Black Wolf (2010) (25 page)

“Yes.”

“The car blows up. They’ll be running to it.”

“Yes.”

They were so close to the house that he couldn’t see the roof. This was good—it meant that the Werewolves on top couldn’t see him either. But it was nerve-wracking and dangerous as well—he couldn’t see where they were or what was going on.

“Danny, what’s happening?” said Nuri, realizing that over the radio it would seem as if he was back at the checkpoint. “We let the car go through. Where is it?”

“It came up the driveway,” answered Danny. “We’re going to let the man out of the building.”

“Is that a good idea? You’re going to let them escape in the car?”

“I have no choice,” said Danny. “We’re going to let them leave. One of them is moving to get down now, with Tiny.”

“What? You’re letting him get down?”

“He’s going down the south side,” said Danny. “I don’t have any other choice. We have to let them go.”

D
anny glanced in the direction of the sniper on the southern side of the house. He couldn’t quite see him. Or her.

“Where are our men?” demanded the Wolf with the rifle.

“We’re working on it,” said Danny.

The man holding Tiny slid to the southern end of the roof. He had Tiny’s head pressed close to his, using it as a shield. It would be difficult to take him without hitting Tiny; a bullet from the other side would probably go through his skull and kill the hostage as well.

We knew these guys were good,
Danny told himself.
We just didn’t know how good.

“American!”

“Your men in the building aren’t answering,” said Danny. “They may have been killed—there was a gunfight at the tunnel.”

The two men on the roof began talking to each other. The one holding Tiny was inclined to leave their friends—after all, they had left them.

“Get down,” ordered the man with the rifle. “American, back! If you do anything, your friend will be killed.”

Danny bit his lip, holding his breath as the man took Tiny to the edge of the roof.

T
iny felt his legs dangling over the edge of the building.

Enough of this bullshit, he thought. If I have to die, at least let me do something. Anything.

With a scream, he began to kick and flail his elbows wildly, aiming for his captor’s groin. Whether he hit it or not, the next second he felt himself falling from the roof.

N
uri heard the scream and jerked out of the car, pushing the door closed with his leg, gun raised. The Wolf who’d been holding Tiny let go as he jumped. They were close together, incredibly close—the Wolf was to the right. . .

Nuri fired as the man fell, and kept firing, moving to his left to get away from the car, shooting wildly. The sniper did the same in the opposite direction.

None of their bullets struck the Wolf’s head, and he rolled to the ground and got to his feet. He put his hand on the car, steadying himself as he took aim at Nuri.

Then the grenade exploded.

“W
hiplash! Whiplash! Take them! Take them!” screamed Danny as Nuri fired.

One of the snipers drilled the Wolf on the roof. The man fell backward, sliding head first off the house. In the next moment the grenade exploded in the car. Danny leaped to his feet, running toward the side of the building. The explosion had shattered the windshield, sending the glass flying as shrapnel through the air. But much of the force of the explosion was contained by the car and its engine compartment.

Danny saw Tiny, writhing on the ground on his left. The Wolf, in dark clothes, had been dazed. He was lying on his back in front of the hood.

Is it Stoner?

By the time the question occurred to him, Danny had already shot the man twice in the forehead.

He stopped, caught his breath as he saw the man’s lifeless face.

It wasn’t Stoner.

N
uri found himself on the ground. He was thirty feet from the car. He couldn’t recall how he’d gotten there—he’d run, but had he flown, too, when the grenade exploded?

Maybe.

He couldn’t hear. He tried rolling to his right to get up, then realized he was already on his stomach. He pushed up, dizzy, and began feeling his legs, and then his chest.

Somebody grabbed his right arm. It was Danny, yelling at him.

Nuri tapped his ears. They felt as if he were in a plane, ascending quickly. He tapped them, trying to get them to pop.

“You OK?” yelled Danny. “OK?”

“I guess,” answered Nuri. “I can barely hear you.”

“The grenade in the car—good idea,” said Danny. He ran back toward the building.

