“Thanks for sharing,” Will said.
“We need some music.” Danny leaned forward and flipped a switch. Loud, blaring sirens filled the street. “Just in case,” he shouted.
“In case of what?” Will shouted back.
“In case there are very attractive young women out there, waiting for us to come rescue them. Can you imagine how thankful they’ll be when they hear this and come running out to be saved? ‘Oh, Danny, oh Danny!’”
It took them longer to get back to the SWAT house than they expected. The culprit, like so many things in Houston even before last night, was traffic. The feeder roads around the highways were parking lots, awash with cars of every shape and size. Will was forced to use the small roads, and even so he kept running up against pileups and congestion, often forcing him to back up and find a new route.
They hadn’t found any survivors on the way, which surprised Will. Downtown was always thickly packed, even during the weekends. There were always people around. But the streets were empty, and all he could see were covered windows. Even the blaring sirens didn’t help, and he was sure they could be heard across the city given how absolutely soundless the world was at the moment.
The SWAT house was located away from the main hub of Sheriff’s Department buildings in the middle of the Downtown area, sitting on a small road a couple of blocks from Highway 59, which looped around Downtown.
Or at least, the SWAT house used to be there.
A fire had gutted the building, much of it probably fueled by the inordinate amount of weapons and ammunition stored inside. There wasn’t much left of the two-story structure but huge, charcoaled beams, leftover debris from the roof, and a fridge that Will remembered was inside the lunch room, near the back. The fridge, which had been painted over at least three times, the third and final time in throw-up yellow, was at least fifty meters from where it should have been.
They stood looking at the remains of the House, as stunned by the sight of the carnage as they had been by anything in the last two days. Danny had miraculously not yet run out of Funyuns despite the long drive, and he opened another bag now. With the sirens turned off, there was only the crunch-crunch of the onion chips.
“How many of those did you find?” Will asked.
“About a dozen.”
“Tell me that’s the last one.”
“Six left.”
“Jesus.”
“Want one?”
“No.”
Silence again.
Then Danny said, “C4 is probably still there.”
“In that?”
“If the C4 had gone up with the fire, there wouldn’t even be rubble. There would just be a big crater where the House used to be.”
“How much C4 was in there, anyway?”
“Enough to take out most of the neighborhood. Give or take. We just stocked up last month. Chief got it special ordered from Uncle Sam at a discount, and I was supposed to start training Ross and Jenkins on them next week.”
Will looked at the remains again. Could anything have possibly survived that? But Danny was the expert here, so he would know. “Can you find it?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Danny poured the last few rings from the bag into his mouth, then crumpled and tossed it away. The wind snatched the bag out of the air and took it down the empty street.
“We kept the C4 in a safe,” Danny said. “It’s solid steel, fireproof. You’d need an explosion to open it, and this looks like a fire. A raging, destroy-pretty-much-everything fire, sure, but just a fire.”
“I didn’t know there was such a thing as ‘just a fire’.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, Kemosabe. Like women. Kids. And how to avoid women with kids.”
Danny walked into what was left of the SWAT house, Will following behind. Burned wood and singed fabric crunched underneath their boots. They were halfway through the rubble when they came across a hand sticking out of the blackness, as if reaching for salvation and finding nothing to hold onto. The flesh had been burned clean off the bones.
They found other bodies in the pile, five in all. Nothing left but bone, and it was impossible to tell who they used to be.
Danvers has to be one of them.
Danvers had gotten left behind with a stomach flu when they rolled out yesterday. He wouldn’t have gone home, but would have stayed behind in the House in case they needed backup. Will wondered if Danvers had in fact gotten that backup call and rushed over to the Wilshire Apartments to help out.
They saw more charred remains scattered about the black and smoke. It was impossible to tell if they were wearing uniforms or civilian clothes. Or if they were wearing clothes at all. Will felt the same sense of loss, the overwhelming sadness in the pit of his stomach that he felt when Marker and the others died in the Wilshire Apartments.
He was sure one of the bodies was Caroline, the civilian secretary. She was always good at manning the phones when the team was out on calls. With the team out and Danvers sick, she would have stayed beyond her normal hours to keep him company. That was Caroline. Sweet, always dependable Caroline.
But who were the others? Maybe civilians that ran to the House for help. It would be the most logical place for people to go in times of emergency, and last night would have been a really big emergency. A SWAT house was like a police station, only with heavier weaponry. That would account for the extra bodies in the rubble.
It turned out Danny was right. They found the armory near the back of the destruction, where it was supposed to be. Although the room had been gutted, most of the weapons melted and the ammo expended in the fire, they found a big, ash-covered lump among the debris, a charred beam lying across it.
Danny pushed the beam aside with his boot and kicked the big lump. It didn’t budge an inch, but the kick knocked loose the ash that covered it. Evidence of a smooth, metallic surface shook free underneath. The safe. It lay at an angle, one very sharp metallic end pointing up.
“Can you open it?” Will asked.
Danny nodded. “The combination’s fire-resistant. So yeah, as long as I remember the combination.”
“Do you?”
“Probably. Give me a sec.”
It took them a while to clear away the burned chunks of the House that had fallen around the safe in order to access the combination lock and the latch underneath it. The safe was much too heavy to lift out of the ruins, and rolling it over was also impossible. Eventually, they found the ash-covered combination and latch. Danny crouched next to it and spun the lock right, then left, then right again, and finally left one more time. He grabbed the latch and twisted it, and the safe opened a crack, though it took both of them to pry it open enough for Danny to reach in for its contents.
The C4 looked like stacks of packaged modeling clay, each about the length of a shoebox, one inch in height and two inches wide. They were malleable plastic explosives, so users could twist and prod them into whatever shape was needed to do the job. The only way to set off a C4 explosive was to detonate a smaller charge. Danny knew all about that. He had served a stint with the Army’s EOD, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit, back in Afghanistan.
They stuffed the C4 into three heavy satchels that they carried back to the squad car and were back on the road again in minutes.
“Where to now?” Danny asked.
“Silver,” Will said.
“I don’t mean to pick on your fashion sense, but do you really think now is the time to start accessorizing?”
“I’m thinking more along the lines of silver bullets. Like the Lone Ranger. If the silver on those crosses can kill those things, what kind of effect do you think silver bullets will have?”