15. Hadley
HADLEY
Twelve men. Forty minutes.
The numbers bounce around my skull like a pinball, refusing to settle into anything that makes sense.
Twelve is a dozen. A dozen is a lot. A lot of men with guns and shoot-to-kill orders and the legal authority of badges that Banks says mean nothing because the man who pinned them bought them like party favors.
Forty minutes is the length of a spin class. The runtime of a sitcom episode without commercials. The amount of time I once spent choosing between two nearly identical shades of nude lipstick for a flat-lay photo that got eleven thousand likes.
Forty minutes is not enough time to survive what's coming.
Banks crosses to the dead enforcer's snowmobile in four long strides, his boots punching through the crust of frozen blood and churned snow that marks the killing ground.
The machine sits canted at an angle where its rider left it, engine still ticking as the metal contracts in the cold.
Banks swings one long leg over the seat, turns the key that's still dangling in the ignition, and the engine catches on the first try.
It roars to life, the sound splitting the morning quiet like a chainsaw through glass.
"Get on."
I don't move. Not because I don't want to.
My legs have stopped accepting commands from my brain.
My knee, the one I twisted running through the deep snow yesterday, has swollen to something grotesque inside my borrowed thermal pants.
Every time I shift my weight, white fire shoots from kneecap to hip.
Banks looks back at me. Those pale gray eyes sweep from my face to my legs and back again. He reads the situation in under a second.
He leaves the snowmobile idling, crosses back to me, bends down, and scoops me up with one arm under my knees and the other behind my back. His left arm, the one with the knife wound, doesn't even tremble. Whatever pain it costs him, he buries so deep I can't find a trace of it on his face.
He sets me on the back of the snowmobile like I weigh nothing. Positions my hands on the grab handles bolted to either side of the seat.
"Hold these. Don't let go. No matter what."
"Where are we going?"
He points. Down the gorge, past the narrow throat of rock where he killed the enforcer, the terrain drops sharply through a series of switchbacks choked with alpine spruce.
Beyond the trees, maybe two miles below us, a frozen lake stretches like a slab of dirty white concrete between the mountain walls.
Even from this distance I can see the flat, open expanse of it, unbroken by trees or terrain.
"Extraction point. Frozen lake at the bottom of the drainage. That's where the FBI team will land."
"That's two miles down a mountain."
"Yes."
"On a snowmobile."
"Yes."
"With twelve men behind us."
He doesn't answer that one. He straddles the machine in front of me, and the seat dips under his weight. His back fills my entire field of vision.
He reaches back without looking and grabs my right hand. Pulls it forward. Wraps it around his waist. Does the same with my left. Locks both my hands together against the hard plate of his stomach, my fingers interlaced over muscle and gear.
"Hold me. Not the handles."
"You just said hold the handles."
"Changed my mind. You hold me."
The engine screams as he hammers the throttle. The snowmobile lurches forward so violently my neck snaps back and my teeth crack together. I taste copper. My arms clench around his torso with every ounce of desperate strength I have left.
We shoot down the gorge like a bullet through a barrel.
The world becomes a smear of white and dark green and gray rock.
Banks steers with a kind of violent precision that has nothing to do with recreation and everything to do with combat driving.
He cuts between boulders with inches to spare.
Leans the machine so hard into turns that my knee nearly scrapes the snow.
The wind tears at my face, ripping tears from my eyes and freezing them into salt crystals on my cheeks before they can fall.
I press my forehead between his shoulder blades and close my eyes. The vibration of the engine shakes through both our bodies. His heartbeat is a steady, slow drum against my clasped hands. Mine is a hummingbird trying to escape a cage.
A tree branch catches me across the shoulder. The pain is sharp and immediate but Banks doesn't slow down. Can't slow down. Behind us, faint but growing, I hear the whine of other engines.
Not one.
Not two.
Many. A swarm of high-pitched mechanical screaming carried on the wind, bouncing off the rock walls of the gorge and multiplying until it sounds like the mountain itself is chasing us.
They found us faster than forty minutes.
Banks hears it too. His stomach tightens to iron under my hands. The snowmobile accelerates again, and the frozen lake below grows larger through the gaps in the trees.
