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  Wilson dodged to his left and felt the lightweight Kevlar weave lining his jacket stop at least two rounds. He fired again, aiming at the center of the man’s head, and watched the corpse roll away like a leaf caught in the swirling wind. He shouted at the other man struggling to free himself from the debris inside the guardhouse.

  “FBI! Throw down your weapons and come out with your hands in the air!”

  A burst of autofire cut a swath through a pool of water in an uneven spot of the pavement only inches from Wilson’s foot and drenched his pants legs.

  Newkirk’s assault rifle barked once and the second jackal went down.

  Mercury-vapor lights flared to life around the perimeters of the plant with audible clangs, then splashed white fire against the falling rain. Five delivery vans painted red and gold were parked at a loading dock near the rear of the building. Two of the dock doors opened with the rush of chains running through electric hoists. A half-dozen armed jackals spilled out into the night, their shadows long and edged against the white of the building.

  Reaching into his pocket, Wilson took out his T-jack. He touched the chrome elbow of the miniaturized comm to his right jawline and triggered the electromagnetic field that adhered it to his flesh. Slightly larger than a finger’s width, the T-jack’s transmitter curled up like a question mark next to Wilson’s lips, while the receiver was tucked just inside his outer ear without interfering with his normal hearing. He switched it on, then blew on the mike to activate it.

  “Count off,” he said softly.

  Newkirk reported in first, followed in swift succession by McDonald, January, Scuderi, and Rawley.

  The eighteen-wheeler had jackknifed across the open parking area. The driver was working frantically to free the rig while Scuderi and McDonald closed in. Scuderi hit the brakes and sent the sedan into a skid that left them covered from the fire of the advancing line of jackals. The sedan spun, slammed its ass end into the eighteen-wheeler’s rear tires, then rebounded. Before it came to a halt, Scuderi and McDonald were in motion.

  Scuderi’s golden blond hair was cut short and spiky, shot through with strands of platinum. In street clothes she could break a man’s heart. Tonight she looked like a wraith cut from the shadows, dressed all in black. She was lean and trim and moved with the grace of an athlete. She kept the 10mm pistol in both hands as she ran toward the truck’s cab.

  Bob McDonald flanked her, ducking under the belly of the big truck and coming up on the other side. Mac was no taller than Scuderi and might have weighed twenty pounds more. At fifty-one, he was the second most senior member of the team, but Wilson had yet to find a man better able to operate on sheer cussedness and determination when the chips were down and the odds were stacked against them. Mac’s silver hair reflected the light from the mercury-vapor lamps. An M4 hung upside down at his side from a shoulder strap. He carried his pistol at his other side.

  Wilson climbed into the sedan again. The hood was smoldering now with a cloud of white smoke clinging to it. He slipped the transmission into drive and waited for Newkirk to drop into the passenger seat. Wilson had the car in motion before Newkirk had settled, then stretched out a hand for the bandolier of extra twenty-round drums for the Atchisson.

  Autofire ripped into the truck’s cab as the jackals either decided on their own to sacrifice the drivers in an attempt to get to the FBI strike force, or were given orders to do so. The eighteen-wheeler jerked, then the engine died. The glaring lights carved tunnels that trapped the line of jackals in them.

  Newkirk opened fire at once, and emptied a thirty-round clip that sent some of the jackals searching for cover while others dropped in their tracks.

  “You can scratch the truck,” Mac commed. Though years and miles from the hills in southern Oklahoma where he’d grown up, the man’s words reflected the Western twang of his roots.

  “Affirmative,” Wilson said.

  Newkirk slammed a fresh magazine into the M4. Movement in the rearview mirror caught Wilson’s attention for just a moment, and he saw the Ford minivan speed into the parking lot. He blew on the mike and accessed the frequency. “Rawley.”

  “Go.”

  “You and Darnell have the front door.”

  “Roger.” The minivan altered course, then streaked for the front doors of the building.

  “Maggie.”

  “Go.”

  “You and Mac have the outside cleanup. Once we’re inside, you’re to maintain a support position in case we have to pull back. In no circumstance are you to allow that load of evidence to leave our possession.”

