14. Banks
BANKS
Three machines. Three shooters. One narrow gorge with limited cover and a wounded SAR tracker running low on ammunition.
Good enough.
I shove Hadley against the rock face behind me. Her fingers grip the back of my jacket. I can feel them trembling through the layers.
"Stay behind this boulder. Do not move. Do not look."
She nods against my spine. I don't wait for more.
The lead snowmobile is two hundred yards out and closing fast on a straight approach up the drainage. The other two have split wide, flanking through the trees on either side. Textbook pincer. Whoever this enforcer is, he's trained.
But he's trained for flat ground. For open terrain. Not for this.
I drop behind a granite shelf and glass the gorge through my scope.
The walls here narrow to forty feet across, choked with house-sized boulders and ice formations that have calved off the cliff face over centuries.
One way in. One way out. The snowmobiles have speed, but speed means nothing in a bottleneck.
The left flanker hits the gorge mouth first. He's riding aggressive, standing on the pegs, a short-barreled carbine bouncing on a chest sling. His machine bucks over a buried rock and the nose dips. Half a second of instability.
I put a round through his engine block.
The snowmobile seizes. The track locks. Eight hundred pounds of steel and fiberglass pitches forward and the rider catapults over the handlebars into a snowbank with enough force to bury him to his waist. He's already clawing for his weapon when I send the second round six inches from his head.
He stops clawing.
"Next one goes through your skull. Stay down."
The shot echoes off the gorge walls, multiplying, bouncing, turning one rifle into what sounds like four. The right flanker brakes hard behind a boulder cluster a hundred yards out. Engine idling. Waiting.
The lead rider never slows.
He cuts his machine sideways in a perfect combat stop, using the snowmobile chassis as a barricade, and opens fire before the snow settles. The first burst chews rock splinters off the granite shelf three inches above my head. Accurate. Controlled. Three-round groups.
I roll left off the shelf and drop into the drainage channel that cuts the gorge floor. Eighteen inches deep, packed with ice. Barely enough to hide a man my size if I push my face into the icy gravel.
Rounds walk across the ground where I was lying. Methodical. He's probing.
I belly-crawl ten feet through the channel, keeping below the lip, and come up behind a different boulder. New angle. The enforcer is still positioned behind his snowmobile, scanning the shelf where I'd been.
Wrong spot.
I put two rounds into the snowmobile's fuel tank. The first punctures. The second sparks. The machine doesn't explode like the movies. It catches. A low, spreading fire that turns the white chassis orange and forces the enforcer to abandon his cover.
He moves well. Rolling away from the burning machine, finding a new position behind a fallen slab of ice in under two seconds. But those two seconds cost him his sight line on my position.
I'm already relocating. Moving through the boulders in a low combat crouch, using the gorge walls and the drifted snow to mask my silhouette. My side screams with every step. The wound from the bridge has opened again and I can feel warm blood soaking the bandage under my jacket.
Doesn't matter.
The right flanker finally commits. His engine roars and he comes screaming up the gorge, trying to flank while his boss has me pinned.
Bad call. The gorge narrows to thirty feet here, and a massive ice formation hangs off the left wall like a frozen wave, creating a choke point barely wide enough for the machine.
I grab a fist-sized rock and hurl it at the ice formation as he passes underneath.
The rock hits the overhang and a fracture line spiders through the translucent blue surface. A massive chunk of ice shears off and drops.
It catches the snowmobile's rear end. The machine spins sideways, flips, and pins the rider's leg under the track assembly. He screams. His carbine skitters across the ice, well out of reach.
Two down. One standing.
The enforcer is smart. He's gone quiet. No more firing. No engine noise. Just the wind and the crackling of his burning snowmobile and the pinned man's groaning.
I hold position behind a boulder and slow my breathing. Listen.
Nothing.
He's repositioning. Working through the rocks the same way I am. Hunting me while I hunt him.
I check my magazine by feel. Four rounds left in the rifle. The backup sidearm is with Hadley. The dead mercenary's pistol from yesterday sits in my waistband with an unknown round count.
The wind shifts. I catch a scent that doesn't belong in an alpine gorge. Gun oil and expensive cologne.
Close. Very close.