Nuri followed. Tiny was on the ground, his face twisted in pain. His right leg was bent at an unnatural angle; it hurt just to look at it, but Nuri couldn’t take his eyes off it.

“The big building!” yelled Danny. “There’s one more person in the big building.”

Before he could turn, the ground shook with an explosion so strong that Nuri lost his balance and fell to the ground.

“Looks like we don’t have to worry about getting him out of the building,” Danny said. “He just blew it up.”

THE SHOW

49

Moldova

T
he first priority was securing the buildings and making sure there were no Wolves left. Boston took charge of that, organizing a room by room sweep of the main house. Meanwhile, the severely injured were tended to. Tiny had broken his leg in the fall, and his ribs had been shattered by the Wolf’s punch. The trooper shot in the leg had lost a great deal of blood. Danny decided to have the Rattlesnakes take both of them directly to the nearest hospital. The other wounds turned out to be relatively minor, handled by temporary stitches, and an ice pack and aspirin in the case of a sprained ankle.

They’d been lucky, Danny realized. They’d taken the Wolves by surprise with overwhelming force, protected by the best body armor in the world and aided by technology that should have made this a cakewalk. But in truth, they could have easily been overwhelmed if the Wolves had reached their weapons.

So who were these guys? And was Stoner here?

Danny asked himself both questions as he walked through the house. The muscles in his legs trembled ever so slightly, moving sluggishly, as if the op had changed the electrical impulses they used to communicate with the brain.

He stood over a body in the hallway on the second floor. It was facedown in a pool of blood, riddled with bullets—the man looked to have taken an entire magazine, if not two, before going down.

Was this Stoner?

Danny dropped to his knee in the pool of blood and turned the body over. It was heavy—he had to use both hands.

The body slumped against the opposite wall, head flopping. For a second Danny thought he was alive and jerked back.

A bit of skull fell away.

It wasn’t Stoner.

Danny rose, his stomach starting to turn.

D
anny went from corpse to corpse, expecting each time to see Stoner. He was sure as he approached each body that this would be him—this would be the man, vaguely remembered, who had saved his life, and whose life he had saved.

Each time his throat thickened and his heart pounded faster. Each time his breath seemed to slip away. And then each time the face, battered by bullets and covered with blood, didn’t belong to Mark Stoner. It was too young, too long, too round, too blond, or too different.

As varied as their faces were, all of the Wolves had many physical traits in common. All were at least six feet, most much taller. They were bulked up with muscles that would have made a bodybuilder jealous. Several were wearing prosthetics and implants. The man who Nuri had killed after he jumped from the roof of the house had an artificial leg fused to his bone just below his hip. Another of the men, killed in the house, had an artificial arm. Three of the others had scars on their upper arms and calves; Danny guessed there were implants of some sort there.

They gathered the bodies so they could be evacked and inspected by the technical team that evening. Danny went down to the Moldovan police lines to look at the other Wolves who’d been killed.

The deputy minister met him on the road. Lacu’s face was ashen; for all his earlier enthusiasm, he clearly hadn’t counted on so much bloodshed.

“We’re just finishing a sweep right now,” Danny told him. “We want to make sure there are no more booby traps. We have specialists, bomb people. Once it’s secure, you can come in and take over.”

The Moldovan deputy minister nodded.

“Nuri?” he asked.

“He and your sharpshooter are fine. They, uh, they were shaken up a bit. But your man was very brave. They were both brave.”

Lacu didn’t smile, exactly, but his nod this time seemed more positive.

“I need to look at the dead men,” said Danny. “We’re going to have to do, uh, autopsies.”

“Autopsies?” The minister didn’t understand the English word.

“Inspect the dead, the . . . uh, have doctors look at the bodies.”

Lacu still didn’t understand. Danny decided he’d let Nuri explain it to him, and went over to check on the rest of the Wolves.

Stoner wasn’t among them. None of the men had exoskeleton gear either. A good thing, Danny decided; it would help preserve the fiction that this had only been a drug raid.

