POLICE DOG BARKS DESPERATELY AT MAFIA BOSS’S SON AT AIRPORT SECONDS LATER,THE AIRPORT WENT SILENT!

Chapter 5

The evacuation was a wave of chaos — screaming, shoving, luggage abandoned, a man trampling a woman’s coat, someone’s phone left lying on the floor, still recording. Alarms whaled off the glass walls. Passengers stampeded toward the exits in a tide of panic.

Cole didn’t move.

He knelt beside the backpack, one hand resting on Apollo’s back, and he watched the man standing thirty feet away with his hand still clamped on his son’s shoulder. Victor Kane’s face had gone pale. His dark eyes were fixed on the device on the floor, and there was no surprise in them. No shock. No confusion about what had just been pulled out of that bag.

Only awareness. Cold, flat, calculating awareness.

You knew, Cole thought. You absolute monster. You knew.

The EOD team arrived in under four minutes. Two technicians in bomb suits moved with practiced urgency while a third set up a portable X-ray scanner. The terminal had been cleared back two hundred feet, but Cole refused to leave. Apollo refused to leave. The dog stood at his side, body low, eyes locked on the bag, his mournful whine cutting through the screaming alarms like a single thread of grief.

The lead technician was a woman named Reyes. She crouched beside the device, her voice coming through the headset mechanical and calm. “Confirming visual. Custom fabrication. Military-grade components. Motion sensor active. Timer active.”

“Can you disarm it?” Cole asked.

Reyes didn’t answer right away. She adjusted the scanner, studying the display, her face unreadable behind the visor. “This isn’t military. It’s not cartel either. This is bespoke work. Expensive. Precise.” She looked up, and even through the visor, Cole could see how pale she was. “Whoever built this knew exactly what they were doing. The timer’s the easy part. The motion sensor is the problem — if we shift it wrong, it detonates regardless of the clock.”

Thirty-six minutes, now. The red numbers blinked, indifferent.

Cole turned toward the security line where Kane and his son were being held by tactical officers. The mask had shattered. The composure, the arrogance, the calculated control — all of it gone. Kane’s face was slick with sweat. His hands shook as he pulled the boy against his chest, and his eyes kept darting between the device and the exit, wild and desperate.

“Mr. Kane.” Cole walked toward him, and the alarms seemed to quiet around them. “Where did that device come from?”

Kane’s mouth opened. No sound came out.

“Who put it there?” Cole’s voice cut through the noise. “Who put a bomb in your son’s backpack?”

Something in Kane’s face crumpled. For a second — one terrible second — he looked like he might cry. Then the desperation curdled into something darker.

“They would have killed us both.” His voice cracked. “Both of us. This was the only way out. We stage the death. I collect the insurance. We disappear.”

The words hung in the air like poison.

Cole went very, very still. “You put a bomb on your own son.”

“I didn’t have a choice!” Kane’s voice rose, cracking. “You don’t understand. My rivals collapsed. My accounts were frozen. They were going to find me — they were coming for me. I needed to disappear clean. The staged death, the media storm, the chaos — it gives me a five-hour head start. Untraceable assets. A chance to—”

He stopped. He’d said too much, and he knew it.

Cole stared at the man. Not a gang hit. Not a rival planting evidence. A father so desperate to escape his own sins that he’d wired his seven-year-old son with explosives and sent him through airport security as bait, as a distraction, as a sacrificial offering to the god of his own survival.

He looked down at the boy. Eli was crying silently, his face pressed into his father’s chest, not understanding anything except that the world had turned to fire around him.

“You’re a monster,” Cole whispered.

And Victor Kane’s eyes flashed.

It happened in one violent motion — Kane shoved the tactical officer beside him, hard enough to send the man stumbling, and he lunged. Not for the exit. Not for the bomb. For his son.

His fingers were reaching for the boy when Apollo moved.

The German Shepherd was a blur of fur and muscle, and he didn’t go for Kane’s throat or his arm. He slammed his entire weight into the space between the father and the son — a living, breathing wall — and the growl that erupted from his chest was a territorial roar, absolute and terrible. His teeth bared not in hunger for a fight, but in pure protective fury.

Kane stumbled back, swearing, his eyes wide with shock. He’d prepared for police resistance. He hadn’t prepared for a dog that would die before letting him touch his prey again.

Apollo stood fixed in his defensive stance, body angled toward the boy, gaze locked on the man. The message was unmistakable, older than language:

You do not touch the innocent.

The tactical officers closed in, voices sharp, and the scuffle was over in seconds — a flurry of elbows and shouting and the cold click of handcuffs. But in the scramble, someone’s boot caught the table holding the EOD equipment, and it went over with a metallic crash.

Reyes’s voice came over the radio, suddenly tight. “I’ve lost the diagnostic feed. The motion sensor just triggered a warning sequence. Timer’s accelerating — I have to isolate the primary detonator circuit now, or we lose windows.”

Cole scrambled back to the device. The red display was blinking faster now.

Thirty minutes. Twelve seconds.

And something in the cargo hold had just started beeping.