Chapter 10 - The Iron HiveEthan didn't die.
At the split second the bullet left the barrel, a silver blur shattered the frost-covered window. Maya, the she-wolf, lunged into the cabin, taking the heavy bullet through her shoulder. The sheer kinetic force of her attack knocked the operative's aim off, sending the round tearing through the wooden floorboards instead of Ethan’s skull.
Maya let out a pained, guttural roar, using her remaining strength to snap her jaws onto the operative's helmet visor, cracking the reinforced glass.
"FALL BACK! SECURE THE ASSET!" the commander barked, dragging his wounded comrade out into the roaring blizzard toward an armored, ski-fitted heavy transport vehicle idling in the snow.
By the time Ethan dragged his broken body off the floor, the engines were roaring. The transport tore through the pine trees, disappearing into the whiteout toward the peak of Mount Sentinel—the highest, most treacherous summit in the range, where no human was supposed to be able to survive.
Ethan collapsed beside Maya. The heavy she-wolf was bleeding heavily from her chest, her breathing shallow and ragged.
"You can't die on me now," Ethan wept, pressing his hands against her bloody coat. "Not after everything. She needs us... Ava needs us!"
The four small pups crept out from under the table, whimpering and licking their mother's face. Maya let out a faint, painful whine. She looked up at Ethan, her gold eyes gleaming with an ancient, unyielding intelligence. She nudged her head toward his coat pocket.
Inside was the thumb drive his wife had recorded three years ago.
Ethan plugged it into his wrist terminal. A hidden, secondary partition had opened on the drive—a map file, unlocked only when the drive was exposed to the specific sub-zero frequency of the Apex Directive's tactical comms.
The map revealed a sprawling, subterranean megastructure carved deep into the molten core of Mount Sentinel: The Iron Hive. It was three times the size of Facility 09, a black-budget military lab that had been secretly operating since the Cold War.
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Ethan bound his cracked ribs with duct tape, patched Maya’s wound with emergency medical foam, and loaded his heavy-duty snowmobile with every explosive charge and high-caliber round he had left in his stash.
He looked at the wounded mother wolf. "We're going to burn their kingdom to the ground."
