The Law of Nines (Sword of Truth 15.50)

There were places along the way that at first looked impassable. In each case, though, he quickly found a way to pass. In other spots he had to climb over gaps in the narrow outcropping, but along much of the sloping, weathered rock ledge it widened to several feet, and in spots at least six or seven feet, where it presented no trouble at all, except that it sapped his strength to climb so fast at such a steep angle. His thigh muscles burned from the effort. He panted for air as he pressed on, refusing to slow for anything.

In a little more than an hour, he was getting near the top. As he came around a protruding rock face, two burly men were waiting. Alex took a hurried step back, at the same time drawing his gun. Without hesitation he fired at the closest man charging toward him. The bullet must have gone through his heart, because the man faltered and dropped.

The second man put a boot on the downed man and leaped over him, diving toward Alex. Alex pressed the trigger twice in rapid succession. He didn’t know if his bullets found their mark or not, because the man was still crashing in on him. As the man’s arm came out to tackle him, Alex dodged aside, seized the man’s hair, and used his forward momentum to help heave him out over the edge. The man stumbled, trying to stop, but he was moving too fast. He screamed all the way down.

Gun held in both hands, Alex pressed his back against the rock wall, catching his breath. He looked out over the edge and went weak in the knees at how close he had been to going over the side with the assailant.

The man on the ground wasn’t moving. Alex didn’t like the idea of not having the gun fully loaded as he went into an unknown but definitely hostile situation, so he quickly pulled a box of ammo out of his backpack. With his thumb he forced four more shells into the magazine, filling it to capacity. Seventeen rounds in the magazine plus one in the chamber gave him eighteen rounds in the gun plus the rest of the loaded magazines if he needed to reload in a hurry.

While eighteen rounds sounded like a lot, he knew that if there were enough men coming at him even that many shells wouldn’t last long. He didn’t know what choice he had.

Gathering his wits, he hurried the rest of the way up the trail to the top, where it flattened off considerably. Even so, it wasn’t exactly flat. Beyond an expanse of forest, jumbles of rock rose up to make the top of the massive plateau a series of rocky layers.

While from a distance it might have looked flat on top, up close the stacks of ledge, the sheer granite faces, and the squared-off breaks in the stone had a hauntingly man-made look to them, even though the plateau was obviously entirely natural. A person with a good imagination could make more out of it than layers of rock. With some imagination it looked almost like an extensive, complex structure.

Now that he had made the top, Alex wasn’t sure what to do. He searched around the area where the sloping rock ledge had emerged on top, but there was no man-made trail. While the trail below was used by the security force to get to the mountain, they apparently rarely or never climbed to the top. It didn’t look to him like anyone had ever walked across the delicate pale lichen and deep green mosses.

He finally decided to follow the exposed ledge that created a natural trail through the woods. In one low, damp place, he spotted Jax’s boot print. Deeper in, he came to a curious depression leading into the rock jumble.

Before going into the narrow chasm, he pulled a box of ammo and four magazines from his pack. He put the box of ammo in the front pocket of his jeans and the spare magazines in his back pockets. As he moved into the tight opening in the rock, he found that it wound into gorges that eventually rose perhaps a hundred feet in places.

The natural trail through the rock led him into a narrow cleft. High above, he could see that the smooth sides revealed only a long slash of leaden sky. Alex went in deeper. The rock overhead that must have once stood taller yet had toppled over in the distant past, possibly during earthquakes, so that it now lay across the cleft and acted as a roof. The deeper Alex went, the gloomier it became.

The farther in he went, the more the jumbled, weathered rock turned into a dark labyrinth. Alex stuck a hand into his pack, searching blindly for a flashlight. He found it and pulled it out.

When he switched on the light and pointed it ahead, a man was standing in the narrow passageway through the rock. Alex went for his gun.

“If you want to see her alive, you need to follow me.”

Looking at the man through the iron gunsights, one eye over each of the two outer dots and the center blade of the front sight rock-steady over the bridge of the man’s nose, Alex hesitated.

But for only an instant.

He pressed the trigger. The gunshot inside the confines of the rock passageway was deafening.

“I don’t negotiate with murderers,” Alex said under his breath as he stepped over the corpse and made his way deeper into the maze of rocky crags.

