Page 28 of Fire and Smoke (Nothing Special #9)

Wesley (Wes) Drake

Wes’s heart thundered against his ribs as he crouched near the darkened entrance at the rear of the five-story apartment complex.

A humid mist saturated the air, sticky on his skin under the heavy tactical gear.

Law was close beside him, one trembling hand on his shoulder, the other gripping a modified smoke release pistol. His breathing was short and regulated but unmistakably nervous.

Wes flexed his gloved fingers around the gel cartridge and applied it to the door’s rusted lock, then nodded once to the enforcers.

The compound hissed, ate through the mechanism in seconds, and the lock fell away with a whisper.

It was far stealthier than a SWAT battering ram.

“Nice,” Ruxs breathed.

After a couple of seconds, Free cut all electricity and the entire block went dark—it’d appear as a power outage instead of a raid. No reason to cause alarm.

Wes tapped the side of his shades, activating the night vision lenses—Free’s patented technology—that glowed a vibrant green. A map of the complex was now projected a few inches below his line of sight.

“Stealth mode activated.” Free’s voice was smooth and clear over the comms. “Law, Wes, your heartbeats are off the charts. Calm down and breathe easy for me, okay? We’ve rehearsed this frontward and backward. Steele and Tech will be less than three feet from you at all times.”

Green eased the door open, and Ruxs followed in close behind him.

He and Law were crouched, moving in the swift pattern they’d rehearsed for weeks.

They swept silently through the first floor, the enforcers swinging their weapons side to side, across, and over each other in perfect sync as they cleared the apartments on each floor.

Most were empty, some had old furniture indicating a person or family had once lived there but had chosen to leave a landlord who ran a meth empire out of the upper units.

The team slowly ascended the back stairwell that reeked of mildew and acetone, a pairing that made Wes want to gag.

They exited on the fourth floor, finding rooms stuffed with storage crates, each marked with vague labels in other languages and warning signs.

Ruxs and Green started snapping images of crate contents, chemical drums, and vacuum-sealed bags.

Steele knocked on Tech’s helmet before Wes was tapped twice on his shoulder, cueing him to continue forward.

“Four minutes, twenty seconds, let’s pick up the pace,” Free said.

It appeared three of the apartments had been converted into one large room that was filled with desks, outdated computers, and still-humming laptops with USB drives plugged into the hubs.

“Pull all of them, but don’t power up the system,” Free instructed. “Tech, extract the information, then put ’em back.”

“Ten-four.” Tech began yanking out the discs, Steele never far from his side as he watched every angle of the room.

Just as Tech downloaded the last drive, they heard movement in the hallway.

Syn nodded at Law to do something, but he was already unclipping a device from his vest.

He lobbed it into the room across the hall, an instant burst of smoke erupting, curling dark and thick like ink in water, drowning the tight corridor in a disorienting fog.

Whoever had been charging forward stopped, their shouts breaking into ragged coughs and hacking.

Men were stumbling blind, the hall flooded with confusion as the voices morphed from yelling orders to desperate gasps for air.

“Got approaching vehicles in the front of and back. Bogies on the second landing and ascending fast.”

Before Free could finish, gunfire erupted like strings of Red Devil firecrackers tossed into a furnace.

The thin walls trembled with the impact of bullets tearing through the plaster, forcing them to dive for cover.

The noise was deafening, the air scorching.

“Stay down!” Steele hollered, bearing down on Wes’s back, protecting him with his own body.

Tech skidded across the floor, flipped a table in front of Law, and took aim over the top, firing his weapon of nonlethal rounds with fast, measured burst that struck men with bone-breaking force.

“We’re compromised,” Syn said loud into the coms. “Alpha team, prepare to breach on my mark.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

God, Day, Hart, and his SWAT officers were the Alpha team.

Wes couldn’t control the panic that tore through him. He was told it’d be unlikely they’d be needed since this warrant was supposed to be quick and quiet.

He and Law were to create a few distractions for the spineless workers too low on the totem pole to know what to do, and by the time they called someone, they’d be long gone.

Whoever was shooting at them sure as fuck didn’t sound as if they were scared, clueless, or low on the totem pole.

Wes was shaking so fucking hard it took him three tries to yank the top off his palm-sized magnesium flare.

“Anytime now, Wes,” Steele rumbled as he ducked from return fire.

He fumbled with the striker, breath hitching as the gunshots got closer. The top lit and a blinding white flame roared to life in his grip.

