“Too sophisticated. He’s more like eight. Isn’t that the age when kids love fart jokes?” Wulf looked across her to Deavers.
“Don’t look at me. My oldest’s still perfecting knock-knock-banana.”
“Yo, backseat comedians, here’s your banana.” Cruz flipped them the bird.
“I’m still curious. What’d Guleed do that impressed you?” She pictured a scrawny boy rescuing Wulf from a crashed helicopter or breaking him out of jail.
“Bill me for a drink.”
“That’s all?” Three pairs of eyes—only Kahananui managed to keep looking forward—stared at the man to her right.
“It was a messy drink.” He crushed the paper cup, then stuffed it in a bag. “The tab included a coffin. Took nerve for a slum kid to chase me.”
While the earlier silence had seemed to result from confirmation of the dangers they faced, this time Theresa imagined they were considering how the former child had aged into a prosperous middle-aged man and Wulf hadn’t.
Finally Cruz cleared his throat. “Well, he turned out well. Nice daughter too.”
“You met his family?” she asked, intrigued by a link to Wulf’s past.
“Oldest girl’s an accountant. She was checking the books when we arrived.” Kahananui didn’t pull his eyes off the road as he answered. “I thought Cruz was MIA when he got a look at the Somali-Swede combo platter.”
“Guleed married a Swedish biology professor,” Wulf muttered next to her ear. “His wife’s tall and rather, ah, impressive.”
“As in brilliant researcher?”
“Uhh—”
“Refined my lady plan.” She recognized Cruz’s tone as the one he used to provoke his teammates. “Not just brainy. Number-cruncher chicks appreciate a man of action, and I could use some investment advice, so I thought—”
“No thinking.” This time Wulf rapped twice on the back of Cruz’s skull. “Not about any woman I’ve ever introduced you to, got that? I spent too many nights listening to you bitch and moan in bars on six of the seven fucking continents to want you near—”
Theresa didn’t know enough Spanish to understand Cruz’s interruption, but she could guess at its content from Wulf’s scowl and the other men’s laughter.
“Here we are.” Kahananui turned right, but half the vehicle wanted to make a U back to Copenhagen. He steered into the skid, and they straightened out pointing the correct direction, if the lower strip of snow between high drifts indicated a road.
As the van inched forward, an entirely different quiet descended. Each man went somewhere in his head. She could sense them planning with an almost physical quality, as if mental readiness was actual gear they donned before a mission. Their focus rubbed off on her, because she absorbed much more than plain white hills from the scene outside. There were shapes under the snow, and it seemed like she could identify them. Fences. Shrubs. Depressions that had to be ditches. Then they stopped.
“End of the line, chimichangas.” Cruz zipped his one-piece snowsuit to his neck and jumped out of the front, rifle up as he scanned the hills. Within seconds he’d put on snowshoes, goggles and a pack. “Talkie channel six, right-o? Scout out.” And like that, he was gone.
After reaching behind the bench seat, Wulf dumped snow pants and a parka into her lap. “Dress.” All intimacy had disappeared as quickly as Cruz.
“I’m not a dog. You don’t need to bark.” She struggled to disentangle fabric and suspenders while feverishly hoping that the ankle zippers opened wide enough for the pants to slip over her C-Leg. No getting around that she was slower and weaker, but she didn’t want to end up floundering from the beginning.
“I’m in charge of keeping you alive.”
Thankfully the pants fit over her prosthetic. But she had to hump up and down on the seat to pull them over her thighs and butt. Deavers had left the side door open for air, a godsend because she was already panting and sweating.
Wulf must’ve thought she was ignoring him. “For this op, do as I say, immediately, no arguments, or I swear on a burning longboat, I’ll flex-cuff you inside the van, got it?” His face hardened, as if the word cuff didn’t bring back memories of the night before.
She stared at her trembling hands. How much help could she offer?
“Hang ten, Wulfie.” Kahananui slapped him on the back, but he didn’t relax.
“Remember how to use one of these?” Stepping between her and Wulf, Deavers handed her a nine-millimeter Beretta pistol.
Automatically her wrist rotated and her thumb slipped over the cold metal so she could both feel and observe the safety lever. On. She must have performed that check twenty times a day in Afghanistan, every time she put her weapon on, took it off or cleared it at a barrel outside a building. For months that movement had been as natural as signing a prescription, and doing it again switched something inside her to the ready position. The pistol was a hunk of metal, inert and black, but in her hand it became so much more.
“Cruz!” Deavers spoke into one of the walkie-talkies Guleed had provided. “Ready to report, or you too busy jacking off? Over.”
“All clear. No movement, no lights. Should I recon the targets? Over.”
“Negative. Stay hidden. K and I will do close recon after we prep for departure. Over.”
“Got it, Great Leader. Out.”
Prepping for departure turned out to mean turning the van. She shifted gears and steered while the men pushed until the vehicle pointed toward the highway.
Flushed with cold and exertion, Wulf rested his arms on the window frame and lowered his face to be level with hers. “Ma’am, do you know how fast you were driving?”
“That depends.” Looking into his eyes crystallized the urge to kiss him, as if they could sneak one of those you’re-here-and-so-am-I-so-let’s-kiss moments, even in the middle of robbing a historic site. “Are you the good cop or the bad one?”
“I’m the very bad—” A massive ball of white hit him in the back of the head, knocking his shoulders through the opening and making her giggle.
“Think that’s funny?” He mock-growled before he kissed her, cool lips and mint candy and man, but the moment she softened, he pulled away. “Sorry I was hard on you earlier. I’m not used to...” He trailed off with a shrug.
“I promise I’ll listen to you and the others. I’ll leave if you say it. No arguments.” He didn’t have to say that she was a distraction or not up to speed. She knew. “Believe me, all I want to do is find the cross and go.”
The next snowball thunked into the windshield so hard she jerked and slammed her elbow into the steering wheel. Luckily she missed the horn.
“Got the message!” Wulf called over his shoulder. “Unless you want to stay in the van, time to get out and join us.”
How she didn’t fumble the door handle, she didn’t know, but somehow she climbed out of the van and stood and her knees didn’t shake, at least not visibly.
Within ten minutes of starting the uphill trek, her thighs were shaking and she’d revised any initial enthusiasm for getting intimate with the crunch of snow. Ardently, vigorously, adamantly and vehemently revised. Even with her smart C-Leg auto-adjusted for uneven terrain, snowshoes sucked. The metal teeth on the bottoms of these traylike contraptions didn’t prevent her from sliding backward on the incline, so she walked ducklike with the fronts of the shoes pointed out. Unlike the men, she used two lightweight poles as outriggers to keep from tilting left or right, but her thighs still burned worse than a bad bikini wax, worse than a shot of cheap tequila, worse than physical therapy exercises. Chicks from New Jersey did not do shit like this. If they were jocks, they played soccer or skied in the Poconos or even joined the army, but they did not snowshoe. This was hell. That freaking cold day had indeed arrived.