Chapter 33 Cole
thirty-three
Cole
Magazine seated, chamber loaded, suppressor threaded tight.
The SIG sits in my hand like it's grown there, and I run through the checklist one more time because the checklist is what keeps people breathing.
Vest strapped across my chest, spare mag on my left hip, knife I won't need but carry anyway.
The warehouse squats forty yards ahead, corrugated metal gone rust-brown under the streetlights, graffiti sprayed across the loading dock doors.
Rust-crusted chains hold the dock platform in place.
Diesel exhaust hangs over the staging area, mixing with wet asphalt and the particular smell of San Francisco waterfront at midnight.
"Frost, confirm overwatch." Kade's voice through comms, low and even.
"Overwatch confirmed." Asher, already positioned on the adjacent rooftop. "Four tangos visible through east windows, second floor. Two stationary near the south end, two moving north. Armed based on posture."
"Reaper?"
"South entrance. Ready." Damian.
"Nitro, north side?"
"Locked in, Ghost. Say the word." Jax, running a little too hot.
"Siren?"
"West approach. In position." Mira.
"Chaos, primary breach?"
Xander taps the flashbang against his thigh beside me behind the concrete barrier. "Loaded and waiting, boss."
"Copy all." Kade runs the final count from HQ.
"Thermal shows eight signatures clustered southeast corner, second floor.
Reading as one mass. Likely victims. Four mobile signatures, armed based on posture.
Eight minimum, possibly more." A pause, and his voice warms by exactly one degree. "Hellcat and our guest are monitoring."
Guest. Angelina. Sitting in the command center across the city, watching whatever feeds Vanessa can give her. Safe.
I key my comms. Let the thought finish forming before I say it.
"Copy all. We're coming home after this, Firefly."
Dead silence. Three full seconds of nobody breathing into their mics.
"Did he just—" Jax, incredulous, delighted.
"Focus, Nitro." Xander, flat. But his mouth twitches.
Another beat of quiet. Then Kade, dry as sand. "Blade. Confirm ready."
"Ready." I lean forward, center my stance, settle the SIG against my thigh. "Breach in three... two... one—"
Xander's flashbang arcs through the broken window to my left, bounces once on oil-stained concrete, and detonates. White light and concussion, the pressure wave punching my chest even from outside the doorway. The chemical bite of the charge rolls out a half-second later, acrid and hot.
I'm through the loading dock door before the light fades.
Smoke hanging chest-high under the warehouse lights, shapes behind overturned pallets and rusted conveyor frames.
Shipping containers stacked to my right, creating corridors I can't see down.
The concrete floor is slick with oil and grime.
I bring the SIG up, tracking left where the smoke is thickest, and find footing on the dry strip along the wall.
Movement left. A figure stumbles out from behind a pallet, still blinded from the flash, one hand over his eyes and the other fumbling for the weapon on his hip.
"Contact left." I fire twice. Suppressed shots, the sound like hard coughs against the metal walls. He drops.
Xander peels right into the container corridors, weapon up. "Taking the containers. Call if you need me."
"South clear, one down." Damian's voice carries across the open floor from the far entrance. I can see his shape in the thinning smoke, already moving to sweep the next section.
"Contact behind the conveyor," Xander calls from somewhere between the containers. Two suppressed shots. "Clear. He had a radio, by the way. Probably called upstairs."
Wonderful.
Mira appears from the west side. No sound, no warning. She's already at the metal staircase on the east wall, weapon up, waiting.
"Siren, hold," I call across the floor. "We go together."
Gunfire from the north side. Suppressed, controlled bursts. Jax engaging.
"Contact north. Two of them." A pause, two more shots. "One down. Second one's playing dead. Badly."
"Nitro, confirm when clear."
"Almost—" Another burst. "Clear. Both down. Real commitment to the performance, though. I'm heading for the fire escape, coming up on your north side."
"Copy. We're taking the east stairs."
"Nitro." Mira's voice from the staircase base. One word of warning.
"Moving. Promise."
Vega and Park sweep the container corridors behind us, calling clear in sequence. But the sounds from the second floor are wrong. Too many feet on metal grating, too many doors, voices shouting over each other in at least two languages.
"Upstairs is loud," I tell Mira. "More than four."
"I hear it," she says.
