“Sometimes I forget how old you...” He shook his head. “Wait a sec, another thing I keep forgetting. A Night Stalker brought this over.” From a desk drawer, Deavers pulled a plastic bag containing a tangle of silver and lapis jewelry. “They found it while repairing the bird we crashed. Didn’t Dostum give this to your doc?”
That casual phrase, your doc, flashed at Wulf’s heart like a tracer round. Along the way Theresa had become his in his mind, and apparently the team thought so too. Even if that was still fantasy, when this mission was over and he’d erased Wulf Wardsen, maybe he could reinvent himself as a man Theresa would welcome into her life. Maybe she’d become his doc.
Heavy in his hand, the jewelry embodied his time with Theresa. Her roommate had boxed and sent all her possessions to the States, so other than this bag, nothing tangible of her remained at Camp Caddie, not even a picture. And yet every day he was reminded of her countless times, whether by the scent of oranges or the sight of someone else’s ponytail across the mess hall.
“And this was addressed to me, but the letter inside is for you.”
Startled, Wulf looked up from the jewelry. He never received mail. Although he couldn’t recall Theresa’s handwriting, his gut said the block printing on the envelope wasn’t hers.
“Sorry I read it, but my name was on the outside. Guess someone didn’t want to be obvious you were getting a letter.”
The French stamps and multiple creases showed it had traveled hard, and the message was short and unsigned. Tell Wardsen to begin hunting for a lab in Morocco. The second page was a list of names—some with military ranks, others with country code abbreviations. He’d lay odds they were all affiliated with Black and Swan’s business.
“Not the lab we want, so I don’t copy.” Deavers raised his eyebrows. “Should I?”
He remembered the crushed tranquilizer he’d sent Ivar after the attack at Montebelli. He hadn’t heard from his brother about the analysis. Perhaps this was related, or perhaps it was a trap. Either way, he needed to talk to his brother.
* * *
“Thought you should hear about the operation from me.” Wulf paced the team’s deserted ready room while he waited through the extended silence. Next time he considered calling Ivar, he’d remind himself to sleep in wet concrete instead. Updates about the syringe contents and Theresa’s security had been polite and factual, but the courtesy heads-up about the planned raid on Black and Swan’s underground lab had provoked a beast.
“I forbid you to interfere further with Black and Swan.”
“Forbid?” Startled by his brother’s directness, Wulf halted. Somehow he’d imagined his brother would support him after what had happened to Theresa. “This is a military op. Last I checked you weren’t in my chain of command.”
Ivar didn’t respond to the sarcasm. “Isn’t the blood debt we owe your woman high enough? You want to add to it by involving others in this feud?”
“I want to end it. For good.” If he could ever acquire a permanent tattoo on his body, he’d ink a big red slash over a phone symbol.
“Attacking Unferth won’t achieve that. Perhaps you recall he’s immortal.” Ivar lectured without raising his voice, but each coldly dripped word sent Wulf’s blood pounding in his ears. “If I can’t stabilize the conflict you’ve incited, more people may be hurt. Or worse.”
His big brother, the man who had to control everything. Every damn thing. “We’re not moving tonight. You can chill. We’ll hit when the situation presents, so don’t get twisted.”
“Our disputes cannot harm mortals. That’s been our touchstone since Lord Beowulf.” Ivar continued as if Wulf hadn’t spoken. “He may demand to meet you for hólmgang.”
Wulf would relish the chance to enter the ring alone with the skald, but he doubted the bastard would choose the honorable method to settle a feud. It was becoming harder to keep his voice even, but he had to try to change his brother’s mind one more time. “My team is—”
“I said no.”
“I heard you.” Kicking a throw pillow into the wall didn’t relieve his frustration. “But the senator, Theresa, the drugs Unferth’s men tried on me, it’s—”
“My position means I must consider greater issues. Since the dragon killed Beowulf, we’ve prospered. We’ve stayed undiscovered. I won’t change our law, so you force me to contact Unferth to restore balance. Do not undermine my negotiations by damaging his corporation.”
