No, they were having fun.
It made Dice's stomach churn.
There was one man left on the field, huddling behind a tree and clutching his rifle by the looks of it. Ryker and Rio and Prowler and Price must have smelled him around the same time, because the wolf twins came running in their animal form and they made it there at around the same time. What happened then made Dice audibly groan.
The wolves and lions were at a standoff, manes pricked up and their maws bared in snarls. They were arguing over who got to eviscerate the idiot who'd chosen a life of crime over toiling on some goddamn field somewhere. Dice's hands were rolled around the wooden railing so hard now that he thought he might just break it in half in a moment or two. It was Thor that saved him from having to go down there in bear form and kicking the asses of every one of those fucking fools.
One clean shot to the forehead ended the hysterical man's struggles, Thor having aimed right between the growling duos of lions and werewolves.
I'd like to think he did that out of some modicum of human decency but I bet he just wanted the fucking kill.
"Now we're done," Spade said with a nonchalant shrug, before bringing a finger to his ear and speaking into the earpiece. "Get them out of there. Clean and sweep."
Spade turned to look at Dice and the large werebear, still clutching the rail like a lifeline, glared back. He hadn't seen the man in five years. Oh, he'd heard plenty about Spade, along with all the nicknames The Firm operatives had given him, and how he'd been made into this ghost of a beast that seemed to incite fear in even the most brazen of men. He'd thought it to be bullshit. It didn't sound anything like the man he'd known.
But looking at the strict, stern and blasé man standing before him now, all those rumors had obviously been true.
What the fuck happened to you, man … ?
"Why?" Dice asked, his voice little better than a growl as he forced himself to stand up straight.
Projector lights were flicked on as the cleanup crew moved in, one of the special Firm mop-up squads who could have cleaned up any major disaster in half a day and made it look like it had never happened. From what Dice had heard, the Russians were particularly fond of using them.
"I wanted you to see your new team," Spade said mildly, glancing back to the mangled jungle spreading out below them, plumes of smoke wafting into the night sky from several locations.
"You must be insane if you think I'm taking these people on," Dice said with a scoff.
"Oh, but you are," Spade said simply, not an ounce of threat to his words, just simple confidence in what he was proposing.
Like there wasn't a way in the world that Dice could say no. As usual.
It was simply a statement of facts, an unquestioning knowledge that his will would be done. Dice wanted to punch him in the face for that, an emotion he'd never thought he'd have to deal with when facing that particular friend of his. 'Friend.' Perhaps the word didn't quite fit anymore.
"Explain," Dice said, standing straight and crossing his arms over his wide chest.
He was a large man, 6'4'', with dark auburn, short-cropped hair and gray and hazel eyes, the hazel growing fainter the further from the iris it was until it turned entirely gray. Standing opposite of Spade, he had wider shoulders and more mass on the man, but it would be a cold day in hell that he'd think that getting into a fight with Spade would be a smart thing to do.
He remembered the guy too well from basic, and even better from the missions that had followed while they'd both been in the Navy SEALs. Still, a very large part of him wanted to sock him one, just to see if there was any emotion left in the cold husk of deadly purpose standing before him or not.
The rumors said there wasn't. But he'd always preferred seeing with his own two eyes. Now, he wasn't so sure if he'd needed to know.
"I know you're new to The Firm, Dice, but things work a little differently here than they do in the Navy," Spade began with a pleasant enough smile, all teeth and none of it reaching his eyes. "These five are the worst we have. I'll send you their files. Dishonorable discharges, every single one of them. They're some of the best at what they do, their individual skills are beyond question. But they are, simply put … " Spade said, trailing off slightly in search of the right word.
"Psychotics?" Dice offered with a quirk of his brow.
"Troubled," Spade offered as a tamer substitute. "They're on their last option here in The Firm. If you want to be poetic about it, then this is their ninth life. After this, there's nothing. They've gotten replaced out of every special team they've been in. The twins have been separated, they've been put together, it doesn't matter. Whatever they touch, it turns to ashes. They're practically uncontrollable."
"Is this a sales pitch? Because I'm not interested in buying what you're selling so far, Spade."
"Well then, you better keep listening," Spade said with the makings of a sigh, as if it annoyed him to have his trail of thought cut into.
Spade was the main intelligence officer of The Firm, an international institution, for lack of a better word, that dealt with all the problems you didn't want to face. They were mercenaries for hire, a paid army for those who had the fattest coffers, but underneath it all, the company seemed to be striving for some sort of a gray hat in the sea of bad guys and bastards. The Firm was not good, not by a long shot, but it was a damn bit better than most of the alternatives.
Or at least that was what the people working for them thought. Or hoped.
For years, Dice had tried to avoid getting tangled up in the seedier underbelly of the military trained world. Once you were out of the service, a man didn't have a lot of options available to him. He was either going to put up his gun for good, or turn bad. Other than those two shining examples of excellent choices, no one was offering much. No one could really go from saving the world to working as a bouncer, after all.
So a few months ago, Dice Alderson had taken the red pill and joined up. Bootcamp had been hellish, far worse than anything he'd done as one of the elite Navy SEALs, but after that, he'd found himself finding old friends and buddies by the armful. At one point, it had even started to look like that working for The Firm wouldn't be such a shitty thing to do. But of course, then he'd been brought to Bolivia.
"I'm giving you an option here. You take these sorry excuses for human beings and you make soldiers out of them. Fast. You'll report to me directly, with the whole team. This means certain privileges. Certain expenditures that wouldn't be allowed to you working anywhere else in the company. The missions will be 'need to know' only and they will all go through me. There'll be more downtime, the pay will be bigger. I won't stop any of you from working with the other squads when there's a lull between missions."
"So you're looking for a private kill squad?" Dice asked, scoffing.
"If you want to call it that. I've come to think that it's easier to let people know exactly what I want. The whole covert thing got so tiring with the last group," Spade said, smirking wryly.
Dice frowned, leaning back against the sturdy trunk of the tree the platform had been built around.
"Why these guys?"
"Because they don't have anything left to lose," Spade said. "They can't say no to me."
"But I can," Dice said, clearing his throat. "I meant it, Spade. I don't want to be running some kind of a Suicide Squad for you. I'm not a babysitter for the morally challenged."
"You sure about that?" Spade asked with that gleaming smile of his, making a cold jolt run down Dice's spine.
"Pretty damn sure. I don't think there's enough money in the world that you could offer me."
"Oh, it's not money I'm offering," Spade said, his voice almost a purr now.
"What then? You think I'm itching for a lesson in insanity here, that I want to spend time with the ripper squad down there?"
His question was followed up by another explosion that rocked the lush forest below, felling two trees. Dice rolled his eyes. The clean-up crew must have found it easier to detonate the traps Rio had left behind instead of dismantling them. He was sure that it was mostly because the werelion wouldn't offer any help in figuring out his designs.
Fucking bombheads, he thought morosely, getting far beyond annoyed now and solidly into the land of being pissed the fuck off.
"No. It's not a 'what' that I'm offering you. It's a who."