Chapter 43 - Iron Beneath the Ice
The avalanche didn't hit us with a clean drop; it struck like an ocean wave of crushed white concrete.
"Jax, GET TO COVER!"
I threw myself against the armored flank of the transit van, dragging the wounded federal marshal who had crawled through the cracked emergency hatch beneath the vehicle’s steel undercarriage.
The wall of ice hit.
The world went violently white, cold, and breathless. The shockwave lifted our twenty-thousand-pound armored vehicle and slammed it three feet sideways against the sheer granite wall of the ravine, groaning under the immense weight of the snow piling over its roof.
For thirty terrifying seconds, there was only the roar of grinding ice, the sound of metal buckling, and the suffocating pressure of frozen powder packing around our faces.
Then, the slide stopped.
We were buried under six feet of dense snow, the vehicle forming a small, triangular pocket of air against the cliff face.
The air was freezing, thick with ice crystals. The two marshals inside were groaning, semi-conscious from the impact, while the witness—a key accountant who had documented the syndicate’s offshore assassination accounts—was hyperventilating in terror.
"We're trapped," one marshal choked out, his fingers numb, bleeding from a scalp wound. "There’s no way out... we’ll freeze before SAR can dig down fifty feet."
A sharp, rhythmic scraping broke the silence from above the hood.
Scratch. Rip. Crack.
Through the dense packed snow, two massive black paws broke through the frozen crust.
Jax had survived the edge of the slide by vaulting onto the high granite shelf inches before the wall of snow hit. He wasn't trapped; he was digging from the top down with the frantic, mechanical power of a living backhoe.
His claws tore through the packed ice, his snout thrusting into the hole to blow warm air into the pocket, his breath steaming in the dark.
He widened the fissure until his black mask appeared, his copper eyes burning with urgent intelligence. He grabbed the shoulder strap of my tactical parka with his teeth, pulling backward with all ninety-five pounds of his muscular frame, clearing the snow pack to create an airway for the survivors below.
"Out! Move!" I ordered the marshals, boosting the witness up through the narrow vertical shaft Jax had carved.
One by one, we hauled the survivors up through the ice hole onto the surface of the slide.
Above us, through the blinding curtain of falling snow, the faint yellow glow of halogen floodlights flickered three hundred yards up the mountain.
The mercenary commander had survived the avalanche. He had retreated up the abandoned logging road to the derelict Summit West ski lodge—a decaying three-story timber complex perched on the rocky ridge overlooking the valley.
Beside the lodge, an industrial snowcat sat idling, its heavy tracks churning the snow as it prepared to haul the stolen master servers out across the unmonitored backcountry trails into Canada.
"He’s taking the servers," the accountant gasped, clutching his bruised ribs. "If those drives cross the border, the financial proof dies, and every person who testified against them is marked for death."
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Jax stood atop the avalanche mound, his coat encrusted with white frost, his tail held high and unyielding against the arctic gale. He looked up at the ridge, then down at me.
"We finish it," I said.
