Fox ran like his ass was on fire. He couldn’t hesitate. Every second spent was one that could cost them everything, so all he could do was put his life in Axel’s hands and focus on moving as fast as he possibly could.

He slid to a halt behind the truck, kicking up dust and grabbing at the vehicle to stay upright.

He spared a quick look back at Axel in time to see him unlock the trunk of the cruiser.

Fox unwrapped his lock picks and crouched down to eye the lock on the truck’s back doors. What he wouldn’t give right now for a hammer and a screwdriver. He could be in the back of this truck within five seconds. Sure, there’d be noise, but Spike already knew they were out here. It wouldn’t give anything away.

Still, all he had were the right tools for the job. He shouldn’t complain.

He plucked a tensioner out and inserted it into the bottom of the keyway, then plucked a wave rake from his tools. There wasn’t time to do the job with finesse, and he wasn’t too proud to rake the shit out of a lock if it got him what he needed.

He heard a slam, and looked over in time to watch Axel bring the shotgun to bear on the house.

That made everything real again. Axel, shotgun in his hands like he was born to it, backing carefully toward Fox.

Fox hissed at himself and put pressure on the tensioner until he felt the resistance in the plug, then he inserted the rake and began to jiggle it back and forth over the pins, adjusting everything from angle to pressure and relying on the feedback from his tensioner to know when he’d convinced a pin to settle on the shearline.

The trick was to move so fast that the lock thought everything was happening at once. Each and every pin would fall into place and balance precariously on barely a millimeter of metal which was being held in the wrong place by the tensioner. Once he had the final pin, all he had to do was turn the tensioner like it was the real key, and the lock would give way.

Axel backed into the shelter provided by the truck. “How’s it going?”

“Nnnh,” was all Fox could say.

If he lost his concentration, he would have to start over. It would be wasted time and he wasn’t a big fan of inefficiency.

The final pin jiggled into place and Fox twisted the tensioner, then felt the satisfying clunk of the bolt withdrawing.

“All right,” he breathed as he tucked the tools back into his jacket. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

He pulled the handle and wrenched the door open, then gaped into the back of the truck.

It was insane.

Axel stood by his side and let out a low whistle. “Well I guess there’s no guns in there.”

Fox’s mouth felt dry. He had to pry his tongue away from the roof of his mouth. “Yeah,” he croaked.

No guns.

Just a ridiculous amount of explosives.

“What’s the yield on all that?” Axel whispered.

“I have no fucking clue,” Fox said as he shook his head. “It depends on the chemical composition, the housing, the stability, whether they detonate or deflagrate—”

“Okay.” Axel exhaled loudly. “Is it armed?”

“I don’t know.” Fox shook his head and hopped up into the back of the truck so he could get a closer look.

“Careful!”

He snorted. “They drove down a dirt track to get here. If this stuff was impact-sensitive it would’ve blown them sky high before they ever made it this far.”

He wasn’t a bomb disposal expert. This was insane. How was he supposed to know where to start with all this? He’d have to call the office, see if they had someone who could walk him through this stuff, or at least tell him whether this massive pile of barrels with cables and wires sticking into and out of all of it was going to go off in his face. He might know about the physics and chemistry of explosions, but the logistics?

Nuh uh. This was the stuff of nightmares. It was why he did his best work behind a keyboard, thank you very much.

“Hey.” Axel’s voice was like an anchor in a stormy sea. “You’ve got this.”

Fox drew deep breaths and released them slowly until his spiraling panic was shoved aside. “Okay. You better get away in case I screw this up. I’ll handle this.”

“Fox, no. You can’t just…”

Fox turned back to face him in time to see Axel wave a hand around in the air, at a loss for words, and he crouched at the truck’s doorway.

“Yeah,” Fox said. “I can. I have to.”

The look in Axel’s eyes was going to haunt him, he knew it. They were so wide, almost desperate with worry, and Fox’s breath quickened.

He leaned up so that he could kiss Axel. Only quickly. A brief thing that was hard and hungry and begged for more time. And when he pulled back, he felt like it hadn’t ended.

Like it was still with him, gripping his heart.

Axel’s throat bobbed as he swallowed, then his head jerked aside, his gaze drawn away.

“Fuck,” he breathed. “I’ll have to draw them off you.”

Fox didn’t know what he’d seen, but in another second he didn’t need to. The roar of gunfire erupted and Axel slung the shotgun single-handed around the side of the truck to return fire, then he rolled away from Fox and Fox lost sight of him.

Fox backed into the truck. Axel was using his life to buy him time, so the less of that time he wasted the higher the chance Axel would survive.

He began to follow the cables. It was the most rudimentary of troubleshooting techniques, but until he could identify what was connected where he wouldn’t have a chance of getting any further.

The connections went from one barrel to the next, diving in through the plastic and popping out the other side. There was some sort of filler around the holes to stop the barrels leaking, and other cables existed only to hold the barrels in their places against the truck’s outer walls.

He pulled his phone and dialed Gutierrez, then jammed it against his ear so he could continue tracking the wires.

