Chapter 44 - The Last Stand on the Ridge
The climb to the abandoned ski lodge was an agonizing ascent through fifty-mile-per-hour winds that brought the windchill down to twenty below zero.
My fingers were losing sensation inside my tactical gloves, but Jax moved like an alpine predator, his four-paw drive finding purchase on wind-scoured ice where no human could stand.
The lodge was a cavernous ruin of exposed cedar beams, shattered floor-to-ceiling windows, and rotting stone fireplaces.
Inside the main dining hall, the mercenary commander stood beside two open Pelican equipment cases, furiously transferring the encrypted hard drives into a waterproof mountain rucksack. He had stripped off his heavy winter coat, wearing a tactical plate carrier, an assault carbine slung across his chest.
At the sound of our boots against the frozen floorboards, he spun around, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder.
"You don't know when to die, cop!" he roared over the howling wind tearing through the broken windows.
He didn't fire a single shot. He squeezed the trigger on full-auto, raking the wooden doorway with a spray of armor-piercing rounds.
Splinters exploded like shrapnel.
"Jax, split!"
Jax broke hard to the right, using the overturned timber dining tables as cover, his low-slung body slipping beneath the line of fire.
I returned fire from behind the massive stone fireplace, three rounds punching through the commander’s ceramic chest plate, staggering him backward into the shattered glass of the observation deck.
The man grunted, dropping his empty rifle, but instead of surrendering, he grabbed the rucksack, kicked open the emergency door, and threw himself out onto the high suspension walkway that linked the lodge to the ski lift terminal.
The suspension bridge was eighty feet long, suspended over a hundred-foot vertical drop into the jagged glacial chasm below.
The wooden planks of the walkway were coated in three inches of slick blue ice, the steel suspension cables groaning and swaying violently in the gale.
The commander was halfway across, hauling himself along the hand cable toward the idling snowcat on the opposite cliff.
He looked back, drew a backup stainless-steel revolver from his belt, and aimed it at the bridge cables behind him. If he severed the lead anchor clamps, the bridge would swing down into the abyss, taking any pursuer with it.
"Jax, INTERCEPT!"
Jax didn't look at the hundred-foot drop beneath the swaying ropes. He didn't care about the icy planks that offered almost zero traction.
He hit the suspension bridge at thirty miles an hour.
His claws dug into the frozen timber like steel crampons, his body leaning into the terrifying sway of the chasm.
The commander fired twice.
One round sheared the ear-tip of Jax’s left ear, spraying bright red droplets across the white snow. The second struck the wooden plank inches from his rear paw.
Jax didn't flinch. He closed the thirty-yard gap in four massive, bounding strides.
On the final icy plank, where the bridge met the opposite rock face, Jax launched himself into the air.
Ninety-five pounds of Belgian Malinois struck the commander squarely between the shoulder blades mid-air.
The impact knocked the revolver straight out of the man’s grip, sending the weapon spinning down into the black void of the gorge. The two of them crashed onto the packed snow of the opposite landing, sliding ten feet toward the edge of the sheer cliff.
The commander fought with animal desperation, driving his elbow into Jax’s ribs, his fingers clawing for the tactical knife strapped to his thigh.
Jax caught the man’s right forearm in mid-strike.
The crunch of the radius bone breaking beneath four hundred pounds of jaw pressure echoed across the mountain peak.
The man screamed, his hand opening in agony, the knife tumbling into the snow.
Jax didn't tear. He didn't maul. He held the arm in an immovable, crushing vice, using his front paws to pin the man’s neck to the ice, his dark eyes inches from the commander’s face, letting out a subterranean growl that rattled the man’s skull.
"Don't move," I rasped, clearing the bridge with my weapon drawn, my breath freezing in the air as I kicked the rucksack away from the cliff’s edge. "One twitch, and he takes the rest of the arm."
The commander lay in the snow, weeping into his shattered arm, his arrogance frozen into a mask of pure, absolute defeat.
"What... what kind of dog does that...?" he sobbed.
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"A Seattle police dog," I said, snapping the heavy steel cuffs around his wrists. "Unit 4-Kilo-9."
Far below on the pass, through the clearing blizzard, the searchlights of the responding National Guard helicopters broke through the clouds, their twin rotors beating back the winter storm.
