any civilized standard. Paradise compared to the wind outside.
No one is finding us here. Not dogs, not helicopters, not thermal imaging.
The rock overhead is eighteen feet thick.
The entrance faces north into a cliff wall that blocks line of sight from every approach angle.
You'd have to know exactly where this cave is and how to reach it, and the only people who know are a handful of Army instructors and eleven soldiers, three of whom are dead now from various wars and deployments.
I'm the ghost map. I'm the only way in and the only way out.
I clear the cave. Check for animal occupation.
Nothing. Not even a frozen scat pile. I unroll the dead mercenary's thermal pad on the stone floor and help Hadley sit.
Her knee has swollen to twice its normal size.
She lowers herself with a hiss and a sharp exhale, then leans back against the ice wall and closes her eyes.
I build a heat source. No fire. Smoke would mark our position like a flare. Instead, I activate two chemical heat packs from my medkit and position them against the thermal pad. Radiant warmth in a small space. Enough to keep her core temperature stable.