  “Understood.”

  “And get on the air. Let the locals know we’re in town and what’s going down.”

  Scuderi cleared the channel.

  Assault rifles opened up on the sedan, ripped jagged lines down the sides. The windshield spider-webbed with bullet holes, and the rearview mirror disappeared. Wilson had a brief impression of the twisted hunk of steel and glass sailing over his shoulder.

  He twisted the steering wheel hard, using the sedan as a blunt instrument to track down two of the jackals. If possible, he’d wanted to take them alive and let the courts decide their fates. But he couldn’t leave them loose to possibly injure his people. He remembered the pictures and video footage he’d seen about what had happened in Miami: the trail of eviscerated bodies. He hardened himself and put his foot down more firmly on the accelerator.

  The two men tried to break and run, but it was too late. Wilson didn’t fall for their feints, and crunched into them before they could get away. One man went down, disappearing under the wheels as the sedan rolled over his body. The second man was thrown into the air and battered against the windshield before bouncing over the sedan and landing behind it.

  Turning the wheel, Wilson yanked the sedan back on track and headed for the docks. “This isn’t going to be gentle,” he warned.

  “And it probably won’t be pretty either,” Newkirk said. His feet were braced against the floorboard.

  The surviving jackals had already targeted the back of the sedan and were chewing holes in it with their assault rifles.

  A hundred feet from the concrete-and-steel posts fronting the docks, Wilson hit the brakes. It helped slow the speeding sedan a little, but the forward momentum still slammed them hard against the loading docks. The front end crumpled, sent the hood winging up, and the car came to a sudden rest between two of the delivery vans.

  Wilson tried the door, heard the lock pop, but it didn’t open. He rammed his shoulder against it twice, then it grated open with a painful metallic howl. Stepping out, flanked a moment later as Newkirk pushed himself out on his side, Wilson pushed himself up on the rear of the car, ran across the car top, and jumped onto the loading dock.

  The sound of running feet slapping against concrete reached him just before the jackal did. The guy saw Wilson and tried to stop, backpedaling furiously and trying to bring his machine pistol to bear.

  Letting the movements come naturally, Wilson pivoted into a roundhouse kick that had all of his weight behind it. His boot caught the man in the face. Something broke. The jackal stumbled backward, his eyes rolling up in his head before he hit the metal warehouse door behind him. By the time he slid bonelessly into a sitting position, Wilson had a pair of disposable handcuffs out. The FBI agent cuffed the jackal to a length of chain leading from the hoist.

  Newkirk gained the high ground as Wilson stood and kicked the jackal’s guns away. The older agent was bleeding from a cut over one eyebrow, but he looked alert.

  “You okay?” Wilson asked.

  “I’m fine. Let’s drift.”

  Wilson took the lead, the Atchisson hard in his hands. Inside the warehouse, he slipped a pair of nightvision bubble goggles from a pocket of his jacket and put them on. The night and the shadows went away and left a world painted in black and white and grays. With the wraparound design of the goggles, his peripheral vision remained intact.

  He shoved the ball of his thum
b against the small button mounted under the skin along his jawbone on the opposite side of the T-jack and activated the SeekNFire circuitry wired into the neural network along his spine. His palm closed more securely over the shotgun to pull his flesh up against the identification plate that was built into the stock, so the circuitry constructed under the skin of his palm could meld with the weapon. It didn’t make him symbiotic with the weapon, but it read off the specs from the stock and keyed his eye-hand reflexes to get optimum usage from the shotgun.

  SeekNFire wasn’t available on the open market. The system was extremely expensive and still in its testing phase. The Omega Blue team members had the work done as a matter of course before hitting the bricks. Anyone who couldn’t successfully undergo the operation was bounced from the Sensitive Operations Group unit, despite his or her qualifications. With the unit limited to six people, they needed every edge available.

  A staccato burst of thunder echoed inside the empty warehouse. Broken and vacant wooden skids lay haphazardly around the room and were propped against the walls. Two forklifts sat silently near the doors, in preparation for off-loading the cargo aboard the eighteen-wheeler.

