Chapter 47
The silence that fell over the frozen creek bed was heavier than the snow itself. Cole knelt in the freezing slush, his hands digging violently into the earth, his chest heaving with ragged, agonizing breaths.
He had failed. The apex predator, the untouchable ghost of Task Force 9, had been broken.
"Cole," Sarah whispered, groggily pushing herself up from the snow, wiping a streak of blood from her nose. She looked around the empty, ruined landscape. "Nora... where is Nora?"
Cole didn't answer. He slowly pushed himself to his feet, ignoring the ringing in his ears and the profound, crushing weight of failure. He walked over to where Ava lay unconscious in the snow.
He knelt beside her, gently rolling her onto her back and checking her pulse. It was steady, but her face was pale, a nasty bruise swelling on her temple.
"Donovan," Cole commanded, his voice devoid of any emotion, hollowed out into a terrifying, absolute void of lethal intent. "Status."
Donovan struggled to her feet, leaning heavily on her rifle. "I'm functional, Boss. But we are exposed. The local authorities will be responding to the explosions."
"Let them come. We won't be here," Cole stated, lifting Ava effortlessly into his arms. "Sarah, grab the encrypted terminal from the guest house wreckage. I need you to track that VTOL."
"Cole, they used military-grade stealth tech," Sarah argued, stumbling as she walked. "It won't show up on any standard radar."
"Everything leaves a trace, Sarah," Cole whispered, his pale gray eyes burning with a dark, apocalyptic fire. "Find the radiation signature. Find the thermal exhaust. I don't care if you have to hack the Pentagon's primary defense grid. You find out where that plane went."
They retreated to the hidden, underground garage where Cole kept an unmarked, heavy-duty transport vehicle for absolute emergencies.
They loaded Ava into the back. Cole sat in the driver's seat, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly the leather creaked.
He didn't speak for the entire drive to the secondary safehouse in Seattle. His mind was entirely consumed by the logistics of vengeance. He wasn't planning a rescue mission. He was planning an extinction-level event.
Hours later, inside the sterile, windowless safehouse, Ava finally regained consciousness. She woke with a gasp, sitting up violently on the medical cot.
"Nora!" Ava screamed, tears instantly flooding her eyes.
Cole was sitting in a chair beside her bed. He didn't offer empty platitudes. He reached out, his large, calloused hand gripping hers tightly.
"They took her, Ava," Cole said softly, his voice thick with raw, agonizing grief. "I couldn't stop them."
Ava stared at him, her chest heaving, the reality shattering her soul. She didn't cry. She didn't collapse. She looked at the man who had protected her for ten years, and her hazel eyes hardened into fierce, uncompromising iron.
"Then you find them, Cole," Ava whispered, her voice laced with pure venom. "You find them, and you burn them to the ground."
"I have a lock," Sarah announced from the adjacent room, standing over her laptop. "The VTOL didn't head south. It went north. Extreme north."
Cole stood up, walking toward the screens. "Where?"
"Svalbard," Sarah reported, her face pale in the glow of the monitor. "An unmapped archipelago in the Arctic Circle. The coordinates point to a massive, subterranean facility buried beneath the permafrost."
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"The Omega Vault," Donovan realized grimly.
"Prep the winter gear," Cole commanded, racking the slide of his pistol. "We are going to the edge of the world."