We hit the lake at full speed and the world opens up.
The trees fall away like curtains ripped from a stage, and suddenly there is nothing.
No cover. No rocks. No gorge walls. Just a flat, endless white plane stretching in every direction, rimmed by mountains that look painted against the hard blue sky.
The snowmobile's track bites into the lake ice with a sound like tearing fabric, and Banks opens the throttle so wide the machine practically lifts off the surface.
Behind us, the forest vomits snowmobiles.
They pour out of the forest in a ragged line, their headlights cutting the morning glare like angry yellow eyes.
I count them because counting gives my brain something to do besides scream.
Four. Six. Nine. They keep coming, spreading out over the ice in a wide crescent, trying to flank us before we can reach the far shore.
The first shot cracks the air somewhere to our left.
Not close. A warning, maybe. Or just a bad aim on a bucking snowmobile at distance.
The second shot hits the ice fifteen feet ahead of us and punches a fist-sized hol.
Water, black and impossibly cold, surges up through the puncture and freezes almost instantly in the wind.
Banks doesn't flinch. Doesn't swerve. He guns us directly over the bullet hole and the machine jumps as the track catches the rough spikes of shattered ice.
The third shot hits the rear cowling of our snowmobile with a metallic shriek.
I feel the impact travel through the chassis and into my bones.
Fiberglass shrapnel peppers the back of my coat.
Banks drops his weight left and the machine carves a violent arc across the lake surface, spraying a rooster tail of ice chips that glitter in the sun like broken glass.
"Stay low!"
The wind finds the area in my clothing and drives needles of cold into my skin.
My fingers are numb where they grip his jacket.
I squeeze harder, certain that if I let go the centrifugal force of his turns will fling me off the back like a ragdoll and leave me spinning throug the ice until the deputies run me down.
Banks cuts right. Then left. Then right again in a pattern that seems random but isn't. He's reading the ice.
I can feel it in the way he shifts his weight, subtle adjustments that happen faster than conscious thought.
He knows where the ice is thick and where it's thin.
Where the snow has packed hard enough to give the track purchase and where it's loose powder over black water.
He drives the icy lake the way a surfer reads waves, intuitive and absolute, his body an extension of the machine.
A volley of gunfire rips from the ice to our right.
Three, four, five impacts in quick succession, each one punching through the surface and leaving a dark wound that immediately weeps water.
Banks swerves hard left and accelerates into the turn, using the spray of ice from our own track as a screen.
The deputies behind us have to split around the rough ice we've carved up, and two of them collide in the gap.
Their machines tangle and tumble, bodies and metal spinning across the lake in a catastrophic cartwheel that I see over my shoulder with my mouth open.
Seven left.
Banks aims for a pressure ridge. It rises from the lake surface in a jagged wall of refrozen ice slabs, pushed up where tectonic forces in the glacier compressed the frozen sheet into something that looks like a miniature mountain range.
The ridge is maybe four feet tall at its peak.
Banks hits it dead center at sixty miles an hour.
We go airborne.
My stomach drops. The engine howls in open air, the track spinning against nothing.
For one eternal, weightless second I am untethered from gravity and physics and every natural law that keeps human beings grounded and alive.
I grip Banks so hard my arms shake. His body stays perfectly still, balanced, centered, his hands light on the handlebars as if this is just another Tuesday.
We land hard on the other side. The impact drives my spine down into the seat and my teeth into my tongue.
Fresh blood fills my mouth. The snowmobile's suspension bottoms out with a metallic groan but Banks is already accelerating again, using the pressure ridge as a wall between us and the pursuing deputies.
They have to go around. Some of them try to follow and hit the ridge at bad angles. I hear the crunch of fiberglass and the strangled yelp of an engine dying. One less.
Six left.
Another burst of automatic fire tears across the ice ahead of us.
Banks reads the trajectory and cuts behind it, threading the gap between bullet impacts with the kind of spatial awareness that doesn't come from training alone.
It comes from something deeper. Something wired into his nervous system from years of making split-second decisions where wrong means dead.