Chapter 119 - 118 Seven Days
**[ALISTAIR]**
The memory of the gorge does not simply play in my mind; it violently drags my consciousness backward in time, plunging me directly back into the freezing, blood-stained snow of three years ago.
I stand on the edge of the granite cliff in the present day, but my eyes are completely blind to the empty night sky. I am back in the brutal, suffocating depths of Blackwood Gorge. It is the seventh day of the search and rescue operation.
For seven excruciating, agonizing days, I had completely defied the cold, hard mathematics of human survival. Logic dictated that no one could survive a catastrophic fuselage disintegration at thirty thousand feet, followed by a week of sub-zero temperatures in a hostile wilderness. I am a man who builds empires on logic. Yet, I had clung to a desperate, completely irrational sliver of hope. Arthur’s body had not been among the seven recovered from the primary debris field. Therefore, in the darkest, most desperate corners of my disciplined mind, a microscopic probability remained. My older brother was resourceful. He was strong. If his seat had been thrown clear, if he had somehow deployed a survival parachute, he might still be alive, wandering the frozen labyrinth of the gorge, waiting for me to find him.
That fragile, illogical hope kept my blood pumping through the extreme frostbite. It kept me marching through the waist-deep snowdrifts for a hundred and sixty hours straight.
Then, on the afternoon of the seventh day, the tactical radio strapped to my heavy winter parka hissed with a burst of static.
*"Command, this is Bravo Team,"* a voice crackled over the encrypted frequency, the audio distorted by the heavy mountain winds. *"Grid sector four-niner. We... we found him, sir. We found the primary target."*
I did not ask for a condition report. The heavy, hollow silence following the transmission conveyed everything I needed to know.
I abandoned the command tent. I sprinted through the dense, snow-choked pine forest, my heavy tactical boots tearing through the deep powder. My lungs burned with the freezing, thin mountain air, every inhale feeling like inhaling crushed glass. I pushed past the perimeter guards, violently shoving heavy branches out of my path until I breached the edge of a small, jagged ravine.
Bravo Team was standing in a loose circle, their heads bowed, the heavy snowfall dusting the shoulders of their black tactical gear.
They stepped aside as I approached.
I stopped at the edge of a snowdrift. The world around me completely ceased to exist. The howling wind, the crunch of the ice, the heavy breathing of the security team—it all faded into a vacuum of absolute, suffocating silence.
Lying partially buried beneath a mound of fresh, pristine white snow was a body.
The heavy winter coat was torn and scorched, the fabric stiff with frozen blood. The face was completely obscured by the angle of the fall and the accumulation of ice, but the left arm was thrown out to the side, the sleeve pushed back to expose the wrist.
I fell to my knees. The impact sent a sharp jolt of pain up my shins, but I did not feel it.
I crawled forward through the snow. I reached out with a trembling, heavily gloved hand, my eyes locking entirely onto the wrist of the corpse.
Strapped securely to the cold, pale, lifeless wrist was a heavy, custom-made silver chronograph. It was a bespoke Patek Philippe, forged from solid platinum. I recognized every single microscopic scratch on the bezel. I recognized the unique, heavy link of the band. Exactly four months prior to the crash, I had stood in my brother’s private office at the Wolfe Tower and fastened that exact watch around his wrist as a gift for his thirty-second birthday. I had personally ordered the master horologist to engrave our family crest on the inner clasp.
I stared at the silver metal glinting dully in the grey mountain light.
The last, desperate glimmer of hope inside my chest completely evaporated. The titanium fortress of my mind collapsed inward, crushed by the absolute, undeniable reality of his death. Arthur Wolfe, the golden heir, my older brother, was dead. He was gone. I was staring at his corpse.
Before the crushing weight of the grief could even formulate into a physical sound in my throat, the laws of physics violently reasserted themselves in the silent forest.
*Crack.*
The sound was sharp, supersonic, and completely unnatural in the wilderness. It was the distinct, high-velocity snap of a heavy-caliber bullet breaking the sound barrier, followed a fraction of a second later by the deep, echoing *boom* of a high-powered rifle discharging in the distance.