“It’s not a corporation, it’s a criminal gang, and he’s a murderer, so your concern’s a little fucking misplaced.”
“In your army, you follow your commander’s orders, don’t you? In this, I am your leader.” Finally, Ivar’s voice rose louder and faster. “I order you to stop.”
Paradoxically, the rarity of hearing his brother vent partially defused Wulf’s anger, and he regretted the rift he knew was coming. “You’re my brother, Ivar son of Wonred, but if you interfere, you’re not my leader.”
“If you act against Unferth, I have no choice. I must banish you from our brethren—” maybe his voice cracked, but Wulf couldn’t be sure over a satellite-phone connection, “—as I would any other.”
“So be it. Goodbye, brother.” He disconnected without waiting for a response. The thirteen immortals were a shattered group, only Jurik and Bjorn worth their weight in beer. He couldn’t waste time regretting banishment from the company of Beowulf’s Vikings when he had a mission with his teammates, his true clan, the men who mattered to him.
* * *
“Yo, Theresa, car’s out front!” Downstairs, her stepbrother bellowed loudly enough to be heard in the cul-de-sac. Three days a week, he drove her to physical therapy at the Veterans Affairs hospital in East Orange. Her mother rode shotgun. The trip felt like a middle-school car pool, except Raymond hid a Glock in the glove box.
Zipping her army-logoed windbreaker, she settled onto her crutches. Her doctors had promised to fit her prosthetic today, presenting a new skill to master. She was supposed to be excited about having an advanced obstacle course to conquer and a fresh opportunity to exhibit leadership, but the goal felt as small and lonely as the childhood bed at the end of the hall.
Below her, Jeanne held Theresa’s Army Proud water bottle and dipped her head each time Theresa thumped down a stair. “Would it kill you to wear a new outfit instead of all that black and gray? Once, just once, what would it hurt?”
“Ma, I told you, this is my fitness uniform. Until they kick me out, I wear it.”
“At least let me make an appointment with Gina.”
Gina ran the salon her mother had patronized for twenty years. “I don’t need a haircut.”
“What about a little waxing?” Her eyes flitted from Theresa’s forehead to the hem of her nylon PT shorts. “That you could use.”
A little waxing, my ass. Her skin care was an often-mentioned affront to her mother, who wanted her daughter slathered, ripped and stripped from eyebrows to remaining ankle, as if smooth skin would balance what was missing. “Do you think I care if I look like a rottweiler?”
“Nah, your fur’s like a Portuguese water dog.” Behind Jeanne, Ray drew a thick middle finger across his eyebrows and grinned.
“Bite me.” She pulled her lips back at her stepbrother, showing teeth.
“Whaaat? I watch the Westminster dogs with Jeanne, so sue me.”
Easy for him to mock, since he wasn’t the recipient of an improvement plan this week, or even this month. The honor was all Theresa’s.
“Don’t you want to look your best for the other doctors?” Nothing diverted her mother.
“It’s PT, not a job interview.” And not a date.
“Job, schmob.” She rolled her heavily outlined eyes. “That Major Brady—”
Her parent kept talking. If she hadn’t had to use both hands on her crutches, she
might have made the same talk-to-the-hand signal that her stepbrother mimed from the doorway. Didn’t her mother understand how uncomfortable her injury left other doctors? They chatted with Jeanne instead of her precisely because she’d morphed from doctor to patient. None of them wanted a reminder that hot metal could dice up professionals as easily as lieutenants and grunts.
“He has such deep eyes, and he told me his mother was a Ricci from Bayonne—”
Even if her mother spiked the cannoli, Major Brady wouldn’t ask her out. If he did, she’d crutch the other direction faster than Ray could pop a clutch, because the truth was she was so pissed at every man she knew—Raymond was a smart aleck, Carl smothered her and Wulf hadn’t bothered to send one measly email, the bastard—that she couldn’t endure her mother’s schemes for another second. “Mom, I have things on my mind other than dating. I’m trying not to spend my life as a fucking cripple.”
