“Catch you on the other side, Wife.”
She stepped into his kiss, and he gripped her narrow shoulders, raised and trembling against the cold. He savored the feel of her full lips and then pulled away, and they touched foreheads, the rain making them blink. Those translucent blue eyes. Her wide, lovely mouth. The sporadic band of freckles against her milk-white skin.
“I was drowning,” he said, “and you saved me.”
He tore himself away, climbed into the Jeep, and drove off, wiping at the wetness of his face. He didn’t look back, because his self-control would not withstand another glimpse of her.
Around the bend he became aware of Casper galloping beside the Jeep, still favoring one front paw, and he skidded over in the slush and climbed out. He walked back, and they confronted each other in the road.
“Sit,” he said, and the dog obeyed.
Nate put down his hand. “Shake.”
Casper offered up a muddy paw.
Nate said, “Stay.”
Casper’s square head pulled back regally on his muscular neck. The yellow of his eyes shone through the brown, intelligent wrinkles furrowing his forehead, and it seemed in the way it has seemed for centuries between men and dogs that he understood precisely what was being said and what was not.
Casper withdrew his paw, let it drop to the wet earth.
Nate straightened up. “Good boy.”
He kept the muddy smudge on his palm, not wanting to wipe it off. In the rearview he could still see Casper there, sitting in the down-slanting rain, watching him drive away.
Chapter 60
The grille of the Jeep pointed up the paved walk at Pavlo Shevchenko’s front doors. A stretch of twenty or so feet, two drops of three concrete steps each, then the house itself, nestled into the hillside.
The engine ran, though Nate was not behind the wheel or even inside the vehicle. With an AR-15 assault rifle slung over his shoulder, a Glock 19 shoved into the band of his jeans, and a frag grenade wedged in his front pocket, he stood behind the open driver’s door, holding in his hands a football-size hunk of fine-grained granite he’d pulled from Pavlo’s own front yard.
Around the corner, parked under the protective cover of a neighbor’s drooping sycamore, he had prepped everything. Danny Urban, with his militia-like sensibilities, had made Nate’s job easier by acquiring gear familiar to an army grunt. Nate had wrapped two blocks of C4 with tape, adhered them above the gas tank, and sunk a military-issue M6 electric blasting cap into the white putty. Then it came down to junior-high physics, creating a simple circuit.
There was no leg wire in the duffel bag, an omission owed to Nate’s haste in raiding the evidence locker. After pondering the dilemma, he’d removed one of the Jeep’s rear speakers and stripped out several lengths of radio wire, which he’d connected to the blasting cap and the car battery before laying the two ends well apart on the ground before the front bumper. From his pocket he’d removed the two soup-can tops and taped one lead to each. When the jagged metal circles touched, they would complete the circuit and the Wrangler would go apocalyptic.
Now he needed a piece of paper to buffer the soup-can tops until contact. He searched the Jeep, finding nothing. No flyers, no CD jewel case from which to pull a cover. The service manual was long gone, his registration tattered and thin, and the proof-of-insurance slip too small to risk. How was it possible that there wasn’t a single piece of sufficient paper in the vehicle? His concern mounted, edging on panic. He couldn’t imagine coming all this way and having to deconstruct the bomb, drive down the hill, and go paper shopping.
A young father approached with his daughter, laughing and splashing through puddles in their rain boots. As they passed, the man stared at Nate curiously. The wires, C4, and duffel were not adequately indistinct even in the darkness. Nate forced a smile and said, “Engine trouble,” and the pair hurried along.
Watching them leave, hand in hand, Nate felt a solution take shape. He reached for his back pocket, removing the two photographs. Cielle crouching beside her soccer ball, her grin punctuated by gaps. Janie laughing with him at their wedding. Closing his eyes, he kissed them each. Very carefully, he taped the soup-can tops around the pictures, sandwiching them, and adhered the makeshift pressure plate to the Jeep’s grille. A collision of any force would tear the photographs and push the metal circles into contact.
He’d seen this make of car bomb a half dozen times at checkpoints in the Sandbox, and he knew what the aftermath looked like. Two point five pounds of explosives supersized by a half tank of gasoline should be enough to open Pavlo’s front door.
Standing now at the end of the walk, his weakened arms straining under the weight of the granite, Nate said a silent prayer to Lady Luck and dropped the stone onto the gas pedal. The engine roared. Reaching across, he cranked on the radio, and Shithead Jason’s AC/DC disc spun to life, Brian Johnson wailing from the remaining car speakers:
Below, the front door cracked open, Valerik poking his head out, the stub of his sleek ponytail wagging into view. The heel of his hand rode the stock of an AK-47. They were ready and waiting.
But not for this.
Nate yanked the gearshift into drive, and the Jeep rocketed away, knocking his arm.
Valerik’s head reared back, the whites of his eyes pronounced, and the big door slammed shut.
The Jeep caught air off the first set of stairs, bounced off kilter, and hurtled toward the front door at a tilt, Nate already walking behind, tugging on the sling, rotating the assault rifle into his hands.
The explosion was expansive, the front door and surrounding wall obliterated, the front windows turned to shrapnel. Nate kept on through the blowback, heat and wind scorching his cheeks, his dropped left foot shushing across the concrete. The air stank of gasoline and burned metal. He sliced through a billowing wall of soot and drifted into the crumbled foyer, the Angel of Death. Cloaked in the swirling cloud, rubble loose underfoot, he listened for sounds of life.
A gurgle.
Squinting, he cut through the dense air and found Valerik slumped at the base of a blown-out wall. The blast overpressure had ruptured the air sacs in his lungs, thick dark soup pouring down his chin, drenching his collar. Nate pictured McGuire in his green-and-khaki ACUs, joking over a failed suicide bomber rustling and gagging on a dirt warehouse floor:
Valerik burbled up at Nate.
“Hi there,” Nate said.
Crouching over him, Nate pulled the pin from the grenade and nestled it under his body so the spoon held. He jogged a few steps into the powdered air, hid behind a burning cabinet, and waited.
Panicked voices, feet pounding a staircase, then creaking overhead. Pavlo, retreating to safety.
Nate was about to press on when he heard ragged coughing coming from the kitchen, followed by hoarse cries. “Valerik? Valerik?”
Gun in hand, Dima jogged by, his form resolving briefly from the dust, though Nate couldn’t risk stopping to aim and fire, not with his weakened left hand slowing his reaction time. He kept his back to the cabinet, the AR-15 at the ready. It was a low-end model-single-stage trigger, uncollapsible stock, and no floated barrel-and he reminded himself to use it calmly and carefully.
There came a moist choking as Valerik tried to warn his friend, and then a blast blew a tunnel of clear air through the foyer and partway down the hall. Shrapnel studded the cabinet and the adjoining wall. Nate heard Dima’s body strike tile, then the sound of scrabbling limbs. He was up, moving; Valerik’s body must have shielded some of the blast.
Nate pivoted out from behind the cabinet, fire licking at his sleeve, and headed toward the kitchen. Dima staggered away, a bobbing run, his silhouette framed by the lights sparkling through the floor-to-ceiling windows at the rear of the house. As Nate approached, Dima turned, broad chest flexing as he tried to lift the gun, and Nate
