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I grabbed the barrel and pushed it down just in time. “No!” I hissed. “The cylinders are pressurized! If you hit one and it explodes, everybody dies!”
Everyone cursed and put their guns away. We’d have to do this hand-to-hand.
Creeping forward, we counted three men, plus Maravic. Good. All four were up here. Each was carrying a cylinder and they were spreading out, one moving to each of the four corners of the stadium. They wanted to make sure their gas reached every person in the crowd below.
I frowned. Four cylinders? The crate we’d found in Ohio had been big enough to hold much more than that.
JD used hand signals to point each of us to a different target: Danny, Cal and Gabriel got a man each, JD was backup for whoever needed it and Colton and I got Maravic.
I started forward with Colton right behind me. Maravic and his men hadn’t seen us yet. Walking along the catwalks took a lot of concentration and doing it carrying the cylinders meant they couldn’t use their hands for balance. Plus, their gas masks blocked all of their peripheral vision. I could see that Cal had already almost reached his man. Maybe we can pull this off.
As we crept closer to Maravic, he turned a little. I glimpsed his profile and, suddenly, the memories all rushed back. I could feel Lev jerking in my arms. Hear him pleading with me to save him as he drowned in his own blood.
I stopped dead.
This mission had become about so much more than revenge. But now, looking at Maravic, all the anger came back. My muscles tensed and the blood thundered in my ears. He has to die. There was a flutter of fear in my chest, too. If I got close to him, he’d kill me. My only chance had ever been to shoot him from a distance and now that option had been taken away.
My breathing went tight. Ever since I first went after Maravic, I’d known, deep down, that I’d most likely die trying to kill him. Maybe I’d even wanted it. But something had changed. I didn’t want it anymore.
Then a hand found mine and squeezed it, and Colton’s chest pressed gently against my back. I felt my breathing ease.
Something else had changed. I wasn’t on my own anymore.
I squeezed Colton’s hand. Then, together, we moved forward along the catwalk.
We were less than six feet from Maravic when he heard us and whirled around, the cylinder clutched to his chest. He glanced around, taking in the scene. The fight was going our way: Cal and Danny were tussling with their men and JD was helping Gabriel with the final one. Maravic was trapped: the catwalk to his right led to Cal, we were moving in from his left and the only other catwalk was one of the ones that led out into space.
Colton and I tensed, ready to tackle him if he ran at us. But instead, he pulled out a radio.
And that’s when I realized how badly we’d underestimated him.
“Release it into the air conditioning now,” Maravic said.
My stomach dropped. Who’s he talking to? We’d assumed there were only four mercenaries, to match the four dead men in the van who’d be the scapegoats. But of course someone like Maravic would have a backup team waiting in reserve, when so much was at stake. And because the gas was heavier than air, we’d assumed they’d have to release it from up in the roof. But there was another way to make sure it got everywhere in the stadium: release it into the air conditioning system. I groaned as I remembered the network of pipes I’d seen on the laptop screen at the garage. That’s what they were! Maravic had planned to release the gas both from the roof and into the A/C simultaneously, just to be sure. But either one would kill everyone in the stadium.
I yelled into my radio, “Kian, where’s the air conditioning plant in this place?”
He repeated the question to someone. Then, “Ground level, west end of the stadium.”
I looked at Colton in horror. The team was up here: there was no one down there to stop them!
I looked down. The evacuation was well underway but, just as we’d feared, it was slow going. Every stairway was packed solid with people and the stadium was still half full. Then three blobs of color caught my eye because they weren’t moving towards the exits. I recognized the blue maintenance uniforms with their bright red baseball caps: Maravic’s men. Curved metal glinted in their arms: they each had a canister. I’d been right, there’d been more than four in the crate.
As I watched, they jumped over the barriers and onto the east end of the field. The crowd had blocked all the normal paths, so they were going to take a shortcut straight down the football field. If even one of them reached the far end and got to the air conditioning plant, it was all over.