Her mother shook the water bottle at Theresa. “I don’t care how old you are, or how miserable living here with the people who love you most in the world makes you, you may not use that word unless you want me to wash your mouth out with soap.”
“Even Jeanne can catch you now,” Ray muttered.
By the time her mother turned to glare, the picture of brotherly innocence was holding the front door, looking exactly how he had whenever he was caught with cigarettes in junior high.
Following them past mounds of burgundy asters to her mother’s silver Cadillac sedan she realized that when she had a prosthetic instead of crutches, people would finally walk next to her. At the end of the driveway she blew her breath out hard enough to disturb loose strands of hair on her forehead. “I’m sorry, Mom.”
Raymond held the car door open with one hand while he read phone messages.
“Thanks.” Theresa slipped sideways on the seat, yanking her crutches in before he slammed the door. Thirty more seconds and she’d have been situated to close it for herself, but nobody ever let her try. I still have opposable thumbs. I can work a handle.
Her mother’s silence as Ray started the car clearly meant she’d have to go further to make up for her f-bomb. Last week her mental-health therapist had reminded the group that their injuries changed expectations for their families too. Meeting loved ones halfway, that’s what they’d promised to try this week. She’d always been good at homework. “I didn’t mean to be rude, but I want to focus on my therapy. Maybe later I’ll want to date more.”
“What about that young man at the hospital in Germany?”
“What are you talking about?” She strained into her shoulder belt to stare at her mother, who had half turned in the front passenger seat. “Who was in Germany?”
“I don’t remember his name—he wasn’t Italian—but he was blond and looked like he needed a good meal.” The penciled-in eyebrows went higher, daring Theresa to ask for details. “Carl talked to him. More than once.”
Was it true? Was her dream, the one where Wulf knelt at her bed and pressed his face against her arm and whispered that he’d come for her, but she had to fight to get better, real? “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“It didn’t come up.” Her mother gazed past Theresa’s head before she dropped her perfectly timed reply. “After all, you’ve been busy focusing on your therapy.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
The Afghan fighters asleep in this shed had foolishly reached for assault rifles instead of the sky when Wulf’s squad burst in, so he rolled a body away to lift the tunnel’s trapdoor. The team had waited six weeks for a dark moon to coincide with a Black and Swan contractor’s presence at the target. During those long weeks, they’d rescued a kidnapped high-value Afghan, cleared Taliban out of two villages, visited Dostum and his boys, and trained a parade of Afghan National Army units. Through it all, they’d watched this compound.
The men had talked about after the mission, but they knew that tonight Staff Sergeant Wulf Wardsen would die. All day small gifts had appeared on his bunk or in his boots: his favorite beef jerky and energy bars, a wooden box with the unit crest hand-carved into the lid, waterproof topographic maps. Men who were superstitious about goodbye found ways to speak without words.
Tonight would be the last chance to put himself out front for them. He saw Kahananui and Cruz plug their ears a second before he dropped a flash-bang grenade in the tunnel’s hole. Skipping the rungs, Wulf slid down the ladder’s outside supports. “Clear,” he said into his mike. Weapon up and ready, he advanced, scanning with his night vision gear. Evenly spaced grooves showed where machines had carved this route, and overhead beams supported the ceiling rock. Rounding the first corner, he had less than a second to identify the greenish shape of a man rushing at him as hostile—raised weapon and Afghan dress—and not the contractor they wanted alive. He depressed the trigger.
Bang-Bang-Bang. The guy fell backward.
Shit. He didn’t feel rattled or distracted, but the two rounds he’d wasted wouldn’t pass unnoticed. If the Big Kahuna had already activated the communication relay unit, even the guys stuck aboveground would’ve heard.
Thirty feet away, another human shape flickered across the tunnel’s mouth and threw something.
“Grenade!” Wulf scooped a Russian-style potato masher and lobbed it into an open storage room, then hit the dirt. His heart thumped like mortar fire even though he knew his team had dropped—
Booom. Only a fraction of the explosive force rushed out the door, but the tunnel amplified sound. Expecting rock slabs to crush his back, he almost felt let down by the small chunks that pelted him, although they were a damn good advertisement for the quality of Black and Swan’s construction services.
