Chapter 35 - THE DUEL AT ZERO DEGREES
The bullet left the barrel and entered the storm.
For two full seconds, the universe narrowed to the path of that single sliver of copper. The round punched through the wall of horizontal snow, caught the violent thermal downdraft of the ravine, curved downward and inward along a parabolic arc of mathematical perfection, and slammed into the Devil’s Tooth.
Through her scope, Emma saw the impact.
The bullet did not strike Kozlov's chest. At the final millisecond, a violent gust of crosswind deflected the projectile by two inches. The round struck the titanium chassis of Kozlov’s rifle, shearing the optic clean off its mounting rails and disintegrating the receiver in a shower of sparks and metal fragments.
A figure tumbled out from behind the black basalt outcrop, rolling down the steep shale slope into the snow-filled gully below.
"Target hit!" Emma reported quietly, instantly pushing herself up from the snow. "Rifle destroyed. Target is mobile, falling back toward the secondary redoubt at the old weather station."
"Emma, wait!" Donovan called out. "Sensors are picking up three additional signatures moving up the northern trail! Kozlov isn't alone! Davies’ private military contractors—a security extraction team from Black Shutter—they’ve reached the pass on snowmobiles!"
Emma didn't hesitate. She slung her heavy rifle, drew her suppressed sidearm, and broke into an aggressive, low-profile sprint across the frozen ridgeline.
The snow flew from beneath her boots. Her lungs burned with the icy air, but her mind was incandescent with clarity. This was not a bureaucratic office. This was not the humiliation of the parade ground where Colonel Vance had made her crawl in the gravel to pick up brass. This was the arena where the Carter family had settled debts for three generations.
She reached the perimeter of the derelict weather station within four minutes.
The facility was a relic of the Cold War—a sprawling complex of rusted corrugated iron, shattered radio masts, and concrete bunkers half-swallowed by thirty years of mountain storms. The front gates hung off their hinges, groaning in the gale.
Emma slipped through the breach like a wraith.
The sound of two-stroke engines echoed from the northern gully. The Black Shutter extraction team was arriving. They were here to pull Kozlov out and secure the second volume of the ledger before Pale Horse could extract the truth.
Inside the darkened main hall of the weather station, the air was stagnant, smelling of mildew, frozen iron, and fresh cordite.
A trail of dark red droplets stained the frosted concrete floor.
Emma followed the blood trail with her sidearm raised, clearing every doorway with surgical speed. She moved without a sound, her boots stepping over broken glass without generating a single crunch.
She reached the central communications room—a cavernous vault dominated by rusted mainframe racks and dead cathode-ray monitors.
In the center of the room, sitting on a rusted metal desk with his back against a reinforced concrete pillar, sat Ivan Kozlov.
He was an old man, his beard tangled and white, his face leathered by decades of exposure to high-altitude sun and freezing wind. His right arm hung limp at his side, soaked in blood from the shrapnel of his shattered rifle. But his left hand was steady, resting on an old leather briefcase resting on his lap.
And on the table beside him sat an antique mechanical metronome, its silver needle ticking slowly back and forth across the dial.
*Tick. Tack. Tick. Tack.*
"You shoot like your grandfather, girl," Kozlov said in a low, gravelly voice that carried a thick Russian accent. He didn't look up; he just watched the metronome swing. "He had the same cold heart. The same refusal to bend."
Emma stepped out from the shadows, her weapon trained dead-center on his forehead.
"Where is the ledger, Ivan?" Emma asked, her voice dropping to a deadly whisper.
Kozlov chuckled—a ragged, wet sound that ended in a cough of red foam.
"You think the ledger matters?" Kozlov raised his head, looking at Emma with pale, cataract-clouded eyes that held no fear, only a bitter, mocking amusement. "The ledger is already dead, little Emma. The people Davies worked for... they didn't wait for me to reach the border. Look at your radio."
Emma didn't move her eyes, but in her ear, Donovan’s transmission suddenly devolved into screeching, high-energy jamming.
May you like
"Carter!" Donovan’s voice fought through the static. "Multiple cruise missiles detected incoming from the Black Sea! Non-attributable maritime launch! Impact on your coordinates in three minutes! They're sanitizing the entire mountain!"
---
