Simon shifted on the ground. His bones and muscles felt electrified; every minute that they lay in cover, still and quiet, his body became more desperate to move. That was unusual for him; he wasn’t naturally fidgety or anxious. In fact, he tended toward the opposite end of the spectrum—which was, he thought, what Willa had meant when she’d told him that he stood back awhile before he acted.
But this day was neither usual nor natural. In his hands was a Dragunov sniper rifle. Becker lay a few feet away with its twin. Between them lay Gunner, with a fucking missile launcher on his shoulder. Most of the rest of the club crouched on the hill behind and below them. They three were the vanguard today.
Until two days before, Simon had never fired a sniper rifle in his life. Neither had Becker. But he and Becker were the best rifle shots in the club, besides Gunner, whose trigger finger had other business in this job. Simon’s eye had recovered quickly, without scarring, so he remained a crack shot. Gunner had taken him and Becker out to Dane’s place and given them an afternoon’s tutorial on hitting a target up to a mile away. It was finesse work, no mistake.
Even his inexperience with the weapon in his hands didn’t have him feeling so jumpy. It was the job itself, which was sure to—intended to—blow their war with the Hounds into the daylight. And they meant to kill today.
This was Irina Volkov’s plan—her intel to suggest it, and her weapons to do it. Delaney, Dane, and Rad had sat with her and Alexei and laid this out. Irina wanted the war in the open, insisting that it could only be won that way. She’d convinced the head of the Bulls’ table, and the officers had convinced the rest of the club—at least enough to win the vote. Maverick, Griffin, and Slick had voted nay. Simon was fairly sure it had been the first time Slick had voted on the other side from him; he tended to follow his sponsor’s lead.
Simon was an officer, too, but he was only the money man, the keeper of their books. When it came to jobs like this, he was no more than a soldier and not part of high-level planning. He’d heard the plan with the rest, and, trusting his president more than the Russians, he’d voted for it.
Today, he was just a grunt with good aim and a steady hand, doing what he was told to do.
“Time check!” Gunner called back. As tense as Simon was, Gun must have been crawling out of his skin. He came out of the gate at about seventy-percent twitchy. It was his third time check—further evidence of his impatience.
“Fifteen-oh-three,” Delaney answered, military style. Simon had to math that out to understand it was three minutes past three in the afternoon, but he knew Gunner had understood right away. He was a war vet like Delaney. Different war, same Army.
“Three minutes past projected time,” Delaney added. “Stay easy, Gun.”
Gunner jerked his head once, acknowledging the time and Delaney’s order.
While Simon and Becker had learned to shoot the Russian snipers, Apollo and Rad had taken the Russians’ map and scouted the right place to set up the job—long view of the road, good cover on the side. A place to set up three big guns and a whole MC.
Here they were, set up on a state highway southwest of Tulsa, waiting for their target: a parcel truck hauling bulk baking goods. Flour, sugar, corn starch—excellent camouflage for cocaine, if you could be sure to keep the product separated from the decoy.
It would be escorted by two unassuming SUVs. The Hounds weren’t bikers. According to Irina, they collected the truck at a hand-off in Texas, ran it into Tulsa, packaged it for retail in their warehouse, and sent their dealers and brokers off from there.
There were two good hit opportunities: the truck once the Hounds took responsibility for it, or the warehouse. Irina had wanted to crater the warehouse, and Delaney had brought it to the table first. But there would be a lot of people in that warehouse who didn’t deserve to be killed—women and teens the Hounds used for their scut work. Not Hounds. Innocent. The Bulls had recoiled at the idea of taking innocent women down, and Delaney hadn’t sold the idea hard. He hadn’t liked it, either. They had enough innocent blood on their hands already.
To her credit, Irina could have pushed the Bulls aside and done it anyway, but she had not.
So they were hitting the truck—out in the open, and more dangerous for a host of reasons, but, hopefully, no damage but to the Hounds themselves.
“Hold up,” Rad said. He had watch and had held a pair of high-powered binoculars to his face almost non-stop for at least twenty minutes. “I think…yeah. This is it. Blue Ford up front. Explorer or Expedition. Parcel truck right behind. Road’s clear this way.
“And this way,” called Maverick, binoculars pointed in the opposite direction. Simon looked through the sight and saw what Maverick described.
“Showtime, boys,” Delany said. “You know what to do.”
Simon heard Gunner take and release a deep breath. He sighted his target—the driver of the lead SUV—and took a breath of his own. From this vantage, and this distance, the vehicle moved almost right at him, so the movement itself was less troublesome than if they’d been aiming from the flank. But it wasn’t dead on, so he took his aim where he expected the driver to be and squeezed the trigger.
Shit, that was fucking loud without earplugs.
His aim had been true, and the SUV veered. They’d hoped it would turn to the near shoulder, where the terrain rose from the road, and stay close to the field of play, but it didn’t—it crossed the grassy median. There’d been a passenger beside the driver, and they couldn’t let him get away.
As Simon aimed again, intending to fire again and disable the engine on his target, an explosion at his side slammed against his head and turned his already ringing eardrums to mush. On reflex, he looked up from his sight as the missile hit the truck and exploded. He’d never seen anything like it, and it was nothing like he’d imagined. In his mind, he’d seen a fireball lift the truck and toss its parts around.