  Wilson sprinted for the door in the corner of the warehouse, trying to recall a blueprint of the building. They had a map of sorts-if the warehouse hadn’t undergone construction in the last seventeen years. He focused on the freezer area.

  Going through the door at almost a dead run, aware that time was running out, Wilson used his free hand to push himself off the wall ahead of him and cut left. A shadow took form in front of him, becoming clearer as the night-vision goggles amplified the existing light. He felt the familiar thrum of the SeekNFire circuitry locking into his reflexes, and followed its guidance as he swung the Atchisson up.

  The jackal fired from a Weaver stance, appearing almost calm.

  Bullets whipped by Wilson’s head. He squeezed the Atchisson’s trigger, loosed three rounds that caught the jackal above his belt buckle and tracked up to his sternum. The smell of cordite stung Wilson’s nostrils as he brushed the still-falling corpse out of his way and ran on.

  Gunfire from the other end of the building echoed through the maze of hallways.

  Wilson blew on the mike to access the T-jack. “Rawley. Check.”

  “Check. We’re still standing.” Machine-pistol fire that sounded up close and personal stopped as the channel cleared.

  “Here,” Newkirk called out.

  Wilson turned, saw Newkirk opening a stainless steel door that let a rectangle of harsh yellow light spill out onto the tiled floor. Dark patterns that Wilson recognized as blood were worn into the tiles in front of the door, then trailed down the hallway in a series of thin streams.

  The chill wind turned gray in the hallway, blasting Wilson as he stepped inside the meat locker. The cold made his wet clothes and hair cling to his body and seem to gain weight. The stainless steel floor was slippery, covered with a thick pad of ice and frost. Maintenance hadn’t been a big priority since the jackals had moved in. Racks lined the walls. Most of them were empty, but several held stainless steel canisters of different sizes.

  Picking one up, Wilson glanced at its sealed mouth. He pressed the button on the side, and the cap hissed as it released and moved over. A viewscreen opened, leaving the bulletproof glass in place. Electronic data contained in the canister’s nanochip information display juiced the circuitry. He read it at a glance. CONTENTS: HUMAN HEART. DONOR, TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD FEMALE ALCOHOLIC. NO DISEASES, NO INFARCTIONS, SLIGHT ABNORMALITY IN LEFT VENTRICLE THAT CAN BE …

  He pressed the button again, stopping the flow of information that trickled across the glass. An interior light came on and a purplish red organ, slightly smaller than his fist, was displayed: perfectly suspended in the saline solution. A chill touched his own heart as he automatically thought of the husked bodies that had been left in Miami. He flicked the light off and returned the canister to the rack. On the red market, the underground organ trade, the jackals could turn more than a quarter of a million dollars on a quick sale-more if the buyer was desperate.

  The Bureau preferred any interception of organ jackal cargo to be handled quietly. But Wilson didn’t care that this operation had turned ballistic. The public needed to know what kind of monsters were waiting for them in the shadows.

  “Oh, crap.”

  Wilson looked up, saw Newkirk coming for him, one hand out to slam against his chest.

  “The place is wired,” Newkirk said.

  Wilson went backward, propelled by Newkirk’s charge. He grabbed the man’s jacket and yanked him toward the door, scrambling to get out.

  They’d almost reached the hallway when the freezer exploded.

  2

  Standing in the shelter offered by the nose of the eighteen-wheeler, Maggie Scuderi saw the orange-and-black explosion rip the roof off the meat processing plant and throw it fifty feet into the air. Flaming debris sailed across the sky like confetti scattered by partygoers from hell.

  Scuderi blew on the mike and activated the T-jack. “Slade!”

  Another string of explosions ripped through the building. Metal and mortar slammed against the pavement and the body of the truck.

  “Slade, answer me!” Scuderi held the Delta Elite tightly in her fist. The four other members of the team were scattered throughout that maelstrom.

  A handful of jackals ran from a side exit and started for the truck, then Mac’s sniping skill with the M4 brought two of them down. The survivors pulled up short and sprinted for the fenceline.

