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The Company
Time: Saturday, July 16, 2011 (05:00).
Place: The dude ranch, WY, U.S.A.
Last Event: Opening the assault with AT4 and machine-gun fire.
Communicating quickly by gesture in the growing twilight, the Agents prepare to circle around to the side door near the vehicle shelter. Lev hands off his M240 to Wen in order to lead Zhang, Paul, Vinnie, Anabel, Qoqa, Jili, and Hamid to the objective. Klas sets up the other machine gun beside the first, and then readies both his own M24 and Wen's so that he can provide sniper cover. The idea is that with two support weapons apiece, neither shooter will need to pause to reload. Wen's assignment is to suppress anything that moves, while Klas' job is to put holes in any heads that pop up. Their overall goal is to draw the attention of the gangsters inside the ranch house away from the eight attackers moving to flank them.
When everyone is ready, Klas and Wen start shooting while the others follow Lev at a low crouch. Klas locates and drops a rooftop sniper with a perfect headshot. Wen pins down shadowy figures running for cover inside the front doorway. When the assault team is about halfway to the side entrance, the men inside the ranch house get organized enough to shoot back – it seems that Wen and Klas are doing a good job of holding the enemy's attention. Klas and Wen take turns firing at muzzle flashes, each scoring several hits. Unfortunately, not all of the return fire is random and inaccurate; Klas is struck in the right shoulder and leg.
By the time Wen is low on ammo for the machine guns and turning her attention to Klas' injuries, Lev's team has made it to within striking distance of the side entrance. Something doesn't look right, though – the door isn't fully closed. Lev signals for caution and moves in with Zhang, while Vinnie and Paul provide overwatch. An instant later, the door flies open, revealing a machine-gun team behind a waist-height barricade! In the frantic exchange of fire that follows, Lev is hit hard, but fortunately not fatally, and then aggressive fire from Zhang, Vinnie, and Paul silences the enemy gunners.
With the side doorway clear – at least temporarily – Lev's team rushes forward. Once Vinnie signals that there are no booby traps, the Agents pour into the building and take up shooting positions. Qoqa capitalizes on a momentary lull to pack Lev's wound and administer a shot for the pain. Anabel snatches up the M240 and M4 that the machine-gunner and his assistant dropped at the barricade; she decides to carry (if not use) the machine gun, and hands off the carbine to Qoqa. The others take turns reloading their weapons.
Out front, meanwhile, Klas can do little but keep his head down and apply pressure to his wounds, while Wen abandons the dry M240s for the M24s. There doesn't appear to be any further fire directed at their position, which leads Wen to suspect that the enemy is either preoccupied with Lev's group, falling back to a strongpoint inside the ranch house, or attempting to outflank her. Fearing the last, she uses her rifle scope to scan for trouble. Spotting the patrol Jeep sweeping into her general area, she opens fire. Her first shot kills the driver, her second shot takes down a passenger, and after that the vehicle skids wildly and comes to a halt. Nobody jumps out.
While Wen is executing the Jeep crew, the Agents indoors go back on the offensive, bounding forward by pairs. With Zhang and Paul in the lead, they follow a corridor that runs from the side entrance, through the east wing of the ranch house, and into the center of the building. This passage has many has rooms off it, but no opposition lurks there – whether due to tactical error or casualties, the gangsters' left flank is poorly protected. Paul and Zhang are soon stealing glances into a large room, which looks like something right out of a Western film. To their left and ahead is the front doorway that Wen blew to bits, which opens directly into a two-storey-high hall that's overlooked by a railed balcony reached via a staircase against either side wall. In other words, it's dangerously open!
Unnoticed so far, Zhang and Paul assess the tactical situation up ahead. They see six men of Asian extraction, dressed more for the big city than for guard duty, huddling behind a hastily constructed wall of heavy Western saloon furniture – a bar, several tables, and so on. They have their MP7s braced on their barricade and aimed at the front doorway, as if they expect attackers from that direction. Above them on the gallery, and looking cooler and more alert, are two Caucasians with M4 carbines.
Concluding that the men upstairs with carbines are a pair of Georgi's ex-Spetsnaz – and therefore the most immediate threat – Paul and Zhang decide to take them out first. The goons downstairs are more numerous, but they're probably Toru's muscle, and they're all looking the wrong way. They're unlikely to realize what's going on and reposition themselves before the other six Agents pour in from the east wing and engage them. Paul signals that he'll take the Russian on the west side and leave the nearer one for Zhang, and then the two of them lead the charge.
Aiming for heads and limbs – i.e., body parts unlikely to be protected by body armor – Zhang and Paul drop their victims with their opening salvo. Predictably, the Yakuza men turn to deal with this new threat, only to find themselves on the wrong end of 8:6 odds on their left flank. Before Toru's boys can put meaningful fire on target, all six are incapacitated by well-placed shots. As soon as the last opponent hits the floor, the Agents occupy and secure the great hall. Vinnie and Paul move to watch the staircases, Anabel dashes to the front door and signals for Wen, and everybody takes turns reloading.
As Wen is making her way up to the ranch house and the others are preparing to move further in, Paul and Vinnie suddenly notice two grenades, tossed from somewhere out of sight above, arcing into the great hall! Vinnie dives for one and Paul lunges for the other, both men hoping to kick or toss the bombs away from their allies. Luckily, both of them succeed, scooting the grenades down into the west wing of the building. Less luckily, the devices prove to be incendiaries of some kind, which promptly burst and set the far wing on fire. More unfortunately still, the two Russians who tossed them appear above the Agents to capitalize on the confusion they've caused.