The fight in the main cavern was similarly anticlimactic. Kahananui took out an Afghan whose weapon jammed, and Cruz dropped the American contractor with a shot to the leg. Hands up and blubbering, that rat wasn’t going down with his corporate ship.
“Alpha team up,” Wulf reported to Deavers. “Target secure, receiving first aid. Over.” Watching the guy moan as Cruz dressed his leg, he heard Bravo team call in similar results in its part of the compound. Start to finish, under eleven minutes.
“Work up more sweat in a drive-through at lunch, dude,” Kahananui said.
“Don’t order the mega-triple-fat-attack, amigo.” Cruz yanked a knit hat over their captive’s eyes.
He’d miss these guys. Bad.
“Fucking A-plus for speed.” Deavers’s congratulations crackled over the commo link. “Although I hear Howling Wolf owes two bucks to the tip jar. Remember, gentlemen, our taxpayer overlords own each and every bullet. In tough budget times, we operate on the one-shot one-kill principle.”
“Take it out of my paycheck, sir. Okay to send Rizzotti down.” Laura planned to photograph documents and upload them by satellite to multiple news organizations. After the clusterfuck of the disappearing car-bomb evidence, no one was taking chances. She’d have a big story, they’d have rough justice and Black and Swan would have a steaming mess.
“Power’s up,” Bravo team reported.
In the fluorescent yellow, Wulf counted three rows of six pallets loaded with heroin bags, a half dozen stainless-steel cooking vats, a small conveyor belt and one shrink-wrap machine.
“Look at this shit,” Kahananui called from a corner rigged like a comic-strip cubicle hell, with sand-colored partitions, wood-veneer desks, computers, printers and steel file cabinets. “Every piece of crap here has a Property of the United States Government tag. Fuckers have a nicer printer than we do.”
“This is weirder.” Cruz had his hands on the lid of a chest freezer. “Want to bet there’s a stinking body?” Lifting it revealed bundles of hundred-dollar bills stacked next to euro notes, all the way to the top. The air went out of the room.
“A briefcase is roughly three-quarters of a mill. That must be...” Kahananui paus
ed, probably calculating the freezer’s volume like Wulf. “Twenty-five? Thirty?”
“In a freezer?” Cruz couldn’t look away from his find.
“Rat proof,” Wulf offered. “Remember the cash in Saddam’s warehouse?”
“Sent a bag of shreds home to my girls. World’s most expensive gerbil bedding.” Kahananui hooted. “Good fun, but Jewel was pissed because it stank like money.”
Wulf and Cruz joined his laughter, the shared memories consuming what they knew—but wouldn’t acknowledge—was their last hour together.
“Wait—an idea—” Wulf had to catch his breath before continuing. Tomorrow was time enough to anticipate reuniting with Theresa. Tonight was about the team, and laughing sure as hell beat going out bawling. “Take off your shirt, Cruz. Show your flaming skull tat and that haul, and you’ll hit the front pages and the internet.”
“Special-Ops studly man with the big cash money.” Kahananui doubled over, clutching his stomach as he howled. “Honeys will throw their panties at you in bars.”
“I’m off panty bars.” Cruz almost managed to look affronted. “Smart women, they’re like, hot.”
The shock on Kahananui’s face kept Wulf laughing even after Cruz’s elbow pad connected with his side solidly enough to stagger him.
“How you planning to ace one of those?” The Hawaiian asked. “You’re no Wulfie, all sad kitty eyes and foreign-language-poetry bullshit.”
“Sitting in a fancy espresso shop reading a book and drinking overpriced coffee.” Cruz flexed. “Like fishing with dynamite.”
“This load is amazing.” Laura trotted out from the tunnel and stared between the three of them. “What’d I miss?”
Cruz’s grin widened. “Or maybe I’ll read a newspaper.”
Wulf rapped his buddy’s helmet with a flashlight. “Not that one,” he growled. “Back to work.” He itched to open cabinets and search computers, but first he had questions for their prisoner. Questions about a car bomb.
* * *
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