Chapter 6
The cold hit Emma like a slap as she threw off the wool quilt.
Marc didn’t waste a second on panic. He moved with the quiet, chilling precision of a machine. Pulling his tactical jacket over his shoulders, he tossed Emma her thermal layers and jeans.
“Get dressed. Boots laced tight. Flash drive goes in your inner pocket.”
Emma pulled on her clothes, her fingers steady despite the adrenaline roaring in her ears. “How did they track us through a blizzard? You broke your phone.”
“Not the decrypt,” Marc muttered. “This machine has no radios.” He closed the laptop and shoved it into an olive backpack.
“Rennick opened my clearance file. The cabin was disclosed during my original background investigation. He didn’t track us here—he predicted where I would take you after Delta fell. ”
Emma stared at him. “Then he used what you trusted Blackridge to protect.”
“And sent a team to the only place he thought I would feel safe.” Marc pulled the pack closed. “That prediction ends now.”
He crossed to the back of the cabin, kicking aside a stack of split firewood to reveal a recessed hatch in the floor. He threw it open, exposing a narrow crawlspace packed with extra magazines, flashbangs, and a tactical shotgun.
“They’re coming up the switchback in an echelon formation,” Marc said, turning to face her.
He took her face in both hands, his calloused palms warm against her cold skin.
His gray eyes burned into hers with ferocious intensity.
“I’m taking the fight outside. If they surround the cabin, they’ll burn us out with thermite. ”
“Colt, no—there are four of them!”
“Four men in unfamiliar snow against a prepared defensive perimeter,” he countered, his voice steady as iron.
“The math is on my side. Listen to me, Emma. You stay in the crawlspace beneath the floor. If someone steps through that doorway and it isn’t me, you pull the trigger on that Glock until the slide locks back. Do you understand?”
Emma swallowed hard, her chest aching. She grabbed the lapels of his tactical vest, pulling him down and pressing her mouth hard against his. A fierce, desperate kiss that tasted of cedar and danger.
“You come back to me,” she whispered against his lips. “Don’t you dare die out there.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Not a chance in hell.”
He shoved her gently into the dark crawlspace and pulled the timber hatch shut, throwing the firewood back over the seams.
Darkness enveloped her. Emma curled tightly on the cold earth, gripping the Glock 19 with both hands, thumbs aligned along the frame just as Marc had taught her.
Outside, the quiet morning air shattered.
The sharp, rhythmic crack-crack-crack of Marc’s suppressed rifle echoed down the ridge, followed immediately by the roaring response of heavy automatic fire. Lead tore through the outer timber logs overhead, sending splinters and drywall dust raining through the floorboards onto Emma’s hair.
She flinched, biting down on her lip until she tasted blood, keeping her breathing silent.
Through the floorboards, she heard the tactical shout: “Flank left! He’s behind the woodpile!”
A grenade exploded twenty yards out. The shockwave rattled the cabin’s stone foundation, vibrating straight through Emma’s ribs.
Then came the heavy, wet crunch of tactical boots on the porch outside.
Emma’s heart slammed into her throat. Through a hairline crack between two floorboards, she saw the shadow of a man moving past the window. But it wasn’t Marc. The operative was broad, clad in winter digital camouflage, holding a carbine at high-ready.
Then she saw Marc.
He lunged from the side of the porch, wrapping his left arm around the gunman’s throat while his right hand drove a combat knife under the man’s tactical collar. The struggle was violent, brief, and silent. The operative went limp, collapsing into the snow.
Marc bent over to strip the fallen man’s communications rig.
Suddenly, a deafening burst of gunfire erupted from the ridge above.
Marc spun, his body jerking violently as a round caught him high in the right shoulder. He fell hard against the porch railing, his rifle slipping from his grip and clattering down into the snowdrift below.
“Colt!” The scream died in Emma’s throat.
A second mercenary, clad in black winter gear, emerged from behind the generator shed forty feet away, leveling a submachine gun straight at Marc’s exposed back.
Marc reached for his sidearm with his left hand, but his shoulder gave out, his movement a fraction of a second too slow.
Emma didn’t think. The spreadsheets, the auditing, the rulebooks—all of it vanished.
She slammed her palms upward against the wooden hatch, kicking the split firewood aside. She didn’t stay in the hole. She bolted out onto the porch, raising the Glock 19 with both hands.
“Hey!” she screamed across the snow.
The gunman flinched, his barrel swinging instinctively toward the sudden target on the porch.
That split second was all Marc needed.
Using the railing for leverage, Marc rolled onto his side, drew his SIG Sauer with his uninjured left hand, and fired three rounds in rapid succession. Two struck the mercenary’s armor; the third caught the exposed seam beneath his raised arm. He folded forward, dropping face-first into the snow.
Silence descended over the ridge, broken only by the ragged rasp of Marc’s breath.
Emma dropped to her knees beside him, her hands trembling as she grabbed his jacket. Blood was pouring through the shattered fabric of his right shoulder, crimson soaking the snow beneath him.
“I’ve got you,” she choked out, tears finally breaking past her eyelashes. “I’ve got you, Marc.”
Marc looked up at her, his face pale, sweat beading on his brow despite the freezing air. His gray eyes, though glazed with pain, were wide with disbelief.
“You… broke protocol,” he rasped, coughing slightly as he pressed his hand against the wound.
“I saved your stubborn ass,” she sobbed, half-laughing through her terror as she ripped off her scarf to pack against the bleeding wound. “Now shut up and hold this.”
A low, guttural laugh vibrated in his chest, cut short by a wince. “Remind me… never to audit your books.”
The dead operative’s dispatch tablet lay half buried beside the porch.
Its screen was still awake. Emma reached for it without releasing the pressure on Marc’s wound.
The final order displayed a Blackridge routing header, the target coordinates, and an authentication block ending in the same residue she had found in the ledger: CR-OPS.
She used the tablet’s screen-capture function, preserved the authentication block, and locked the original display. Rennick had signed the order that led the killers to the cabin. This time, the numbers had kept his name.
Before Emma could answer, the deep, mechanical chop of heavy helicopter blades echoed through the mountain valley, growing louder by the second.
Two black Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawks crested the granite ridge, blowing blinding sheets of powdery snow across the clearing as they hovered twenty feet above the timber cabin.
Marc’s delayed distress packet had told Vance that Delta was compromised.
When counterintelligence discovered Rennick’s access to Marc’s clearance file, the cabin became the first place the federal rescue team searched.
The aircraft bore only federal markings: United States Marshals Special Operations Group. Blackridge personnel rode aboard as tactical advisers, but the rescue itself belonged to the government.