“Yes?” Gutierrez never identified a damn thing when he answered a call. There was no way for him to know it was secure until Fox said so.

“Sir, I need an IED specialist on the line ASAP.” He squinted as he tried to untangle some leads to make sure he was tracking the same one all the way. Why the hell were they all the same color?

“Let me see who I can find.”

He was on hold for around half a minute. Half a minute of gunfire and yelling from outside the truck, making a horrendous remix of the hold music which played into his right ear. No bullets punched through the truck and into his head, though, so he counted that as a net positive.

The cables led him to a black plastic box where they all bundled together to squeeze into a single hole. The box was completely featureless otherwise, and he felt kind of disappointed. He’d half expected some kind of counter or clock, even if it was super basic, but this felt anticlimactic.

The temptation to open the box was strong and he did his best to resist it.

“Hey! Agent Walker?” The new voice in his ear wasn’t one he’d ever heard before, but she sounded eager. “I’m Rachel Turner. I hear you need an IED disposal expert? What’s the—” she paused. “Are you in a war zone?”

He wasn’t surprised she’d heard the shooting. It was loud enough to wake the dead.

“Kinda,” he gasped. “Can we switch to video? I need to show you this.”

“Absolutely!”

He took the phone from his ear and poked at it, and when she appeared on his screen she looked younger than he was. Mid twenties, if he had to guess, with her auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. Looked like the Agency just went around recruiting all the young geniuses it could find.

“What’ve we got?” she said.

Fox switched cameras on his phone so that he could give her a look at the inside of the truck. “Every wire in here leads to this,” he said as he followed the cables to the black box. “Any ideas?”

“Depends what you wanna do. Are you trying to defuse it or detonate it?”

Fox snorted. “I can’t even tell whether it’s primed.”

“Are you in a vehicle?”

“Yes.”

“Has that vehicle moved?”

He nodded. “Yes, down a dirt track road. So whatever it is has to be stable enough for transport, right?”

“Right,” she agreed. “Wiggle one of those containers. Tell me whether you hear anything.”

He switched the camera back so that he could stare at her in horror. “What?”

“I think this device is disguised to look like liquids,” she explained. “But most liquids are too unstable to transport like this. Let me know if you hear sloshing.”

Fox winced at the idea of manhandling a vat of something that could tear all the meat off his bones, but she was the expert.

He took a deep breath and leaned in to place his ear against a barrel as he jostled it.

He heard the faintest of sounds, like shifting sands. At first he thought he imagined it over the ongoing serenade of rifle and shotgun fire outside, but it rustled against his ear like a rainmaker stick.

Critically, his body remained in one piece.

“Sounds like sand,” he gasped into the phone.

“Great,” she said. “Does it smell?”

“No. I haven’t smelled anything in here.”

Turner’s head bobbed briefly. “I’m going to guess it’s ANFO, which means each barrel must have its own booster agent. A blasting cap won’t set it off. They’ll need some Tovex or pentolite to start the reaction, which is probably in there with the ANFO, and that means your little box is most likely the thing that’s gonna instruct the booster agent to blow.”

“Great.” Fox wiped his forehead, then threw himself to the floor as a slew of bullets punched through the side of the truck. “Shit!”

“Walker? Are you okay?”

“No! I’m not okay!” Fox rolled onto his back and stared up at the ragged holes on both sides. The rounds had punched straight through and out the other side of the truck.

This was bad. They shouldn’t be shooting at him, they should be focused on Axel, so why weren’t they?

Was Axel dead?

Fox grabbed his phone and scrambled toward the plastic box. “Okay. How do I set this off?”

“It’s going that good, huh?” Turner leaned forward. “Show me the control unit.”

Fox flipped cameras and dragged the box down to floor level rather than risk raising his head.

“Useful,” she muttered. “No way of knowing if it’s booby-trapped. You’re gonna have to crack it open if you want to know what’s happening in there.”

“Fine.”

Fox put the phone down and grabbed his multi-tool, then flipped it open and selected the knife blade. He locked it into place, took the featureless box, and wedged the knife into a thin sliver of a crack which ran around the edge.

The box had to have been open at some point for Spike to have gotten things inside it. All he had to do was pry it apart again.

Are you insane?

What if it’s trapped?

What if you open it and the whole truck blows up?

He did all he could to shut down that line of thinking, forcing his hands to proceed on auto-pilot. There wasn’t time to think, let alone to feel.

No time to worry about Axel or the silence of his shotgun.

And no time to let himself dwell on what that might mean, because if it did…

If Axel was gone…

He blinked tears away and struggled not to make a sound that Turner might pick up on.

If Axel was gone, Fox might as well fucking take out every last one of these assholes rather than let them shoot him like a fish in a barrel.

With a sharp pop, the lid of the box cracked open. Fox held his breath as it clattered to the floor, but he was still here. Still alive.

“Okay,” Turner said. “Show me what you’ve got.”

Anger, he thought. Anger is what I’ve got.

Anger and a powerful need to send Spike straight to hell.