"Chaos, we're moving up. On me." I look across the floor to Damian. "Reaper, hold the ground floor. Nobody leaves this building."
Damian nods once from beside the south entrance.
"Vega, Park, follow us up when you're clear down here."
Xander jogs back from the containers, sweat on his forehead, gloves dark with someone else's blood. "Right behind you."
The metal staircase rings under my boots no matter how I place them. No quiet approach, nothing to be done about it. The whole frame hums with every footfall. Mira behind me, lighter on the grating but still audible. Xander brings up the rear, the structure rattling under his weight.
"Ghost, we're on the second floor. Count is wrong, more than four—"
Static, and nothing comes back.
"Ghost, copy?"
Nothing.
"Comms are dead," I say over my shoulder. "Building's eating everything. No HQ."
"Outstanding," Xander says. "Love it."
"Keep it verbal. Everything you see, you call it."
"Hai." Mira says it before I do and it almost makes me turn around. She doesn't look up.
Top of the stairs. The second floor hallway stretches ahead under industrial lights that flicker and stutter, casting everything in sick yellow one second and near-dark the next. Narrow, two people wide at best. Doors on both sides, dented and scarred like someone's been kicking them for years.
The air hits. Sweat and urine and something chemical underneath, sweet in a way that coats the back of my throat.
"That's people," Xander says behind me, low. "That smell is people."
"Stay on it."
Vega and Park come up the stairs behind us, filling in the line. Ground floor secured.
Two men at the far end of the hallway. One with a rifle, one dragging a heavy duffel toward the back exit. The one with the rifle sees us first.
He fires before I can get a clean line. Not suppressed. The report slams off metal walls and hits from every direction, deafening in the enclosed corridor. The round cracks past my head, close enough that I feel heat brush my left ear, the displaced air moving my hair.
Two inches right and Chesca wakes up without me.
One thought, and then I'm moving.
"Contact. End of hall!" I go left against the wall, Mira goes right.
Xander drops to a knee behind me, weapon up, covering the doorways between us and the shooter.
Muzzle flash strobing against the dented doors.
I put two rounds center mass into the shooter and he folds, rifle clattering on the metal grating.
The runner drops the duffel and sprints for the back exit, cutting across the east-facing office doorways. Too many walls between us for a clean angle.
"Runner heading northwest, no shot—"
One of the office windows shatters inward. Glass sprays across the hallway floor and the runner drops mid-stride. Asher, one shot through the window.
"Thank Frost later," Xander says, rising from the knee and stepping over the glass.
My left arm burns. I glance down, sleeve dark and wet from the elbow down, doesn't matter when. Through the meat of my forearm, in and out.
Mira sees it. "You're hit."
"Graze. I've got grip." I flex my left hand to prove it. "Keep clearing."
She looks at me one second longer than she needs to but doesn't argue.
Full-auto erupts from the north end of the hallway.
Jax's end. He must have come up the fire escape and run into someone waiting.
Not suppressed, not controlled, just the hammering roar of someone holding down the trigger, rounds chewing through drywall and ringing off the metal ceiling, casings bouncing on the grated floor somewhere I can't see.
Vega grunts behind me and drops against the wall, hand clamping his thigh.
Shrapnel from a ricochet, blood running between his fingers before he even gets pressure on it.
Park takes a piece through his right forearm, hisses through his teeth, and starts wrapping it one-handed without breaking stride.
Then the full-auto stops.
My breathing stops with it. One beat, two, and I force my lungs to work again.
Mira goes still beside me. Her eyes too wide for one second, too much white showing around the iris. I've worked with her for months and I have never seen that look. Then she locks down.
Xander is already heading north, moving fast down the hallway toward where the gunfire cut off. I hear his boots on the grating, then his voice, low, talking to someone on the ground. He comes back at a jog, breathing hard. Blood on his gloves.
"Nitro's down." Flat, report voice. "Breathing. Two to the plate, close range. Barely conscious, blood from his nose." He looks at Mira. "Shooter's dead."
My grip tightens on the SIG until my knuckles ache. I make myself ease off.
"How close?" Mira asks. Her voice is level. Her knuckles aren't.
"Under ten feet. Full auto. Burned the whole magazine trying to kill one person." Xander swallows. "He told me to stop hovering."
That's Jax, broken ribs and all.
File it. Keep clearing. He'd say the same.
