Christina stayed in close to her teammates. The last time, she'd had them spread out, but this time, huddling tight made more sense. They needed to be in one place to provide backup to each other.
Though she had her rifle on her, it was her handgun that stayed up and at the ready. The smaller gun simply didn't require as much space to operate as the rifle did. So she consciously relaxed her grip and let her eyes glaze, hoping to spot anomalies.
She didn’t find anything, so she pushed forward again.
They'd headed north, like the first time they’d come out. Actually, there was no evidence as to which direction the soldiers would strike from next. Maybe whoever was in charge was working their way around the compound counterclockwise, and the agents should have gone south.
But some of the troops would still be here guarding this line of the property, if only to keep the wolves in. She’d chosen this direction in part because they’d been up here before and knew the layout better than they did other areas surrounding the family compound.
In her hopes, Christina and her team would figure out what Aegis X was. Maybe it was a weapon. Maybe it was an idea or a plan. Maybe it actually was the ancient boogeyman that baby wolves were threatened with to keep them behaving.
She hoped Will’s team could take out Marks and Menon. But if her team found them, they’d be just as dead. She really wanted that news to be something GJ could hear about later as a report, and not anything she had to be involved in herself.
Christina held no illusions that this time, they might capture a soldier and get them to talk. That wasn’t even on the table now. Two separate, deadly blasts had made that clear.
To the west, a faction of Will’s wolves had the same executable orders as her team. As wolves, they were able to move fluidly and quietly through a landscape they knew better than the soldiers did. Her team did not have that advantage.
But the wolf team lacked the two weapons that Noah had pointed out, giving her team a different advantage—and these other soldiers probably had no idea what Christina and Noah could do.
At the front of her cluster of agents, she once again made her hand signal to pause and look around. They'd crossed the property line, and though the area appeared abandoned, she didn't believe that for a second. There were simply too many troops out here. Even if they'd been trying to space themselves apart, at least one of them would be close by.
Surely, they haven’t all cleared out. Christina began to believe that, with every step, she was getting farther and farther into enemy territory and that she would soon be—if not already—surrounded.
Still holding up her hand, she waited as five sets of eyes swept the area around them. Hand signals came back one by one.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
With a motion at her shoulder, she told the group to press forward.
She only made it about twenty feet farther than she’d thought they would before she caught sight of a small piece of equipment apparently abandoned near a tree.
With more silent hand signals, she alerted the others. As a group, they checked it out, but it appeared the machine was only some kind of detritus left behind by a group long gone. It was one of the small, no-light heaters she’d seen when they’d tracked Noah before.
The whole area looked as though it had been simply abandoned by whatever soldiers had once held this ground. Walter leaned over and picked the thing up, shook it as though checking for fuel, then shrugged and set it back down. Her broad arm gesture swept the area to say, “This is nothing.”
Exactly as they had planned.
Christina didn't hear it, but more sensed… something. Keeping her hand down at her side, she tapped each of the others, no longer making the big hand gestures that anyone that distance could probably decipher as the signals they were.
In her head, she counted down.
Three…
Two…
One…
But it took another five seconds for it to happen. It was not the sharp onslaught she was ready for, but a slow change in the landscape. She realized that suddenly, there was one face, one human form, to her right. And then another appeared in front of her. Slowly, soldiers materialized around her agents where they stood. Every one of the combatants was heavily armed with helmets, rifles, and tactical vests.
They meant business, she knew.
She also realized they probably weren’t wolves. For a wolf, all the gear would be too hard to get out of when they wanted to change form.
Maybe she’d just learned something, and the armies were split—humans in one faction, wolves in another. She pocketed that away, slowly swinging her gun from one face to another.
Working on the proposition that she had to look scared, she found one soldier to focus on. For whatever reason, this one grabbed her attention. But his face seemed mildly familiar, so she turned away from him and aimed at the man next to him. His plastic goggles warped the shape and color of his eyes while they protected him.
Christina breathed easily. She aimed center mass, and pulled the trigger, starting what she hoped was a war.