I did not even have time to turn my head.
Vaughn, my personal bodyguard and the lead tactical officer of the extraction team, was standing exactly two feet to my right. The heavy, armor-piercing round struck him directly in the center of his chest.
The sheer kinetic force of the impact lifted Vaughn’s massive, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame entirely off his feet. He was thrown backward through the air, his tactical vest completely failing to stop the sniper round. A horrific spray of bright, crimson blood erupted from his back, painting a wide, violent arc across the pristine white snowdrifts.
Vaughn hit the frozen earth with a heavy, sickening thud.
"Sniper!" Vaughn choked out, blood bubbling violently over his lips. Even as his lungs collapsed, his elite training forced him to shout the warning. "Get down! Sniper on the ridge!"
My survival instincts, honed by years of ruthless paranoia and intense physical conditioning, instantly overrode my paralyzing grief. I threw myself horizontally across the snow, rolling rapidly to my left just as a second supersonic *crack* split the air.
A heavy bullet slammed into the frozen earth exactly where my head had been a millisecond prior, kicking up a violent geyser of ice and dirt.
I scrambled backward on my hands and knees, dragging myself behind the massive, four-foot-wide trunk of an ancient, towering pine tree. My heart hammered against my ribs with the force of a battering ram. The freezing air rushed in and out of my lungs in rapid, jagged gasps.
This was not an aviation accident.
The realization hit my brain like a bolt of lightning, illuminating the dark, chaotic tragedy with terrifying clarity. The pressure anomaly. The catastrophic failure of the Gulfstream’s fuselage. It was not a mechanical flaw. It was an orchestrated, highly calculated execution. Someone had brought down the plane to eliminate the Wolfe family heirs, and now they had sent a cleanup crew to finish the job in the mountains.
I pressed my back against the rough, frozen bark of the pine tree. I pulled my heavy, matte-black Glock 19 from the tactical holster strapped to my thigh. I disengaged the safety, my thumb moving with pure, mechanical muscle memory.
I slowly leaned my head around the edge of the massive trunk, narrowing my dark green eyes against the blowing snow.
I scanned the dense, jagged canopy of the surrounding ridgeline. My eyes processed the environment in cold, geometric grids. I looked for the anomaly. I looked for the break in the natural patterns of the forest.
There.
Seventy yards up the steep incline of the ravine, concealed within the thick, snow-covered branches of a massive spruce tree, a slight, unnatural movement caught my attention. The sniper had realized his secondary target had successfully taken cover. He knew his elevated position was compromised the moment he fired the second shot. I saw the faint, dark outline of a figure rapidly pulling a long-barreled rifle back into the foliage, preparing to displace and escape the immediate area.
"Ridge, two o’clock high," I barked into the radio clipped to my shoulder, my voice a low, freezing command that cut through the panic of the surviving security detail. "He is attempting to exfiltrate. Flank him. I want him captured alive. Do not kill him. I need names."
"Copy that, sir," Miller, the second-in-command, responded. I could hear the crunch of boots as my men began to fan out, executing a tactical pincer movement up the incline.
I tightened my grip on my sidearm, preparing to break cover and advance on Arthur’s body to pull Vaughn to safety.
Before my boot could even leave the snow, the ground directly in front of my pine tree completely erupted.
Suddenly, from beneath heavy, snow-covered camouflage tarps buried at the base of the tree line exactly twenty yards away, three massive figures violently breached the surface.
They were foreign mercenaries. They wore completely white, insulated winter combat gear that rendered them virtually invisible against the snowdrifts until they moved. Their faces were hidden behind thick, tactical ballistic masks and heavy goggles. They moved with the terrifying, synchronized speed of highly trained, tier-one operators.
They did not carry long rifles. They held compact, highly lethal submachine guns—Heckler & Koch MP5s, heavily modified for cold weather combat.
They raised their weapons and immediately opened fire.