  “That was the meat locker area,” Mac said grimly.

  “I know,” Scuderi replied in frustration. Wilson’s orders were not open to question. Once given, they were forever. “Unless you’re dead,” she whispered to herself.

  The three jackals disappeared into the night outside the reach of the perimeter lights. The whole building was going up as prearranged incendiary packages continued to erupt.

  Scuderi blew on the mike again. “Rawley.”

  “Standing.”

  “Darnell.”

  “Here, Maggie.” January’s voice was a pleasant bass.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” January said. “The main explosion was at the other end of the building. But we’re blocked here.”

  “Did you find the records?”

  “Affirmative,” Rawley replied. “And I saw them go up in hellfire a heartbeat later. I put down three guys in there. The fireblast took out the rest of them. I didn’t have time to retrieve anything.”

  “Can you get to Slade and Emmett?”

  “Negative. I’m blocked too. Most of those charges were set to implode the building. If these guys had been any better, the walls would have fallen in on us.”

  “Get out of there and stand ready to greet the locals. They should be here in minutes. Mac and I will be able to reach Slade and Emmett before you guys can get clear.”

  Mac gazed at her around the nose of the eighteen-wheeler. “You plan on leaving the truck? We lose the cargo, we don’t have a case.”

  “We’re not leaving the truck.” Scuderi pulled herself onto the running board, opened the door, and shoved herself behind the wheel. The Delta Elite slid uncomfortably between her thigh and the seat, but it was ready at a second’s notice. “It’s the best door opener we’ve got.” She keyed the ignition as Mac crawled up into the passenger seat and strapped himself in. The big diesel engines rumbled with power and made the entire chassis shiver.

  Mac patted the pockets of his brown bomber jacket down in a characteristic habit Scuderi recognized. “You feel like smoking?” she asked.

  His blue eyes never left the flaming building on the other side of the bug-splattered windshield. “Just wanted to make sure I hadn’t lost ‘em so I’ll have ‘em for after.”

  Scuderi fastened her seatbelt and engaged the transmission. The tractor’s rear wheels dug into the pavement with enough force to buck the cab. “That sounds pretty optimistic.�
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  “If you’re going to do what I think you’re going to do,” Mac said with real feeling, “I’m going to need a cigarette when we’re finished.”

  The eighteen-wheeler rolled forward with increasing speed, came around in a semicircle as Scuderi pulled on the wheel with both hands. Her thoughts were on Wilson and Newkirk. Ever since Wilson had taken over as chief of the Omega Blue unit, the three of them had been together. Five other people had died over their three-and-a-half-year history. The faces of the dead floated through her mind’s eye. She breathed a silent prayer and made the sign of the cross as she held the blunt nose of the truck on course.

  Her hands never left the wheel when the eighteen-wheeler smashed through the side of the building, and she didn’t allow her eyes to close. The seatbelt closed over her breasts with enough force to leave bruises that would be there for days. Her head snapped at the end of her neck when the big rig came to a sudden halt against a reinforced support pillar twenty feet into the structure.

  Lightning flared behind her, poured into the hole the truck had made, and electric-white light robbed the shadows for an instant. Bricks, timber, and mortar thudded against the cab and trailer, then cascaded off as things settled down.

  Fisting the 10mm from under her leg, Scuderi shoved her door open and jumped down lithely, avoiding the bulk of the litter. Her night-vision goggles easily penetrated the darkness.

  “We’re on the killing floor,” Mac said quietly.

  Scuderi scanned the large room, saw the rails that permitted single-file movement only. Chain hoists with meat hooks at the end hung overhead, and coiled water hoses connected to spigots in the walls testified to the grim efficiency of the processing plant. Red-eyed rats hugged the shadows in the corners.

  “This way.” She jogged along the length of the trailer and checked it for any compromises in the metal. There weren’t any. Even if there had been, she was sure the organ canisters inside would have survived the impact. The jackals spared no expense when it came to packing their wares. The product was hard to get, even harder to keep till a sale could be negotiated.