MY HERO K9 TACKLED A SCREAMING 7-YEAR-OLD IN FRONT OF A LYNCH MOB—THE CHILLING SECRET BENEATH THE LEAVES SAVED HER LIFE, BUT STARTED A DEADLY CONSPIRACY

The pitch-black room exploded into screams and wild, muzzle-flashing gunfire.

The mercenaries fired blind, their automatic bursts stroking the dark in violent, jagged bursts of orange light. The ricochets shrieked off the steel transformer casings, gouging fiery sparks from the brick walls.

They were firing at ghosts.

Jax moved like a wraith in the dark. He didn't charge in a straight line; he used the industrial pillars, striking from the flank, taking the first shooter down by the thigh with a bone-crushing snap, dragging him away from the detonation terminal before the man could draw a sidearm.

I took the second gunman out with three rapid, center-mass shots guided by the muzzle flash of his rifle.

The team leader—the man holding the master remote trigger—dived through the emergency ventilation shaft, scrambling up a rusted steel service ladder that led directly into the maintenance shaft beneath the elevated monorail track.

"Jax, with me!"

We burst through the upper maintenance hatch into the freezing rain fifty feet above 5th Avenue.

The Seattle Monorail track ran like a narrow concrete ribbon twenty feet above the street traffic, slicing through the high-rise canyons between Westlake Center and the Space Needle.

The storm was howling down the avenue, wind ripping off the glass facades of the skyscrapers. The concrete guideway was three feet wide, slick as grease under the downpour, suspended over a four-story drop to the asphalt below.

Thirty yards ahead, sprinting along the concrete track toward the moving monorail train slowing down for the Westlake terminal, was the leader.

He had the remote detonator strapped to his forearm. If he boarded that train, he would disappear into the crowded terminal with enough high explosives behind him to bring down the commercial heart of the city.

"Stop!" I shouted, the wind tearing the words from my mouth as I stepped onto the narrow track beam.

The man turned, raised a high-caliber semi-automatic pistol, and fired three rounds down the beam.

The first slug struck the concrete between my boots, sending stone splinters into my shins. The second caught me in the shoulder of my tactical vest, the blunt-force trauma knocking me down onto one knee, my Glock slipping from my wet glove and tumbling into the darkness below.

The man smiled—a cruel, triumphant grin against the gray rain. He raised his weapon to finish me.

"Jax... VORAN!"

Jax didn't hesitate. He didn't care about the sixty-foot drop on either side of the narrow three-foot concrete beam. He didn't care about the gale-force crosswinds trying to blow him off the rail.

He launched down the concrete track at full sprint, his claws digging into the rough aggregate like steel spikes.

The gunman swung the barrel toward the charging dog and fired.

A bullet grazed Jax’s left ribcage, tearing a bright red line through his fur, but the momentum of ninety pounds of Belgian Malinois didn't drop by a fraction of a mile per hour.

Jax cleared the final ten feet in a massive, horizontal dive.

He hit the gunman squarely in the chest just as the blue monorail train drifted past the platform thirty feet away. The force of the impact drove the man hard against the emergency railing at the edge of the track.

The gunman swung his heavy fist, pounding Jax across the skull, trying desperately to break the dog’s grip, but Jax’s jaws were an immovable vise of bone and muscle clamped across the man’s forearm, crushing the metal remote detonator into useless, shattered plastic.

"Off, Jax!" I sprinted across the wet beam, slamming into the leader, tackling him to the concrete deck, driving my knee into his spine and wrenching his hands behind his back into heavy steel cuffs.

The man screamed, thrashing against the wet track, his eyes wide with horror as he looked over the edge of the beam into the abyss below.

Jax stood over him, his breath coming in ragged, steaming bursts, rain streaming off his black muzzle, his blood dripping into the puddle beneath his paws, his tail held high and unyielding against the storm.