“Mask on!” Steele yelled.

Wes hurled it like it was a live grenade, and the hall lit up in a searing blaze that quickly dissipated into a cloud of paralytic vapor, causing the men to drop like stones once inhaled.

Steele dragged him out the door and over bodies by his collar as they barreled down the hall in the opposite direction.

“Alpha team, fourth floor!” Syn roared as the back stairwell door burst open and four or five men came through with guns raised, firing wildly toward them.

Wes’s nerves were a wreck as Steele kicked in an apartment door and shoved him inside. He expected Law to be tossed in behind him, but he wasn’t.

“Law!” he hollered.

“Tech has him, Wes, stay calm. This will all be over soon,” Free said in a low tone.

“Fuck you!” he snapped.

This was not what they were told would happen.

The hall filled with a bluish smoke. It was Law’s NX-9 obscurant formula. Engineered to create a visibility-blocking fog that only they could see through with their infrared optic lenses.

Wes wish he couldn’t see at all.

Too many armed men were coming at them from all directions.

“On your feet,” Steele barked, not giving him a chance before he yanked him up by his Kevlar vest strap and forced him toward the door.

Why the hell was Steele so calm? Wes was in a nightmare he had no way of waking up from and it made his fight-or-flight instincts kick into overdrive.

He barreled into the hall and slammed right into Syn’s chest. The sergeant spun and pushed him into the opposite room and went back to fighting.

“I got you. I got you,” Law caught him. “Come on, we’re getting the fuck outta here. This is bullshit.”

He and Law stood at the entrance of an apartment, watching as Ruxs and Green moved like twin lunatics.

Ruxs grabbed a man by his throat and slammed him into the wall hard enough to crumble the plaster. He jabbed the stun baton into the guy’s ribs—once, twice, three times—until the body fell in a heap at his boots.

Wes’s mouth fell open in a silent scream at the muzzle pointed at Rux’s skull, but before a sound escaped, Ruxs dropped under it, the bullet ripping through the air over his head.

He surged forward and whipped the baton up between the man’s legs with a sickening crack. He folded, gagging, but Ruxs didn’t stick around—he rocketed an elbow into another target’s chin, the blow snapping his head back before he hit the floor in a spray of blood and spit.

Green was just as fast, if not faster, kicking off the wall and landing a knee into the center of his target’s chest. As he gasped, Green struck him across the back of the neck with his baton.

At the same time, he pivoted and kicked another guard in the gut—hard enough for him to empty the contents of his stomach—before he swept his legs from under him.

Men continued to rush forward, but Ruxs and Green played off each other, and Wes swore he heard them chuckling as they put one disoriented man after another on their backs.

“Let’s clear this bitch out like it’s last call at the strip club.” Tech gritted as he used his baton at same time he fired continuous rounds of pepper balls into the faces of Mercer’s men.

They’re fuckin insane!

Wes saw the opening at the same time as Law, and they both bolted toward the stairwell door.

“No, don’t—”

The door slammed shut behind them, cutting off Syn’s order. Fear drove Wes’s legs as he raced as far away from the fight as he could. Two more floors and they’d be outside.

“Wes, Law, stop running,” Free said in his earpiece. “I won’t let anything happen to you, but you have to listen to me.”

“What! What do you want us to do?”

“Go back up to the third floor.”

He and Law skidded to a stop.

“Hell no,” Wes breathed.

“I need you to trust me,” Free said. “Go back up a level and go through the third floor access door.”

Footsteps and curses could be heard coming toward them, and Wes almost shit himself as he and Law took the stairs back up two at a time.

Law held his hand tight as he cracked open the hallway door and peeked inside. Once he saw it was clear, he moved them slowly down the stuffy hallway.

“Now what?” Wes said. “Free. Free. Now what do you—”

Windows exploded inward from two empty apartments on both sides of them with the power of a cannon blast. Glass, debris, and dust rained down around him like a shattering chandelier.

Wes froze as Law dove on top of him, taking them both to the floor.

“I got ’em, Free,” a woman said in a loud, confident voice.

“Wes, Law, it’s Dinah, go with her,” Free ordered.

“Let’s move you two,” Dinah barked as she stood in front of a team of five. “You can nap later.”

He didn’t hear any more gunshots as they were hustled down the last few floors of the building and out of the front door.

The entire street was lit up brighter than the Fourth of July in New York City.