No. There was certainly a fireball—like a goddamn neutron bomb. The shockwave rolled over them like a fright train, heat and wind and thunder, forcing them all down, even from a flashpoint so far away.
He’d been away from the rifle sight no more than a second, one he couldn’t have resisted, but when he sighted again and looked for the errant SUV, he saw only field. Dammit. They needed to track it down.
“I lost the SUV!” The world around him was wrapped in thick cotton, but his own voice bellowed in his brain.
“Hold up,” Delaney yelled as Simon put his legs under him to stand. “Not until we’re sure nothing more is gonna blow.”
“There’s nothing left to blow,” Gunner said.
Delaney didn’t answer, so Simon stayed put and watched the fire.
Gunner was right. The fire burned out quickly and left only a cloud of dust and smoke—because there was nothing left to burn. Nothing but scorched, broken asphalt.
Becker never got a shot off. He didn’t need to. The rear SUV and its occupants no longer existed. Simon looked through the rifle sight, seeking a debris field. He saw nothing. No trace of anything except heaved road and earth.
Gunner had said that a Vampir missile would vaporize anything smaller than a tank, and he hadn’t exaggerated. Simon hadn’t really believed it.
They’d erased two million dollars’ worth of pure cocaine. Irina hadn’t wanted the truck or its contents for herself. She’d wanted it destroyed. Her message to the Italians.
This wasn’t just a Tulsa war.
“Fuck,” Gunner muttered. “Holy fuck.” Usually, he was exuberant after any kind of intentional violence, but he sat on the ground, his mouth open, as stunned as the rest.
“You’ve seen this before, right?” Simon asked him. “In the Gulf War?”
“Huh?” Gunner blinked. “Uh, yeah. Yeah. It’s…fuck. That shit doesn’t belong here.” He shuddered. “I can’t…”
“Gun—you good?” Dane asked, gripping his shoulder.
Another shudder, this one sharper, like he was shaking off whatever had him in its clutches. “Yeah, I’m…I’m good.” He stood, and seemed steady.
“Okay, we gotta track down the runaway SUV,” Delaney said. “Si, you sure you got a clean shot—killed the driver?”
“Yeah—but there was a passenger, and I only got one shot off.” If only he’d kept still and focused when Gunner had fired the missile. How could he have, though?
“Okay. We gotta roll. That shit made a hell of a racket. Dane, Rad, Eight—see if you can track it down. Keep it low, and get your asses home. The rest, let’s pack up and roll before law gets here.”
~oOo~
They’d had the clubhouse set up and ready to go to immediate lockdown for weeks, and had been running something like a modified lockdown since Maddie’s place had been hit. Delaney’s first idea had been sound on paper—it did, in fact, make the Bulls and their families one big target when they grouped together—but in practice, splitting up had simply made many weaker targets. They were better off together.
But trouble had been going on for weeks. Lives couldn’t just stop. People had jobs. Business had to be done. So they’d been coming together at the clubhouse when they had no responsibilities elsewhere, and they’d been in pairs or with guards when they did.
Dane had told his daughters, both in college out of state, to stay away. Leah, Deb, and Sam were at the farm. The other old ladies had double security, and they all stayed together as much as they could. When big jobs came down—gun runs or a mission like the truck hit, then they locked down hard, bringing all of their people in Tulsa to the clubhouse.
A true lockdown was more than simply patches, prospects, old ladies, and children. Girlfriends, sweetbutts on the roster, established hangarounds, close friends and neighbors—anyone who could conceivably get hurt in club trouble was invited to stay. The closer someone was to the club, the more pointed the invitation became. Someone close enough to get hurt in club trouble might be close enough for that hurt to become club trouble.
It was a lot of people, and it had been a lot of weeks. Though Mo had the girls on nearly non-stop cleanup duty, the crush of people had taken its toll on the place. As Simon sat at the bar, waiting with his brothers for Dane, Rad, and Eight Ball to return, he felt the accumulated presence of scores of trapped lives press on his back. The place needed a good psychic airing. And an open window or ten.
Dane had called in nearly an hour earlier. They’d handled the SUV, but had no sight of the passenger. Delaney called them home. They meant to go a long route to get around the blast sight, which had attracted official attention.
No one had seen the blast, except for the column of smoke it had left. Hundreds had heard it, though. They had the news on in the clubhouse. So far, it was being described as a ‘mysterious explosion.’ Eventually, they might come across some debris, but the beauty of that hit was the power of its destruction. Anything that had survived even remotely intact would have been flung far from the blast site. Into woods and fields. The missile had destroyed its own evidence.
Simon’s body hadn’t calmed since the ambush. A current of electric tension hummed through him, and he couldn’t drink enough to dull it, because they weren’t done. He needed to stay sharp, in case the Hounds came back at them fast.
He wanted to talk to Deb. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t lay his head in her lap and find calm, but he could at least hear her voice.
