Chapter 30 - The Ring of Fire
It didn't sound like thunder. It sounded like an earthquake.
Gabriel shoved the radio into his pack, spun around, and scooped Nora into his arms before the echo of Arthur’s voice had even faded from the concrete walls.
"Hold on to me, Nora! Wrap your arms around my neck and do not let go!"
Nora buried her face into his throat, locking her small fingers into his jacket collar with terrifying strength. She didn't ask what was happening. She knew. The monsters had found the door.
Gabriel rushed to the heavy iron blast door, sliding the viewing slit open.
His blood ran completely cold.
Through the falling snow and the thick cedar trees, three tactical armored personnel carriers—eight-wheeled monsters mounted with heavy remote weapon stations—were plowing through the timber, their massive tires crushing saplings like dry grass.
Behind them walked twelve men in full hazardous-materials combat armor, carrying industrial-grade incendiary flamethrowers and thermite grenade launchers.
They weren't here to search the bunker.
They were going to seal it with liquid fire, turning the underground room into a concrete incinerator.
And standing on the roof of the lead armored vehicle, illuminated by the harsh halogen floodlights cutting through the blizzard...
Was Elena.
Half of her face was covered in a pristine, white porcelain mask, concealing the catastrophic burns from the yacht explosion in Emerald Bay. But her remaining eye burned with a deranged, triumphant madness. In her gloved right hand, she held a remote detonator.
"GABRIEL!" her voice shrieked through an external amplifier, echoing off the granite cliffs like the scream of a banshee. "COME OUT WITH MY DAUGHTER! OR I WILL TURN THIS ENTIRE MOUNTAIN INTO YOUR GRAVE!"
Gabriel stepped back from the door.
There was only one way out. The bunker had an emergency escape hatch—a vertical drainage shaft forty feet high that led to the upper rim of the granite waterfall above the gorge. But climbing it required both hands. It was slick with ice, rusted, and vertical.
With Nora on his back, a single slip meant falling forty feet onto concrete.
*BOOM!*
A thermite canister slammed against the exterior steel blast door. The heavy iron groaned, and within seconds, the center of the door began to glow a terrifying, cherry-red. The temperature inside the bunker skyrocketed instantly; the air filled with the suffocating stench of burning paint and molten steel.
"Gabriel..." Nora coughed, tears streaming down her soot-stained cheeks. "It's hot..."
"Look at me, Nora!" Gabriel barked, grabbing her shoulders, his eyes blazing with an unyielding, unbreakable light. "We are going up the chimney! You are going to ride on my shoulders, and you are going to hold onto my head like a little crown! No matter what happens, you don't look down! Do you hear me?!"
"I won't look down!" she cried.
Gabriel hoisted her onto his shoulders. Nora locked her legs around his neck, her tiny hands clamping around his forehead.
Gabriel turned to the rusted iron rungs set into the dark vertical shaft in the back of the bunker.
Behind them, the blast door gave way.
A torrent of liquid thermite and orange napalm erupted into the front of the bunker, turning the wooden table and cots into an immediate roaring wall of fire.
Gabriel grabbed the first frozen iron rung with his bare hand and pulled himself upward into the blackness.
He climbed.
Ten feet. Twenty feet. The heat below followed them like a living beast, licking at the heels of Gabriel’s boots, the smoke rising into the shaft and choking his lungs. His muscles screamed in absolute agony; his bloody hands slipped on the frozen iron, leaving crimson handprints on every rung.
Thirty feet.
Above them, a circular iron grate opened to the freezing night sky. Snow fell through the opening, dusting Nora’s hair with white flakes.
Gabriel reached the top. With his last reserve of human strength, he shoved the heavy iron grate upward with his head and shoulders, spilling out onto the razor-thin precipice of the granite waterfall.
The freezing blizzard hit them like a wall of ice.
Gabriel pulled Nora down into his arms, rolling away from the smoking shaft onto the snow-covered rock.
They were at the top of the cliff.
Below them, the entire valley floor was engulfed in a sea of roaring orange fire. The bunker was a furnace. The forest was burning in a catastrophic circle of destruction.
Gabriel stood up, swaying on his feet, his breath coming in ragged, bloody wheezes.
He turned toward the only path leading north toward the Canadian border—a narrow suspension footbridge made of wooden planks and steel cables, spanning a four-hundred-foot gorge over a churning, frozen river.
Gabriel took two steps toward the bridge.
And stopped dead.
Standing at the center of the suspension bridge, silhouetted against the white expanse of the snowy gorge...
Was a solitary figure.
He was dressed in an immaculate, heavy cashmere overcoat, leaning calmly against an ivory-handled walking cane. His silver hair blew gently in the freezing wind.
Arthur Ashford.
The billionaire smiled, adjusting his silk scarf, looking across the bridge directly into the eyes of his four-year-old target.
Beside Arthur, kneeling on the bridge with a remote detonator wired directly to the suspension cables, stood two snipers.
Arthur raised his cane, pointing its silver tip directly at Gabriel’s heart.
"Welcome to the end of the board, Gabriel," the old man called out over the howling wind, his voice smooth, elegant, and devoid of mercy. "Step onto the bridge and fall... or turn around and burn with the child."
Nora tightened her grip on Gabriel’s coat, looking down into the four-hundred-foot abyss beneath the swaying bridge.
Then, she looked up at Gabriel.
"Gabriel..." she whispered, her voice strangely calm, her tiny finger pointing not at Arthur, but at the cliffs towering high above them on the opposite peak. "Look."
May you like
Gabriel snapped his head toward the high peak.
And what he saw moving through the blizzard above the bridge made his heart stop entirely.
