Nuri 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.
“Whiplash! 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.
Nuri 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
The 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.
Danny 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.”
One 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.