“You… you’re a dead man. The Colonel is already here. He’s gonna tear you apart.”
“The Colonel?” Mike repeated. A name surfaced in his memory. A man he’d thought was dead for fifteen years.
A man who had betrayed their unit in the mountains, selling their route to the insurgents. Colonel Vance. Callsign “Vulture.”
If it was Vance, everything made sense. This wasn’t just a cleanup; it was a personal vendetta. Vance had survived, climbed the ladder, started his own PMC, and now he’d come to close the final chapter.
The radio on the wounded kid’s chest crackled. “Ghost… I heard the shots. My boys are running out, aren’t they?”
The voice was calm, almost cheerful. “You were always stubborn, Mike. But your ammo isn’t infinite. And I brought something interesting with me. Look at the roof of your house.”
Mike spun toward the cabin. Through the trees, he saw a tall figure standing on the roof, lit by the snowmobile headlights. The man wasn’t holding a rifle.
It was an M72 LAW—a rocket launcher. And beside him, kneeling, was a small, hunched figure. Mike’s heart skipped a beat.
It was Mrs. Gable, his neighbor from the valley who occasionally brought him fresh eggs. How did she get here? They must have picked her up on the way.
“You have a choice, Mike,” the radio crackled. “You walk into the clearing, drop your gear, and we talk like old friends. Or I turn your cabin into a bonfire, along with the old lady and your friends in the cellar. I’m counting to ten.”
Mike looked at the wounded kid at his feet. The boy was smirking at him. “It’s over, old man!” he whispered.
Mike turned toward the house. His eyes no longer held exhaustion or doubt. Only cold, crystal-clear fury remained.
Vance had broken the last taboo. He’d brought in civilians. “One! Two!” the voice on the radio counted.
Mike checked the rifle’s mag. Almost full. He ripped two grenades off the dead merc’s vest.
“Hang on, Mrs. Gable!” he whispered. “I’m coming.” He wasn’t going to surrender.
He was going to give the Vulture the kind of war that would make hell look like a vacation. Mike vanished into the dark, moving toward the house in a spiral, closing in for the final act of this bloody drama. The end was near.
“Three!” Colonel Vance’s voice, amplified by the radio, echoed over the snowy clearing, drowning out the wind. Every second of the countdown hit Mike like a hammer. He knew Vance.
He knew the man wasn’t bluffing. The Vulture had earned his name for his total disregard for human life to get what he wanted. If the count reached ten, the thermobaric blast from that launcher would turn the cabin into a funeral pyre, incinerating the hostages in the cellar, Mrs. Gable on the roof, and the very memory of the peace Mike had built.
Mike moved through the deep snow with unnatural speed for his age, but smoothly, like water. He didn’t run straight; that would be suicide. The headlights of the snowmobiles, parked in a semi-circle, created overlapping zones of light, but narrow corridors of darkness remained between them—blind spots only a professional eye would catch.
Mike used the terrain: a small dip, a fallen hemlock, a snowdrift. His heart was redlining, pumping blood thick with adrenaline, but his mind stayed cold. He had a plan—risky as hell, but the only one he had.
He couldn’t attack Vance head-on; any sudden move and the Colonel would pull the trigger. He had to make him slip up, make him look away. “Mike, you’re disappointing me. You’re really going to let an innocent old woman die? That’s not very heroic,” Vance taunted, scanning the woods through the thermal scope on his helmet.
But Mike already knew the weakness of that tech—snow. Heavy, dense snowfall created interference, and what if he added a heat screen? Mike reached the overturned snowmobile, the one whose rider he’d taken out first.
The machine was on its side, the track still spinning slowly, and gas was leaking from the tank, filling the air with a sharp chemical smell. It was a gift. Mike pulled the pin on a captured grenade, but he didn’t throw it at the house.
He carefully placed it in the puddle of gas under the snowmobile, shielding it with his body from the view on the roof, and after a two-second count, he bolted, rolling behind a thick tree. The explosion was deafening. The gas fumes ignited instantly, creating a fireball that shot fifteen feet into the air…
Comments are closed.