Chapter 54 - The Scent of Pine and Cordite
David didn’t wait for the Suburbans to open their doors.
He dove into a narrow ravine carved by spring runoff, tumbling down through briars and snowdrifts until he hit the floor of the pine forest. Asset 409 had stopped crying; the infant was clutching David’s shirt with both tiny fists, his skin burning with an unnatural, feverish heat. The LED on his wrist was humming now—a steady, terrifying whine that felt like a detonator countdown.
Behind him, car doors slammed.
"Spread out in teams of two! Suppress and secure!" a gravelly tactical voice commanded through the trees. "Asset 409's transponder is thirty meters south! The father is armed—center mass double-taps only!"
Four men. Ex-military. Moving with tactical discipline, boots crunching through the crust of the snow.
David knew he had less than ninety seconds before their thermal optics cut through the thin canopy of hemlock branches. He looked down at Asset 409. The baby’s veins near the wrist band were glowing with a pale, bioluminescent blue tint—Julian’s synthetic genetic additives reacting to the extreme stress and cold.
"Hold on, little guy," David whispered.
He slid beneath the overhang of an ancient granite boulder half-buried in the hillside. Setting the child down on the driest patch of pine needles he could find, David gripped the knife with his teeth and pulled his firearm.
He had five rounds left in the magazine. No spare clips.
The first contractor stepped into view ten yards away, sweeping an HK416 carbine mounted with a PEQ-15 infrared laser. The red beam danced across the bark of the boulder, millimeters from David’s boots.
David didn't fire. He waited until the man turned his head to check his six.
In a fraction of a second, David lunged from the shadows. His left hand smashed the contractor's rifle barrel toward the frozen earth while his right drove the hilt of his ceramic pistol into the side of the man’s Kevlar-reinforced helmet. The operative grunted, dropping to one knee, but reached for a sidearm with terrifying speed.
David slammed his combat boot into the man's throat, pinning him to the snow, and pressed his gun barrel directly beneath the contractor's ballistic eyewear.
"Disarm the wrist tracker," David whispered, his breath steaming against the man's face.
The operative spat blood, a venomous smile touching his split lips. "You don't get it, do you? That's not just a tracker, Sterling. It's a biometric regulator. If Cassandra remotely disconnects that unit, that baby's heart stops in ten minutes. She owns his pulse."
Before David could reply, a voice crackled through the comm-link mounted to the dying soldier’s shoulder:
*Unit Two, report. Target 409's heart rate has spiked to two-ten. We are initiating localized neural lockdown.*
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Asset 409 let out a suffocated, agonizing gasp from beneath the rock.
***
