Lycan Legacy - Paladin: Tales of Luna White - Werewolf by Veronica Singer (funny books to read TXT) 📕

gesture and pulled out a chair. “I need a minute to process this.” He took ten deep breaths, in a pattern strangely like my meditation routine.

Then his eyes blinked open and he smiled. “So, you’re also an explosives expert with a bloodhound’s nose?”

“No, Manny. I have a sharp nose, but I’m not an explosives expert. That’s why we need you.” I gestured to the C-4. “If I tried anything with this stuff, I’d blow up the entire subdivision.”

Mollified by my admission, Manny stood and said, “Do you mind if I repeat the tests?”

“Be my guest. How do you test these?”

Manny went to the laundry room and returned with a small kit that contained glass vials. “This is a fresh test kit. Put a sample in, screw the top on, break the seal, the chemicals react with the material and change color. Bright purple is real C-4.

“The three random samples I took at the seller’s all tested good. Now you’re telling me some of them are bad. We’ll just check every one.”

Manny took a sample from each block, ran the tests, and got purple with each.

“See? I told you they were good.” He smiled triumphantly.

“Do it again, Manny,” I instructed, “but take the sample from the center of the block.”

“What? Why?”

“The fakes are coated with real C-4 around an inert substance. These were made to fool those test kits.”

Manny dug a stainless-steel probe deep into the clay-like substance, dredging up a small sample for his test kit.

His face fell when the chemicals stubbornly refused to turn purple. He tried several times, but the best he got from the suspect blocks was a faint mauve.

Manny’s face darkened. “I’m going to kill that cheating bastard.”

“It’s a shame when you can’t trust your black-market arms dealer,” I agreed. “But we don’t have time to go back and get revenge on this thief.”

Manny gave me a surprised look, then laughed in resignation. “Okay, you’re right. We need to concentrate on the mission. More than half of these bricks are good, so we still have more than enough for the plan. Hell, if things go smoothly, we might not even need the demo.” He shook his head. “I thought the deal was too good to be true.”

I bit back a comment that if I had been there, he wouldn’t have been ripped off. Nobody likes to hear ‘I told you so.’

“We’ll leave a strongly-worded Yelp review after this is over,” I said dryly.

Mike and Manny laughed and got to work on the demo. They spent about an hour doing things I didn’t understand with the plastic explosives, shaping them into various forms and packing the forms into separate bags.

Finally, the table was cleared, and our backpacks were filled with explosive goodies. We sat over another cup of magic coffee and looked over the printouts of the compound we were going to invade.

“This place is huge,” said Manny. “It’s surrounded by a double-layer perimeter wall twelve feet high, with razor wire on top. There are five guard towers embedded in the inner wall, spaced out around the perimeter.”

“A pentagram,” said Mike. He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. I gave him the ‘I’ve got this covered’ hand signal. I could walk through almost any magical barrier on this world. Once inside, I could open it to allow everyone else to enter.

Manny missed the byplay. “Yeah, it’s a pentagram. Maybe they’re superstitious. Won’t do anything against C-4.”

He pointed to the space between the walls, which was cleared. “This is wide enough for a vehicle to race around to any intrusion point.”

“Will they have guard dogs between the walls?” asked Mike. He looked at me. “You can handle dogs, right?”

“Unless they’re specially trained, the repellent and ultrasonics I have will make them run away.”

“Repellent? Ultrasonics?” asked Manny. “I didn’t see any equipment like that.”

I gave Manny my ‘need-to-know’ look and said, “Dogs won’t be a problem.”

Mike moved in with a smoother lie. “We have access to stuff that SEAL teams would cream their jeans to have. Just the existence of this equipment is compartmentalized information.”

Manny nodded acceptance. The security aspect was making it easy to hide magic.

“Anyway,” said Manny, “I don’t think they’ll have dogs. Saudis consider dogs unclean animals and almost never use them. We’ll just worry about guards in vehicles.”

“So that’s why I haven’t sme—seen any dogs here,” I said.

Mike and I shared a look. If they considered dogs unclean animals, what would they think of werewolves?

Manny turned his attention back to the charts. “They’ll have sensors, infra-red and night-vision cameras, as well as roaming guards.

“Since a helo drop is out of the question, there’s no way to surprise the guards. I think we should do a ‘shock and awe’ entrance.” Manny pointed to a section of wall closest to the main building. “Satchel charges here to enter, then a second charge on the inner wall. Once inside, we double-time to the building, open any doors we need with breaching charges, find the hostages, bag ‘em, tag ‘em, and cart them out.”

“‘Bag ‘em, tag ‘em?’” I asked.

“SOP for hostage rescue,” said Mike. “Hostages do crazy things: run away in fear, run back to their captors, grab weapons and try to become heroes. Those are all bad for everybody. Since neither of our targets have been through SERE training, they won’t know what to expect during a hostage rescue.”

I nodded. It made sense. Alisha hadn’t been trained, and Logan’s wolf side might strike out at anyone nearby when he was released. If I were there, I could control him. But if I didn’t make it that far…

Manny stood and looked around. “Is everybody good with the plan?”

I took a deep breath and Manny gave me an impatient look. I tried to be diplomatic.

“It sounds like a good plan, Manny. But there’s something you didn’t know. I have the means to avoid the sensors.”

Manny scoffed. “Avoid the sensors? What do you have, a Harry Potter invisibility cloak?”

“No, I have ways to block them. The invisibility suit is too