I looked at the man on Wyatt's left. His jaw was set—not the professional set of a man doing his job but the clenched set of a man bracing. The tendons in his neck were visible, standing out like cables. His breathing had shifted from the shallow, easy rhythm of five minutes ago to something deeper, slower—the controlled breathing of someone preparing for exertion. For violence.
The third man, behind the partition, had gone still in a way that wasn't calm. It was the stillness of a coiled spring. His eyes had stopped scanning and locked forward—target fixation, the narrowing of attention that happened when a man had alreadydecided what he was going to do and was waiting for the signal to do it.
Three men. Three bodies telling the same story. The gradual, synchronized tensing of operators approaching a go-point.
These weren't FBI. No fucking way.
I looked at Wyatt. Gave him the signal—the one we'd used since we were kids, before we'd ever heard of hand signals or combat communication. The signal that meanttrouble, right now, get ready.It was a thing our father had taught us on the ranch, a subtle shift in posture that meant a bull was about to charge or a horse was about to bolt or the weather was about to turn.
Wyatt saw it. His body changed. Not visibly—internally. The coil. The gathering of a man who'd been resting and had just been switched on.
I had maybe three seconds before the staging became action. The man on the right was almost there—his hand drifting, his weight shifting forward, the micro-movements of a body preparing to do violence.
I went first.
The confined space of the van was both advantage and nightmare. Six men in a metal box, no room to maneuver, no room to miss. Every punch landed. Every elbow connected. Every movement had consequences measured in blood.
I drove my forehead into the nose of the man closest to me—the one behind the partition, the third escort who'd been sitting quietly and was now trying to bring his weapon up in a space that didn't allow the full extension of his arm. The headbutt crushed cartilage. I felt the wet, structural give of his nose collapsing under my skull, and his hands went to his face instead of his weapon, which was the whole point.
Wyatt moved at the same instant. He'd been sitting with his hands loose and his elbows slightly flared—a posture thatlooked relaxed and was actually loaded, the springs compressed, waiting. He drove his right elbow into the temple of the man on his right with a force that came from the hips, from the floor, from a body that had been trained to generate maximum violence from minimum movement.
The man dropped. Not unconscious—stunned, his eyes going blank for the half-second that separates functioning from not functioning, and in that half-second Wyatt took his sidearm.
The man on Wyatt's left was faster than I'd expected. He got his weapon clear of the holster and brought it up toward Wyatt's center mass.
I grabbed his wrist. Both hands. Redirected the barrel toward the floor and twisted, hard, using the confined space as leverage. The man's finger was inside the trigger guard and the gun went off—a deafening crack in the metal box, the round punching through the floor of the van, the muzzle flash blinding in the enclosed space.
Wyatt shot the man I'd headbutted. Two rounds, center mass, the controlled double-tap of a man who'd been doing this for as long as I had. The escort crumpled against the partition, his body sliding down the plexiglass, leaving a smear that caught the light.
The man whose wrist I was holding fought. Hard. Stronger than I'd estimated, with the ferocity of a man who understood that losing this fight meant dying in this van. He drove a knee into my ribs—a solid shot that sent a bolt of white through my vision—and I lost the wrist for a half-second.
He brought the pistol up.
Wyatt shot him. Through the shoulder—not center mass, because the van swerved and Wyatt was working with what he had. The man screamed. His gun clattered to the floor.
The driver heard it all. The partition was thin—plexiglass and aluminum, not the reinforced steel of a real federal transport. Hereacted the way I would have reacted if I'd been driving a van full of people who were killing each other—he reached for his weapon with one hand while trying to maintain control of the vehicle with the other.
He couldn't do both.
I lunged through the partition opening—a narrow slot, barely wide enough for my shoulders—and grabbed the driver by the back of his head. Slammed his face into the steering wheel. Once. The horn blared. Twice. His hands came off the wheel entirely.
The van lurched. Hard left. The tires caught something—a curb, a median, the edge of the road—and the physics of a top-heavy vehicle moving at thirty miles an hour with no one controlling it did what physics always did.
We went over.
The world rotated. Everything that wasn't bolted down became a projectile—bodies, weapons, the bench seats tearing from their mounts, the partition cracking as the van's roof met the pavement and the entire structure compressed along the axis of impact. Glass shattered. Metal screamed. The sound was enormous—the industrial violence of a large vehicle dying at speed.
I hit the ceiling. The wall. Something else. The impacts blurred into a single, continuous event that lasted either two seconds or twenty, and when the van finally stopped moving—on its side, the engine ticking, the horn stuck in a long, dying note—I was on my back against what had been the roof, covered in safety glass and blood that was partly mine and partly not.
Silence.
Not real silence—the temporary kind, the aftermath silence that lasted exactly as long as it took the human brain to reboot from trauma and start processing again. Three seconds. Five. The horn finally stopped.
"Wyatt," I said. My voice sounded like it was coming from inside a barrel.
A groan. Movement. Glass scraping against metal.
"Here." His voice, rough but functional. Alive. "I'm here."
