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“Done,” Jax said, tossing the phone to the floor.
He picked up his gun as the car roared toward the Wonderland Hotel. The mountains wavered in the heat-hazed distance, but his focus was on the figures moving around the edges of the hotel. Someone darted out from behind the building, saw the cars and Harleys coming, and then vanished again. In front of the hotel, a pair of figures stood in front of the black Escalade with guns strapped across their backs, and Jax felt his insides freeze. Assault rifles. His 9mm handgun had stopping power, but not if he never got a chance to use it. And he’d never reach the fancy Russian AR that Oleg had given him before the enemy opened fire.
“Kirill says we take the back,” Jax said, raising his voice to be heard over the engine’s roar. “They’ve got the front.”
Oleg slapped his hand on the driver’s headrest. “You heard him. Go!”
Ilia twisted the wheel to the right, ignoring the parking lot. Ilia steered them into a delivery lane, rear wheels slewing and screeching on pavement. Jax saw movement in the backseat and glanced over to see Oleg pulling a new Kalashnikov AK-12 from under the seat. It gleamed, even newer than the one Jax had left in the trunk.
“Where the hell’d you get that?” he asked. “I didn’t think they’d made more than the prototypes for it.”
“This is a prototype,” Oleg said. “Call this a field test.”
The men by the Escalade opened fire. Bullets tore up the street and the burnt grass beside the hotel. Ilia and Oleg ducked, and the rear passenger window blew in, tiny bits of glass spraying all over the interior. Jax watched the other three cars race toward the hotel, the Mercedes turning into the circular drive as bullets strafed it. The RAV4 slid past. Guns thrust from windows spat bullets rapid-fire, but the RAV4 wasn’t stopping or slowing. It sailed by and turned, heading for the other side of the building.
Jax worried about Chibs and Opie, glanced back and saw that they’d turned to follow him, Oleg, and Ilia. The Harleys roared up beside them, using the car as a shield. Smart. Stay alive, he thought.
Oleg shoved the AK-12’s nose out the window and opened fire, strafing the Escalade. One of the men stood his ground and fired back, but the other ran for cover, trying to get behind the giant SUV. The Mercedes—with Gavril at the wheel and Kirill firing out the window—slammed into the man and then into the Escalade, sandwiching him between the two vehicles in a scream of metal and human anguish.
Then they were alongside the hotel and out of sight of the melee out front.
“Here we go,” Ilia said, cutting the wheel to the left as they turned, skidding around the corner. The fence around the empty swimming pool loomed ahead.
“Kitchen door,” Oleg said. “Close as you can.”
Ilia said nothing, only nodded grimly.
Jax felt a dreadful calm descend upon him. The job was killing. The path from here to the other side of this chaos would be one of unhesitating bloodshed. He’d been down this path before.
His jaw tightened. His heart calmed. The car skidded to a halt. Jax was out the door before Ilia had a chance to throw it into park. Cold inside, he felt the sun baking his skin. The world seemed to shift into lower gear. He called for Ilia to open the trunk and was headed around the back of the car when he saw one of Lagoshin’s men come around the side of the Dumpster, tall and pale with thi
Jax glanced down, saw the furrow in the fabric of his shirt, saw the blood welling and soaking into the fabric, and realized the furrow had been dug not just in cloth but in skin.
He bled, and he moved, ru
Ilia and Oleg were ahead of him, yanking open the kitchen door, whose frame had already been shattered by the intruders. Motion in his peripheral vision made him glance left, and he saw Opie and Chibs ru
“You all right?” Opie asked, in that familiar gravel voice. He’d turned a little pale, seemed to be favoring his left side where the bullet had grazed him, but it didn’t appear that he’d started bleeding again.
Chibs went to the door but hesitated to follow the Russians inside, waiting for them.
Jax still felt calm, focused, but a new confidence made him exhale. He was with his brothers. They would prevail.
“Let’s go,” he said, suddenly hating the weight of the assault rifle. It would help even the odds, but he’d rather have a handgun any day. More precise. Less unwieldy. “Chibs, check the stairways, top to bottom. Opie and I are going room to room. Take out anyone in your way. If Trinity’s alive, we’re getting her out.”
“What about Lagoshin?” Opie asked.
Jax nodded, remembering the beating Lagoshin had given him and the vow he’d made. “Trinity comes first. We stay alive, we can take care of that asshole later.”
Boots scuffed the ground. They turned to see another Russian coming around the corner beyond the Dumpster. Opie lifted his gun but didn’t need to fire. The Russian threw his arms up as bullets stitched up his back, some of Kirill’s men having come around from the other side.
Jax tried not to keep count of how many men he saw go down. His side was badly outnumbered, but numbers didn’t tell the whole story. Even so, he was glad to have Rollie and the SAMNOV crew on the way. He just hoped they would hurry.
Chibs led the way through the kitchen. They spotted Oleg and Ilia for a second, but then there was gunfire in the corridor ahead, and the two Russians raced headlong toward it. Jax pulled the trigger on the TsNIITochMash, and a barrage of bullets burst forth, the silencer muffling the noise. Then he ran on. He wanted to back Oleg and Ilia up, but he had other priorities.
“Go,” he said to Chibs, who nodded and set off at a run, swinging right and left in search of a stairwell door.
Jax called his sister’s name in the kitchen. Opie checked the walk-in cooler. Then they went into the corridor and started their search. Room to room, watching each other’s backs as they listened to shouts and gunfire echoing through the hotel.
“Wonderland,” Opie said, voice dripping with irony. He winced at the pain in his side but said nothing of it.
Jax didn’t smile. He slammed open a bathroom door and went in, gun ahead of him, calling his sister’s name in a voice that echoed back to him.
The place sounded hollow. Empty.
For the first time, he understood that she might already be dead.
18
Chibs glided along the corridor, back to the wall. He glanced into a few open doorways, turning and then moving on in fluid motion. His pulse was steady, his breathing calm. During his time as an army medic, one lieutenant had said if they’d monitored his brain waves during combat, the test would show that Chibs was asleep. “Maybe even dreaming.” Every time violence erupted around him, Chibs assumed he was going to die—he just wanted to make the bastards pay before he did.
When he wasn’t in the field, though… it was then that Chibs had trouble. Under fire, he was calm, but when things were quiet, he could feel old anger simmering inside him. Even now, years later, he spent most days with an electric tension buzzing along his spine. He’d been a man without a country, and the brothers of SAMCRO had opened their arms to him. Without SAMCRO, he had nothing.