Chapter 14 - Shattered Stone
A high-caliber round slammed into the stone pillar inches from my head, showering my face with sharp granite dust. I grabbed Hannah by the tactical vest, shoving her behind the reinforced iron casing of the old lighthouse door as an entire magazine of suppressive fire chewed up the wooden doorframe.
"Are you hit?" I roared over the deafening whine of ricochets.
"I'm clean!" she shouted back, racking the bolt of her submachine gun with fierce efficiency. "They're trying to funnel us toward the upper levels! There's only one exit!"
"Good," I snarled, a lethal grin spreading across my face. "Let them try to climb."
In close-quarters vertical combat, weight and position were everything. Cole’s men were professional contractors, but they were fighting in a vertical cylinder where gravity and choke points favored the defender.
I pulled a flash-bang grenade from my tactical vest, pulled the pin with my teeth, and tossed it upward through the central opening of the spiral staircase.
BOOM.
A blinding flash of magnesium-white light and a concussive shockwave echoed up the stone shaft, followed immediately by the desperate screams of operatives tumbling backward down the iron steps.
"Move! Up!" I grabbed Hannah’s hand, and together we sprinted up the spiral stairs, our boots clattering against the rusted metal grid.
We burst out onto the open lantern gallery at the very top of the lighthouse. The wind up here was ferocious, howling off the Atlantic and whipping our hair across our faces. The old glass dome of the lantern room was shattered, letting the freezing sea spray mist over the rusted iron floor.
There was nowhere left to run. We were trapped eighty feet above the jagged rocks.
Footsteps echoed heavily on the stairs behind us. Cole emerged onto the gallery, his tailored suit torn, blood trickling from a cut above his left eyebrow, his pistol raised and aimed directly at my chest. Two surviving operatives flanked him, their weapons locked on Hannah.
"End of the line, Victor," Cole gasped, breathing heavily, his eyes wild with desperate fury. "Hand over the drive, or I drop the girl right off this ledge into the rocks."
I stood between Cole and Hannah, my own pistol empty, the slide locked back in the empty position.
"You won't get away with this, Cole," I said, my voice eerily calm against the howling gale. "The entire federal oversight committee has a dead-man switch keyed to my satellite communicator. If my heartbeat stops for sixty seconds, your entire black-ops roster goes public to every news agency in the world."
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Cole hesitated, his finger twitching on the trigger. He knew I wasn't bluffing. In my line of work, a dead man's switch was the only currency that truly mattered.
"Drop the weapon, Victor," Cole hissed, his face contorting with rage. "Drop it, or I swear to God I'll put a hole through her anyway."