"Doc's in the van outside," I say. "No comms to reach him. Once we secure this floor, someone goes down."
"I'll go," Xander says. "Need the air anyway."
"Good?" I ask Park. He's got the bandage wrapped tight on his forearm, weapon transferred to his left hand.
He flexes his left hand on the grip. "Good enough."
"Vega?"
"I'm up." Through his teeth, hand still pressed to his thigh. "Don't pull me."
The office door is open. Walsh is inside. Expensive suit, silk tie, sitting at a desk feeding pages into a shredder with the unhurried pace of a man finishing paperwork before a meeting. He looks up at me the way you'd look at someone who walked into the wrong room.
Not scared, just annoyed.
"I want credentials. Right now. Do you have any idea—"
His hand drifts toward the desk drawer.
I holster the SIG, cross the room in three steps, and slam the drawer shut on his fingers. My left forearm screams and I let it. The sound Walsh makes is high and sharp and worth it. Mira zip-ties his wrists to the arms of his rolling desk chair before he stops screaming.
"You can't do this. I know people. I know—"
"You do," I tell him. "You keep people. In chains. Down the hall."
He shuts up.
The files he didn't finish shredding are still on the desk. Manila folders, a stack of them. Later.
"Leave him," I tell Mira. "He's not going anywhere."
She looks at the rolling chair. Then at me. One eyebrow. "Let's hope not."
"Don't you dare leave me—" Walsh is still shouting when we close the door.
Xander passes us, heading for the stairs. "Getting Doc. Don't have all the fun without me."
Static crackle in my earpiece. Then Kade's voice, live and direct.
"Blade. Sitrep. Now."
"Six hostiles, not four. Four neutralized. Nitro down, two to the plate, conscious. Vega and Park walking wounded. Walsh secured. Still clearing."
Silence. Then: "Copy." A pause. "Come home."
"One more door. Southeast corner. Closing now."
Damian comes up the east staircase and falls in without a word, weapon up.
Ground floor locked down, time to finish it.
Three of us converging on the last door at the end of the hallway.
This one is different from the others. The deadbolt is on the outside.
A padlock hangs from a hasp welded to the frame, heavy and industrial.
Deadbolt on the outside. Padlock. This isn't storage.
"Reaper, on me. Siren, watch the hall."
I position on the left of the frame. Damian takes the right. Mira turns to cover the way we came.
I look at Damian. He nods once.
He shoots the padlock. Kicks the deadbolt free.
The door opens.
Dark. One bulb overhead, barely working, throwing a circle of weak yellow that doesn't reach the corners.
The smell is everything from the hallway compressed into a room with no windows and no ventilation.
Unwashed bodies, urine, bucket toilets left for days, and underneath it all that chemical sweetness, thick enough to coat my tongue.
Mattresses on the floor. Thin, stained, laid in rows with barely a foot between them. Chains bolted to the concrete beside each one. Short chains with small cuffs, sized for wrists that couldn't fight back.
Something behind my ribs clenches hard enough to hurt and I breathe through it the way I breathe through a hit.
Seventeen people. Not eight. Thermal was wrong because they were packed so tight the signatures bled together on the screen. Fourteen women and three children, pressed against the far wall, blinking in the hallway light behind me. Some shield their eyes. Some are too tired to move.
And one more figure. Not a victim.
Young man, mid-twenties, backed into the far corner.
Pistol pressed against the temple of a teenage girl he's pulled in front of him, one arm locked across her chest. His hand shaking so badly the barrel clicks against her skull with every tremor.
Cornered, sweat soaking through his shirt, eyes darting between me and Damian and the door.
"Suéltame o la mato." Let me go or I kill her. His voice cracks.
The girl is frozen. Eyes wide, breathing in quick shallow pulls, not making a sound. An older woman behind her has both hands pressed over her own mouth, holding in the scream that would get someone killed.
My weapon is up. Clean angle to the head, but his finger's inside the trigger guard and his whole arm is shaking.
"Blade." Damian beside me. Low, waiting for my call.
Behind the cluster of women, pressed between two bodies trying to shield her, a little girl is watching me through the gap. Dark hair tangled around her face. Maybe seven years old. Eyes too old for her face.
If I shoot, he shoots.
She's watching me. Seven years old and she's watching me like I'm supposed to fix this.