He wasn’t supposed to do it, but the clubhouse was loud and crowded, and the only phone anywhere private was in Delaney’s office. He pulled his Nokia out of his kutte and dialed the farm. He’d have Apollo change out the phone if it was a problem.
“Wesson Farm. Sam Wesson speaking.”
“Hey, Sam. It’s Simon. Is Deb around?”
“Sure thing. I’ll call her.” There was a pause, and Simon thought he’d gone to get his daughter, but then Sam asked, “Simon—is everything good with you? The Bulls?”
Knowing that a pause would come off like an answer, Simon said the quickest, truest thing he could. “We’re good, Sam. All whole and on plan. Gun’s good, too.”
“That’s good.”
Another pause, and this time, it was Deb who spoke. “Hey, you.”
“Hey. Just wanted to hear your voice. Good day?”
“Yeah. Usual. Slow start this morning, but we had a good day.”
He’d called last night and reached a very drunk and rowdy Debra. She’d had her friend Aly out there, and those two always drank hard. They’d even gotten Leah drunk, and Simon wasn’t sure he’d known that Leah imbibed.
“You’re a kinky drunk. Shame it went to waste,” he teased, smiling against the phone.
“Baby, you don’t need to get me drunk.” Her voice had gone low, and Simon imagined her father in the next room. “You just need to get me.”
He chuckled. Behind him, he heard the side door open. He turned as Dane, Rad, and Eight Ball filed into the party room. “I gotta go. I’ll call later. I wish you had a phone in your bedroom. I’d love to sex you up over the phone.”
“Pale substitute. But do call. Everything’s okay?”
“Yeah. A little hot, but we got our hands on the knob. Maybe we can turn this up and get it done.”
“I hope so. I miss you.”
“Miss you, too.” Delaney waved everyone to the chapel. “Gotta go.”
He caught Apollo outside the chapel door. “Hey, man—I just made a personal on the club phone. Is that a problem?”
Apollo gave him a look he didn’t appreciate at all. “Fuck, man. There’s a reason I said don’t do it.” He sighed. “Gimme. I’ll wipe it after church. Asshole.”
Not sorry at all, Simon handed him the phone. They went into the chapel together.
Alexei Sokolov sat at the foot of the table, facing Delaney. Simon wasn’t surprised. Irina had left him in Tulsa to run her front, and he and Delaney had been closed up in D’s office since they’d gotten back from the hit.
Delaney gaveled the meeting open. “Let’s get a report, Dane.”
The VP nodded. “Called in a wrecker from Jones Salvage. SUV is handled. I didn’t have enough cash, so we got a payable there.” He glanced at Simon. “Twenty-three hundred.”
Simon nodded and made a mental note.
Delaney went on. “A tree ate the truck. Passenger door was open, so Si was right about another rider. We tried to track him but got nowhere. When we had sirens, we had to scoot. So I’d say the Hounds already know who gets credit.” They’d intended to claim credit anyway—it could only be effective as a move on the board if the Hounds saw it as such—but they’d wanted to time it on their own clock.
“No matter,” Alexei answered. “A witness to our power is useful. He ran, but he saw. And now he will fear.”
“Or he’ll hate,” Griffin said.
Alexei looked sidelong at him but didn’t respond.
They’d kept Griffin back today, on guard at home. That had been Delaney’s call, but Simon suspected that it had been Alexei’s request. The Russians saw Griffin’s ex as a significant problem.
But was she? She’d been part of Griffin’s life for years, and part of the Bulls extended family, but not that much deeper than the most favored sweetbutts or longest-standing hangarounds. She’d never kept Griff’s flame, but because of that, everyone had known to hold back a little with her. Unless Griffin had broken a club rule and confided to an unmarked woman.
He said he hadn’t. No reason not to trust that. He was a brother, in good standing and well-liked. Loyal and steady.
On the other hand, things got said in bed. Even Simon had caught himself once or twice almost saying something to Deb. Never anything serious, but a few grey-area mentions that he’d cut off at the last second.
The biggest hitch that Simon saw was that the club hadn’t known of her Northside ties. Griffin said he hadn’t known, either. No reason not to trust that.
But now there was a woman, angry and grieving and blaming the Bulls for the death of her kin, who had family ties on enemy turf, who’d been close to the club, who might or might not know things that could hurt them.
Delaney addressed Griffin’s comment. “They already hate us. This hit, it’s a big statement. It puts them in trouble with their superiors, too. That’s two million dollars in product lost in transit, while the Hounds had charge of it. Their supplier will want a reckoning for that.”
“This is the plan,” Alexei picked up. “Yes, I think Hounds will look for vengeance, but we are ready and waiting. We all stand together to fight them off. But most important victory today is how battlefield will shift. Now, heat will come from Mexico to Hounds. And our Italian friends will turn attention as well. Hounds will be trapped.
“Cornered dogs bite,” Maverick said.
“Yes,” Alexei agreed. “There is more to fight. But what you did today—this is your…” He paused and lifted his eyes as if he meant to pluck his next words from the air. When he had it, he smiled and scanned the faces of the Bulls around the table. “Your D-Day.”
“More like Hiroshima,” Becker muttered.
Either way, Simon thought, if Alexei was right, it meant that the Bulls had already won.