“One of my men will show you a clear path to the marijuana fields,” Danny told the deputy minister. “But you should approach it very, very carefully. We don’t think there are booby traps, but you never know. These guys were really well prepared.”

“Yes,” said Lacu. “I see that.”

O
ne body remained unchecked—the man who had blown himself up in the building.

Was it Stoner?

The explosion had leveled the building, turning it into a pile of debris. It would take days to dig through it.

It must have been Stoner, Danny thought, staring at the ruins. Knowing he was about to be captured, probably realizing the force after him was American.

Did Stoner know that he was there?

A chill swept over Danny’s body as he stared at the twisted wreckage. He felt certain Stoner was buried underneath.

“What happened?” Danny whispered to the last wisps of smoke that furled upward. “What really happened?”

I
n theory, the house should have contained a trove of information about the organization, even if actual records weren’t kept there. But the men had no personal effects—no IDs, no wallets even, nothing besides wads of euros and Moldovan leu, the local currency.

There were filing cabinets in the guardroom. Thinking they might be booby-trapped, Flash brought in a small electronic scanning device and determined there were no live circuits in the drawers. He drilled the key locks gingerly, but not trusting the Wolves, rigged a rope to open the first cabinet from outside the house.

Instead of the explosion he feared, there was a soft sound, almost like a pillow being fluffed. Smoke curled from the unit, followed by a small deck of flames that consumed the entire row of folders.

Shortly afterward, convinced that the area was secure and they hadn’t missed anything important, Danny called Breanna to tell her what was going on. He thought he was waking her up back in the States; to his surprise, he found her on the C–20 over the Atlantic, en route to Prague.

“It went well,” he told her. “But they’re all dead.”

“All of them?”

“I’m afraid so. One blew himself up in one of the buildings when it was clear he wasn’t getting out alive. The others were in no mood to surrender. They were like supermen. They’re all extremely strong.”

Danny described some of what had happened.

“Was Mark one of them?” Breanna asked finally.

“I don’t—he’s not one of the dead,” said Danny. “But . . .”

His voice trailed off.

“Danny?”

“I think he may have been the one who blew himself up. I—it’s just a hunch, I guess. Maybe a gut feeling.”

“Do you have photos or—”

“Nothing. No evidence. I reviewed the video images. There’s no shot of his face. But I just—I guess I feel that it’s him. It’s not rational, I know.”

“All right. And, to find out we have to dig through the wreckage, right?”

“It’ll take days.”

“We’ll get more manpower,” she told him. “The medical team and the other experts will be there by this evening.”

“Right. I should get back to Kiev. Just, uh, in case they have more people.”

“Yes, absolutely. Listen, I’ll be in Prague in a few hours—should I come to Moldova?”

“I don’t know that it would be necessary,” said Danny. “Why Prague?”

“There’s an air show. We’ve taken an aircraft that some of the NATO members are interested in. And I’m going to surprise Zen—he and Teri and my niece are there for the show.”

“Oh.”

“Did Zen tell you he was going to Kiev for the NATO conference?”

“No.”

“He is. It was a last-minute substitution when Senator Osten had a heart attack.”

“No, jeez, I hadn’t known at all.”

“Yes, he’ll be there. Listen, I know you and Zen text each other. Don’t tell him I’m going to Prague. It’s a surprise. OK?”

“No sweat.”

They talked a little more. Breanna agreed to brief Reid herself, saving Danny from giving his whole rundown all over. She told Danny that the task force that had developed the information on the Wolves was being expanded. It was likely that, with the op over, Whiplash would be able to come home and regroup.

“After Kiev,” she said. “Assuming nothing happens there.”

“Right.”

While they had knocked out a good part of the organization, Danny was sure they hadn’t gotten the real leader or leaders.

“These guys were just the muscle,” he said, aware of the understatement. “Whoever put these guys together like this—he or she would be capable of doing just about anything. We can’t let our guards down.”

“We’re not going to.”