“Seventeen left,” he counted to himself as he hurriedly followed what was becoming like a cave running deeper into the mountain. With his flashlight he had to check that each side branch he came to was clear. He stuck to what seemed the main crevice running through the mountain. In places the huge slabs of granite had shifted over millennia or even tipped and fallen, leaving many spots a tight squeeze to get through. In other places he had to climb over rubble from when the rock overhead had collapsed.

Alex didn’t know how long he had been running when he realized that up ahead he saw natural light. As he continued on, the light grew steadily brighter.

When he rounded a slight bend in the fissure through the mountain, he spotted something out ahead in that area of light. He rushed ahead, trying to make it out.

His heart came up in his throat.

It was Jax.

58.

ALEX COULD SEE JAX STANDING in the middle of a broad area of white sand. The place looked to have once been a cavernous dome but the center of the roof seemed to have eroded away and partially collapsed over time to leave a room that was open to the sky. Here and there boulders that looked possibly to have once been part of that domed ceiling sat littering the room.

Jax, standing in the center of the sand under that opening, watched him come. He could tell that her hands were tied behind her back. Tears stained her face. A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth.

With his gun held in both hands and at the ready, Alex inched into the open area. As he emerged from the passageway through the rock, hundreds of men came into view. They stood silently around the outside near the walls or in other caves and cracks leading into the room. They were all watching him. None made a move.

They were dressed in clothes that would be familiar anywhere—mostly jeans and oversized T-shirts with words on them. A number of them wore baggy, knee-length shorts and sandals, just like a typical guy at the mall or out getting a pizza. Alex spotted what looked like knives under the shirts of some. He was sure that all of them had weapons concealed somewhere on them.

Despite their ordinary dress, they weren’t especially well groomed, with ratty hair and scraggly beards or stubble. Alex supposed that even that wasn’t too out of place anymore with their everyday outfits. They all had hard eyes and wore grim expressions. They looked like thugs. That, too, was a rather conventional look that seemed to be cultivated by many men and had become accepted.

Walking down the street these men wouldn’t warrant a second look from most people. Any one of them, carrying a knapsack, could walk unnoticed through any airport. Seeing them gathered all together as they were, though, on a remote wilderness mountaintop, looked bizarre in the extreme, as if they had all been transported there from the bleachers of a basketball game.

Alex knew that they were chameleons, killers intended to fit in and be unseen—until they struck. That, in itself, was what was so frightening about them. They would be invisible out among innocent people.

A glance back showed that the way he had come in was now blocked by dozens more men just like them.

“Alex,” Jax said in a shaky

voice, “give them your gun.”

“No.”

“Please . . .”

“I’m not—”

“You can’t hope to change things,” she said. “Don’t make it any more difficult than it already is. Please?”

The audience of killers all silently watched. Alex knew that even if he hit his target with every round, and he managed to reload with every one of his spare magazines, he wouldn’t have enough bullets to take out all the men gathered. When he ran out of ammo, they would have him. But he knew that in reality it would never come to that. They would all simply rush him at the same time. They’d be on him before he could empty the magazine in his gun.

“Talk to me, Jax. What’s going on?”

“Give them your gun, or they’ll just hurt me until you do, or take it away from you after you run out of bullets.”

As if to demonstrate, one of the men heaved a fist-sized rock. It struck Jax in the back of the shoulder. She cried out as she went to a knee, bent by the pain of the blow.

Alex put two rounds into the man, dropping him almost instantly. None of the other men so much as flinched at the loud sound or the flash.

Dozens of other men all around the cavernous room lifted rocks to show him that he had no chance to change the outcome. Jax staggered back to her feet. If all of those men threw those rocks she would be stoned to death before he could do anything effective to stop them. Alex’s vision was red with rage. He wanted to strike out at all of them.

But he knew that doing so would only get Jax hurt.

Violating a rule that had been drilled into him from the first time he had learned to shoot, he squatted down, laid the gun on the ground, and slid it across the granite toward Jax. It stopped right before the area of sand.

Ben had always told him that you never give up your gun. But a gun was merely a tool of self-defense. If it couldn’t defend him, or protect Jax, then it ceased to be a tool and became nothing more than a useless hunk of metal.

Alex was enraged that he had no choice but to give up the weapon.

He was ashamed of himself for not thinking of something to keep it from coming to that.