14. Banks #2
The sat-phone is in Hadley's jacket pocket where I stashed it this morning. She pulls it out with shaking hands when I limp back behind the boulder, and the look on her face when she sees the blood covering me nearly breaks something in me that I didn't know was still intact.
"You're hurt. Banks, you're really hurt, you need to sit down and let me?—"
"Phone."
She hands it over. Her fingers brush mine.
Warm against cold. I pull my fist around the sat-phone and lower myself against the boulder, biting down on the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper.
My left arm has gone mostly numb below the elbow where the knife went in.
The rib wound has reopened for the second time and the blood has soaked through the bandage, through my layer, through my jacket lining, all the way to the outer shell.
I'm leaving a trail a blind man could follow.
Two hours. Maybe three. That's what I have before the blood loss takes my energy. After that, I become a liability instead of an asset.
Hadley drops to her knees beside me and starts pulling at my jacket zipper. I catch her hand.
"Not yet. Phone first."
"You are literally bleeding from four different places."
"Phone first."
She purses her lips. Doesn't argue. Just regards me with too much trust for a man who is currently calculating how many bullets he has left.
Fourteen. Six in the rifle. Eight in the pistol I pulled off the dead enforcer. Plus whatever is in the sidearm I gave Hadley. Call it twenty rounds total.
Not enough.
I power on the sat-phone. The screen glows blue in the gray morning light, casting shadows across Hadley's face.
She's pale. Lips cracked from the cold. The fading pink streak in her hair is matted with ice and sweat and dirt.
She looks nothing like the polished influencer I pulled out of that ice cave a lifetime ago.
She looks real.
I punch a number into the sat-phone from memory.
Not local dispatch. Not the Juneau SAR office.
Not the state police. Every single one of those channels is compromised.
The radio chatter we intercepted yesterday proved that.
The senator's money runs deep enough to buy badges, and any call I make through official channels gets me a bullet instead of a rescue.
One number. Fourteen digits. A direct line I memorized six years ago in a plywood shack in Kandahar and swore I would never dial unless the situation had gone completely sideways.
The phone rings. Once. Twice. Three times. The satellite connection crackles with atmospheric interference from the storm system that's still circling the mountain range to the north.
Four rings. Five.
Pick up.
Six.
"This line is not active."
"Rooftop. Mazar-i-Sharif. June ninth. The lieutenant who wouldn't leave the bird."
Silence. Three full seconds of it.
"Tanner. You stubborn son of a bitch."
"Colonel Maddox."
"It's Deputy Director Maddox now. FBI Northeast Division. And this line hasn't rung in three years. Which means you're either dead or about to be."
"Working on the second one, sir."
I give him the situation in the clipped, stripped-down format he drilled into us during field briefs. Location. Threat assessment. Civilian asset. No wasted words. No editorial. Just data.
Hadley listens. She's ripping strips from the dead enforcer's jacket and shoving them against my arm while I speak. I let her. The pressure helps.
"Two men dead at a frozen waterfall near the Kahiltna drainage.
Professional hitters. A third victim, identity unknown, executed and dumped with a duffel into a crevasse.
The duffel is likely evidence of the mining operation.
Flight manifest from a private helicopter ties the hitters to Senator Kenneth Ridler's office through a shell company called Borealis Extraction LLC.
I have the manifest. I have GPS coordinates for the crevasse, the helicopter cache, and the illegal mining site. "
I rattle off the coordinates. Maddox doesn't ask me to repeat them. He never had to.
"The senator has framed me through local law enforcement channels. They're broadcasting that I went rogue, murdered the men at the falls, and kidnapped the civilian witness. Every badge in a hundred-mile radius thinks I'm the threat."
"And the civilian witness?"
I look at Hadley. She's tied off the makeshift bandage on my arm and is now adding pressure with both her palms against the wound on my ribs, her jaw set, her eyes locked on the blood seeping between her fingers with a determination that belongs on a battlefield, not on a twenty-five-year-old woman from Manhattan who was supposed to be filming a sponsored hike.
"She's with me."
"Copy that." No follow-up questions. He was always good at reading what wasn't said.
"I'm spinning up a federal extraction team out of Elmendorf-Richardson.
HRT assets. My people, not locals. They'll come in with federal jurisdiction and enough firepower to make the senator's bought deputies think twice. "
"Timeline."
"Two hours minimum. Maybe two and a half depending on weather at altitude. The storm system?—"
"Two hours is a long time, sir."
"I'm aware. Tanner, listen to me carefully. I intercepted state police traffic on the way into this call. Senator Ridler went loud fifteen minutes ago. He's activated his insurance policy."
"Define insurance policy."
"A dozen deputies from the Mat-Su Borough sheriff's department.
His people. Every one of them hand-picked, every one of them on his payroll.
They mobilized from a staging area at Talkeetna with snowmobiles and dogs and shoot-to-kill authorization.
Based on the chatter, they've got your approximate grid from the sat-phone ping when you powered it on. "
I look down at the phone in my hand. The blue screen pulses against my blood-smeared fingers.
Of course.
The sat-phone I took from the helicopter pilot. Registered to Borealis Extraction LLC. The senator's own hardware. The moment I powered it on, it broadcast my position to every asset in his network.
I brought them right to us.
"How far out are the deputies?"
"Radio traffic puts them at the Kahiltna River fork twenty minutes ago. You know that terrain better than I do. How long from the fork to your position?"
I do the math. Twenty minutes from the river fork. Six miles of drainage gorge. Snowmobiles traveling in a pack through broken terrain with fresh snow, conservatively thirty miles an hour with stops to navigate obstacles.
"Forty minutes. Maybe less if they push."
"Then you have forty minutes to get somewhere defensible and stay alive until my people arrive." A pause. "Can you do that?"
My left arm won't close into a fist. The knife wound has severed something important in the forearm.
My ribs grate with every breath. I've lost enough blood to make my vision swim when I turn my head too fast. I have twenty rounds, no comms to anyone except a man two thousand miles away, and the only person in the world who matters to me is kneeling with my blood on her hands.
"Yes, sir."
"Banks." He uses my first name. He never uses first names. "Don't you die on that mountain."
"Negative, sir."
I kill the connection. Pull the battery from the sat-phone and crush the SIM card under my boot heel, grinding the chip into the snowy gravel until it's powder. No more signals. No more pings.
Hadley gawks at the destroyed phone.
"That was our only way to call for help."
"Already called. Help is coming. Two hours."
"Two hours." She processes it. Reads the thing I'm not saying. "But something else is coming first."
I pick up the rifle. Check the bolt. Scan the gorge entrance where the morning light is turning the snow into a blinding white corridor that stretches south toward the river fork.
Toward the sound of engines that hasn't started yet but will. Very soon.
"Twelve of them. Forty minutes."