A shadow passes across the snow to my left and I spin, bringing the rifle up, and find myself staring directly into the muzzle of a suppressed pistol held rock-steady by a man with dead eyes and a senator's money behind him.
We fire simultaneously.
His round takes me across the ribs. Same side as the bridge graze. The bullet tears through the jacket’s outer layer, skips off the bottom rib, and keeps going. Not a clean hit. Not a miss either. The impact spins me sideways and my back slams into the boulder behind me.
My round catches his suppressor. Shears it clean off the barrel and sends it spinning. The pistol bucks in his hand and his second shot goes wild, punching into the gorge wall five feet above my head.
Half a second of mutual surprise. Half a second where we both register that neither of us is dead.
Then it's hands and teeth and desperate animal violence.
He closes the distance before I can cycle the rifle bolt. Smart. Inside the rifle's effective range, the long barrel becomes a liability. He drives his shoulder into my wounded side and the pain whites out my vision. My knees buckle. The rifle drops.
His elbow comes up, aimed at my temple. I tuck my chin and take it on the forehead instead.
Stars, but no blackout. I wrap both arms around his torso and drive forward with my legs, lifting him off the ground and slamming him spine-first into the granite wall.
The rock face has a lip of ice on it and his skull bounces off the frozen surface with a sound like a baseball bat hitting a melon.
He doesn't go down.
This man has been hit before. He's been slammed and shot at and frozen and he keeps operating. Whatever the senator is paying him, he's worth it.
He hooks his thumb into my wound.
I roar. But I don't let go.
My hands find his throat. Not a choke. A gouge. Thumbs pushing into the hollows below his jaw, fingers locked behind his neck, driving his head back into the rock. He abandons my wound and grabs my wrists, trying to break the grip. His face is turning dark. Veins rope across his forehead.
He knees me in the stomach. I double over but my hands stay locked. He knees me again. A third time. Each blow loosens my grip by fractions and I can feel my fingers cramping, going numb from the cold and the exertion and the blood loss that's made my jacket heavy and wet down the entire left side.
He breaks free.
I stagger back. He gasps, sucking air, one hand going to his throat. His eyes are bloodshot and furious and completely devoid of fear. He pulls a combat knife from a sheath on his thigh. Six inches of blackened steel.
I have nothing.
He lunges. The blade comes in low, targeting the femoral artery.
I twist sideways and the knife opens a line across my hip.
Shallow. Burning. I catch his knife hand at the wrist on the backswing and wrench it outward, rotating his arm against the elbow joint.
Something pops. He grunts but switches the knife to his other hand with the fluid ease of someone who has practiced that transition a thousand times.
The second thrust comes high, aimed at my neck. I block it with my forearm. The blade bites through my jacket sleeve and into the meat of my left forearm. I lock my arm around his, trapping the knife between us, and headbutt him square in the nose.
Cartilage crunches. Blood sprays across both our faces. He reels.
I rip the knife free from my own arm, reversing it in my grip. The handle is slick with my blood. The blade is warm.
He sees it coming. Tries to dodge left. Too slow. The dislocated elbow has stolen half his mobility on that side.
I drive the knife into the junction of his neck and shoulder. Deep. All the way to the guard.
His legs go out. He drops to his knees, both hands reaching for the handle.
His mouth opens and closes but nothing comes out except a wet, gurgling rasp.
His dead eyes find mine and for the first time something human passes through them.
Not fear. Recognition. One professional acknowledging another.
Then it's gone.
He falls forward and doesn't move again.
I stand over him, blood dripping from my arm and my ribs and my hip, painting the white ground in irregular splotches that steam in the freezing air. My pulse hammers so loud it fills the gorge.
Then it fades.
And there is nothing.
No engines. No gunfire. No helicopter rotors. No radio chatter. No dogs.
Just the wind. Just the ancient, indifferent silence of a mountain that was here before any of us and will be here long after.
The pinned rider under the overturned snowmobile has gone quiet. Unconscious or playing dead. The buried flanker near the gorge mouth hasn't moved. I stand and listen for a full thirty seconds, bleeding, scanning every shadow, every tree line, every ridge.
Nothing comes.
I pick up my rifle from the ground. Cycle the bolt. Chamber a round. Walk the perimeter of the kill zone on legs that feel like they belong to someone else.
Clear.
"Hadley."
"It's done."