The Boy Who Walked Toward the Gun

Marcus moved like a phantom across the familiar terrain of Devil’s Ridge.

Years before his private security career, Marcus had hunted these ridges as a boy with his father. He knew every drop-off, every unstable scree slope, and every cave tucked beneath the limestone bluffs.

The rain fell in sheets, washing away the smell of gunpowder and muffling his footsteps. Marcus climbed up a narrow goat path that led to an overhanging limestone shelf known locally as the Devil’s Pulpit.

Behind him, the mercenaries were closing in, their tactical flashlights cutting through the dense fog. They were communicating via short radio clicks, moving in a two-man pincer formation.

Marcus crouched behind a boulder at the mouth of the narrow ledge. His ammunition was down to nine rounds in the submachine gun and one spare magazine for the Glock. He couldn't win a sustained firefight; he had to use the mountain itself as a weapon.

The first mercenary rounded the rock face, his rifle raised to his shoulder.

Marcus waited until the man took one step onto the loose shale shelf. With lightning speed, Marcus hurled a thirty-pound limestone rock directly into the mercenary's chest.

The impact knocked the man backward, his boots losing purchase on the slick, collapsing shale. With a choked cry, the hitman slid over the edge, tumbling fifty feet down the rocky embankment into the raging mountain river below.

"Contact left! Vector two down!" the second hitman shouted, opening fire on Marcus's position.

Bullets chipped the rock above Marcus's head, showering his face with razor-sharp stone fragments. Marcus dropped to his stomach, rolled around the base of the boulder, and fired three controlled single shots.

Two rounds struck the second gunman in the shoulder and thigh, dropping him to the mud.

Before Marcus could advance, the remaining two mercenaries flanked the path from the upper ridge, pinning him down behind the narrow ledge.

"Give it up, Hale!" a voice shouted from the darkness above. "You're out of room! Senator Sterling sends his regards!"

Marcus pressed his back against the cold stone. He looked down at his weapon. The magazine was empty. He had only the sidearm left.

Suddenly, a loud, whistling crack echoed from the high treeline above the ridge.

A heavy wooden timber, rigged to an old logging winch perched on the cliff above, swung down through the darkness like a battering ram. It struck the lead mercenary with devastating force, sending him flying twenty feet across the clearing into a thicket of thorn bushes.

The fourth mercenary spun around in shock, aiming his rifle toward the trees. "What the—"

A small figure dropped from the lower branches of a hemlock tree right behind him, brandishing a heavy iron logging wrench.

Ethan Cole swung the wrench with all his twelve-year-old might, striking the mercenary directly behind the knee.

The man collapsed in pain. Marcus surged forward from behind the boulder, delivering a crushing right hook to the mercenary's jaw that knocked him cold.

The ridge fell silent, save for the roaring wind.

Marcus stood breathing heavily, staring at Ethan in complete disbelief.

"Ethan?" Marcus gasped, wiping blood from his forehead. "I told you to stay in the cellar!"

Ethan stood holding the logging wrench, his chest heaving, his denim jacket soaked through with mud and rain.

"You told me to be like an oak tree," Ethan said, his voice trembling slightly with adrenaline. "Oak trees don't run away when their family is in trouble."