Hard to Break: A Michael Gannon Thriller


 
 
 
 Praise for the Michael Gannon series
 “Michael Ledwidge is the real deal!” 
 —James Patterson on Run for Cover
 “Michael Gannon is the next great hero in popular fiction.”
 —Allison Brennan, New York Times bestselling author
 “Michael Gannon is a fantastic protagonist, destined for the pantheon of characters we love to follow through countless adventures. Here’s hoping for many more.”
 —Rob Hart, author of The Warehouse
 “Ledwidge knows how to tell a fast-paced story, and he has created an appealing maverick hero... Give this one to those who remember and still love John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee.”
 —Booklist
 “Worthy of going to the top of your must-read list, thanks to Ledwidge’s peerless setup and execution of each and every scene.”
 —Bookreporter
 “An author who has mastered his craft.”
 —Forbes
 “Great characters, lots of action, and a razor-sharp plot. Good stuff. Really good.” 
 —Marc Cameron, author of Tom Clancy: Oath of Office
 
 
 Since 1999, Michael Ledwidge has been writing fun and popular bestselling suspense novels that have excited and delighted tens of millions of readers from all over the world. In 2003, he partnered with the world’s most popular suspense master James Patterson to write over a dozen global bestsellers. In 2020, he reignited his solo career with Stop at Nothing, an action-suspense thriller so gripping that Forbes magazine dubbed him “an author who has mastered his craft.” His latest unputdownable page-turner, Hard to Break, is his twenty-first novel.
 
 
 Hard to Break
 A MICHAEL GANNON THRILLER
 Michael Ledwidge
 
 
 
 Contents
 PROLOGUE
 Chapter 1
 Chapter 2
 Chapter 3
 Chapter 4
 Chapter 5
 Chapter 6
 Chapter 7
 Chapter 8
 Chapter 9
 Chapter 10
 Chapter 11
 PART ONE
 Chapter 12
 Chapter 13
 Chapter 14
 Chapter 15
 Chapter 16
 Chapter 17
 Chapter 18
 Chapter 19
 Chapter 20
 Chapter 21
 Chapter 22
 Chapter 23
 Chapter 24
 Chapter 25
 Chapter 26
 Chapter 27
 Chapter 28
 Chapter 29
 Chapter 30
 Chapter 31
 Chapter 32
 Chapter 33
 Chapter 34
 Chapter 35
 Chapter 36
 Chapter 37
 Chapter 38
 Chapter 39
 Chapter 40
 Chapter 41
 PART TWO
 Chapter 42
 Chapter 43
 Chapter 44
 Chapter 45
 Chapter 46
 Chapter 47
 Chapter 48
 Chapter 49
 Chapter 50
 Chapter 51
 Chapter 52
 Chapter 53
 Chapter 54
 Chapter 55
 Chapter 56
 Chapter 57
 Chapter 58
 Chapter 59
 Chapter 60
 PART THREE
 Chapter 61
 Chapter 62
 Chapter 63
 Chapter 64
 Chapter 65
 Chapter 66
 Chapter 67
 Chapter 68
 Chapter 69
 Chapter 70
 Chapter 71
 Chapter 72
 Chapter 73
 Chapter 74
 Chapter 75
 Chapter 76
 Chapter 77
 PART FOUR
 Chapter 78
 Chapter 79
 Chapter 80
 Chapter 81
 Chapter 82
 Chapter 83
 Chapter 84
 Chapter 85
 Chapter 86
 Chapter 87
 Chapter 88
 Chapter 89
 EPILOGUE
 Chapter 90
 Chapter 91
 
 
 PROLOGUE
 WILD BLUE YONDER
 
 
 1
 The Delta flight out of Salt Lake City had a two-hour layover in Seattle so they didn’t get up to Juneau until late in the afternoon. Coming into the terminal from the bag retrieval, Gannon saw that it looked a lot like the airports in the lower forty-eight except it wasn’t that crowded and the gift shop had a giant stuffed moose in its plate glass window.
 When they were halfway down the concourse to the exit, the rumbling luggage cart suddenly got much heavier as Gannon’s son, Declan, stopped pushing it. He stood pointing at the green glow of a Starbucks sign.
 “What do you think, Dad? Coffee time?” he said.
 “Again?” Gannon said skeptically as he slipped out his phone to check the itinerary. “How much coffee can a person possibly drink?”
 The super-extra-deluxe spring brown bear Alaskan hunting trip they were about to embark upon had originally been booked for Gannon’s friend, John Barber. But when John couldn’t go at the last minute, in order to avoid the huge hit on the cancelation fee, Gannon had decided to step in and scoop it up for his son’s birthday instead.
 Gannon read off the screen. They were to head to a seaport on the other side of Juneau, where a little Piper Cherokee would take them on the final hop to a base camp in the interior of Glacier Bay National Park.
 But that was at three, he read. They still had about an hour.
 “Yes, okay,” Gannon said. “I will allow it. If you hurry. Get me a small one. Black.”
 “Cookie, too, Daddy? Please?” his six-three, two-hundred-twenty-pound son said, maneuvering around a sandwich board sign that said Alaska: North To The Future.
 “Split one?” Gannon said.
 “Split one? Come on, Dad. We’re headed straight into Call of the Wild country. We need to carbo-load.”
 “Speak for yourself,” he called out at his son’s wide departing back.
 To the left of where Gannon was standing was a huge window, and he squealed the luggage cart over and stood looking out. Beyond the airport tarmac, a bright silver curtain of mist was billowing gently along hills filled with huge pine trees. As he watched, an open airport vehicle went by along the shoulder of the landing strip, its driver wearing a snow hat that said, Yeah, But It’s A Dry Cold.
 Gannon smiled out at the landscape. Even though he’d been born and raised in New York City, he actually possessed a special affinity for Alaska ever since he was a child. In his fourth-grade class at St. Margaret’s, each kid had to do a special project on one of the fifty states and when he reached in and drew out Alaska from the Yankee hat Sister Ann was holding, he had a special feeling about it being his state.
 Silly as it sounded, throughout the entirety of his life, his sense of fateful connection to its Big Dipper star state flag, (which he had to draw), its state flower, (the forget-me-not), and its main exports, (zinc and oil and fish), had never left him.
 “And now I’m finally here,” he said out loud to it.
 Gannon smiled even wider as the mist parted and a muscular