The man was practically gibbering in fear. “B-b-but you won’t be able to get to them! The security—”
“Is our concern,” Kowalczyk cut in. “Your concern is the unbearable pain and permanent disability that will result if you provoke me into shooting you. I can always find another office drudge to tell me what I want to know.”
I had to give it to the man... he had ‘dead-eyed and terrifying’ down to an art form. Not normally a compliment, true—but it was useful under the circumstances. My sensitive alpha nose detected the smell of urine a couple of seconds before the dark stain appeared on the office guy’s trousers.Classy.
Kowalczyk released the man’s jaw with a look of disgust.
“I c-can take you, but I don’t have keys for the checkpoints,” the guy stammered.
“We don’t need keys,” Kowalczyk said, and stepped back, gesturing with his gun. “Move.”
One of the soldiers shoved him, and the man stumbled forward.
“Th-this way,” he said, gesturing toward a set of double doors.
Both teams made their way into the prisoner wing at the guy’s direction. Irina was staying inconspicuous, I couldn’t help noticing. It made sense. Even if she could pull off the accent, the presence of a small woman in a paramilitary operation was too memorable. From what I understood during the briefing, they wanted any surviving witnesses to remember only a bunch of masked, black-clad goons with guns... except for me, with my face bare for the world to see.
Judas goat and sacrificial lamb all rolled up in one neat package, I thought.Just tie a fuckin’ bell to my neck next time.
We ran into guards in twos and threes, reinforcing the idea that places like this were geared toward preventing the people inside from getting out, not preventing people outside from getting in. At least, not if those people were armed, trained, and possessed explosives.
The first few prison guards fell before they could even get a shot off. When we had to stop and blow the lock on yet another security door, it gave the guards inside enough time to set up an ambush. Bullets flew as soon as the door swung open. We were hugging the walls in anticipation of such an attack, but one of Nikolayev’s men went down with half of his neck blown away.
Irina pulled a flash-bang grenade from her belt and tossed it through the door. I turned away and covered my ears. After the blinding light stopped spearing through my tightly closed eyelids, I stormed into the newly opened section with the others and gunned down two guards who were struggling to regain their feet.
The others took care of the rest. Kowalczyk confronted the admin guy, who was clutching at his right ear, tears streaking down his bloodless face.
“I can’t hear!” he said, too loudly. “I’ve gone deaf!”
Kowalczyk stared him down, muttering, “Fuck’s sake.” He lowered the muzzle of his gun meaningfully toward the man’s knees.
“It’s th-this way,” office guy said, pointing with the hand that wasn’t still cradling his ear. “S-sorry. Left at the next junction! That’s the high security wing!”
We waded through the carnage in the corridor, toward the next T-junction. Four more of Sloane’s guards shuffled off this mortal coil beneath a hail of our gunfire, and eventually we reached a door markedMAXIMUM SECURITYin bold, blocky lettering.
Thankfully, the door itself was no different to any of the others we’d blown open. The corridor beyond was oddly deserted. The lack of an active defense prickled the hair on the back of my neck. Cameras whirred, their red eyes watching us from the ceiling.
“The omega will be in interrogation room one,” office guy babbled. “The alphas will be in interrogation room t-two! Now please let me go,please! I did what you asked!”
Kowalczyk nodded to the man’s guards. The one who’d held a gun on him lifted it and shot him through the head without comment. Office guy slumped to the floor, twitching.
Irina exchanged a glance with Kowalczyk and made the hand signal for ‘split up.’ The two teams would peel off to retrieve our separate targets, and then try to get the hell out before anyone in the facility managed to get outside backup involved.
Each team had started out with six soldiers. Ours was down to five, and one of Irina’s was bleeding from the shoulder. It didn’t matter—we were close enough to Beckett and my packmates that I could practically smell them. The pounding agony in my skull had faded to something distant and unimportant. The weakness in my ravaged body wouldn’t slow me down because I wouldn’t let it. My senses thrummed, wondering where the trap was.
Interrogation Room One was at the end of the corridor. It killed me inside not to hang back and watch as Irina and her team prepared to force their way in, but that wasn’t my part of the mission. Interrogation Room Two was around the corner. My heart pounded, driving blood through my veins and strength to my muscles as Kowalczyk set the directed charge above the lock. The five of us pressed our backs to the wall on either side of the door.
Crump, and the door swung open a few inches, off-kilter on its hinges. Kowalczyk kicked it open and promptly went down with a cry, blood spurting from an artery in his thigh. Through the open door, I got a confused impression of a man in a guard uniform, a second man in a white lab coat cowering behind a table... and Flynn chained naked to the wall with a pair of battery leads clamped to his chest.
With a roar, I put my head down and charged the man with the gun.