Most of the Agents manage to dive for cover, but because Vinnie and Paul are hastily sprawling after grenades, they're caught in the open and completely flat-footed. Vinnie lucks out: bullets riddle the floor on all sides of him, but he escapes unharmed. Paul doesn't fare as well . . . he feels a brief stinging pain in his left arm, and then numbness. Nobody else is exposed enough to be hit, the downside to which is that only Hamid, Jili, and Qoqa have both a loaded weapon and a line of sight to these new foes. In other words, two technicians with handguns and a medic with a carbine find themselves facing a pair of trained commandos who hold the high ground.
Remembering to shoot to avoid body armor, the three Agents in a position to return fire take their shots, aiming mainly for the legs. Lady Luck might have abandoned Paul, but she smiles on Qoqa, Jili, and Hamid. Both of the men upstairs take multiple hits to the lower body and collapse. The rest of the team moves forward, pointing weapons up at the balcony, but the matter appears to be settled. Qoqa dashes over to treat Paul's injury, while the others take turns watching the gallery, reloading, and grabbing MP7s dropped by the Yakuza men.
Wen arrives moments later. She reports that Klas is hit, and that while he'll be fine for a while, he needs a medic. Glancing into the west wing, Wen sees that the ranch's sprinkler system is working and opines that the group has time to finish the raid before the place burns down. She warns that it's still prudent to get on with the assault – if only because every second wasted gives the remaining opponents time to regroup. As Wen generally knows her stuff where arson and shooting people are concerned, the Agents get ready to resume their push.
Wen prepares to lead Hamid, Jili, Qoqa, Vinnie, and Zhang upstairs. The wounded-but-stable Lev sets himself up downstairs with the M240 that Anabel lugged along; his backup consists of Paul brandishing a pistol in his good hand, and Anabel toting an MP7 taken from a dead Yakuza man. Because Wen is a wicked shot with a rifle and the M24 is too bulky for room-clearing, she trades her weapon for Qoqa's M4. The rest of Wen's squad packs submachine guns – a mix of captured MP7s and Zhang's trusty MP5s. Once the whole team is ready, they dash up the stairs with Wen on point.
The balcony overlooking the main hall affords a view down upstairs corridors that run the length of each wing, but there's nobody lurking there. Qoqa decides that she would feel safer with a carbine, and grabs one off an incapacitated Russian. Then because the Russians are clearly dug in up here, with an antenna farm on the roof, the Agents make their way to the entrance to the room that seems most likely to lead to attic access. The door is closed, but Vinnie checks it and finds it unlocked. Once everybody is ready to shoot the heck out of whatever lurks beyond, Vinnie opens it up . . .
. . . and Wen sees a primed grenade drop to the floor and roll out of sight. She tosses her weapon aside, dashes into the room, and spots the device in the corner next to the door. She manages to scoop up what looks and feels like a frag grenade, which she hastily hurls out the room's one window, through the windowpane. The thing explodes an instant later, but the old ranch house proves substantial enough to stop the fragments. Fortunately, nobody shows up to shoot Wen.
As it turns out, there are only two points of interest in the room: a ladder heading up to some kind of attic hatch, and what looks like a locked closet door in one corner. Vinnie creeps up the ladder, moving slowing and silently, as he knows that the grenade blast likely alerted whoever is upstairs. He gives the hatch the slightest of pushes and feels a heavy weight atop it. Through the ceiling, he can just make out the sound of a voice in Russian. It sounds as if someone is calling for assistance by radio.
Vinnie sneaks back down the ladder and whispers his observations to the others. The Agents agree that simply shoving the hatch open and clambering through would be suicide – there could be a dozen of Georgi's men up there, and they wouldn't need firearms and grenades to kill someone poking his head through a hole in the floor! The consensus is that it would be smartest to force the thing upward using a pole of some kind and then have Wen, who has the best arm by far, toss grenades through the narrow crack. Vinnie leaves to search the downed men on the balcony for grenades, while Qoqa inches toward what she hopes is a cleaning closet to see whether there's anything useful inside.
At the same time, Wen cautiously approaches the window to see what's happening outside. Risking a quick glimpse, she sees what she assumes to be the four men who were manning the rear-facing dugouts behind the ranch house, approaching at a low run. All four have M4s in hand and AT4s slung on their backs. They're still far enough away to have dismal odds of hitting anything with an unscoped weapon, but they need to be stopped before they can bring their AT4s into play. She hisses a warning to her allies and asks Zhang to fetch her M24 from downstairs.
With Wen observing and Qoqa, Vinnie, and Zhang off on errands, it falls to Hamid and Jili to cover the ceiling hatch. Fortunately, that remains closed – the people up there appear not to have any interest in taking a look downstairs. It seems quite likely that they are in radio contact with their associates out back, and are waiting to coordinate their next move with them. A few tense seconds later, Vinnie comes back into the room with three frag and two incendiary grenades. An instant after that, Zhang returns with Wen's rifle.
As Wen sets up her M24 at the window, Qoqa gestures for Vinnie and explains that the closet door is locked. With Qoqa covering him, just in case, Vinnie picks the lock in no time. The closet proves to be full of cleaning supplies, as Qoqa surmised. Qoqa finds several brooms and mops that should do for forcing the attic door open from below. She takes one and distributes the rest to anybody who doesn't have another task.
At this stage, nobody has taken an exact casualty count, but the Agents estimate that they've taken down 18 of Georgi's men and 18 of Toru's in the assault. Meanwhile, Klas is hors de combat out front, Lev is badly hurt and barely mobile, and Paul has an arm out of commission. The Agents realize that with wounded and without the advantage of surprise, and with heavily armed men approaching the building, they're going to have to move quickly if they want to force their way into the attic to grab whatever intelligence they can find, and then onto the roof to snatch the signals gear.